of klingon design....

[Mikey]

Certainly possible. I just hate having to accept an explanation that presupposes a less-than-likely "what if?" scenario.

[Tyyr]

*Shrug* Just advancing it as a possibility. Frankly the Klingons and Romulans sharing any designs is one of those things that bugged me. Like someone wrote a script and at the last moment they changed Romulan to Klingon in the script and notified the makeup and wardrobe departments.

[Mikey]

Well, more like Roddenberry couldn't afford an extra model, but that hardly helps with an IU explanation...

[Captain Seafort]

You mean after they broke the first one?

[Mikey]

From what I understand, they couldn't really afford even the one that they had...

[Lazar]

Like someone wrote a script and at the last moment they changed Romulan to Klingon in the script and notified the makeup and wardrobe departments.

Something like that did happen with STIII, when they changed the villains from Romulans to Klingons, giving us the Klingon BOP. (A cool design, but I would have loved to see a movie-era Romulan ship too.)

With the Romulan use of D7s, the (speculative) impression I got was that now that the Romulans had opened up again to the outside universe after a century of isolation, they were desperate for some ship designs that were on par with the other powers. The BOP was designed to be good at making big sneak attacks, but overall it seemed rather primitive compared to the Federation and Klingon ships.

From what I understand, they couldn't really afford even the one that they had...

So did they lose or break the Romulan BOP model? We only saw it the once.

[Captain Seafort]

From what I understand, they couldn't really afford even the one that they had...

So did they lose or break the Romulan BOP model? We only saw it the once.

Twice - it turned up in "The Deadly Years" as well (although that may have been reused footage, I'm not sure)

And they dropped it, it broke, and they had to scramble to replace it with the D-7 model.

[Lazar]

Twice - it turned up in "The Deadly Years" as well (although that may have been reused footage, I'm not sure)

I just checked - yeah, it looks like they reused the footage from BoT.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Beat me to it, Lazar. lol.

The Romulans might've been reaching out to any non-Federation powers at the time, looking for an alliance. The Klingons might've said yes, but then the two groups realized how badly contact was going...

[Mark]

Or not an alliance at all. Just a one time exchange. Starfleet never would have "sold" the Romulans ships for cloaking tech nor would the Romulans even have asked (they thought Starfleet was to big a threat). The Klingons, however......... a one time "sale" of military hardware. Say, half a dozen D7s for cloaking device tech AND a functioning unit as well.

Actually seems like a reasonable trade to me.

[steamrunner]

I like the trade idea. I've kinda seen this as an attempt to bolster numbers of ships. Perhaps the Klingons were like the old Soviet Union making WAY more MiGs than they needed.

[Sionnach Glic]

Aye, I can see the KE selling ships.

[Mikey]

Especially for something as game-changing as cloaking technology.

BTW, the USSR didn't build "extra" anything - Soviet designs were just expected to have high losses.

[Mark]

As would a species who we later learn believe in death in glorious combat.

[Sionnach Glic]

And whose idea of WW2 era tactics was to charge a frickin' Wehrmacht machine gun emplacement.