So you need a ton of it to keep it together? Well, it's a thought. Though it seems stable enough as they transport it around in tiny drop quantities to send it to its final destination, like a planet's core.
Which is the "minutes" Spock would worry about, evidently.
It's a heck of a problem, just as a drill itself that's miles long and keeping that coiled up in a ship is an engineering problem.
Most of it is pretty problem-free, given Star Trek. Nero is drilling with what looks like a big phaser. Phasers make matter just plain disappear to some sort of alternate dimension, so they're better at making deep holes than anything else imaginable. Just make the hole, pretty wide by the visuals, and before all of it collapses, drop your bomb.
It need not go particularly deep, mind you. When Vulcan collapses, it does so quite prominently from one side only.
And I fail to see the reason for it at all, though like you said, perhaps you can invent one and explain why a black hole needs to be down deep at or near the core to destroy a planet.
Not a black hole, but red matter. The droplet isn't a black hole in itself and has no gravitic pull of note - but when eating surrounding matter, it creates something that is much better than a black hole, giving the corpse of Vulcan more gravitic pull than Vulcan itself originally had (so a ship previously in orbit is now in a maelstrom). That's magic, but that's consistent, which is what counts.
They said the core, and Spock said the center of the planet, so it's not just moderately deep - it goes all the way down.
Only to the border separating "not core" to "core", it seems - as said, the collapse is lopsided.
[/quote]And you wish to suggest the mass felt by the drop in a hole is more than the mass felt at the surface?[/quote]
Obviously. Although the
gravitic pull of that mass is of course canceled out. But what matters is giving something for the droplet to eat. Give a little, and freefloating drops suddenly acquire immense gravity (the pull-together scene after Spock's kamikaze run). Give a lot, and it's immense to the immense power, apparently.
The mass of a ship is apparently enough to trigger it.
Trigger what? With just the wreck of the
Narada to eat, the resulting black hole is feeble, incapable of even significantly further hurting the wreck; it also only grabs Kirk's ship at point blank range. Something more substantial like a planet or a supernova wavefront gives a more potent black hole, one capable of grabbing Kirk's (Spock's!) ship at thousands of kilometers, i.e. over the former Vulcan, or perhaps tens of thousands, i.e. close to the former Romulus.
The amount of matter of an expanding supernova in the shell at a point several AUs out would be less than, say, the amount of matter at the surface of a planet.
Which means less destruction and pull, but the idea isn't to destroy or pull - it's to eat the wavefront, apparently.
... how far away is this star? Light years, probably
Not very probable when we actually
see it's Romulus' own sun. Sure, we could argue we're seeing things, but why bother when this only creates problems?
so this all makes little sense and would likely take hundreds of years.
And since it doesn't, that interpretation can be dropped at once. Isn't that nice?
and I reject the idea that he'd save the planet if it's the stellar system's own sun. You know how useful that would be? Hardly. Without its sun, life on the planets will die anyway.
Too bad. But defeating the blast wave would let millions survive and escape at the very least.
And what are you suggesting about red matter? It eats matter, but then magnifies the gravitational pull of that matter so its suddenly much stronger than just how much more gravity and mass that should be, like it's creating matter out of nothing as it eats matter?
Pretty much.
Still, a lot would have been avoided if they just called it the red matter effect instead of saying it is a black hole.
What's the problem? The result is an immensely powerful black hole (of the Trek type that serves as a wormhole and time conduit and probably gives you a shave at the same price, too) - since it came about by magical means, there's no point in sweating the steps of the process.
First, what we're shown is likely another star system. It already went supernova, and THEN Spock talks about promises and then outfitting the fastest ship, etc. to contain it. You don't have time to do any of that after the supernova, unless it's light years away.
It doesn't work that way. If Spock did have time to talk etc. then Romulans also had time to see death was coming. But they reject the premise, indicating nothing has happened yet and they think Spock is just mouthin' off.
Also, Spock has no business flying to Romulus if the star has already exploded and Spock can calculate to the ninth decimal point the hours by which he will be late.
Reading the narrative so that Spock is the mad scientist who believes in the upcoming explosion and all others laugh him out of the court (except for the Vulcans who just stare), and justice is then served when the Romulan homestar blows while Spock is en route, makes much more sense.
And it
is Romulus where Spock is headed, rather than a supernova location that is not Romulus, because it is at Romulus that Spock meets Nero, an eyewitness to the carnage.
so not the home star of the Romulan Empire, which probably isn't the type to go super nova, anyway.
Which no doubt is why Spock was laughed out of court in the first place.
apparently Earth is now so well acquainted with Romulans, their 3 dialects, and all the rest of it when in the prime universe we haven't even seen Romulans yet, or know they are related to vulcans.
Such things must hang on a thread, given Romulans being Romulans. Who knows how many harebrained schemes of their mad Praetors went unnoticed in one universe but noticed in another? Even Picard might not know Romulan cusswords yet if "Balance of Terror" had gone slightly differently.
Well, with ships so fast now they can go from earth to Vulcan in minutes, why not?
No basis for "minutes". Or do you think the sedative McCoy gave Kirk was a placebo? The man probably slept for hours at the very least.
WHERE are they inside the event horizon in a Trek show?
VOY "Parallax". Not a biggie, starships should be immune, and are. It's just that from the viewpoint of the FTL vessel, the event horizon here is some sort of a rigid shell, for whatever reason.
So my point here is, they were never inside a blackhole, not even when Nero's ship was going down (for if they were, the tidal forces would have torn them apart)
When executing Nero, they probably weren't inside the black hole (although they
could well have been and lived to show the selfies) - the visuals don't suggest such a thing, after all. But why would the tidal forces be worrisome inside as opposed to outside? They only grow too much for the SIFs to bear at some technology-specific point, and that need not coincide in any way with the event horizon.
And you think dumping the warp core, warp power, and FTL travel and losing all that thrust will be more than made up for with a slower than light shockwave, which wouldn't even happen in a vacuum anyway?
It didn't seem they were in a position to do any FTL anyway. And yes, I gather a subspace shockwave (which is what you always get from these warp core mishaps elsewhere in Trek) might well hit the ship with more helpful power than what the STL engines could deliver in the best of days. I mean, why not?
And what's this nonsense about "no shockwaves in vacuum"? No compression waves, perhaps. But that's what the word usually means in the context. An expanding sphere of destruction, at a wavelength of your choice or consisting of matter of your favorite taste, is perfectly realistic.
What episode do you have in mind here? I mean, you seem to be inventing multiple things here to make it work, like a subspace shockwave
Naah. I watch Star Trek, so I have plenty of other people invent such stuff for me. What we see here is standard Trek, not exceptional Trek. And it strikes me as either pretentious or inattentive to claim the latter, and I don't really know which is worse.
The genesis device was better explained, more limited, and the illegal, unethical material used to make it limits it more in other stories.
Can't agree with a single point here. No explanation was given, no limits were established (or, rather, some were but they did not hold true in the end), and its disappearance from other stories makes no sense considering its uses were feared to be illegal, meaning the means also being illegal would be utterly irrelevant. The Genesis torpedo was a perfectly good WMD even after ST3:TSfS. So, stupid, undramatic David Marcus bashing inserted to no practical or interesting effect whatsoever.
And yet, while it does seem to operate on a stellar system scale, it's only using existing matter and making something that is relatively well understood.
If you mean it's making relatively well understood palm trees and parrots, I might agree with you. If you mean something beyond that, you completely lost me. How is all this matter transmutation business more believable than the red matter stuff? Your precious conservation laws aren't in effect at Genesis, either.
But a ship of that power, and their apparent working knowledge of temporal mechanics, going back/forward in time and fixing the problem and saving his wife and planet seems like plan B compared to plan A of reeking vengeance on a guy who tried to help
...For a moment, I thought you were talking about Spock's plan B. Which for all we know indeed
was time travel. Why else dive into the time portal after Romulus was gone?
I can't think of a reason to credit Nero with a plan? He's not the type - he's a stupid miner who sees Spock at the scene of crime and cries bloody murder. If he has any "knowledge of temporal mechanics", it's something he learns in the next 25 years of time exile and regret, and it doesn't amount to anything anyway if he doesn't have red matter.
(...Which he gets from Spock a few hours before he kidnaps Pike and tells him that he prevented genocide. Perhaps he did save Romulus?)
I'm just saying from my POV, there's a lot more problems in that movie (those movies) than in your regular Star Trek episode, making them, IMO, bad episodes. YMMV, of course, and that's fine.
My mileage does vary in that the very part I cannot agree with at all is this last paragraph of yours. It's classic Trek through and through when it comes to techno-magic, alternate astronomy or alien motivations - it's merely pumped with Fast and Furious storytelling that has never before been part of Trek, and as such has no effect on the techno-magic or the rest.
But yes, it does make for relatively bad episodes. The F&F part, I mean. I like my Trek three steps duller, thank you very much.