Darmok Question

[Victory is Life]

The E-D in this episode had begun a firefight with the Tamarian ship, and came out the clear loser...If the Tamarians are that technologically advanced and could best the Federation Flagship in battle, why have we not seen or heard from them since? Why do they not have massive swaths of territory in the Alpha Quadrant? They are clearly a warrior race, one would think they would have SOME sort of expansionist agenda...Or am I wrong and the E-D was somehow not fighting back to its fullest? What do you think?

[Mikey]

Having the ability to fight well and having the desire to do so are two different things.

[Tyyr]

They could be an inwardly focused warrior culture focused on improving themselves and testing themselves against one another.

[Victory is Life]

Maybe I should expand on my original point and ask if you all think that the Children of Tama were just another 'powerful alien of the week', in the same vein as the Husnock (although we technically never saw them).

[Tsukiyumi]

I always got the impression that they were at least a match for the E-D. I agree with Tyyr, though; they may just be an isolationist culture.





After all, no one else can understand what the hell they're saying.

[Mark]

I took it the other way. The E-D ONLY wanted to knock out the transporter scrambler to get Picard back, NOT start an incident, so they made one attempt and didn't fight back very hard.

I assumed the E-D superior, but not very much so.

[Tsukiyumi]

That's just it; the Tamarians didn't seem to want to start an incident either, so they were both holding back. That's why I tend to (guess) rate them about even.

[USSEnterprise]

The Tamarians may control a decent chuck of territory, they certainly seem to have the power to. Just because they are not going on a violent rampage doesn't mean they don't have their own empire. We also have to look at them from a species point of view. Maybe it takes them a long time to reproduce or mature, so their ability to field ships and troops is to low to get into a large scale war. We know that Vulcans can only reproduce every seven years so maybe something similar occurs with the Tamarians. As for why we have not heard of them since, I thought it was kind of obvious in the episode. They speak in a way that is almost impossible to understand in a conventional sense. While steps forward had been taken, it may take awhile for the Feds to get a decent grasp on their language and even then the cultures may be so different future contact may be impossible.

[SolkaTruesilver]

I'm just trying to imagine the Tamarians meeting Dominion representative, and the Vorta Ambassador chewing the scenery trying to understand them.

and the Jem'Hadar reacting not nicely.

[Graham Kennedy]

First, the E-D wasn't trying to win. They rerigged the phasers to do very specific pinpoint damage to the Tamarians; this may well have compromised their overall firepower. Note they didn't fire any photon torpedoes or even particularly try to fire back with phasers when attacked (let's forget that they were firing phasers out of the photon torpedo tubes, please.)

Second, the Tamarians may be on a rough par technically, but there's a dozen other factors involved in being a major power. Starfleet has thousands of ships; for all we know the ship we saw was the one single big powerful ship the Tamarian industrial base could produce. Even if they could produce ten of those ships, they'd still lag the Federation massively overall.

Then there's things like range and endurance. Federation ships can cruise for years at a time with minimal outside support. How long can a big Tamarian ship do that? Does she carry enough fuel? Are the crew sufficiently trained, motivated and experienced for it? Does the ship have the accommodation facilities for it? Do they have hundreds of deep space support bases like the Federation does? For that matter, do they even have a multi-planetary government or are they a single planet society with no particular expansion ambitions?

But then, the galaxy is a big place. Canonically, we know the Federation has only even explored a few percent of it, and it occupies only a fraction of that. There's plenty of room out there for a society to be fifty times as big and never come up on the radar.

[Mikey]

True, and what we saw from the Tamarians was also things like transport blocking fields, etc. The fact of being on par with the UFP technologically does NOT necessarily imply have the same type of technology.

[Sionnach Glic]

Tangent split to here. Thread re-opened.

[stitch626]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how a culture could develop with a language so a deeply rooted in metaphor.

[Tyyr]

Yeah, I had the same question.

[Mikey]

Should it be that surprising? To paraphrase the HHG: the galaxy is big... really big. Here within the sphere of own singular little planet, we've had a number of cultures - cultures which would otherwise be within our familiar Indo-Aryan language group - which used metaphor-based alphabets. Heiroglyphics developed into a phoneme-based alphabet, but it didn't start that way. Hell, kanji is still in use even today.

So, it's not quite the same thing as a metaphor-based language, but it's in that ballpark. Now multiply that chance of incidence by the size of the galaxy compared to one planet...