of klingon design....

[steamrunner]

We're talking about the D7 design, right?

[McAvoy]

Yes. It was also the first showing of the D7 design as well.

[Mark]

The Klingon that brought the first Cloaking Device back to the Empire after all would have been one of the most honored in the Empire, no matter how he did it, right?

[McAvoy]

Uh, yeah?

[Mark]

So how do we know that there was ever a real "alliance" anyway? Some ambitious Klingon fleet commander could have betrayed his entire fleet, allowing his crew to be killed, and the ships to be taken by the Romulans...........as long as HE went back with at least one cloaking device, he would have been lauded as a Hero of the Empire. Seems more likely to me of the Klingons of the time.

[Mikey]

It's possible, but just doesn't sit right with me considering the seeming ubiquity of the D-7 types in the Romulan navy.

[Mark]

Again, I think the D7s were just to bolster the Romulan fleet, not act as it's mainstay.

[Mikey]

Perhaps; but (I don't have percentages to back this up, this is purely anecdotal) it seems that there were a relatively high proportion of D-7-types in the Romulna fleet. In TOS, I think we saw more of those than the BoT-type warbird.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

We saw one instance of the Romulans using the D-7. The Enterprise Incident.

However, there were two instances of the BoP used. Balance of Terror and The Deadly Years.

[Mikey]

Hmmm. OK, hardly a statistically sound sampling, but let's go with that. Does 33% of all extant ships seem like a one-off purchase or capture?

[Lazar]

We saw one instance of the Romulans using the D-7. The Enterprise Incident.

However, there were two instances of the BoP used. Balance of Terror and The Deadly Years.

Well, "Balance of Terror" was Season 1, "The Deadly Years" was Season 2, and "The Enterprise Incident" was Season 3 - it might be that our hypothetical alliance or exchange took place between the latter two episodes. In original version of "The Enterprise Incident", the Romulans used three D7s; in the remastered version, they used two D7s and one BOP.

[Mikey]

in the remastered version, they used two D7s and one BOP.

Even better. Using the D-7 in a mixed task group indicates that it had it's own unique role in the fleet - task groups are by their nature comprised of ships with differing roles. The fact that it was used in a 2:1 ratio with a homegrown design indicates, to me, that it was more common than would make sense for a ship that was only used in the case of a few captured examples.

[Tyyr]

Or it could be that those three ships were the ones they had on hand at the time.

[Mikey]

Or it could be that those three ships were the ones they had on hand at the time.

Could be. It still doesn't make sense to me that captured and converted ships outnumbered homegrown designs when it comes to availability to dispatch to a problem area.

[Tyyr]

It just depends on who's patrolling where. 90% of the ships on patrol could be home grown but when this incident comes up it just happens to occur where two captured ships are and only one homegrown.