Population Numbers...

Yes, I know. Which is why I brought up the whole point of there being species very similar to Vulcans, but they're not Vulcans. You're saying the same thing I said, only differently.

Actually, its a continuity glitch that in the Abrams timeline, Vulcans and/or Humans must have made some contact with the Romulans that did not happen in the original timeline. In the original TOS timeline, humans had not seen a Romulan (in a manner that was widely reported) until the incident with the Enterprise. Spock theorizes at that time that Romulans might be an offshoot of Vulcans, something he implies is not a certain fact. But in the Abrams timeline, Spock states to Kirk that Romulans and Vulcans are related as a matter of fact statement without any controversy or doubt. That suggests events happened a little differently after the Kelvin incident than just Kirk's childhood history.


I would imagine that a planetary evacuation is not something that happens often, if almost ever. There was no evidence of a threat to the entire planet, and at the time the technology probably didn't exist to destroy a planet so completely. When a mysterious starship appears overhead and starts firing a weapon at the ground, I really don't think your first option is to evacuate the planet. You'd think that the big scary ship that just destroyed the starfleet expeditionary force might obliterate your evacuation fleet as well, or at least sizeable fractions of it.

As soon as Spock realized what Nero was doing, he ordered Uhura to signal a planetary evacuation. The planet was destroyed just a couple of minutes later. That's not a lot of time to evacuate an entire planet. And as far as I can see, there were only two modes of escape from Vulcan. One: board a shuttle and take off really fast. Two: find a transporter room that can beam you on board the Enterprise. And they didn't have long: even before Spock beamed up its clear large parts of the planet were already unstable or uninhabitable.

I'm basing my numbers on the very cynical assumption that only 1/10 of 1% of the Vulcan race was off planet. One tenth of one percent. That would mean of the 6 billion that died on Vulcan, 6 million were offworld when their homeworld was destroyed.

Damn Superboy Prime and his time punches!

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I wasn't thinking of Vulcan colonies or their own Starfleet, whatever they called it. I just find it silly to assume that isn't several million just doing various jobs on other planets. It's a big Universe and a few million could easily be scattered all over the place.

No, what I am saying is that, according to canon, Vulcan history is known to have been distorted and it is reasonable to presume that the Vulcan/Romulan split was not due to Surak's teachings since Surak's teaching were different than what it was believed they were up until the 2160s if I remember right, and given not only the long life but the stubborness of Vulcans it is likely that even presently "Surak's teachings" are not his teachings, but rather a bastardization of both what Surak taught and what it was though he taught for those thousand years.


Luminara, a bigger ship is easier to maintain because there are less moving parts. If you have to clean 100 tiny mechanism or 1 giant one it will take you usually several times as long to clean the 100 tiny ones than the 1 giant one. Also having 100 smaller one increases the chances of 1 of those will break down, while the bigger one while just as likely as any one of the smaller one to break down is less likely in terms of once it's up an running. And it also takes less material, so even if the big one break down its easier to replace.

Why is that a reasonable assumption? If the objection is that Vulcan is relatively insular and isolationist, then no percentage is necessarily reasonable. To take it to an extreme, if I were to say that millions of Vulcans were cannibals, based on the assumption that only one tenth of one percent of them eat other Vulcans, its clear the percentage is meaningless. There's no basis for assuming that percentage without evidence. Similarly, without evidence, there's no reason to assume some percentage of Vulcans must be off-world.

Except even the Romulans don't dispute the basics of the Vulcan/Romulan split. Maybe it was because Surak had bad breath and that fact is now lost to history. But its still obviously the case that the militaristic and empire-building values left with the Romulans, because there's no evidence of a Vulcan Star Empire and there's ample evidence of a Romulan one. If Vulcan had even a tiny fraction of the imperial aspirations of the Romulans, Earth would have been conquered by Vulcan before Cochrane's flight.

Moreover, Surak's teachings were distorted at the time of Enterprise but its clear that this was for the most part corrected with the discovery of the Kir Shara. By the time of either TOS or the Abrams Trek, the teachings of Surak would have been properly known. I'm pretty sure they included stuff like not conquering neighboring worlds somewhere in the fine print. Its also clear that Romulans rejected Surak's teachings of using logic to control emotions and passions.

I don't remember the first part, but it's been a while since I last watched JJTrek. And there are a lot of continuity errors like that (I blame Enterprise. For everything. Including JJTrek. And Final Frontier), which makes it hard to keep up.

And ok, so planetary evacuations aren't that common an occurrence. Still, it seems to me that someone should've been paying enough attention to sound an alert after Nero destroyed the fleet sent to investigate. The planet must have some sort of sensor array that directs orbital traffic, which means that whoever was manning it would've known that the ships sent to investigate were turned into a brand new orbital debris field. Now I don't know about you all, but if I were on duty when the planet started shaking and a bunch of Starfleet ships-of-the-line were suddenly destroyed, I'd be telling people to evacuate on whatever ships were in orbit/planet side. At the very least I would start preparations for evacuation, so that if the call came it would go a lot faster and more people would make it off the planet.

Suppose the Vulcans were actually as on the ball as you expect them to be. We have an unknown vessel that is firing an energy weapon at the planet that is disrupting communications and transporter technology. It has destroyed a fleet of starships. At this moment, the logical thing to do would be to order the population in and around the area of the ship into civil defense shelters probably underground. The rest of the planet would be similarly warned to keep away from potential military targets such as spaceports. It would be illogical to head into space at this point in the face of an unknown enemy that is primarily shooting up starships and generating electromagnetic disruptions. No one either on Vulcan nor on Enterprise had any idea that the safest thing to do was *not* to head underground shelters until Nero shot the red matter into the borehole. At that moment, most of the population was not primed to evacuate the planet.

How exactly do you prepare to evacuate an entire planet without actually doing it? Perhaps to their detriment, the Vulcans are unlikely to go on TV and say every man for themselves: make a break for it. They would have proceeded orderly and logically and my guess is many shuttle pilots died on the ground waiting for orders to depart or their passengers to arrive. They would not leave with empty craft when there were people heading to them for evacuation, and few if any knew exactly how much time they actually had. It might have been as little as two minutes. And panic is an emotional response.


Edit: I'm reminded of the Decker error. You're in command of a starship that is investigating a string of destroyed solar systems. You come across an incredibly powerful weapon that you cannot dent and is blowing your ship apart. So you beam your crew down to the safety of a nearby planet, whereupon the incredibly powerful weapon decides you're not interesting anymore and proceeds to destroy the planet you transported your crew to. In retrospect, perhaps not the best move. You are, after all, investigating destroyed solar systems. But you believe at the time that you're facing a weapon that will eventually kill you all and can do so easily, so you make the call, and it ends up being the wrong one. The Vulcans were in a similar situation. Unknown powerful enemy vessel capable of destroying an entire fleet. Logic suggests not sending up any more vulnerable starships, and protecting your people on the ground. Because logic doesn't warn you that the vessel is about to eliminate the ground.

No. The more functions you cram into a device, the more overly complicated it gets.

Think of a house. Now think of an apartment building. Which is more complicated and harder to maintain?




-np

Yeah, but...


The thingy was...

The engineer in me really has only one thing to say: don't put all your eggs in one basket. What matters is not how easy it is to fix one ship verses hundreds. What matters is what do you do when your one ship breaks. And no matter how much redundancy and fault tolerance you put in it, it will eventually break with your entire species in it. And I'm not thinking break as in light bulb. I'm thinking break as in genocide.

Even if you had two or three, that's still way more concentrated value than I would ever recommend in a system intended to keep an entire species going. When you're talking about the survival of your race, six-sigma doesn't seem all that impressive anymore.

Just another example of why JJ Abrams sucks.

I think there was a mention in either a TV episode or one of the books that the all-Vulcan ship was destroyed because they were over-reliant on logic. I forget the details, but after that incident no other ship was crewed entirely by Vulcans.

Although to be fair, no one involved in Trek (including Roddenberry) was ever concerned with continuity, so "canon" is kind of a loosey-goosey word for that franchise.

In this instance, though, since Abrams' movie is considered a reboot, none of the other series or movies matters. So if Spock said only a few thousand Vulcans survived, then that's likely the case since he doesn't make a lot of mistakes.

Most of them had returned home for the septennial Pon Farr Fiesta.

There may be fewer total moving parts on one large transportation unit than there are on a thousand smaller transportation units, but the equipment on that one larger transportation unit is far more complex, prone to failure and difficult to maintain than the thousand smaller ones. No-one who knows anything about engines will argue that a single enormous one, like you'd find on a locomotive or ocean liner, is simpler and easier to maintain than a hundred basic ones, like you'd find on mopeds or chain saws.

Furthermore, the larger your transportation unit, the more "stuff" you have to put into it to support the inhabitants, and unless you make it with magic, there is a point where that one large unit is using more "stuff" to keep it going than all of the smaller units would use combined. Additional cooling for working systems, extra backup systems to avoid wiping out the entire population in the event of failure of a single system, more spare parts which must be checked and tested for functionality regularly.

Except that you wouldn't have to clean those 100 at the same time. They can be maintained or repaired on the fly, or abandoned, while the rest of the fleet moves on or waits. And due to the increased complexity of the larger one, it would take as long to disassemble, clean and reassemble the larger one as it would to clean a preset number of smaller ones, which may actually be greater than the equivalence of ships currently in the Migrant Fleet.

So many erroneous assumptions here...

If one smaller one breaks, it doesn't put the entire population at risk.

The larger one is more likely to break than a smaller one because it is more complex. Yes, it may have "less moving parts" than a hundred smaller ships, but that's irrelevant because 100 smaller units aren't going to suffer identical failures at the same time. In actuality, you can only compare the repair and maintenance time of a single large engine to the expected average for the smaller ships together.

Analogy: A single semi has fewer moving parts than a hundred mopeds. But a single semi is not easier to maintain or repair than a hundred mopeds, because a hundred mopeds won't all fail at the same time, won't all fail in exactly the same way and won't require exactly the same repairs. Nor is it easier to work on that semi, because the complexity of the the engine, fuel system, hydraulics, electrical system and mechanical parts are all far, far greater than the complexity of the mopeds.

The larger one is also more likely to break than the smaller ones because the parts are being used more heavily and with fewer rest periods for maintenance, replacement and adjustment. Smaller ships can stop, do maintenance or repairs, and catch back up to the fleet later. A large ship just breaks down and drifts, or kills the entire population if the failure is severe.

They need twice the material goods, minimum, plus space to store all of what they need for repairs, plus space and equipment to fabricate replacements and repair parts on site. One giant ship can't scavenge anything for repairs, because there's only that one giant ship, nothing from which they could scavenge. In addition to all of the parts it has actively working, it needs sufficient spares to swap out everything, or materials and space to fabricate replacements. And that's in addition to all of the backup systems that have to be kept on standby, and yes, they absolutely would have backup systems for everything. Electrical, environmental, engine, plumbing, sanitation, everything. One thing failing and not having an immediate switchover to a backup could kill the entire population.

Read up on ocean liners. They operate essentially identically to what you're describing for a "city ship". They aren't as simple as you'd like to believe, they don't have the material requirements that you espouse and the same is true of spacecraft.

Where exactly did I say my assumption was reasonable? I'm pretty sure I said it was cynical. You know contemptuously distrustful of (in this case Vulcan) nature and motives. Not trusting an imaginary race of aliens, that's hardly reasonable.

No, I keep saying that the larger devices are not inherently simpler devices, and that larger mechanical devices are composed of more smaller devices, which inherently makes them more complex, not simpler. If you knew anything about any of what you were attempting to discuss, you'd know how true that is.

Mechanical devices are not braided, twisted fibers. Ropes don't have millions, thousands, hundreds or even dozens of moving parts, circuitry or wiring, electrical components, pipes, hydraulics, doors, decks or anything else you'd find in a space ship. How you arrived at using rope as an analogy for complexity in mechanical objects is beyond me, because it isn't even remotely comparable.

And despite that being the stupidest analogy possible, it can still be used to prove that you're wrong. When you extend the length of that rope 10x, you correspondingly increase the risk of breaking the rope as well. The longer it is, the greater the chance of failure at some point along the rope because it will have more flaws and you will have a greater likelihood of missing something during an inspection or repair. The only thing you've proven is that you know even less about any of what you've said than was previously in evidence.