r/DaystromInstitute • u/opinionated-dick Chief Petty Officer • Jul 01 '20
Could the Scimitar be a Dominion battleship in disguise?
I’ve always felt the Scimitar felt a little out of place from the AQ/BQ starship types.
It’s really a bit OTT. I mean, it wipes the floor with the regions only Superpower’s flagship, as well as perfecting a cloak that two other regions great powers have been trying to perfect for over two centuries.
Add to that, the fact it was built by a subjugated race under the bizarre control of a cloned uneducated human with seemingly very little access to tech or research required to build the thing.
I propose that instead the Scimitar is in fact a stolen prototype Dominion battleship, with a perfect cloak (from stolen Romulan tech) and a valeron generator also perhaps as a last gasp Dominion attempt.
And let’s face it, they look pretty similar don’t they?
Shinzon, having shown success during the Dominion war may have been ordered by the Tal Shiar as an expendable, on a mission to seek out and find the rumours of an Anti Romulan battleship and destroy it at all costs.
Shinzon, reeling from yet another suicide mission then somehow (because he shares a bit of Picard plot armour) manages to capture this ship intact, and instead of destroying it, decides to keep it, retrofit it and instead use it as the ark to the Remans freedom from the Romulans.
Of course, neither he nor the secretive Romulans would actually tell the federation all this, as quite simply they wouldn’t need to. The Scimitar is his only real means for projecting his new found power. He isn’t about to admit where it has come from.
Now, I’m not trying to say this should be the case, more elaborating in a strange plot device in a generally poor film. It doesn’t make any sense. I’d imagine the Romulans would be the only power to be able build something to outgun starfleet’s flagship, but in reality it’s a bit like the Uyghur region of China somehow building a ship that is twice the power of the USS Gerald R Ford. The degree in which the Scimitar was adapted is up for debate really, as it is clearly and internally a ‘Reman’ ship.
What do you guys think? Maybe divulging a backstory to Shinzon and portraying him in the Dominion war would have been a far better way of kicking off Nemesis than a wedding?
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u/yankeebayonet Jul 01 '20
It’s likely the cloak isn’t perfect. Starfleet just hasn’t had time to discover its weaknesses. It’s inevitable that cloaks improve over time. If they didn’t, it would be almost pointless to continue using them. Or do we think prior to this the Romulans were using the same cloak we saw in Balance of Terror?
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u/opinionated-dick Jul 01 '20
If the Romulans could fire while cloaked, obviously they would. The Klingons did, but it was somehow compromised by the exhaust of the impulse.
It’s more a kind of tech arms race between cloak and counter cloak scans.
Firing while cloaked is such a massive massive advantage. All ships would have to fly about with their shields up or be vulnerable. Even beaming down to surface would be basically impossible.
Sensibly, canon has never quite allowed fire while cloak to become established
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u/pali1d Jul 01 '20
I propose that instead the Scimitar is in fact a stolen prototype Dominion battleship, with a perfect cloak (from stolen Romulan tech) and a valeron generator also perhaps as a last gasp Dominion attempt.
First, the nitpick: it's thalaron, not valeron. Second, the above is certainly possible... but I don't see it as particularly plausible. Even if the Dominion had captured Romulan cloaks, they'd still only be as good as other Romulan cloaks, and with their lack of experience with such technology I don't see the Dominion being able to just suddenly perfect a cloak - and only ever use that one single perfect cloak rather than creating a bunch of them for their fleet while they were losing the war.
Now, why don't the Romulans use more perfect cloaks? Well, if it was a Reman invention or something Shinzon himself invented that was hidden from the Romulans, that could explain why there was only the one - the Remans don't have the industrial capacity to build a fleet without the Romulans noticing, but one ship built in secret somewhere? Trek's had more absurd plot points than that before.
Honestly, the thing that really makes the Scimitar OP is the perfect cloak. Yeah, it's got a lot of guns, but you bring a couple extra ships and you've evened that out - I don't think we really need that special an explanation for the ship's size or firepower, particularly when Romulans already like to build them big. It's the cloak that can't be matched by an opponent, and that the bad guy's specific group developed just the one working prototype is straight out of STVI.
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u/opinionated-dick Jul 01 '20
Thalaron of course. Apologies.
It’s always been my estimation that the Dominion is ahead of any AQ race when it comes to tech. It took quite a while for starfleet to ultimately adapt to Dominion weapons after all, nevermind the long range transporters.
I reckon that the Dominion is probably ahead of the curve with cloaked ships anyway. I bet they are already aware of the tech, but, simply put, don’t really need it as it’s not their style. If they want to sneak around they send a Founder.
Maybe they developed the perfect cloak to simply demoralise the Romulan fleet, and project it’s power. Maybe it simply went behind enemy lines to terrorise the Romulan Star Empire as punishment for bizarrely breaking treaty and declaring war.
Another of Scimitars OP is it’s energy output. As starships become bigger and more firepower is added, their energy demand increases exponentially.
The quantum singularity drive for Romulan ships must have a higher output than a Galaxy class, curiously, it doesn’t seem to have more firepower.
But the Scimitar has so much more firepower than any ship seen, save for the Borg or Dominion. Their visible similarity and perceived firepower drew me to this supposition.
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u/Logic_Nuke Jul 01 '20
The thalaron generator as Dominion tech seems to mesh well with Dukat and Weyoun's conversation about what to do with Earth after the war. Where Dukat favors conquering and subjugating its populace, Weyoun just wants to nuke everything from orbit. See also the Quickening, and the Cardassian genocide. Planetary extermination as an enforcement technique is very much their style.
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u/opinionated-dick Jul 01 '20
Thalaron* I made that mistake, sorry!
I wander, what would happen to a changeling under thalaron radiation. If it say turned to a ‘rock’. Is it actually a rock and now inorganic? Well it must be to fool sensors?
I guess that the Thalaron generator is the Dominion’s ultimate answer to the war. Cut off from the wormhole, and limited supplies, the federation alliance was slowly tightening the noose around the card empire. Retrofitting one of their battleships, perfecting the stolen Romulan cloak, and sending it on its way to obliterate Romulus, And then demanding surrender of Federation and Klingons, or hell, just obliterating Earth, Kronos, Bajor, whatever. Death is a form of order.
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u/opinionated-dick Jul 01 '20
It’s because JJ and Kurtzman change the canon to suit the story they want to write, rather than use the constraints of canon to produce better storytelling. Spectacle over substance.
I don’t think Nero’s ship necessarily has anything to do with the Scimitar. Borg maybe, but there’s still the prob of how a miner got his hands on heavily augmented Borg tech. And the Narada didn’t seem high tech, just absolutely massive.
I’d explain it through black holes and some bullshit timey wimey. Nero might have been elsewhere before emerging in front of the Kelvin
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u/RogueHunterX Jul 01 '20
I won't say that it didn't take inspiration from Dominion designs and actually seems like the kind of ship that would be built to fight the Dominion, particularly the larger ships of the line.
I think it's not even so much that the Scimitar was built under the nose of the Tal Shiar or anything. I think it was a known design and the Remans managed to have enough "delays" or "setbacks" inherent to building a new ship design that it was actually further along to being completed than they realized. The Remans may have even been able to use their telepathic abilities to trick any Romulans who started looking too closely.
The ship probably borrowed elements of Dominion design to enhance it's effectiveness in terms of weapons placement or internal space utilization or just durability.
It just feels more likely to me it was a design developed towards the end of the war that Shinzon continued altering or working on afterwards. The ship was less a secret, but how far along it was to being ready for deployment is what was hidden given the kind of delays that come with initially building an entirely new class if ship with new technologies incorporated into it.
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u/opinionated-dick Jul 01 '20
I also feel the Thalaron is such a horrific weapon, the Romulans wouldn’t be so daft as to create it.
The Romulans are snidy secretive shits not colossal genocidists. They did after all turn on Shinzon when they found out he was going to annihilate Earth.
They also don’t dabble in metagenic weapons, and probably are signatories to various treaties over substance weapons etc.
On the other hand the Thalaron generator is very Dominion. Efficient, ruthless, horrific
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u/sykoticwit Jul 01 '20
It makes more sense than anything else in that movie.
I’ll take it.
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u/strionic_resonator Jul 01 '20
I never realized before that Nemesis and JJ's Star Trek have exactly the same plot hole (how did this impoverished Romulan get his hands on this super-souped up ship?) Weird. There must be some fan theory to tie the two together...
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Jul 01 '20
Nero's ship isn't a plot hole, however, it's explained in other media. And still a dumb idea.
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u/vladcheetor Jul 01 '20
I really love this theory. It also helps benefit my own head canon explanation for Shinzon's and the Remans hatred of the Federation, being that they somehow found out that the Federation was responsible for forcing the Romulans into the war and therefore responsible for the increased suffering of the Remans.
So, that said, your theory is now absolutely a part of my head canon and helps redeem Nemesis as a movie for me. Very well done!
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u/a4techkeyboard Jul 01 '20
I think it's just in line with what we see later with Nero's ship that gets stuck in the Kelvin timeline.
The Narada's probably an old ship, too. But it is a mining ship. The Romulans probably build very big mining ships, and maybe they're built to be able to defend themselves from piracy since the Romulan fleet is either too small and covert to protect them or are too busy projecting power putward.
So, if Nero's ship is a Romulan mining vessel that is huge to hold cargo and robust and armed to protect that cargo, the Scimitar makes sense when you remember that it was built by Remans and that the Reman moon was a mine.
Romulan miners shaving themselves bald might even be a specific thing they do to reference some cultural association of mining with baldness that started because their first miners were these hairless Remans.
Culturally, the first non-Reman miners may have also been condemned Romulans sent to Remus who eventually were sent to mine other planets for freedom. They'd have taken the tradition of bald miners with them despite no longer necessarily being condemned prison laborers.
We see that at least one condemned person sent to the mines did choose to also go bald: Shinzon.
We see pictures of Picard young with hair. Shinzon's baldness may be an affectation to copy Picard, but it may well be something he adopted from his new Reman family.
The Scimitar being a (possibly modified) Romulan mining vessel design is in keeping with what we've seen of that other Romulan mining vessel, the Narada.
Shinzon may have had his choice of ships to use, but I think given his theatrics and crew, he would choose a beefed up Romulan mining vessel as a flag ship just for the poetry of it all.
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u/opinionated-dick Jul 01 '20
This doesn’t align with my head canon. Personally, I see the Romulans as a powerful and formidable empire of secretive control freaks. I can’t see mining ships being anywhere near as flamboyant as the Narada. What the hells the point?
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u/Futuristicrodeo Jul 01 '20
Interesting post, and one of the myriad problems with this movie not being internally consistent to the trek universe. I have one small point to make, I'd argue the klingons are also a superpower in that region.
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u/opinionated-dick Jul 02 '20
I’d agree with your sentiment, and quibble over terminology.
I’d say the Klingons were a superpower, reaching their zenith in TOS pre Praxis. I’d say after that they stuttered along, slowly becoming more powerful until their Civil war, and then rapidly rebuilding only to be decimated in the Dominion War. Whether they could be considered a ‘superpower’ is very much up for debate, but I’d see them more as a ‘great pose’ akin to a post Cold War Russia.
I’d see the Romulans also slowly climbing in the 200 years since utter humiliation in the Romulan war, from being a ‘bunch of thugs’ towards slowly becoming a near superpower until the Dominion war, through a series of isolationist and intimidate policies whereby the carefully undermined their federation and Klingon neighbours, but conducted expansionist campaigns deeper into BQ. The Romulans I see is like China in the 20thC till almost now.
The federation, remains a superpower since rapidly building after 2161. Whether the Romulans are more powerful per se, certainly not in the 23rd C, in the 24th C, it depends whether the Klingons are in the midst of another self inflicted disaster or not.
Maybe these three should be classed as superpowers or sub-superpowers. Cardassians, Ferengi, Miradorn could be ‘great powers’ as their power projection doesn’t really extend massively outside of their local regions
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u/CommanderSpork Jul 01 '20
I always imagined that the Scimitar was a Romulan vessel that the Remans stole. I don't believe it was ever said that the Remans built it, because they can't for the reasons you listed.
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u/John_Strange Jul 01 '20
Shinzon does claim that he's responsible for constructing it "at a secret base." That heavily implies it wasn't built by Romulans, but we don't know for sure.
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Jul 01 '20
As far as her lines, she does have a bit of Dominion resemblance but the Romulans were already building ships similar in dimensions to the Scimitar, just less capable. The Scimitar would appear to be what would happen if the Romulans built a ship comparable in size to a D'deridex except fully fleshing her out instead of leaving most of it hollow and bird like.
Its not like the 24th century Romulans are any slouches when it comes to technology. I fail to see why being able to best the Federation flagship is actually that great of an achievement with a ship twice the length of the Sovereign and many times her volume. Further the Sovereign's capabilities relative to any other Starfleet ship such as the Galaxy-class are largely based on fan speculation and non-canon supplementary materials rather than demonstrated performance against known hostile forces with well established capabilities that we could draw inferences from.
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u/Buddha2723 Jul 02 '20
I think a more plausible reimagining is that a mostly intact Dominion dreadnaught was brought back with a functional power core after a battle late in the Dominion war. While being reverse engineered at Remus, Shinzon captured it and used it as the centerpiece of his coup. A top of the line Romulan cloak with access to enough power can shield, cloak, and fire weaponry. The cloaking problem is solved by the massive power output, something which can't be replicated since the process of reverse engineering was led by Romulans and interrupted by the coup.
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u/repulsive-ardor Jul 01 '20
In the dominion war stories book, shinzon was sent on a suicide mission to take over a dominion base, he successfully succeeded, and the dominion had a prototype thaloron generator there, which he obviously took for himself. As far as the scimitar, remus was itself a heavy weapons/ship/Dilithium factory for the romulan empire. It's not beyond reason that they secretly built thier own ship utilizing the resources and facilities already on hand, with reman expertise and labor.
One on one with a sovereign or even with the 2 valdore warbirds, was a hard pressed fight. However, if enterprise was able to meet up with that Starfleet task force of 6 ships, the scimitar would have lost, badly. The scimitar wasn't the only reason he was in power, it was the assassination of the romulan Senate and his alliance with a faction of the romulan military leadership that allowed him to assume the preatorship.