Contemporary Vulcan Era

Warp Era
 Despite the devastating war, new scientific achievements had been made, particularly in the field of robotics, computers, and atomic power plants. Other societal changes included the removal of the pagan festival of Rumarie. The Vulcans' limited space technologies took a great leap when the scientist T'Vran discovered the secrets of warp drive in 1440. T'Vran's team was responsible for the construction and testing of the first warp engine, using unmanned, automated probes. These were successful enough that T'Vran herself participated in a manned flight.

Following this event, the Vulcan people quickly began the construction of faster-than-light exploratory vessels in order to begin charting the regions around their homeworld. The Vulcans soon established colonies on worlds such as T'Khut, Kethri and Mevet.

This new age of exploration lasted six hundred years. A secondary aim was locating the hostile force that attacked them earlier, but teh Vulcans did not discover the Romulan Star Empire during this time. As their first contact with an alien race turned out to be violent, the Vulcan exploration corps had strict instructions to not make contact with other species until all gathered data could be analyzed. This era of expansion led them to encounter a number of worlds, including Haurok leh-keh, with their survey determining that its population consisted of a matriarchy, with the male sex being viewed as the weaker of the pair.

Early contacts with numerous primitive and violent races provoked the Vulcan belief in remaining hidden from such races until they 'matured' or developed themselves. This would later form the initial basis for the Prime Directive.

During their encounters in space, the Vulcans encountered the Andorian Empire and were distressed by the violent and emotional nature of the Andorian species, to the point that they sought to guide the race. However, the Vulcans' actions were seen as both overt and covert attempts to coerce and control the Andorian people, who reacted volently. This sparked a series of conflicts and skirmishes between the two races that ended with the signing of the Tau Ceti Accords and left a state of cold war between the two governments.

This was not the Vulcans' only attempt at guiding other species. They encountered the dilithium-rich world of Coridan and sought to help the native inhabitants develop a stable world government. While such an act would seemingly be against the policy of non-interference of developing worlds, the Vulcans logically reasoned that Coridan's resources would benefit the Vulcan government, and that by stabilising the planet they could facilitate a mining agreement. This was crucial to the Vulcan state, due to the significant economic and material gains, as well as continued tensions from Andoria. Vulcan's close economic and political ties with the Coridan government spawned dissident rebellious factions, who in turn were supported by the Andorians, who also sought to acquire Coridan's resources. This cold war for Coridan continued for many years.

In addition to conflict with the Andorians, the Vulcans also had skirmishes with the Tellarites, with the two species reverse-engineering Vulcan technology into their starships.

Interacting with Humanity
The Vulcans also kept watch on the planet Earth, and they may have reached the world as early as the 19th century. However, continuous warfare on the planet's surface made the Vulcan's weary of any contact, and they kept their activities discreet until the 20th century. At that point, Vulcan exploration programs were cut back due to the expansionist efforts of the Orions, which the Vulcan's began to focus on in order to curb their exploitation of pre-warp worlds.

During the early 1900s, an unmanned Vulcan probe prevented a cometary fragment from wiping out half of central Europe by diverting the body, forcing it to explode over an uninhabited region of Siberia known as Tunguska. Though humans remained unaware of this activity, between 1955 and 2018 there were at least eighteen legitimate two-dimensional photographs taken of the Vulcan probe ships. These were without exception dismissed as frauds and hoaxes. The Vulcans continued to observe the conflicts that raged over Earth's surface in the early 21st Century, starting from the Second American Civil War, to the eventual cataclysm of environmental crash of the millenium. The Vulcan Science Academy suspected that the Humans would ultimately destroy themselves in warfare.

During the mid-22nd century, the Vulcans began to suffer the predatory attentions of the Klingon Empire. Many raids were conducted by Raptor-class scouts, a designation that the Vulcans initially gave the ships due to their physical nature and combat roles. While the strategy initially worked, the Vulcans quickly learned the simple tactics employed by the Klingons and began to avoid telltale signs of such traps, such as distress beacons in asteroid belts, journeying through the upper atmosphere in Class-J giants or areas that were suffering from ion storms. The Klingons eventually turned their attentions to other neighboring civilizations.

At some point, the Vulcan Science Academy authorised a probe mission to chart gravitic anomalies in the Alpha Centauri-system. However, three days before reaching its destination, a new order was sent from the communications division of the Vulcan Science Academy that diverted it to the Sol-system in order to track several massive warp eddies, which the suspected were generated by Jupiter's intersection with its sun.

In 2118, the Vulcan science vessel T'Plana-Hath, led by Captain Sevak, detecting a warp signature, which was the Sixteenth Exodus Fleet with 10,000,000 colonists on a 5-year voyage to the 70 Ophiuchi-system. This led to the eventual first contact between the Vulcans and Humans on April 5th, 2118, when the T'Plana-Hath detected a manned warp flight from the planet Earth and became the first extraterrestrials to formally make contact with Humans. The T'Plana Hath landed at lunar settlement Armstrong Colony, the launch site of the warp ship, to greet its creator, Zefram Cochrane.

While the Vulcan Science Academy had believed that humanity had either destroyed itself or reduced itself to the Stone Age, the contact made by Sevak proved otherwise. Humanity had infact been actively colonizing new worlds almost mere weeks after the Vulcan's began to curb their own expansion. During this period a dozen major colonies had been settled. Captain Sevak later returned to Vulcan and spoke to the Vulcan Council, where he voiced the opinion that despite their emotional nature, the human race was advanced enough for further relations. While there were fears of cultural contamination, as well as exposure to their emotions, this was drowned out by the desire for peaceful negotiations. Thus, the Vulcans decided to make further contact and help guide humanity into galactic politics and possibly bring an era of peace and rationality to the species.

However after first contact, it took decades for Humans to accept Vulcans on Earth. With their new Human allies, the Vulcan High Command established the Vulcan Advisory Council, which coordinated with United Earth Starfleet Command and monitored Earths progress. The Vulcans refused to provide their technology to Earth, which resulted in Earth's first warp five starship launching fifty years after Humanity first developed warp technology. For some Humans this was a source of much resentment; they believed that the Vulcans had impeded their progress.

This period lasted for decades, as the Vulcans believed that mankind was not ready for the dangers inherent in exploring other worlds and intended to curtail their expansion and establishment in the galactic neighborhood until they were deemed ready. This was met with resentment and resistance and while they failed to slow humanity's expansion, it did give the Vulcan's a major trade boost and in exchange, shielded humans from hostile alien powers.

22nd Century
As far back as 2105, a Vulcan outpost was established on Berengaria VII that consisted of pacifists and scientists, who studied the worlds diverse ecosystem for pharmacological reasons. Following first contact with Humans, the Vulcans began to form a close relationship with the inhabitants of Earth. In the early part of the 22nd century, a physician of the Vulcan Science Academy known as Sobon joined the scientific contigent working on Earth. Unlike his comrades, Sobon advocated a closer cooperative relationship with the humans and championed the cause of sharing technology with them in certain fields, such as medicine. It was largely through his efforts that human medical science made several leaps in a short span of time and led to gradual increase in the life span of mankind during this century.

By the mid-22nd century, the Vulcans were a regional power, involved in an ongoing conflict with the neighboring Andorian Empire. Meanwhile, Earth's first warp five starship, the Enterprise (NX-01), was launched in 2151. While reluctant to allow humanity to begin its period of exploration, the Vulcans consented to the launch of the Enterprise in order to avoid a diplomatic incident with the neighbouring Klingon Empire after the crash of their courier Klaang on Earth along with the decaying habitability. When the Enterprise was launched, the Vulcans stationed subcommander T'Pol on the ship to aid and monitor the humans' journey.

In 2153 a Xindi probe weapon attacked Vulcan and fired on Shi'Kahr, destroying the capital city and killing 19-million Vulcans and bringing the government into the Xindi Conflict. Because of this action, the Confederacy of Vulcan joined the Interstellar Coalition.