In an interview on Trekmovie.com months ago, the writers used the butterfly effect to describe the changes in the timeline. They said that Star Trek was the butterfly flapping it's wings, and Star Trek Into Darkness is the resultant tornado. Now, if destroying seven starships, 47 Klingon warbirds and the entire planet Vulcan are just wings flapping...
^ The sad thing is a Kutcheresque scenario would be more believable than a black hole thing not crushing whatever goes back in time through it.
http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/kerr-black-holes-time-travel http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/04/58359
Seriously. They REALLY need to change that annoying abbriviation. How hard is it to type "new" anyway? Which, considering that the movie is three years old, is no longer correct anyhow. Okay, rant over, to answer the actual question, I don't know.
Speculation. Let's just suppose they are magic time portals... they still have more g-forces than the biggest stars out there. They can't even keep it consistent within the frame of the movie being the black holes suddenly had gravitational effects at the end where before the Narada and the Jellyfish just flew in and out of them easy as you please.
In speculative fiction? The horror! Back on topic, in the nuTNG universe everyone will be younger and better looking. And hopefully nuWorf's muscles won't be sewn into his uniform.
I doubt any of the characters from TNG, DS9 or Voyager will even exist at all in the Abrams timeline. The butterfly effect will pretty much guarantee that their ancestors' lives will be so different as to make it impossible that the same people could be born at the same times and even to the same parents. Look at Chekov, for example. He wasn't even born when Nero appeared in 2233, and while we do have a version of him in the Abramsverse, he looks different and is a different age (he's older). So if this can happen to Chekov, it can happen to anyone else.
Logically, that would seem to be the case, but the butterfly effect is highly variable in the STAR TREK universe. Just look at "Mirror, Mirror," where everybody is more or less in the same place at the same time, despite fundamental changes to history and civilization . . . .
^ The Mirror Universe is different. It's not an alternate timeline created by time travel; it always existed. It's a completely separate universe. The same people's births and lives are simultaneously no more, and no less, likely to happen in the MU than they are in any other.
But, seriously, the odds that a completely different universe would bring an Enterprise with the same crew members, at the same ranks, to the same planet to negotiate with the same alien leader during the same cosmic storm doesn't kind of blow the idea that different circumstances lead to different outcomes out of the water? I'm just saying there's room to fudge here . . . .
Is there anything from the shows or even books to support that? AFAIK, the books and comics have given several divergence point stories, and William Shatner even pitched an Enterprise episode about the point at which the timelines split.
^ I admit there's nothing to support this viewpoint, but nothing to deny it either. There's no evidence that someone travelled back in time and altered history to result in the MU's creation (like Nero has done with the Abrams timeline). I prefer to draw the distinction between an alternate universe and an alternate timeline.
Didn't Enterprise imply that the point of divergence occurred when Zefram Cochrane went off-script and killed those Vulcans at First Contact . . . ?
^ No, it didn't. That was a symptom of the divergence, not a cause of it. There's no proof that the MU didn't exist long before that.
I always figured the butterfly effect was used as a justification or plot device rather than an actual plot point. They'll just use it to justify any changes they want that might not otherwise make sense. If they want a NuPicard, all the flapping butterfly wings in the world won't stop it. Nor will they stop NuKirk fighting the Borg if that's what they want.
Based solely on the known events of the first film I don't see why the TNG crew as individuals would necessarily be that different, though of course whether they all end up together and what their ship would look like have probably been altered. That said, it's certainly possible that differences could exist, especially if any of them had ancestors on any of the ships shown in the first film.
Exactly how I see it. I didn't notice the supposed scale change until someone on the net mentioned it...
Hell, if a disruptor was held to my head, I still couldn't tell you what the dimensions of a Constitution-class starship are supposed to be. It has nothing to do with the story or the characters.