I'm convinced this will be set during the classic episode The Best of Both Worlds Part II when the Borg reach Mars.
Exactly... We know the short is a prequel to STP and in the above trailer we see Mars, Picard in the Enterprise-D Ten Forward, during a nightmare. The plot of the short includes an emergency alert. Something binds them together. Nothing like the threat of annihilation to bring us together.
Except the Borg do not attack Mars in BoBW. They just destroy three drone ships and then continue on toward Earth. The viewscreen in the trailer clearly shows the Starfleet stealth-bomber ships attacking.
We do see a guy, probably a teacher since this is a school, with Vulcan/Romulan ears at the end of the trailer.
Just noticed that when the "Emergency Alert" is announced and the Romulan/Vulcan is spinning around, at around 0:22 you can see a ship fly by on the left-hand viewscreen. I thought it was one of the stealth/kite ships, but it looks to have a round hull. So, this could be our first glimpse of a 24th century starship?
Hopefully the short is better than the previews. But, previews are rarely a good indication...I hope this holds true.
A Romulan school with English writing everywhere, and Federation shuttlecraft ferrying the students around? Given this point of this Short Trek is to tie in with the Picard series, which the prequel comic features the Romulans plotting an attack on the Sol system and one of the latest trailers shows massive explosions on Mars, I think it far more likely this is related to the Disastrous Event which will make Picard leave Starfleet than it being about TBOBW. Besides, as mentioned above, the Borg didn't even attack Mars in TBOBW. They flew by, shot down the Mars Perimeter Defense, and continued on to Earth.
As you said earlier, the alert noises are always reused with no thought behind the source or setting. The Scimitar's intruder alert in Nemesis is a Starfleet ship's warp core breach alert which then got used as the red alert on the Klingon Ship of the Dead in Disco. The Son'a Collector's intruder alert in Insurrection is a Cardassian red alert. So a Federation school using a Romulan alert sounds more likely to me than a Romulan school displaying English all over the place.
Since Picard is on the Enterprise-D in his dream sequence, and we have established that it’s Mars out the Ten-Forward window I think it’s very likely that we are looking at a flashback back to the The Best of Both Worlds. We are definitely going to see something about that very specific past, which gives Picard’s story arc much to work with. Lots of people died in the Borg attack. That was a established in TNG-BBW, Family, and DS9-Emmisary. We don’t know if anyone died on Mars, but we do know that there was a thriving terraformed world there by the 23rd century. We know that the Mars Defense Perimeter was broken. This could easily be a “Rogue One” kind of thing, albeit a short. One line is used to build a whole story. But clearly most of the story is about the two little girls, not the “emergency.” If bad things happen on Mars they have a great opportunity to demonstrate the realistic consequences of Picard’s involvement with the Borg. Think about how much he suffered in TNG-Family and First Contact. He keeps talking about the past haunting him in the trailers. This really makes sense to me.
There's no reason to expect this. It's a dream sequence -- Picard is reliving some traumatic moment, and it just so happens that he's sitting in Ten Forward. But that doesn't mean the traumatic event was observed out the window of Ten Forward! After all, he wasn't sitting there when the Borg flew by Mars. Haven't you had dreams where all of a sudden you're back in your childhood home? And as pointed out by others, they didn't stop to take pot shots at an otherwise insignificant planet. They were this close to capturing the falg at Sector 0-0-1.
I’m not saying that everybody died on Mars, but the Borg “passing by” would certainly constitute an emergency. Even though dreams are abstract and non-sensual, you can rest assured that the writers chose Ten-Forward and Mars for a reason. No frame of this show will be wasted. I’m not saying Picard was in Ten-forward when this happened. He was Locutus and in a lab somewhere else on the ship. But, TF is the best place to “view” a disaster and would be the best place to film it. Whether Children of Mars is connected or not SOMETHING will be taking us back to Mars and the Enterprise-D. So far, I think my hypotheses is the best I’ve read!
This has likely been answered in the Countdown to Picard comic: Spoiler The shipyards at Utopia Planitia are building a rescue fleet to evacuate the Romulans from the impending supernova (seen in ST'09). A faction do not believe that the Federation is sincere in its efforts to assist them, and that it is actually a Federation invasion armada. At the end of the last comic, the Romulans demonstrate the ability to override Starfleet ships' computers and assume command. The working theory here is that the ships attacking Mars in the Short Trek and remotely commanded by Romulans.
https://www.trekcore.com/audio/aliensounds/romulan_alarm.mp3 Wow, I never noticed the Warp core alert on the Scimitar and the Cardassian one on the collector! I probably heard the Klingon and Romulan ones way too often in PC games. So they got careless and/or lazy by INS and NEM. Still, are there any similarly reused sounds in the shows before DIS? Maybe whoever is responsible for the sound effects thought "Oh, Klingon alert, we'll use that when the Klingons are attacking. Ok what do we use for the Romulan attack? Hey, there's a Romulan alert, perfect!" XD
First: who knows if this is the sound effect in the final edit. Second, Star Trek has a history of mixing sound effects, regardless of their origin. Klingon/Romulan/Cardasian/Asswhipian aside, did anyone complain that the "Red Alert" screens in TWOK were also those of the Nostromo in Alien? The alert sounds like an alert you'd hear in a fire alarm today. That's the only thing that's important. It communicates intent to the viewer.