Again, Kirk knows the ship that attacked the Kelvin was Romulan. Something must have happened to give Kirk that knowledge. More than likely it was the logs from the Kelvin or from histories written by people who examined those records. (Perhaps Pike's dissertation) Also, the Romulan language has been known since before the UFP was formed. T'Pol knew the language in the 22nd Century and Hoshi Sato heard it then. The war that followed would also give humans and their allies a great deal of experience with the language. I assume the UT would record the original language as well as give a translation.
Copies of the U.S.S. Kelvin logs would have been downloaded to all the evac shuttles as a matter of emergency routine: "Let the next guy know what killed you" to quote David Brin's novel Earth. And Nerys Myk has figured out much of the rest of how they'd deduce "Narada = Romulan ship" from there.
But STXI insists that it's indistinguishable from Vulcan, unless you are an expert. Something really doesn't add up there. In terms of the nuMovies, the first Nero encounter would offer zero information on why this bunch of violent Vulcanoids attacked a Starfleet ship. In terms of the rest of Trek, Romulans must have changed their native language after "Minefield"! I guess the only way out of this is to assume that when the no-name Lieutenant indicates inability to tell Romulan from Vulcan, it's akin to somebody saying he can't tell Polish from Russian. This is only halfway plausible: Romulans are such an ancient enemy that it's perfectly possible virtually nobody knows their language - but Vulcans are such a close ally that any communications officer should be fluent in that language, or at least be able to positively identify it. Okay, let's believe that one impossibility before breakfast: perhaps nobody bothers to learn Vulcan, because there are fewer than 10,000 Vulcans outside the homeworld. Fine; nuUhura is a linguist, and knows both of the obscure languages. Pike probably had experts to help him establish for his dissertation that Nero spoke Romulan - but now we hit the next problem... ...He doesn't see any connection between the space thunderstorm (an odd phenomenon Chekov deems worth reporting, wholly out of context!) and Romulans, despite being the expert there! How does that fit with the supposed timelines? Are space thunderstorms fairly typical after all, even though none were encountered before 2233? Or is Pike simply far less interested in his old dissertation than the obsessed Kirk Jr.? (Perhaps he copy-pasted his academic work?) Timo Saloniemi
Kinda like the way Japanese and Swahili sound similar to people who doesn't speak either language. Except they were speaking one of the known dialects of Romulan. Presumably, the same dialect that the Romulans had used to negotiate the neutral zone treaty 60 years earlier. OTOH, this being the Abramsverse, it's entirely possible -- and even likely -- that Robau knew (or at least suspected) that Nero was a Romulan. He has two reasons not to jump to conclusions here: 1) the Narada is freaking huge and bears no resemblance to anything the Romulans have ever been known to build 2) Their behavior, the layout of their ship, their tattoos and customs are very strange, and the questions they start asking him are puzzling to say the least. When Ayel asks him about the stardate, Robau asks "Where are you from?" I think at that point he had a good idea what was really going on. Nero must have realized this as well, which is why he killed him. Impossibility? Vulcan is preset #2 on all Federation universal translators. NOBODY learns Vulcan anymore, except for actual Vulcans. It probably just slipped Pike's mind. He wrote that dissertation, what, 20 years ago? How much do YOU remember about an essay you wrote in the 1990s? Kirk, OTOH, would have read it RECENTLY, so it would still be fresh in his mind. Also, it's more personal to Kirk than it is to Pike so he would have memorized the details of his father's death even if Pike's dissertation was actually an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the Kelvin class starship in emergency situations.
Ancient would be a stretch, since its roughly one hundred years between Minefield and ST09. Maybe Lt. No Name just isn't very good at his job. As far as I'm concerned, Kirk's knowledge that the Romulans attacked the Kelvin trumps Lt. No Name's lack of expertise in Vulcanoid languages.
Or there could have been further incidents outright establishing that Romulans are renegade Vulcans. But that's not necessary, merely a plausible addition, if we go the "Comms Lieutenant doesn't know Polish from Russian" route. It just differentiates between two outcomes if Pike actually contacts the Romulan Star Empire over Nero's antics: Romulans grunt that they have nothing to do with this Nero character and close the channel, or Romulans go to utter panic because the Federation has somehow found out they are pointy-eared, green-blooded ex-Vulcans! But there's another aspect to this: On the background, yes (although Ayel might have been speaking English). But how does the UT actually work? After the translation is done, is it possible to learn what the original language had been? Most probably there would be ways to dig up the information after the fact, by opening a "toolkit" menu and rummaging through the short-term memory of the device. But the device died with Robau... Would a putative transmission from Robau to Kelvin have carried this "comment track" or just the translation? Then again, Sisko has to learn to speak Bajoran to conduct ceremonies. Yet most Bajorans can communicate with Sisko all right, before Sisko learns any Bajoran - and Bajorans don't strike me as the type to stoop to learning foreign languages. If Bajorans have UTs that turn Sisko's English (French? Creole? Personal mumbling?) into Bajoran, how can they tell whether Sisko is conducting a ceremony in Bajoran? If we assume they can (and it's not something Sisko does simply because he finds it spiritually necessary), then the UT most probably could also reveal the original language of Ayel, down to nuances such as dialect. And the UT could do that fairly trivially, not just with expert help. So if the Kelvin crew eavesdropped, they might have gotten some clues, too. Timo Saloniemi
Let's also not forget that, if ENT is accurate that Section 31 existed as far back as the Earth Starfleet, and if Section 31 has always been so good at acquiring information, Section 31 and certian high-level Starfleet and Federation officials probably knew what Romulans looked like during the original war. (The "Star Trek: Federation" book speculates that this was intentionally kept secret so as to not disrupt the burgeoning alliance between Earth and Vulcan.) Therefore, all we need is for someone from Section 31 to see a recording from the Kelvin to know who the attackers are, and then I'm sure the S31 machine cranked into high gear, gathering information on Romulan language and culture.
... which is why they would have analyzed Ayel's message to the Kelvin herself. It's highly unlikely Ayel was speaking English at the time. And when he speaks Bajoran, his words are usually untranslated. It's probably because Bajorans are really anal about the proper recitation of scripture and the universal translator doesn't preserve all the nuances of meaning and/or rythm and structure of the passages. Have you ever gone to a bible study at a Southern Baptist church? I've seen people literally thrown out of the building because they brought the wrong translation (King James Only, dammit!) Also, many Muslims will insist on reciting the Quran in the original Arabic despite the fact that many of them don't speak a word of Arabic. Same with many Catholic rites that are still recited in Latin, which NOBODY speaks anymore. I reserve the possibility that Sisko may be speaking a Bajoran dialect that even most Bajorans don't speak themselves and isn't programmed into most translators (and there's precedent for that as well; we know there is at least one Klingon language that the universal translator doesn't catch).
Everything happens faster in this timeline - contact with the Cardassians (at least compared to the Prime-novelverse), the crew comes together, Praxis explodes, Khan is awoken, the death scene in the warp core etc etc. so I have zero trouble with the Federation and Romulan Empire having had renewed formal contact years before "Balance of Terror", stemming from the attack on the Kelvin.
Actually, we found out in Enterprise that Starfleet had first contact with the Borg in the 22nd century. Technically, Starfleet have started running into their advanced scouts ten years before Kelvin was destroyed. Or... maybe they DID? If we needed a name for the blue pulse weapons the Kelvin fires at the Narada, what fits better than "antimatter spreads?"
Romulans would be more of a threat than ever before. Do consider that they are a aggressive arrogant race to begin with: when word has reached their planet that their sun is going to go super nova, the campaign for expansion has switched from ego tripping careers to a necessity for survival of the Romulan Empire.
I'm still kind of dumbfounded as to why STID completely shelved the Romulans even though all the problems in this movie was a direct response to a catastrophic Romulan attack. I know Nero said he didn't speak for the Empire, but the Klingons have never destroyed an entire planet before, and they were also attacked by the Romulans in the same movie. So to shift the focus to the Klingons and ONLY the Klingons seems really out of place.
On one note: The Federation is made up of different planetary alliances, so perhaps other alien cool heads has prevailed? Most likely in settling any affront to an allied planet, one should not respond in anger would be the ongoing practise in keeping the peace among themselves and not just how they will respond to an outside attack. On the other note: I am under the impression that Klingons were a closer threat to Earth than Romulans were. Perhaps it is by proximity is how a threat is assessed as being greater? The further the distance, even if Earth was conquered by Romulus, the greater the chances that their resources would not be able to maintain a conquered planet, and would be at risk by the native insurgents on the planet's surface as well as their supply line being open to Klingon attacks. It would explain why Romulans have been so busy attacking the Klingon Empire so much. Still, you would think we would hear of these skirmishes in the second movie to paint the atmosphere that the Romulans were going full tilt on this now that their solar sun will be going supernova, thus giving a hint of the 3rd movie. But in order for the Romulans to be a threat, the Klingon Empire has to be crippled enough so Romulans can proceed to attacking the Federation, with the covetted prize being Earth.
Odds and ends: But why should S31 or others in the know make the information public, accessible to nobodies like Pike or Kirk? The whole idea was to keep the universe from learning that Romulans were Vulcans - wouldn't keeping this secret be more crucial now than ever before? Is it? He'd know he was dealing with a Starfleet vessel, and the skippers of those speak English in his century... Showing off by speaking the opponent's language might be a typical Romulan trait. Why should anything stem from the attack on the Kelvin? So a space monstrosity came and destroyed a starship. So what? That must happen every second Thursday or so. The enemy had exotic weapons, but most space monsters do. There's no particular point in analyzing the attack of a unique enemy who's not likely to be encountered ever again, and probably little chance of reaching any conclusions from such an analysis anyway. In what way exactly did Kirk's encounter with the Space Amoeba alter Starfleet? Or with the Doomsday Machine? When we actually saw Starfleet for the first time, in the TOS movies, there was no way to tell whether it had changed or not, as there had been no good insight into Starfleet back during Kirk's original adventures. The same with any "change" between the teaser of STXI and the body of that movie. Timo Saloniemi
Because the writers say so. They even went so far as to have the front for the Section 31 base beneath London called the "Kelvin Memorial Archive". Khan's premature resurrection stems directly from the destruction of Vulcan. It's all intended to be Butterfly Effect repurcussions of Nero's arrival in 2233. It happened a lot in TOS, but this is a pre-TOS AU. The death of one (ship) is a tragedy, the death of millions (well, at least half of the TOS Connie fleet) is just a statistic. Perhaps the refit into an "almost totally new" and more powerful Enterprise in TMP? Or development of the USS Excelsior?
Not in their writing, no. Nowhere in ST:ID does anybody suggest that Nero even existed, let alone had an influence on Starfleet thinking. Certainly there's no suggestion that Nero's antics would have had any effect before he destroyed Vulcan - say, making Starfleet build a bigger and badder Enterprise. (And the Vengeance doesn't appear to be all that much newer.) Quite so. And the idea was that this should look like the least significant thing on planet Earth, to hide its crucial true significance. So a name referring to an irrelevant incident would fit right in. It's not indicated to be that. So Nero made all other space monsters disappear? And while the DDM was something Starfleet might not encounter until sending ships to extreme deep space exploration missions (but in TOS, it had already sent two ships to that particular spot, and one of them made a revisit!), it was apparently headed towards shallower space; the Space Amoeba was found in shallow space, as was NOMAD. That's a giant perhaps, especially considering that neither of these appeared to give Starfleet any real improvement in anti-Amoeba or anti-DDM capabilities... Starfleet getting bigger and better ships is most probably a natural development that doesn't especially benefit from individual incidents. Timo Saloniemi
I think there are really two things at play here - public reaction and private reaction, and also, reaction to the Kelvin's loss versus reaction to Vulcan's loss. I hate to play devil's advocate, but isn't the intention in ID that the Kelvin Memorial Archive is minor - and that having S31 headquarters beneath it is ironic? That's the feeling I got from it. "Why would anyone blow up the archives?" seemed to be the reaction to me. In other words, the Archive being named after the Kelvin disaster doesn't really mean anything as to how much of an impact the indicent publicly had. There could have been a Constellation or Intrepid Memorial Archive in the Primeverse. Many, myself included, have concluded that the loss of the Kelvin had a butterfly effect on the Abramsverse, resulting in changes to the Enterprise, among other things. Does ID prove that this was the case? I'm not sure. We see that Admiral Marcus was planning a war with the Klingons, and this resulted in the Vengeance. What was the result in the Primeverse? Was Marcus similarly inclined? In the Abramsverse, was the Vengeance an extension of a mentality that began with Kelvin, and was expanded with the loss of Vulcan? I really don't think we can decisively say. Khan says that Marcus scoured the universe looking for anything that would help him fight his war, more or less. But was it the Klingons he was really planning on fighting?
We saw a Marcus in the prime universe - he just happened to be named Cartwright, and wasn't the Big Boss yet*. We got another one a century later. Starfleet probably sprouts those almost as often as it kills space monsters... And the butterfly effect just alters the names and faces. Timo Saloniemi * Cartwright was a five-star Admiral, too, if we trust the Fletcher scheme. But he wasn't the only one, or the first among equals. Leyton was two rungs down from there. I wonder what the top of the organization chart really looks like?