But doesn't it mean new to the Enterprise? They already know their own timeline. And didn't a past article say something about a "familiar space station"?
That's a conceivable interpretation, but by no means certain. The more obvious interpretation is that "their new timeline" means the timeline that they come from -- that is "theirs" -- and that's new to us because it was only created five years ago. It's unlikely that phrasing would be used to mean "a timeline that's new to them," unless whoever wrote that copy phrased it poorly. Well, of course DS9 will be familiar to us in any timeline, just as Terok Nor was familiar in the Mirror Universe. "Familiar" just means reminiscent of something we know. Again, it could be read the way you're interpreting it, but that's hardly the only possibility. We won't know for sure until the comic comes out.
This has been on my mind for a bit and some of the stuff from the comics has been backing it up. It can be argued that Abramsverse Chekov is a totally different person than Prime Chekov. He's a different age, is physically the most separate from his Prime counterpart, he has very different jobs than Prime Chekov (Ostensibly a TNG-esque Operations Officer, as opposed to Prime's Navigation/Weapons officer.) I also don't recall Chekov being considered a wunderkind in TOS. Granted, we really don't know much about Chekov in the series. Which is to say that, while he's crafted to be the same as Prime Chekov, stuff they've done to get him on the Enterprise for the films and to give him a job that wouldn't leave him without anything to do, they've essentially grafted an old name onto a new person.
Well, actually, Chekov's role in the '09 movie was more of an assistant science officer, which was also Chekov Prime's role in his first few episodes before he was moved to navigation. So it's not completely different. I agree with the rest, though.
A theory I've heard is that Mr and Mrs Chekov concieved earlier due to the changes in the new universe, however they always had the name 'Pavel Andreievich' reserved for their first boy.
Who says Chekov was being honest? Just because a character says something, doesn't necessarily make it irrefutable fact. Perhaps he was getting techy about his approaching 30th, perhaps he was 22 in Earth years minus some relativistic time dilation or other temporal shenanigans, or maybe he was a fertilized egg implanted earlier in one history than another (thanks, teacake) The idea that Chekov's unborn older brother from another timeline wound up in the same spot as Chekov Prime on the Enterprise is possibly the most fanwanky thing I have ever heard.
No worse than the contrivance of all the other characters ending up in the same jobs on the same ship -- let alone doing so nearly a decade earlier in the Abramsverse. One pretty much has to assume that there's some force of quantum probability driving timelines to converge around similar events and patterns, though with some major variations here and there.
That's not so far-fetched, actually. The idea that a character can be different ages depending on time dilation factors (esp. if they live much of their lives on board a starship) has been used before in Trek...once with Janice Rand, I think.
In Enterprise: The First Adventure, yes, but I never bought the idea that Rand was biologically only 16 at the time of that book, which would've made her only 17-18 at the time she was in the show. Which is impossible, since Grace Lee Whitney was twice that age at the time, and since "Charlie X" made it quite clear that Rand was an unattainable older woman to the 17-year-old Charlie. I really don't know what Vonda McIntyre was thinking when she put that in the book. Although E:TFA has something in common with ST'09 in that it also contrived to have the entire familiar cast aboard at the start, even a young Chekov, although his age in the book was more consistent with canon than it is in the movies.
Well, in TOS Chekov was intended to be the "young guy" of the group, the inexperienced one who all this is new for. Were he really approaching 30 he'd be in the same basic age range as Sulu and Uhura, and therefore not very young or inexperienced. And I'm fairly certain the intent when Adonais was written and filmed was that he was giving his actual age. To be honest, Chekov's presence is one of the worse examples of the "Nero's presence changed the timeline" handwave excuse's we get in the Abramsverse. There's no real reason Nero showing up and destroying the Kelvin should have motivated Chekov's parents to have a child sooner but there we are.
Ripple effects aren't always straightforwardly recognizable. There's no telling how many dominoes could've fallen between the cause and the effect. Say, the Kelvin's destruction by an advanced Romulan ship puts Starfleet on more of a defensive footing, so they increase their shipbuilding efforts, and they need more personnel, so Andrei Chekov takes a job on Earth instead of the offworld gig he would've taken, and that keeps him closer to home so he and his wife can start a family four years earlier.
It's not one of those things that I would expect them to pursue or spell out. Or that, outside of a Prime/Abrams crossover, making any mention of. More a thought experiment. I can of course rationalize the intentions of the filmmaker over the statements of characters between series that are 40 years apart. However, it's a fun thought experiment to see that for some reason Chekov was born earlier in this timeline. Military step up because of the Narrada? Butterfly effect causing a change in the probability of fertilization? Who knows? Maybe someone can answer for us in the comics. (Times like this you wish they had a letters column so you could submit for a No Prize.)
The biggest difference between the characters is that NuChekov is a genius and TOS Chekov... wasn't. Nu Chekov is less of a support scientist and more of an engineer. They are quite different careers but Trek has always played it fast and loose, shovelling characters between departments whenever they feel like it. Qualifications and experience are secondary concerns to plot convenience.
He didn't become an engineer until the sequel. In the first movie he was doing more sciencey stuff, aside from working the transporter.
Do people think it's just Q and the Deep Space Nine cast guesting in The Q Gambit or might they dip into the other series?
Well, it is six issues long and we only know about the first two. I'll be surprised if we don't see Abramsverse TNG characters before this is done.