>Default, mass-produced ship is over twice as large as primary enemy's flagship
>Devote 100% of the facilities on-board to weapons, shields, propulsion, cloaking, and life support, while the enemy devotes most of its space to science and exploration facilities, with weapons and shields being secondary at best
>Romulan Empire is an empire and strives to improve its ability to maintain that constantly, while the Federation considers actual fighting to be unseemly at best
>Takes two of your ships to even threaten theirs
>Claim you will one day rule the stars
Sure.
>>46136710
It takes a lot of weapons to get past plot armor.
>This thread again
>>46136710
>>Default, mass-produced ship is over twice as large as primary enemy's flagship
In terms of overall dimensions, yes, but notice that a huge part of the D'deridex-class Warbird is empty space in the middle. On the whole it actually masses around the same or even slightly less than a Galaxy-glass starship.
>Takes two of your ships to even threaten theirs
How something *looks* has little to do with how advanced it actually is - the NX-01 Enterprise from Archer's looks far more advanced than the NCC-1701 Enterprise from Kirk's era, but in fact the latter can wreck an entire fleet of the former without even noticing.
>Claim you will one day rule the stars
Consider than it 100 years the Romulans went from being decidedly a third-rate power significantly behind the Federation and the Klingons (in Kirk's era), to overtaking the Klingons and achieving close to technological parity with the Federation (in Picard's era).
"One day" was meant to mean a matter of decades or even a century or two, not next week.
>>46136710
So, how did the Romulans get rid of the "big empty space in the middle" requirement when building their newer ships? Also, I was always unsure as to whether this new class was stronger than the D'deridex, or just faster
>>46136710
>>46139216
>So, how did the Romulans get rid of the "big empty space in the middle" requirement when building their newer ships?
That seemed to be something unique to the D'Deridex, their older 23rd/22nd century ships didn't have that. I figured it was some kind of variation on the Vulcan-style ring engines (like the Apollo class and a bunch of ships from ST:Enterprise).
>>46139216
Well if you believe the wiki it was designed to be empty in the middle so that the warp drive pylons on either side had line of sight to each other. That was supposedly a requirement for warp drives to function at one point, but it seems to have been dropped from canon. The original design was also considerably bigger and thicker instead of having stick wings.
I've also heard in a few places that the D'deridex is supposed to have some kind of energy ball or singularity sort of thing that hovers in the middle to be used as a power source.
>>46142026
>Well if you believe the wiki it was designed to be empty in the middle so that the warp drive pylons on either side had line of sight to each other. That was supposedly a requirement for warp drives to function at one point, but it seems to have been dropped from canon.
One of the model designers (or maybe it was Michael Piller?) talked about this in the TNG DVD special features. They said that was more or less the entire reasoning behind the design of the ship.
>>46142026
>some kind of energy ball or singularity sort of thing
Artificial black hole. Supposed to be an awesome power source except most of the ship design and power output is dedicated to preventing the ship from collapsing into the engine.
>>46145586
That's like building a house out of asbestos because it's DESIGNED to be on fire.
Who thought this was a good idea?
>>46147543
The ancient Hirogen comm relays that Voyager found were also powered by artificial black holes, and were the only other technology we see that uses a power source like that, and the map of the relay network shows it extended deep into the Beta Quadrant and Romulan territory. My personal theory is that at some point the Romulans started reverse engineering the tech in them, possibly even before they developed advanced antimatter reactors like the Federation and Klingons use, so their tech is all designed to work around these black hole drives they found instead of the more "natural" tech tree, and now they just keep rolling with it because it's what all their scientists and engineers learned in school and it's TRADITION dammit.
