That, and the navigational ability of the ship's counselor that was sitting at the helm.
Vengeance vs Narada
- Thread starter xvicente
- Start date
No, it had to do with the enemy employing a military tactic that rendered the Enterprise defenseless.
Well if the Enterprise fired all weapons, she would have destroyed the BOP easily
Yup, a Galaxy class starship could fire enough phaser and photon weaponry into any area of space not much could survive, according to Timo, so just massive gross incompetance from every single person in charge on that ship.
Really deserved to be scuttled, Starfleet essentially promoting them is probably why the enemy keeps getting so close to winning, stupid trickling down.
The ships at Laurentius were never touched by Nero. There was no Rura Penthe in the movie, no capture, no dormancy. And whether Nero really defeated 47 Klingon ships or not is debatable - it's all hearsay that oh so conveniently appears to draw Starfleet's attention elsewhere, supposedly to Laurentius...
One then has to ask why Marcus didn't use these weapons to more quickly finish off the Enterprise. Why go easy and delay? There was nothing of value aboard the Enterprise that Marcus knew of, and it was imperative for him to kill Khan and to stop Kirk from blowing the whistle.
Thankfully so, as the aired product is superior to the original plans, both in terms of dramatic pacing and of story logic...
Which makes it strange that Spock should launch at all. If he's late from the farewell party of Romulus, the next one won't happen until a few years later when the supernova reaches the next star system of interest - so why the hurry?
The way it's edited allows us to believe in a realistic supernova whose only immediate impact would be to pulverize Romulus (thereby upsetting galactic balance and triggering horrible wars and whatnot). Heck, the way it is filmed not only allows but begs us to believe in such realism, as we see in the zoom-in that the star that blows up is right next to planet Romulus.
True enough. But if we wiggle too much, we'll have to start pretending that Spock flat out lied to Kirk, as he also gives a narrative. And that narrative does not allow for passage of time or space between the loss of Romulus and the timehole trip.
Every starship, starting at least with TOS but probably with ENT, has been able to deliver enough firepower to level multiple cities in a short timeframe. By the time of DS9, this has been upped to a fleet of a few dozen such ships melting the entire surface of a planet in a matter of minutes. So it directly follows that shields are very potent defenses...
That accepted, we can talk shop. BoPs are weak ships by the frequent admission of their own crews, but is that offensively or defensively? Outside the Dominion War, such ships are only lost when caught shields down, which tells us little. In the Dominion War, and in the "Way of the Warrior" preceding it, single shots from fixed installations (surface bases, stations) can kill small BoPs even when they have little reason to be unshielded. So multiple hits from the E-D ought to have an effect even if single ones may well be weaker than their "ground fire" equivalents.
Yet the Duras sisters themselves appear overtly surprised that their shields are holding. We see Soran promising the sisters some means of defeating the odds, that is, the E-D. We never hear what those means are. One of them evidently is the bugging of the VISOR, but it should be within Soran's means to bolster the shields of the BoP, too - after all, he comes from a senior culture and has demonstrated technological skills beyond those of the UFP (might also explain why the heroes have such hard time noticing the VISOR-tapping, as opposed to, say, "Mind's Eye" which already sets the challenge level rather high).
In general terms, Galaxy class vessels are curiously distinct in being the only Dominion War participants on the Alpha Axis to actually score capital ship kills (or indeed any onscreen kills at all, Defiant and Rotarran victories notwithstanding). They are also the only type not shown taking damage or being destroyed.
Timo Saloniemi
This makes absolutely no sense - if it wasn't Nero that wiped out the entire Federation fleet in the Laurentian system, who was it then? Lord Voldermort? The Death Star? All while the Narada was on its way to Vulcan? You're actually saying the Narada was never there??? True, we never actually see the Narada chopping up all these ships on-screen, but who else could possibly have the firepower to create the debris field that made the aftermath Wolf 359 look like a trip through the daises? It's called dramatic effect! The implication was that the Narada wiped them all out single-handedly. We don't always have to see things to understand exactly what happened. And it's been a long time since I saw the movie, but I thought there was some brief mention, either in radio chatter or a sideways mention by a crew member (Uhura, maybe?) of a Klingon fleet being wiped out, marking the return of the Narada to the field. The actual number (47) might be apocryphal, but again, we don't always have to see what happened to know what happened.
You seem to be misremembering this somewhat. The fleet at Laurentius never came under any sort of threat: it just sat there, waiting for Spock to fly the Enterprise there to meet up with them. The fact that the fleet was at Laurentius was merely the gimmick that forced Starfleet to help out Vulcan with a pitiful force of surplus ships crewed largely by raw cadets - and it was that fleet that Nero destroyed on Vulcan orbit.
Absolutely. Nobody was. Except, of course, the fleet. We never learned why - but Nero luring them there with false messages (say, about a mysterious supership wiping out Klingons left and right in the neighborhood) would be one plausible explanation.
It's equally possible that the fleet was there for some legitimate reason, though, and had been for weeks. Perhaps they were helping out the victims of a space hurricane, or fighting Tholians, or something. The movie doesn't tell, and we don't really need to know.
Nero did wipe out the cadet fleet at Vulcan single-handedly. That, and at least one additional starship (because we see the wreckage of one USS Mayflower, but no such ship was listed among those launched from Earth with cadet crews, and we did get an exhaustive list of all seven names). That's way simpler than hurting Starfleet's main forces - especially as the cadet ships arrived with their shields down.
The movie gives us an almost blow-by-blow timeline of the events, for a rare once. Chekov says Starfleet observed what we later learn was the timestorm of Spock's arrival at 2200 hours. Uhura says she overheard the call about Klingon activity at 2300 hours. The next morning, the call for help from Vulcan comes (but it's fake, as it mentions seismic troubles before Nero even starts drilling); within that same day, the cadet fleet reaches Vulcan and is slaughtered.
Now, it takes Nero forever to sail from the ruins of Vulcan to Earth. Getting from meeting with Spock to Klingon space in one hour isn't consistent behavior for his trudging ship, then. But falsifying signals is consistent, and falsifying signals of disaster at a location far, far away from Vulcan (i.e. Klingon prison planet near Laurentius) would serve his tactical purposes and allow him to deal with just seven helpless ships rather than hundreds of dangerous ones.
Timo Saloniemi
IrishNero
Commodore
And, despite coming from what is most probably the worst movie of the ST franchise, it's the Reman Warbird Scimitar that sneaks in for the win.
Yep. And she'd had about as much training as I had; just observation.
That, and the navigational ability of the ship's counselor that was sitting at the helm.
Yep. And she'd had about as much training as I had; just observation.
And, despite coming from what is most probably the worst movie of the ST franchise, it's the Reman Warbird Scimitar that cloaks in for the win.
Fixed that for you
Oh crap! Okay, now I remember. It has been a long time since I've seen it and the two events got muddied up in my head and my long-term memory clearly isn't what it used to be. Apologies for the confusion. Man it sucks to get old.
The presupposes that after the Klingon's first shot the Enterprise was still capable of doing such. The first torpedo from the Klingon ship might have deprived the Enterprise of the ability to fire "all weapons."
In the final shot of the battle, Riker order a "full spread" of torpedoes, the ship only fired one, suggest that it couldn't fire more than that.
IrishNero
Commodore
And, despite coming from what is most probably the worst movie of the ST franchise, it's the Reman Warbird Scimitar that cloaks in for the win.
Fixed that for you
Even better. Thanks.
Starborn Dragon
Captain
One thing people seem to be missing is that Narada was NOT a warship.
Heh, no prob! I have never heard of a version of the 2009 script that would have paid more attention to exactly why this fleet was at Laurentius - it's a thing you can easily miss in the scene where the cadets are ordered to Vulcan, and it's never expanded on when Spock wants to go there and Kirk thinks it's the most stupid idea since the invention of the sequel. I doubt the writers themselves really created an unvoiced backstory, either. But they were clearly thinking in terms ofOh crap! Okay, now I remember. It has been a long time since I've seen it and the two events got muddied up in my head and my long-term memory clearly isn't what it used to be. Apologies for the confusion. Man it sucks to get old.
a) excusing Cadet Kirk being sent, and
b) excusing Nero in his single ship (albeit a big one) defeating Starfleet in its home turf,
and IMHO they did just fine. There's plenty of precedent to "Starfleet being engaged elsewhere" or "spread thin" or whatever, and of seeming milk runs and sideshows escalating into galaxy-rattling adventures whenever Kirk is involved.
And Nero was not a soldier, and his campaign was not a war.
Nero wasn't a terrorist, either, though. He had no intent of using the deaths of Vulcans and humans and possible others as a means of influence - he just wanted them all dead. He was an avenger on a rampage, and a suicidal one at that: he must have known that once Starfleet got back from Laurentius, his time would run out.
Whether he might have gotten a third planet in addition to Vulcan and Earth if Kirk hadn't interfered... Depends on how far Laurentius was. Even though so many voyages in these new movies seem to last for hours at most, this isn't evidence that there could also be journeys taking weeks or months as well. After all, Kirk is about to launch into a five-year mission of exploration, and that sounds pretty excessive if it only takes an hour to get from one star system of interest to another!
Would the Vengeance have done better? We did not learn that she would have planet-killing weapons aboard, but those would be consistent with all other Trek. And Khan would probably have insisted on installing some, as that's the exact sort of "savagery" he was supposed to insert into the project. And now that Marcus knows that one can kill planets with instant black holes, he's going to press S31 to build him some. (Whether they would come up with any before the Admiral was defeated, and whether those efforts would continue despite the deaths of Marcus and Khan and the bombing of the London workshop, remains to be seen...)
Timo Saloniemi
Sure he was a terrorist, the elimination of Vulcan was the ultimate in ethnic cleansing. Removing from existance the people you personally don't like is pretty much the definition of a terrorist.
No, it isn't. Acts of destruction are just acts of destruction, but sometimes they are done to incite terror. Not here: nobody was supposed to get scared about the loss of Vulcan. The only goal was to make all Vulcans die, and Nero scored that one.
And ethnic cleansing is completely unrelated to terrorism. Few terrorists would have the means or the patience to conduct ethnic cleansing; that's something for relatively wealthy nations to practice. Terrorists can at most conduct smallish racially motivated crimes that aspire to be elements in ethnic cleansing, the same way a pebble can aspire to be a continent.
(That is, unless they get their hands on lots of nukes and eliminate a small nation-state such as Iceland or Israel, but no terrorist so far has gotten even close to that, and nuking Israel would not cleanse an ethnic group from the face of the Earth).
Eliminating those you don't like is a fairly common goal or dream for somebody possessing a weapon. Terror rarely enters the picture, though. But when terror is sought as a means to an end, it would be wasteful to "eliminate" anything: the point of terrorism is to make many people afraid by hurting very few. If the terrorist actually possessed the means to eliminate those many, he wouldn't have to dabble in terrorism.
Timo Saloniemi
And ethnic cleansing is completely unrelated to terrorism. Few terrorists would have the means or the patience to conduct ethnic cleansing; that's something for relatively wealthy nations to practice. Terrorists can at most conduct smallish racially motivated crimes that aspire to be elements in ethnic cleansing, the same way a pebble can aspire to be a continent.
(That is, unless they get their hands on lots of nukes and eliminate a small nation-state such as Iceland or Israel, but no terrorist so far has gotten even close to that, and nuking Israel would not cleanse an ethnic group from the face of the Earth).
Eliminating those you don't like is a fairly common goal or dream for somebody possessing a weapon. Terror rarely enters the picture, though. But when terror is sought as a means to an end, it would be wasteful to "eliminate" anything: the point of terrorism is to make many people afraid by hurting very few. If the terrorist actually possessed the means to eliminate those many, he wouldn't have to dabble in terrorism.
Timo Saloniemi
(emphasis mine)
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXsFPPe4Cbw[/yt]
I'm pretty sure Timo means during the war itself and in major on-screen fleet battles, when Starfleet had time to prepare. First Contact with the Dominion was disastrous yes, because Starfleet was unprepared that time.
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