Jedi Master Spock wrote:What's the flap about Spock being the (half) Vulcan officer of Starfleet if Vulcans were serving as first officers on Earth ships before the Federation even existed?
Actually, this was rendered moot with the Vulcan arc. By the time of TOS, the Vulcan philosophy (espoused by Sarek in "Journey to Babel") was that peace did not depend on firepower.
This is completely different than the Vulcan philosophy pre-2155. Recall Archer's mention that the Vulcans weren't really into exploration. The maneuvers of the Vulcan fleet and the philosophy of its High Command suggested that it was more of a security force . . . it explored predominately to locate and thwart threats.
Their treatment of Earth in the 90-odd years after first contact fits in that view. They
were holding Earth back, and as Soval noted, they
were scared of Earth. They logically justified it on the basis of Vulcan 'national security', which might not've been a bad argument.
But the point is, theirs was a culture in deep denial, and it was only the discovery of Surak's teachings that brought that denial to an end. Hence the dismantling of their fleet . . . which, once known to the Romulans, might've helped bring about the war.
Fits rather nicely, thanks to Coto.
But back to the point . . . they probably viewed the new Federation Starfleet as a sort of extension of their own past flawed ideas. Thus it's not impossible that very few Vulcans served in the early years.
The main problem with the Spock issue is that official papers from the 2250's marked him specifically as "Half-Vulcan Science Officer Spock". Maybe they'll quietly CGI that away by the time the Blu-Ray TOR eps come out.
The existence of an entire region (the Expanse) full of new large and technologically well-developed civilizations (e.g., the Xindi) ... which have never been mentioned in TOS and supposedly did not go suddenly extinct after ENT.
The Expanse and the Xindi are indeed a big problem. For one thing, we ought to be able to see it in the sky right now. For another, they had hella-fast FTL.
Unless they (a) Civil-Warred themselves to oblivion again, (b) their FTL required the existence of the Expanse/Guardians and stopped working shortly after those disappeared, or (c) unless they all decided to just bug out for parts unknown (only to be rediscovered centuries later in time for the Enterprise-J crewman), I don't see a way to fit that stuff in for later. I can't imagine why there would be a fixation on warp drive if Xindi FTL was available.
Nobody took notes on the Borg when they first ran into them? Or the Ferengi, which were first contacted by Picard roughly two centuries later on the much-expanded frontier of Federation space?
The usual idea on the Borg was that they were simply an unknown "species" and marked as uber-top-secret, but then largely forgotten. After all, if the subspace beacon thing was only going to arrive hundreds of years later, and with decades being assumed for such a voyage at best, then it's possible that the information simply had not been disseminated.
Now the Ferengi thing was just dumb. The only saving grace was the whole nobody-said-Ferengi thing a la the Borg, but that kind of move is just too weak to use twice.
