In the Star Trek universe, humanity futzed about the Solar System in the early 20th century, sent out a few interstellar STL ships and then developed Warp Drive in 2063. The Klingons developed Warp Drive sometime around the 1950s or so according to Quark. The Cardassian Union was formed about the same time as the Franco Prussian war, though this in of itself shows when they worked out Warp Drive. In contrast the Vulcans have had warp travel for much longer. The Monastery of P'jem was built around 850 BCE, so they had to have some form of interstellar travel since then. Mind you the Vulcans never stuck me as expansionist on the whole (they nearly go extinct in the Kelvinverse when their homeworld gets destroyed), especially after Surak. However, there was a faction of them that was.
These militarist guys got booted off Vulcan around 370 CE, then flew hundreds of Light Years to Romulus on some starship and began building up a new civilization with all this technology and plotted their eventual reconquest of vulcan and conquest of the galaxy. Here's the thing. The Romulans have done just that. If we say they had a starting population of 40,000 or so and had an average population growth rate of 0.02 they'd soon have have a population of over a billion people. With that and warp drive they'd basically steamroll any group of iron age feudalists they came across. They got the tech, the ideology and the will. Frankly Earth, Chronos and Cardassia should have ended up as Romulan Colonies by the 1500s century or so instead of the Star Empire playing second fiddle to the Empire of Bat'leth Weilding Morons and the Upstarts who are seventeen centuries behind the times.
What do you have to say about that?
Zor