I personally love the idea that everyone else used the simplest method while the Vulcans used a complex system as a flex on all their neighbors. It just fits the [ENT era] Vulcans perfectly. I've been saying that for years, and I love that someone with an actual audience has put that out there.

"Logically you would plot a straight-line course to your destination before engaging warp drive. There is no need for high manoeuvrability at warp speeds beyond the rare necessity to avoid obstacles that the screens cannot handle." - T'oi L'ett, a Vulcan scientist I met in the bar at Quarks.

Always thought Vulcan ring ships were the best looking alien vessel. Vulcans have a very refined sense of aesthetics for an emotionally repressed people.

I like how the Vulkan design is really logical from an in-universe perspective, since warp nacelles are supposed to be able to see each other. Can't get more line-of-sight than a ring.

If the ring is more efficient but less maneuverable, you'd think it would be employed by freighters and cargo transports. Who want to conserve as much fuel as possible for long haul flights. I would like to see some Federation ships using the ring design for that purpose. I think it'd be an interesting addition to the lore.

According to the Haynes Klingon Bird-of-Prey Technical Manual, written by Rick Sternbach no less, the BoP has "warp wings", a fairly unique design involving capacitance plates in the wings themselves, rather than conventional solenoid-like warp coils in dedicated housings. It means you need a big surface area for your warp engine, but if your starship design already has big wing structures then it saves you having to have additional nacelles as well, preserving manoeuvrability and minimising weight, which is important for a ship that features atmospheric flight capabilities and can freely land and take off from planet surfaces.

Don't forget that the exodus spawned other vulcanoid offshoots, and so supports the idea of a slower, potentially multi-generational, exodus where there would be several offshoots: the Mintakan and the Debrune, to name a few.

Yes, it was my head cannon that the twin nacelle could theoretically get to to well above warp 7 as a design by the time of the NX-01, even if nowhere near reaching it, so humans went that way. Whereas the Vulcans, complacent by the time of Enterprise saw no need to go that fast, or as they iterated slowly, the energy requirements seemed too far away. But then humans come along and move fast and break things!

i also have the theory that during fights the Ring of the bigger warships could have been rotated 90° to be flush with the outside hull making it much harder to hit and therefore eliminating or at least defending one of the biggest weakspots of any warp capable ship. Sadly that was never shown on screen, but I still love that Idea

The vulcans love their ships so much, they put a ring on it....

I always thought the reasons Vulcans had rings was they let them have more precise sensor readings at warp even if they were much harder to maintain or something else scientific like that

I figured that the ring drive has a big requirement for maintenance. If your warp specialist has 200 years of experience and spends all day tweaking the warp field, then a ring drive works. If you don't have time to do all those adjustments, linear nacelles are better. And probably better for "ruggedness" if you start getting shot at.

A deep dive into the Vulcans would be FA-BU-LOUS. I think we might have learned more common-people details about the Vulcans from Tuvoc (and Nelix's pestering) than from Spock, who taught us from a higher "intro to Vulcans" level.

I kinda realize the Vulcans knew they be left behind so creating the federation was essential for them to not get left behind

Please. More Vulcan history ❤

Perhaps the path across space that the Vulcan exiles navigated, should be looked into what worlds/navigateion hazards did thay run into along the way? It's quite a distance from Vulcan to Romulus. Slower Sleeper Ships or Multi-Generational Ships might have effected how long the trip lasted also not all Vulcan exiles desided to live on Romulus.

You want to talk more about Vulcan History? Of course I'd watch it. I'm still waiting fro continuation of Star Trek Online though. Your narrations adds so much to it that it is irreplaceable IMO. I just wish Tarsi could blow up something, like she used to.

A lot of people have said it already, but the Vulcan design resembles that of the concept art for the Alcubierre drive. Though I'm not sure which came first, it makes pretty convenient sense either way. However, Romulans may not have needed warp technology to make it across the galaxy, as we saw Bajorans and other species travel via non-warp means over long periods of time. Solar sails can actually get pretty decent speeds as well, even in a vacuum with little to no proximity to a star.

More Volcano history would be great! 😃

I’m so glad I found this channel. Now I can watch something good while I cook.

Rick, I thank you for your ST work. From the lore, to STO, show reviews, and more, your work is incredible, & I appreciate your efforts through the years! Many Thanks, - Carn

That is actually a very interesting information! If that is the case, it would then be more efficient to produce civilian warp ships with the Ring design than the twin nacelles. Because you wouldn't need that level of flexibility for a civilian design. So if true, I would expect most of civilian ships to be "ringed" & military ships to have "nacelles".

I would love to hear more Vulcan (or any other) history- apocryphal, beta canon, or utterly made-up! I really enjoy your take on the Trek universe!

Yes please more Vulcan history I’m begging you

Ironically, it seems counterintitive that the warp ring would be the less stable option, when it comes to creating a 360 degree bubble around you.

I took the warp nacelle being the easiest to maintain/repair, it was made from scraps after all. The ring might better while in use possibly not damaging subspace.

Humans: The twin-nacelle design is robust; it's more forgiving of warp field navigational error. Vulcans: Simply do not make any errors.

4:21 - i appreciate that the bit of spatter was green

According to the "Klingon Bird-of-Prey Owner's Workshop Manual" written by Rick Sternbach & Ben Robinson which is a 'Official Licensed Star Trek Product'. The Klingon Bird of Prey uses "Warp Wings". The Wings themselves are the emitters for the Warp Field. The Aft Red emission is the Impulse Drive Exhaust and it's MASSIVE, that's what allows the Bird of Prety to have amazing STL acceleration & Top Speeds. It's Impulse Drive is excessive for a vessel of it's size & mass.

It was implied in the show, that while Vulcan's slowly tuned they drives. Henry Archer break Warp 3 barrier using clever hack where additional third coil hidden between nacelles actively compensated instability of the Warp field, allowing humans to go to Warp 5, despite not having stable reactor. Because Warp work by going closer to subspace, more flat field is needed to not breach into it, because otherwise weird anomalies start taking place. On low level usually causing vibrations what tear ships apart. It seams that Up to Warp 2 even highly unstable field is too weak to breach into subspace. But Humanity could go Warp 5 without having stable field and by extend when Compensator failed, ships jump into subspace. What did happen to Columbia, Enterprise, Old Bonaventure (Ceres) and most notably Franklin. And yes, that meant time travel shenanigans. It make sense that only reason why Vulkcans give Earth they classified Warp 7 Drive, was to rid of high performance Archer Drives. What honestly did work. PS: Borg use transwarp technology, so they utilize T'Kon'ian Gate network directly. And mentioned ancient alien network actually may be source of subspace. We in fact know that Borg is tolerated there only because they use Temporal Compensator. So yes, they drive have same nature as subspace. Though unlike Spore Drive they can only jump to beacons.

My personal take is that the ring system is technically more stable once you get it to work - with both the upsides and downsides that has. Due to the warp geometry it creates, it is largely self-sustaining, with few ways it could ever fail catastrophically - however, this rigidity also makes it much less adaptable and near impossible to make quick adjustments. It also requires the ship and drive to be fine-tuned to each other, with higher speeds requiring much more work than just "MOAR POWA!" Compared to the singular "low pressure corridor" the ring design projects around the ship, the nacelle variant instead creates two "high pressure" areas that turn the area between them into a comparably "low pressure" zone that the ship can cruise through. This takes more energy and requires constant monitoring, but you can easily adjust the two fields against each other - not only for steering, but also to adjust for any inaccuracies your design may have. That would easily explain why Starfleet would ditch the warp ring after their first tests, since nacelles are much more prototype friendly in their adjustability - which also allowed them to progress so much faster than the Vulcans.

What about P'Jem? It was said the monastery is like 3,000 or 4,000 years old in that Enterprise episode iirc

Those Volcan histry was best part, do it more :D

They're Vulcans. I suppose the ring in a way signifies complete connection with ideals and technology.

More Vulcan, please!

The D'Kyr class is by far the best looking ship in the entire Federation navy. I know everyone loves their Galaxys and Odysseys and Intrepids, but give me a D'Kyr instead any day of the week. Also I know it'll never happen but I would LOVE to have a Trek show set aboard a Vulcan vessel, either a D'Kyr or the newer Sh'vhal. Maybe with a Vulcan captain but a lot of Humans and especially Andorians among the senior staff. The character development for the captain would be amazing, slowly seeing the strengths of emotion and illogical thinking over time, knowing he's (or she's) not supposed to do that, and eventually settling into the idea that emotions and seemingly-irrational solutions to problems aren't inherently bad, they just require good judgement to know when to use them and when not to.

Yes please do more on the Vulcans

Love the conclusion that Vulcans are just showing off! It's the most perfect explanation. They're so proud but they deserve the credit for their precision. 🖖

Please do explore more of that!!! I've been a Star Trek Superfan for over 48 years & I'm a Superfan of your KZfaq channel as well!!!

I'm always interested in more Trek lore

My assumption is that the faction that later became the Romulans where those most advanced in that research but where losing the clan war. So they left wth all of their research to start again somewhere else. They must have kidnapped all scientists they could from other factions, destroyed all remaining research installations and took the data with them. In short, Surak's clan won the war but left Vulcan nearly destroyed (may be the future Romulans must have launched all they had in terms of WMDs before leaving for good) and with no researchers and no tech to use in space to go after the culprits. (I'm trying to reconstruct logically what must have happened) No wonder they took so long before reattempting space travel with warp drive. First they had to rebuild their civilization and society, unify the planet and culture for good (and that could take a while) and rebuild the space industry from scratch. Plus add some level of fear that going that far could bring new problems, new factions wanted to try other ways of life (those without logic that NX01 comes across... for example), so the Vulcan Administration stayed very conservative and played it safe. Empathetic to Humans just coming out of their nuclear war, they thought implementing the same principles on the Human Warp Program would work. They thought wrong. Warp tech and first contact is what cimented Earth and not the otherway around (despite some discordant voices, Terra Prime I'm looking at you). Vulcans simply lost their objectivity with their fear that what happened to them could happen to humans (despite showing some prudence is still a good move over impatience, they tried to boos humans around, obtaining the opposite result as the one they desired) In fact one could argue that being part of the interstellar community was the new raison d'être of the Earth...

Wow. I always assumed the rings on the XCV-330 Enterprise were Centrifugal Artificial Gravity rings.

That actually makes sense, especially for the Vulcans of Enterprise era who had lost their way, having a major superiority complex over all the other emotional species. Which was a major complaint about earlier Enterprise, until the Surak's katra plotline, where they found the original teachings and became the Vulcans we know. Which all ties together with how Earth became the centre of the UFP, which didn't really make sense before.

They have retconned continuity so many times that i just say hang the sense of it and just enjoy it! I came to that conclusion during enterprise...just be in the moment

Well done Rick! Another great video mate!❤

It looked like there was an inner ring as well. Hmm possibly the steering ring while the outer ring is propulsion ring?

More Vulcan videos please sir! Even if they are not cannon, thank you!

*Vulcan Ambassador Soval:* We had our wars, Admiral, just as Humans did. Our planet was devastated, our civilization nearly destroyed. Logic saved us. But it took almost 1500 years for us to rebuild our world and travel to the stars. You Humans did the same in less than a century. There are those on the High Command who wonder what Humans would achieve in the century to come. And they don't like the answer.

The Vulcans take things slow like the Elves of Middle Earth. Maybe there is a connection? The species that took the early Elves from Earth and brought them to Vulcan after the 3rd age

Huh.. I really wondered about all of that. How very.. Vulcan.. of them. Well done, this was really interesting. Thanks for this Rick!

It's crazy to think Zefram Cochrane's design influenced not human warp flight design, but a big chunk of the galaxy because his work was used by Federation for centuries to come, and even Vulcans recognized that

my headcannon was the Vulcans came to use rings as to avoid the Raptor Wing design because of what it represents philosophically.

I always loved the Vulcan warp ring. And I always kinds took it as a angel/ holy reference they gave to the Vulcans..like a holy Halo descending from the heavens kind of vibe. Also it looks cool as hell.

Disabling a warp ring would be harder than diasabling a nacelle. Also a ring would be great place to place deflector shields - also a ring would make easy acces to the warp components within the warp ring. On top of that its a great way to keep the crew fit - by allowing them to run inside the ring ;D

More Vulcan history, apocryphal or not, yes, please! 🖖

Yes, more of that please!

More vulkan lore please!

My Vulcan Tac Officer in Startrek Online flies a Galaxy Dreadnaught named D'vir. So happy the name got a mention.

My favorite design was the Ferengi ships. No nacelles and no ring. Everything is tucked in and smooth.

You should do some Star Trek audio books. I basically see your voice as the standard for Star Trek narration

Just remember: The Vulcan science directorate has determined that time travel is impossible, so we're pretty certain the timeline should be consistent ;)

To clarify the 'Romulan Way' mention...according to Duane's book. the proto-Romulan exiles made use of a psionic-powered 'bootstrap' jump system in otherwise sublight vessels. This has the unfortunate side effect of burning out (and killing) the psi's involved...causing the number of properly-trained (and eventually properly powered as weaker psi's were later employed due to a lack of the more powerful psis) to dwindle so that when they finally did make landfall, psi was nearly absent among the Romulans.

I never connected it before, but looking at these Vulcan designs I just realized that Spock's jellyfish ship from the 2009 movie actually makes sense as an evolution of that ethos. I always dismissed it as a nonsensical design that didn't fit with what the Federation does, but it makes more sense as a purely Vulcan ship

The timeline screws with me. The Vulcans make the Warp 1 engine. They collectively say "Whoa. That was too fast. We need to slow development down drastically." And take a break for 100 years. In that time, the division happens that sends the soon-to-be Romulans into the depths of space. Using just the Warp 1 engine design because it's all they have. And those Romulans, instead of settling on say, a world nearby that wouldn't take centuries to reach at Warp 1, instead travel as some kind of migrant fleet (doubt it was ONE ship) an entire galactic quadrant away. That's a hell of a journey to get away from family. Lol

I love this explanation

I loved the Vulcan ships from Enterprise.

Romulan warp drives aren't powered by a singularity gravitational field. They're powered by the intense radiation emitted by a singularity's accretion disc. It's actually a really plausible power source in real life, if we could actually create a microsingularity in the first place.

IIRC the Romulans left in sleeper ships. I think it's mentioned in the episode Gambit I or II. There were a couple other vulcan descended romulan cousins mentioned in that episode.

Personally I like to believe that the exodus saw Romulans taking off in generational ships but finding and possibly forcefully acquiring warp tech from some different species

I like the fact that not all the other races have the same warp design. It adds variety to the ship designs. Ps. Even though starfleet uses warp coils. They are still arp rings on a smaller scale than the vulcans. So technically, it seems all species use warp rings in one fashion or another

Please do make more content on Vulcans.

"Apocroohal Vulc hist..." Would love to see modern revisits of the early-80s books _Spock's World & The Romulan Way._

The Vulcan landing craft in First Contact wasn't the warp vessel. That was still in orbit.

live long and prosper🖖🏻

This might be an interesting callback to the relation between the Vulcans and Romulans. The Romulans pride themselves on having shinier (but less sturdy) technology powering their starships. Instead of warp core, they use a singularity. The Vulcans don't develop just a nacelle based warp drive, they develop and develop and improve until they have their very own, highly efficient, warp ring drive.

I always assumed the Romulans and Vulcans split earlier on Vulcan and they left the planet after Vulcans adopted the teachings of Surak (which is what lead to their civil war).

It would be great with more Vulcan lore

One interesting thing not mentioned in the video is that our current understanding of physics is that the alcubierre drive would use a ring of exotic matter. So the math saying a ring works is why Vulcans would use a ring. Humans would be more likely to experiment where Vulcan scientists are math based.

It makes sense if after the war a faction of Vulcan’s assumed the planet was beyond salvaging. So they built their generation ship and left. The planet then deteriorated, almost wiping out all remaining Vulcans. Subsequently, surviving Vulcans had to start from scratch and over the next few hundred years the new generations weren’t taught the old ways. Eventually, perhaps they discover the ruins of their old civilisations which sparks a few hundred years of rediscovery. Eventually leading to warp travel once again. This timeline allows for the romulan faction to leave while also making sense of the vulcans apparent 1000 year period of stagnation.

I've always wondered of the Romulans were displaced by the Preservers. The preservers were known to "rescue" groups who were going to be wiped out / way of life changed. They could have removed the Romulan group either before Surak or in his early days when Vulcan was in the grips of a world war. It just seems odd that a group of Vulcans would travel all the way to Romulus to settle when there were just as good planets much nearer. Also Vulcan had no idea of the relocation, which would be hard to miss if done by conventional warp flight - they would have no idea if the the Preservers just snatched them. I bet there is a Preserver Obelisk somewhere on Romulus, possibly under a land slide.

Explore, explore it all!

Vulcans: "we know where we're going, why would we need to quickly change direction in warp?" Humans: "but what if we see something cool and need to check it out!?"

Cylindrical nacelles are just stacks of smaller rings. Such a modular design is redundant and can retain most of its capacity if a few coils fail or are battle-damaged. The Vulcan design might have to limp home on a small spare like the donut spare tire on a car. Large warp rings can have all sorts of unpredictable oscillation modes so it takes a lot of experience to design them properly. Large devices also require heavy industrial infrastructure, gigantic furnaces, presses, forges and machine tools, so it might not even be possible to construct them locally without first building up that infrastructure. In the 20th century the USSR and Canada didn't have the capacity to forge large pressure vessels for nuclear reactors, so they came up with designs made out of many smaller pressurised pipes that were manufacturable and had the advantage of online refuelling

The Romulans should have the early records since they didn't seem to lose their tech base. So, why the Romulans haven't saved those records or shared them with the Vulcans for some diplomatic benefit is a bit strange and vague.

its more in line with the theoretical "real world" Alcubere warp drive models currently being designed.

fantastic video!!!

If Rick finds non-canon Vulcan history to be interesting, then bring it on! He has good taste (and is always careful to disclose sources.)

I thought the Vulcan design had double rings but it was a small inner ring with the large outer ring (reminiscent of a heliocopter design) so it was stable like the double nacelle? Like the inner small ring at center created a protective warp bubble with the encompassing outer larger ring creating the traversal outer warp bubble coalescing into a warp field while ship in flux as space moved around. The difference is that double nacelle created longer [and faster "streamlined"] warp coils while heliocircumcentric warp coil required building larger circumference warp coils...pragmatically speaking, the smaller warp coils being most economical, if that mattered [still], and easiest to design, manufacture and field. Tangentially, the encompassing warp field bubble generating along outer pylon nacelles instead of nacelles tucked into the body like the Prometheus (or the DQ-doppleganger), being the more realistic engineering design, with ponderance...weird Asian engineering thoughts, lol. Of course, I suppose this is my opinion so make of it what you will.

Another way to explain the Romulans is that the early Vulcan drive couldn't sustain much more than warp 1, but it could go faster in pulses until it overheated. Also at these low speeds you don't even need antimatter, fusion could be used to create the warp field. Of course TNG screws everything up by showing far off planets many thousands of years old that are proto-vulcan.

Very good video.

i thought the ring design was to recycle waste energy and give the ship extended range on less fuel, but can't reach the potential speed of a nacelle design. meaning Vulcans were left behind when exploring, gathering resources and ship to ship combat also early Vulcans are the Goa'uld "you have something i don't, so die "

Early Romulans could have left in multigenerational sublight vessels as well. A limited gene pool combined with cosmic radiation (and other environmental factors) would also explain the rather fast seperation into a species of their own.

Do you have a video of the history of the Vulcan and romulans?

🙏🏽 YES PLEASE lol 😂 definitely explore more Vulcan lore even if not canon

I would have expected the warp ring to be less complicated to deal with because of its shape.

Vulcans like specialized designs, most of the Federation likes multirole stuff.

A warp drive requiring extreme precision would seem to have trouble not just from engineering alignment, but also from every gravity wave and minor spacial anomaly in your path. Fantastic speed and efficiency as long as the path was clear, but prone to stalling when it hit a bump. And a tactical weakness that I'm pretty sure enemies would discover and devise a means to exploit, like mines designed to produce a warp field pulse.

Vulcans: Make it perfect! Everyone else: Keep It Simple Stupid!

They do eventually adapt a little with that future tri-ring cruiser seen in ST:Enterprise, though given that they still use the same 22nd-century ships in the 24th, that ship probably won't be seen till potentially the 32nd at this rate.

The dynamic between warp nacelles and rings sounds similar to the dynamic between axial and centrifugal jet engines.