Was there any mention of it in the episode?
How Fast was the Vulcan Ship in Fusion?
- Thread starter StarryEyed
- Start date
According to Archer in "Breaking thr Ice," aren't most Vulcan spacecraft capable of better than Warp 2?
I thought it was more like Warp 7, considering the fact that Enterprise was Earth's first Warp 5 ship and Vulcan was supposed to be quite a bit more advanced.
If I ''HAD'' to geuss, I'd say warp 2/ 2.5/ 3 tops maybe?
I believe the top speed of the ringship we saw in "Breaking Ice" was established as warp 6.5, whereas the similar-looking but a bit larger and differently engined ship from "Fallen Hero" was capable of warp 7. Those would be dash speeds, not sustainable ones, most probably... The significantly larger warship type introduced later in the show (the one with the pivotable ring) could be assumed to be capable of similar speeds.
The ship from "Fusion" was reused as a military vessel in the Season 4 Vulcan trilogy: two of them accompanied one of the big tilting-ring warships in pestering NX-01 on Vulcan orbit. While one of the VFX shots suggests that the "Fusion" ship was really tiny compared with the hero vessel, most of the shots do not give us a chance to compare sizes, and the dialogue establishes the "Fusion" ship as a "cruiser". What should we make of this? The vessel type was supposed to have been retired two centuries prior. Did the Vulcans de-mothball some old vessels in a time of approaching crisis? Or did this ship type remain in service within the Vulcan system, merely retiring from interstellar duty?
Vulcans may have had decent warp thousands of years before ENT, losing much of their tech in the war that killed Surak, and then slowly regaining it. What this means for the top speed of a 200-year-old or older ship type is unclear. Perhaps Vulcans regained the old tech all at once, after recovering industrially - meaning that all ships in the past 500 or 1,000 years have been capable of warp sevenish. Or perhaps there has been a relearning curve, which would make the "Fusion" ship slower by some unknown amount. We're free to speculate...
Timo Saloniemi
The ship from "Fusion" was reused as a military vessel in the Season 4 Vulcan trilogy: two of them accompanied one of the big tilting-ring warships in pestering NX-01 on Vulcan orbit. While one of the VFX shots suggests that the "Fusion" ship was really tiny compared with the hero vessel, most of the shots do not give us a chance to compare sizes, and the dialogue establishes the "Fusion" ship as a "cruiser". What should we make of this? The vessel type was supposed to have been retired two centuries prior. Did the Vulcans de-mothball some old vessels in a time of approaching crisis? Or did this ship type remain in service within the Vulcan system, merely retiring from interstellar duty?
Vulcans may have had decent warp thousands of years before ENT, losing much of their tech in the war that killed Surak, and then slowly regaining it. What this means for the top speed of a 200-year-old or older ship type is unclear. Perhaps Vulcans regained the old tech all at once, after recovering industrially - meaning that all ships in the past 500 or 1,000 years have been capable of warp sevenish. Or perhaps there has been a relearning curve, which would make the "Fusion" ship slower by some unknown amount. We're free to speculate...
Timo Saloniemi
Indeed, I tend to think Vulcan technological growth (or regrowth, as I subscribe to the idea that most of whatever tech was possessed at the Time of Awakening was lost) was ultimately a very slow, very gradual process. For them, a 200 year old ship might not have been particularly outdated. That might also explain some of the later long-lasting Federation designs, imbued with some Vulcan knowhow perhaps? 
Based on how fast most Archer/Kirk era ships of that small size tend to behave and operate I doubt the "Fusion" ship was capable of speeds any greater than, say, the average Earth cargo freighter. Warp 2+ at the most? I don't think even Vulcans had warp engines as powerful as Enterprise's in ships that small.
My educated guess based on years of watching TREK I'd say it was a Warp 2 - 3 vessel. Fast enough to carry its limited crew and passengers where they needed to go in reasonable time. But not so slow it can't run into deep space starships like Enterprise.
That seems plausible. The Vulcans may have had faster ships at the time of its launch, or it may not have. Clearly Earth Starfleet didn't retire all of its slower ships just because they'd developed the NX class. The 'Fusion' ship may have started as a ship of the line but then been 'retired' from frontline duty online, and stay closer to Vulcan as the slower Earth ships appeared to do after Enterprise was launched.
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