Literally, reverse-engineering the
Narada would mean duplicating the technologies of that ship - but Starfleet would not be all that interested in such a thing. Rather, Starfleet would wish to know how to defend itself against said tech. That would include things such as
- determining how hard those missiles hit the shields, to see if ramping up the shields is an option (it probably wasn't - the missiles would go through even if shield strength were increased beyond the means of the 23rd century Starfleet)
- determining how hard it was to shoot down those missiles, to see if it could be done better (there it seems that anti-missile phaser beam strength never was an issue, but targeting accuracy and speed could not be improved much)
- determining how much it would take to hurt the enemy ship itself (an option nobody ever got to use until the climax of the movie)
- determining whether it would be possible to evade the enemy (another option never tried out)
Those things could be done without actually learning anything about how this powerful technology from the future really worked. The first two would mean reading some gauges aboard the
Kelvin and then sending that information home aboard a shuttle. The third could perhaps be calculated from data teh shuttles gathered when the
Kelvin impacted the
Narada. The fourth would be pure guesswork, though. And it all presupposes that data was gathered in the first place, and was successfully transferred to the shuttles; a lot could have gone wrong there.
Marcus explicitly states that both the incident with the Kelvin and the threat of the Klingon Empire was why ships like the Vengeance were needed.
Dang. We really need an online transcript of the movie...
It doesn't make much sense that the loss of a single starship to an infinitely superior enemy would jolt Starfleet. Aren't there any Space Amoebae or Antimatter Clouds or NOMADs or Ancient Gods out there in this timeline?
Timo Saloniemi