THE ROMULAN SHIP RECOGNITION MANUAL WAS THE LAST of the recognition manuals to be produced by FASA.  It covers the third most powerful of the three great Trek superpowers of the Kirk era (the other two being the Klingons and the Federation.)  I first obtained my copy of the Romulan book via mail order in 1989, and from the outset it seemed clear to me that the Romulan manual was the product of a license in decline.
          The visual designs of the ships themselves are pretty good, especially since the Romulan Empire gets virtually no attention at all in the first four Star Trek motion pictures.  But only one ship in the entire book has any basis at all in official Trek canon: the original TOS-era 'Bird of Prey'.  All the rest are elegant, abandoned designs that were a brave attempt to imagine what nobody had yet imagined.  The FASA ship designers had to extrapolate a whole fleet based purely on information left over from ST:TOS scripts and episodes, as well as a tantalizing plot device that was left out of the final script for Star Trek III.  In that film, an early draft has Commander Kruge stealing a Romulan  'Bird of Prey' Scout class ship, and using its built-in cloaking device to penetrate Federation space in search of the secrets of the Genesis Device.  Even though this quirky plot twist is omitted from later drafts of Star Trek III, the ramifications would be huge for both the official lore of Trek, and the license-voided lore of FASA's STSTCS game.
           In official lore, the Klingons of the ST:TOS era and the first motion picture never really have a cloaking device  of their own.  But with a single script omission in Star Trek III not only is a Romulan-styled ship re-designated as a Klingon  'Bird of Prey', but the implication is further made that Klingons now use cloaking technology as widely as the Romulans.  These two facts would ripple deep and wide through the later fleshing-out of the Klingon Empire, witnessed in the various sizes and types of 'Bird of Prey' vessels seen in ST:TNG and ST:DS9, and the ubiquitous nature of the cloaking device—a technology only attributed to Romulans as of the TOS-era.
        On the gaming side, the writers of the Romulan manual obviously borrowed heavily from the omitted portions of that early Star Trek III script.  Indeed, an entire scenario of tech exchange between Klingons and Romulans evolves in the FASA game, beyond the D-7's seen in the famous TOS episode "The Enterprise Incident."
         The so-called 'Bird of Prey' Scout class ship that Kruge uses in Star Trek III is indeed claimed to still be a purely Romulan design, which the Klingons have copied heavily in the years since the initial technology exchange between the two governments.  On the Romulan side the 'Bird of Prey' with its swooped wings and feather-like hull plate patterns would become the basis for a revolution in Romulan ship design aesthetics.  The truncated teardrop shape of the original TOS Romulan 'Bird of Prey' was largely dropped during the gestation of the Romulan ship manual, and a great many of the Romulan vessels therein—especially the numerous cruisers—bear greater resemblance to the long-necked swoop-winged 'Bird of Prey' design that most Trek fans now associate almost exclusively with the Klingons.  Ships like the V-27, the V-30, and especially the T-10 are all extremely similar to the Klingon 'Bird of Prey', and it's a credit to the graphics artists that they were able to so beautifully expound upon the design philosophy of a single, lone ship, creating an entire fleet of vessels.
          Sadly, the writing is just not there.  Whereas certain important classes in the UFP and Klingon Ship Recognition Manuals have pages and pages of backstory printed for them, even the most infamous Romulan vessels like the TOS-era V-8 Cruiser get only a few paragraphs.  And though much of the text from any of the manuals is outdated or simply fabricated in terms of official Trek canon, I liked all those stories and all that background detail.  It really brought the ships to life, and that same detail and those same stories are sorely missed in the Romulan book.
          Not surprisingly, most of the Romulan designs from this book have third-rate stats.  None of the Romulan ships are up to par with their Federation or Klingon foes, and even the mighty Z-1 Battleship or the V-30 Cruiser don't have the firepower of similarly-sized vessels from the other two navies.  The Romulan star navy is also devoid of significant Frigate class ships, as well as being short on Destroyers, while there is an overkill on Cruisers.  This is a stark contrast to the TNG-era when the massive D'daridex class 'Warbird' ships are revealed—ships that dwarf even the mighty Galaxy class of the Federation, and seem awesomely potent when compared to the ships that populate FASA's Romulan Ship Recognition Manual.

        — BRT

NOTE: where possible, I tried to scan each ship at as high a resolution as I reasonably could.  But the original format of the drawings in the FASA manuals typically makes this very difficult.  The designers at FASA used an old black and white layout trick where the "gray" color that shades the ships is not gray at all, but instead composed of thousands of tiny black dots on a field of white.  (click here for an example!)  The net effect viewed from afar by the human eye is that of 'grayness' but the scanner picks up every last dot and it takes a lot of softening/blurring and reduction via Paintshop Pro to get the ships to look halfway decent.  Even then, the images sometimes don't come out nearly as crisp as I'd like.  So if things seem a teeny bit fuzzy around the edges, or if the graphics don't look exactly as they did on paper, please understand that I did what I could with what I've got.  In some cases I re-drew the ships myself, or have been able to find large-scale graphics from other sources for well-known canon ships.  These graphics produce superior imagery when compared to the Ship Recognition Manuals, and I have necessarily replaced the poor FASA graphics.

ASSAULT SHIPS

M-4 Wings of Justice

M-8 Nightwing

BATTLESHIPS / BATTLE-CRUISERS

D'deridex "Warbird" *

Z-1 Nova

V-1 Starglider

V-2 Hunter

V-4 Wing of Vengeance

V-5 Skyfire

V-6 Gallant Wing

V-7 Whitewind

V-8 Bird of Prey

V-9 Night Flyer

DESTROYERS

P'vael ª

T-2 Death Talon

T-5 Fire Storm

T-10 Bright One

ESCORTS

R-4 Mularr

CUTTERS & CORVETTES

P-2 Ranajmar

P-3 Caladan

P-8 Deathsting ∆

P-12 Comilius

MONITORS & GUNBOATS

N-8 Mandukam

Q-1 Great Defender

Q-4 Protector

SCOUTS

S-3 Free Flight

S-4 Swift Wing

S-9 Wind Carrier

S-11 Bird of Prey

SPACE STATIONS

F-2 Nestar

X-3 Aviary

SHUTTLES

H-4 Praetor

H-5 Ras Lovah

MISCELLANEOUS

CS-2 Graceful Flyer
Courier

E-5 Little Nest
Repair Tender

I-4 Graffler
Freighter

I-7 Vespin
Freighter

J-3 Starlifter
Freighter

J-4 Baydron
Transport

J-8 Moorabbin
Transport