Ships of the Empire

1. Overview

Romulan ships are built to be unseen. Every Romulan warship Starfleet has met since 2266 has carried a cloaking device, and the whole design of the Empire’s fleet follows from that fact. A Romulan ship chooses when it is seen, and Starfleet’s knowledge of Romulan ships has always been limited to the moments the Romulans chose.

This article covers the classes of Romulan ship that the Federation has met and recorded, from the Bird-of-Prey of the 2260s to the warbirds on the Neutral Zone today. It separates what is known from what is assessed. The Empire does not publish the names of its ship classes, so the names used here are, in most cases, Starfleet’s: some come from the first ship of a type that Starfleet met, and the newest are Starfleet’s own reporting names. For the navy that sails these ships, see The Imperial Fleet. For the systems inside them, see Romulan Technology.

2. A Note on Names

Romulans call their warships warbirds, and Starfleet uses the same word. Beyond that, names are a problem. The Empire does not tell outsiders what it calls its ship types. Where a ship has been met and named, Starfleet has often named the type after it, as with the Valdore. Where no name is known, Starfleet assigns a reporting name of its own, chosen to mean nothing in particular. A reporting name tells the reader only that Starfleet has seen enough ships of a pattern to treat them as one type. It says nothing about what the Romulans call them, and it may be wrong about whether they are truly one type at all.

3. The Early Ships

3.1 The Bird-of-Prey

The first Romulan warship Starfleet recorded in detail was the Bird-of-Prey met in 2266, when one crossed the Neutral Zone and destroyed several Earth outposts along it. It was a small ship by later standards. It carried a cloaking device, the first Starfleet had met, and a plasma weapon of great destructive power. The weapon was slow, however, and lost its strength over distance, so that a ship able to keep away from it could survive it. The Bird-of-Prey was also, by Starfleet’s assessment at the time, limited to impulse speed. Its commander, faced with defeat, destroyed his own ship rather than let it be taken.

The same name had been used earlier. Starfleet’s record of the 2150s also speaks of Romulan Birds-of-Prey, and of the cloaked mines the Romulans laid in that decade. Earth’s crews of that time never saw a Romulan face.

3.2 Ships of Klingon design

By 2268 Starfleet was meeting Romulan ships of Klingon design, and intelligence reports of the time spoke of an exchange of technology between the two powers. One such force, met that year under a female commander, carried an improved cloaking device. How long the exchange with the Klingons lasted, and how it ended, is not recorded.

3.3 The drone ship

One more early design is worth recording. In the 2150s the Romulans flew a drone ship guided from a distance by a pilot elsewhere. It could make itself look like the ships of other powers, and the Romulans used it to set Earth’s neighbours against one another. The ships were destroyed. They are the earliest known example of a Romulan tactic that has never gone away: the attack that seems to come from someone else.

4. The Warbirds

4.1 The D’deridex type

When the Romulans came back to the Neutral Zone in 2364, they came back in the D’deridex warbird, and it has been the face of the Empire’s fleet ever since. It is very large, larger than a Galaxy-class starship, with a long, split hull that opens around a wide space in the middle. Starfleet assesses its length at a little over 1,300 metres. It is armed with disruptors and torpedoes and carries a cloaking device. It is powered by an artificial quantum singularity, a fact confirmed in 2370 when a warbird’s singularity was at the centre of an incident with the USS Enterprise-D.

Its strengths are endurance, its cloak, and its size. It can sit on station for a long time and show itself when it chooses, and a single one is a statement. Warbirds of this type served in the Allied line in the Dominion War, and they remain the core of the Fleet in 2393, more than thirty years after Starfleet first met one. Its crew size is not known.

4.2 The Valdore type

The Valdore type was first seen in 2379, at the Bassen Rift, when Commander Donatra brought two warbirds to stand with the USS Enterprise-E against the Scimitar. Her own ship, the Valdore, gave the type its Federation name. It is a newer design than the D’deridex, with a different, broad-winged shape, and it carries disruptors and a cloak. At the Bassen Rift both warbirds were overmatched by the Scimitar, which says more about the Scimitar than about them. Its size, crew and full armament are assessed rather than known.

Since 2387 Starfleet has seen ships of this type on the Zone in growing numbers, and assesses that they are replacing the D’deridex in some commands. They have not replaced it yet.

5. Small Ships

5.1 Scout ships

The Empire uses small scout ships for reconnaissance. In 2366 a Romulan scout ship crashed on Galorndon Core, a world near the Neutral Zone, and at least two of its crew survived the crash. Ships of this kind are small, with a crew that can be counted on one hand, and they rely on speed and on not being found. Whether all scout ships carry a cloak is not known. Starfleet assesses that most of the Fleet’s routine watching along the Zone is now done by larger ships and by sensor buoys, and that scouts are used for longer reaches into places the Empire does not want to send a warbird.

5.2 Science vessels

The Empire also flies science vessels, and they are not always doing science. In 2368 a Romulan science vessel suffered a dangerous fault in its warp core, and the USS Enterprise-D went to its aid. The ship was found to be testing an interphase generator, a device meant to put a ship out of phase with normal matter and so make it both invisible and able to pass through solid objects. Starfleet’s view since has been that a Romulan science vessel is a test bed for military technology until shown to be otherwise. See Romulan Technology.

6. The Scimitar (2379)

The Scimitar was not a Romulan ship in the ordinary sense. It was built in secret in a Reman shipyard as the flagship of Shinzon, the human raised among the Remans, and it was the instrument of his coup in 2379. It was very large and very heavily armed. Starfleet’s record of the battle at the Bassen Rift lists fifty-two disruptor banks, twenty-seven photon torpedo launchers, and both primary and secondary shields. It carried a cloak of a quality no Federation ship could see through, and it could fire while cloaked.

Its main weapon was a thalaron radiation generator, a weapon able to destroy all life across a wide area. Shinzon intended it for Earth. The Scimitar was destroyed at the Bassen Rift, and its weapon with it. No second ship of its kind has been seen. Whether the Empire has kept any of its design, and whether the Remans who built it have kept any of their skill, are questions Starfleet cannot answer. For the Remans see The Remans.

6. The Line in 2393: Newer Types

Two newer types have been seen often enough on this border since the patrols returned in 2387 for Starfleet to treat them as classes. Both names below are Starfleet reporting names. Everything said of them is the Federation’s assessment. None of it has been confirmed by the Empire.

6.1 Tarvesh type

The Tarvesh type is a mid-sized warbird, assessed at a little over half the length of a D’deridex. It has been seen on the Zone since about 2388, most often in the Chaltok and Nevrha sectors. Starfleet assesses it as a patrol ship: smaller and cheaper to run than a D’deridex, with a smaller crew, and built to hold station for long periods on its own. It carries disruptors and plasma torpedoes and a cloak that Starfleet rates as at least as good as the D’deridex’s. It is not believed to be a match for a Federation ship of the line in a stand-up fight. It is not meant for one. Its purpose, as Starfleet reads it, is to be present along the line in numbers the larger warbirds could not provide.

6.2 Ilrhen type

The Ilrhen type is a small ship, larger than a scout and far smaller than a warbird. It has been seen on the Zone since about 2389, usually alone and usually near the Romulan sensor buoys and listening posts. Starfleet assesses it as a picket and a tender: a ship that keeps the Empire’s watching network running, moves between its points, and sits as a forward eye on its own. It carries a cloak and light disruptors. Its crew is assessed at a few dozen. It is the Romulan ship most often seen and least often discussed, because it rarely does anything that can be called an act.

6.3 The Tal Shiar’s ships

The Tal Shiar flies ships of its own, outside the Fleet. Its counter-infiltration warbird variant is covered on its own page: see Serrath-type Warbird.

7. Common Features

Romulan ships of every period share a family likeness that goes deeper than their look. Every warship carries a cloak. Romulan designers are assessed to prefer disruptors to the Federation’s phasers and plasma weapons to photon torpedoes, although the Scimitar, built by Remans, carried photon torpedoes. Warbirds since at least the D’deridex draw their power from an artificial quantum singularity rather than from a matter and antimatter reaction alone, which Starfleet assesses gives them great endurance at the cost of a complex and dangerous core. Romulan ships are also built to keep their secrets: their systems are hard to scan, and a beaten Romulan ship has been destroyed by its own commander rather than surrendered, as in 2266. For the technology behind all of this see Romulan Technology.

8. What Is Not Known

The Federation does not know how many ships the Empire has, how many it builds in a year, or where most of them are built. It does not know the Romulan names for its classes. It does not know the crew size of the D’deridex, the full armament of the Valdore, or whether the Tarvesh and Ilrhen types are single classes or families of related designs. It cannot be sure that it has seen every type the Fleet flies, and it can be fairly sure it has not seen every type the Tal Shiar flies. A navy built around the cloak shows only what it wants shown, and Starfleet’s knowledge of Romulan ships is a record of exactly that. For the wider picture see The Romulan Star Empire and The Romulan Side of the Zone.