Romulans and Vulcans have been spacefaring for at least 2000 years

Because they're space elves.

I always assumed that humans got a huge leg up due to the Vulcans sharing their tech

My memory is super fuzzy but as the federation is eventually the Juggernaut of Races it eventually becomes at the time the federation was only comprised of humans at the time Sense the federation shares tech with its members anything the vulcans gave the humans to fight the klingons would eventually make it down the pipeline to allied races. I would enjoy seeing some of the lesser known federation member races updated with say Galaxy or even sovereign class levels of upgrades. Then again I feel the federations choice to completely forgo using Cloaks because it gives them an unfair advantage Suicidal.

There's preobably some form of Moore's law in action concerning Trek tech; yes, Humans are latecomers to the space race, but hitting the plateau doesn't take long. Though even in TNG era they still had edges (cloaks & disruptors).

The lore is a clusterfuck on that regard with only bits and pieces coming from the shows/movies and most of the blanks filled in by EU sources that have contradicted each other about a half dozen times. You're correct that originally they were only supposed to have acquired warp within the TOS-era - I think that is even stated in TOS - but as that made no sense they've since soft-retconned it to refer to the Romulans only lacking 'tactical' warp and by extent the ability to engage in combat while at warp (which ultimately didn't make much of a difference as everyone after the TOS-era seemed to forget you could do that anyways).

It does seem however, once you try and sort through all the conflicting source material to try and get some sort of coherent timeline, that even though the Vulcans/Romulans have been spacefaring for over 2000 years they haven't necessarily had a warp drive (or at least a good one) for all or even a majority of that time. The pre-Surak Vulcans did establish outposts in other star systems and the Romulans of course were able to flee Vulcan for deep space but both of those things could have been done in theory with sub-light propulsion or a shitty form of warp drive that could just barely break the light barrier (ridiculously fast in terms of physics but still pretty sluggish on a cosmic scale). And of course the Romulans spent a lot of that time floating through space as refugees looking for a new home while the Vulcans had to rebuild their world and then spend a bunch of time in quiet contemplation so both groups probably weren't making great scientific progress for a lot of that time.

They did. The Vulcans held back certain key knowledge like that surrounding advanced warp drives (which humans still figured out in record time because Trek humans are, I would argue, a genuinely Mary-Sue-race) because they didn't want humans fucking with stuff all over the galaxy (which humans then did) but they handed over a lot of advanced tech to help at the 'local' level. Terraforming, for example.

It's largely why Earth was able to be rebuilt - and then some - less than a century after a nuclear holocaust.

By their own admission they're slow peoples.`

D'deridex, fuck yeah!

Humans got almost all their shit from Vulcans, that's why they jumped 200+/- years in so little time.

>genuinely Mary-Sue race

Lolno. Humans splashed around in the shallows for 200,000yrs before we finally went from the first railroads to the highway system to airports to Star Trek [1966] to moonshots [1969] in a burst of creative and technological industry unimaginable a mere century before. If we'd told those prospective rail barons what was in store in the next hundred years, they'd have declared us madmen. So, whenever I hear people disparage HFY, I know they're just ignorant of world history - It's not "sue-ish" if humans really ARE fucking amazing.

Given there are still no signs of intelligent ETs, if we got the keys to a post-scarcity economy, recent history suggests that we would soon rule the known universe - in geological terms.

Suck it, Space Elfs.

>which humans still figured out in record time because Trek humans are, I would argue, a genuinely Mary-Sue-race

Meanwhile, Humans also almost went extinct shortly before getting their shit together, advance largely by exploiting the top minds of literally dozens of species, have nearly lost numerous wars (and not just nearly, in some realities, plus wasn't Earth sacked twice in ten years by the Borg and the Breen?) and Section 31 has been quietly murdering people in the name of self-preservation for three fucking centuries now. Humans are about as Sue-ish as any other "good guy" race in trek.

Because they're different.

Well, the Borg didn't hit Earth but they came damn close, like pulling up in a parking orbit close. Maybe shooting up Zefram Cochrane hobo camp for a few minutes.

The Breen, as far as I can tell, only attacked San Francisco to hit Starfleet HQ and the Academy before they were pushed away. Sure, it wasn't much really, but it was a fucking wakeup call to everyone who wasn't taking the Dominion War seriously.

They're space elves.

That should tell you all you need to know.

And don't forget, only about two centuries before the Dominion War the Xindi absolutely fucked the Americas with their prototype super weapon which was probably the biggest loss of life on Earth in a single incident since the Eugenics wars.

The Federation is basically the humans, they hold basically all the important roles in Star Fleet and all their greatest legendary heroes are humans (and if they aren't they are still half-human or raised by humans)

Humanity was hardly "splahing around in the shallows" before the 1800s. You're just totally ignorant of the dynamics of scientific progress and the constant development that led to the conditions necessary for the explosive technological growth from the 19th century onward. Technological development is iterative and synergistic; it builds on what's come before and is facilitated by contemporary developments in other fields. This is what leads to the exponential growth in tech in the past couple centuries; we finally scraped together a critical mass of basic understanding that created a self-fueling spiral of new development. Our discoveries in one area contribute (directly or indirectly) to other discoveries in other areas, particularly when (as in the case of the railroad and, later, the telephone, air travel, internet, etc.) those discoveries facilitate faster exchange of materials and ideas between distant regions. This is just a fundamental mechanism of the invention process; there's no good reason to assume that it's somehow a unique property of humanity and other intelligent species wouldn't benefit from the same phenomenon in their own technological development.

Post-Surak Vulcans probably favored stability over rapid advancement. In there minds it would be "logical" to take the time to perfect a new technology before putting it into widespread use.

Also consider that the logic they believe in isn't always right. For example, the Vulcan Science Academy declaring that time travel was impossible and T'Pol repeating that statement even though they had more time travelers visiting the ship than crew members.

That's based on one line from Scotty that "their power is simple impulse". Referring to the Romulan Bird-of-Prey they were fighting in that episode. Some people assumed that meant they only had impulse engines, but that doesn't make any sense for a number of reasons. Not least of which is that the Enterprise was moving at warp for a large portion of that battle.

Well that's a thing about logic, it is as often as not a personal opinion, it is not an absolute and it is not scientific, it's a conclusion drawn from personal observations

Vulcan is a desert shithole. How they evolved there to begin with is a mystery unless it's a desert as a result of their nuclear war forever ago and they never bothered restoring the ecology for whatever reason. I'm willing to bet resources are scarce so there was little room for dangerous experimentation.

Desertification due to warfare sounds actually pretty plausable considering what we know of the early vulcans who were a bunch of constantly warring and emotion-driven murderhobos before their ideologies changed. A legacy that the romulans still carry.

It's not that they didn't know how to make cloaks or disruptors but they had a treaty preventing them from building or owning cloaking devices and phasers were most likely simply much more useful for their purposes than disruptors.
Both shipborne and handheld phasers seem to have ALOT of utility functions (heating stuff, transfering energy, all that random crap they did using them when the plot required etc) and good non-lethal settings while disruptors are pretty much the AK-47 of the quadrant. No unnecessary features, simple to mass produce, hard to break and good for killing. Also seems to be a much older branch of technology than the relatively new phasers

After first contact they basically took over all of earth and ran everything. Humans had to start getting a bit peacefully rebellious to be independent again.

It's a shame that just one generation later, the Roms stopped building fuckhuge intimidation ships. At least baby Bane kept the true spirit alive.

Big Guys need Big Ships.

It's not like the Valdore was much smaller than the D'deridex though; especially when you factor in the former's huge amount of empty space.

elves, I suppose

Level modifiers man

>tfw the D'deridex is just two fat Valdores fucking eachother

Starfleet Battles tried to explain that one, but ultimately it's because they had no idea what the fuck they were talking about back then regarding the warp-drive. It's not until TNG that the rules regarding warp drives and warp speed begin to solidify.

>OneDDeridexOrTwoValdores.jpg

Actually it's a treaty obligation regarding Cloaking devices. They're banned from research into that line of tech as part of a peace treaty with the Romulan Star Empire. Which is ironic because they were able to develop a better cloak anyways from a covert black ops research center.

The Valdore/Mogai intimidates with wingspan rather than sheer size. It's basically the same effect but more efficient, I suppose.

Well there was the Scimitar too which was made to take on the Dominion's capital ships.