The Genesis Sunrise

[Timo]

The "at least one more" idea doesn't explain where the original Regula star would go: all the Genesis action is within spitting distance of Regula the star and Regula the rock, so the Genesis planet ought to have two stars on its sky if another one somehow was created, or emerged when the nebula was dispersed.

The simplest assumption is that we're seeing one and the same star all the time. And quite possibly the Genesis planet is also the Regula rock, simply transformed by Genesis exactly as the designers intended. Not only is the distance right, but the nearby horizon suggests the size is the same as well.

Timo Saloniemi

[R. Star]

SonicRanger wrote:

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Nebulae are usually star-forming areas. The nebula easily could have had at least one star.

Or it was really a protoplanetary nebula around a sun.

I had always just figured the Genesis thing accelerated the nebula star creating process and popped out a star. Why not? The rest of it's pretty much technobabble magic too.

[Timo]

The two big problems with that have been discussed frequently...

1) The Genesis technology wasn't flexible. It was designed to turn a dead planet into a living one, not to turn a nebula into a star, and even its creators could not "cram another byte into it". It must have been struggling already with being detonated so far away from any planets; it would be rather logical to assume that the Genesis planet only emerged when the effect hit the preexisting planet Regula.

2) New stars don't explain what happened to the old one. A crippled starship won't get far enough at low impulse speed to hide the preexisting star from view.

Here's a bonus one:

3) The planet was a failure, and apparently began to spin out of control and perhaps even break apart when we last saw it. The star didn't show signs of corresponding failure, though; could it be a Genesis product in that case? Granted, Spock didn't explode, either...

Timo Saloniemi

[DonIago]

With respect to #1, how do we know how flexible the Genesis technology was? We know what it was "designed" to do, but any computer programmer will tell you that just because something's designed to behave a certain way doesn't mean that you'll get the expected results. I'll grant your point that they'd apparently hit some sort of limitation, but perhaps they hit that limitation precisely because they were trying to keep Genesis adaptable.

With regards to point #3, as there've been at least two theories for why the Genesis planet failed (protomatter, the target being a nebula rather than an existing planet), and, as you pointed out, Spock continued to survive, perhaps the failure point would impact a planet but not a star.