The Big Four.....

[Duskofdead]

Crap I ment arent the cream of the crop. They are the woman and children running away.

If a dangerous fall were imminent and the ability to flee safely to another galaxy were available, wouldn't it be the best and brightest who escape?

Sociologically speaking it is the rich and elite who escape a society about to collapse (or undergo trauma) first. The lower classes don't get out until later. Cuba is an example.

[Sionnach Glic]

Indeed. Also, they controled a whole galaxy. They would easily have had enough time to get a tonne of people, ships and equipment out long before their numbers were whittled down to the small group in our galaxy.

[Mikey]

Exactly. The only reason the dregs alone would have made it to the Milky Way is if the whole "imminent destruction" story was fabricated, a la the Golgafrinchans.

[Duskofdead]

Indeed. Also, they controled a whole galaxy. They would easily have had enough time to get a tonne of people, ships and equipment out long before their numbers were whittled down to the small group in our galaxy.

If they controlled a whole galaxy then wouldn't they need something better than conventional warp drive?

My initial guesses:
1) They don't have the infrastructure to create better engines in the AQ with whatever they brought with them.
2) They were a sub/under/service class in the overall empire, without access to the dominant technologies.

Anyone ever hashed that out?

[Mikey]

point 1 - probably true.
point 2 - the majority opinion seems to be that if escaping certain doom was at issue, priority would have gone to the elite and not the dregs.

[Teaos]

Maybe they didnt start fleeing until it was to late. They thought they could fight back and only realised at the last minte they are screwed.

[Mikey]

Even so, how would the lower classes have access to ships/tech/whatever that the elite didn't? Remember, it's not a question of the serf-class taking the tech and fleeing; they were a different species.

[Duskofdead]

I guess what mystifies me is how the heck they GOT here at all, with just normal warp drives. Unless they had some type of teleportation device such as a subspace slingshot or transwarp hub or something to that effect. It's not as if their position in the galaxy is right along the edge, like they got here after a very long trip from another galaxy and just settled the first place they could. Although to be honest I think with the distances between galaxies, even a ship going warp 9.99~ would take eons.

[Captain Seafort]

I guess what mystifies me is how the heck they GOT here at all, with just normal warp drives.

They couldn't have - the only way to do it would be to have such fast ships as to instantly become the dominant power of the quadrent, if not the galaxy. Even if their firepower was only equal to that of the other major powers, their ability to strike whenever and wherever they liked would force their opponents to either concentrate their fleets in key industrial systems and abandon the others, or spread their forces so thinly that they'd be vulnerable to the Tholians' concentrated forces. The usual island-hopping strategy of Trek would be usless.

[Teaos]

If they used something similar to a slingshot or an artificial wormhole they could very well end up here with no other way of moving around baring normal warp drive.

[Captain Seafort]

In which case they would have had a demonstrated ability to construct such a device, and so presumably the ability to build a new one. Plus the fact that if they controlled a galaxy they must have had trans-galactic propulsion, which would give them the same stragtegic advantage as inter-galactic propulsion.

[Duskofdead]

So I guess the question remains, whatever transportation method they used to get here was still far beyond warp travel, so whether it was something like a "portal" or a galactic speed propulsion system, how did they lack the knowledge (even over a great period of time) to recreate the technology? Or even something rudimentary building back up towards it, but still better than warp drive.

[mlsnoopy]

If they are so technolgical advance, why did they need to steal the defiant into the mirror universe.

[Teaos]

The point I was making is their old civilisation used to be advanced. These are the guys who escaped the chaos of their old empire falling.

Hell Earth has had high points like Athens golden age that wasnt reached again for centuries.

[Mikey]

True - but those situations didn't involve a mass exodus of the bulk of the populace.

In other words, even if the Tholians arrived here via catapult or whatever and didn't have the materials or even the blueprints to recreate it, they would still have been at the same level of technical ability.