Spoilers NO SPOILERS FOR CODA - A Lit-verse Grand Finale...What We Know (Spoilers for Entire Lit-verse)

PIC established the incipient supernova was detected shortly after NEM. It’d be quite a retcon to say the last six years of the novelverse failed to mention they were all waiting for Romulus to be destroyed but never talked about it.

 

For obvious reasons, Picard takes place in a different timeline than the Litverse. And since as noted, there have been no indications that the Romulus star is going nova like there were for several years prior according to Picard, it stands to reason the supernova won't be happening in the Litverse.

 

Or maybe the Romulans know It but don't share the information with the Federation

 

They already tried to keep it quiet in Last Best Hope, then downplayed the effect radius once the Federation called them on it.

One thing I find most fascinating and exciting about Coda, is that it's a break from the "normal" tie-in formula. Normally, everything ties directly to the canon, anything that doesn't is ignored or explained away. But Coda is an acknowledgement that the novelverse isn't the prime/TV/P+/Kurtzman universe. And even though until now they've been playing by the established tie-in rules, here at the very end they can do anything they want.

I'm also curious if anything from David Mack's last planned novelverse finale, the Old Picard version of Cold Equations 3, made it into this version of the novelverse's end?

 

Groan.

Now that you've said that, I'm going to have to watch the last few episodes aren't I ?

I have absolutely loathed what I have seen and it's been the only Trek show I couldn't finish.

 

It is completely impossible to hide evidence of an impending supernova, because it's a star. The whole deal of stars is that they're in plain sight to everyone. You can literally just look at it from hundreds or thousands of light years away and see the evidence in its spectrum and light curve that a supernova is coming. We do that in real life with stars like Betelgeuse and Antares. And in Trek, they have subspace telescopes that can detect things faster than light. As soon as Romulus's star began to show signs of an impending supernova, every neighboring power would know it. Because space doesn't have horizons or walls. You can't hide a star.

 

Unless you have a Dyson Sphere (which the Romulans don't)

 

Even a Dyson shell would be detectable by its infrared signature. Thermodynamics always wins.

 

I wasn't going to bring this up -- I've been pondering this for several weeks now, but didn't want to say anything in case the basic idea is correct -- but this is from a post I wrote five years ago:

Spoiler: Speculation

Take that with, say, temporal shenanigans prematurely aging stars (shades of Ann Crispin's Time for Yesterday), and I wonder if the actions of the heroes in Coda to save the larger reality have the consequences, intended or unintended, of causing a star or a dozen to go BOOOOM!.

 

Hasn't it been implied in Picard that the supernova had some help? If that's the case it's very easy to explain why it wouldn't have gone nova in another timeline.

 

Not exactly. In The Last Best Hope there's repeated references to the fact that there's no way the supernova can be natural, since according to actual science, stars don't go nova the way the Romulus star appears to have been. However, that was just something inserted in the book, and there's been no indication in Picard the show that the nova was anything other than natural.

 

There were hints of it in The Dark Veil as well. Given the closer coordination between the producers and the novel authors these days, I'd say its mention in two consecutive Picard novels might suggest it's more than just an idle speculation.

 

Could you (theoretically) capture the energy output and funnel it all in a single direction as a very high powered well collimated laser, pointing out to deep space? Fired a laser to one of 300 million random directions in empty space and switch every second and you'd be difficult to triangulate even if you happened to intersect a deep space device with sensors picking it up (if it did pick it up of course, that much energy would likely destroy the sensor)

Gravitational affects of course would still exist.

 

Wasn't it clear that the supernova affected more than just the Romulan home star?

It's apparently fairly easy to create an artificial supernova with just a little trilithium, tekasite, and protomatter, one which would have effects that propegated faster than light (as the entire plan was to wipe out the allied fleet, and once they detected a supernova starting they'd have plenty of time to warp away)

If you do it just with Trilithium though, you'll collapse the star, but not cause a supernova. There are still FTL effects from the collapse (Generations - Veridian), but not enough to stop warping away (Amargosa)

 

The whole point of a Dyson sphere or shell would be to gather as much energy from the star as possible. Logically, any amount of energy you could actually capture and direct would be used to power the energy needs of your Kardashev Level II civilization rather than just blasted pointlessly into space for a game of hide-and-seek. The reason there'd be infrared leakage is because no technology, no matter how super-advanced is ever going to be 100% efficient and there's always gonna be waste heat. Presumably that would be just as true of a super-stealthy random laser energy-waster as of an equally advanced technology that collects the energy for actual use.

Every supernova does. The radiation front from a typical supernova could devastate planetary biospheres for dozens of light-years around.

Those were supernovae. They didn't use the word in the movie, but a destructive shock wave triggered by a stellar collapse is what a supernova is.

 

A supernova would impact more than just its solar system of origin. The radiation would make it lethal to be in a radius several lightyears from the origin.

What are you referring to here?

I always just assumed what we saw in Generations was just sloppy science. Not the first or last time in Star Trek.

 

Not for dozens of years (in time).

We saw Supernovae in Tin Man which didn't have FTL issues (at least enough to worry the Enterprise crew that warp engines might not work), but in By Inferno's Light it was clearly the plan.

Supernova in the near-Earth (say <10kly) vicinity over the space of 300 years include one near Doctari Alpha, Beta Niobe, one of the starts in the Bynar system, Half a Life, the one in Cogenitor. That's a serious number compared with Supernovae in the Milky Way which had effects reaching Earth in the last 300 years.

Which would account for one of the two starfleet crews pre-2373 to have witnessed a supernova.

By Inferno's light, the goal of creating the supernova was to knock out the allied fleet in the Denorios belt, which was at least 9 light minutes from the star (being 160m km from Bajor). To do that would involve preventing them from using warp engines to escape in the way the Enterprise did from Armagosa, or prevent the detection of the supernova (and we know that subspace sensors can detect events FTL)

Thus the combination of materials that would have created the supernova must have had FTL effects to prevent warp, if not FTL destructive events.

 

What's that got to do with anything? Those planets would still need to be evacuated either way. I mean, we know from Picard that they started the evacuation years in advance of the supernova anyway. Because obviously you don't wait until the last second to evacuate dozens of entire planets.

 

This makes me think of the Core Explosion in Larry Niven's Known Space. Basically, for those unfamiliar with it, stars in the galactic core start going supernova, which, due to close proximity (a light-year or two) to other stars, causes those stars to supernova, which causes a massive chain reaction supernova and a hard radiation wavefront from the core that will irradiate and sterilize planets out to the rim, and in several thousand years, give or take, the area near Earth ("Known Space") will be sterilized.

One of the races of Known Space, the Puppeteers, who are fearful and downright paranoid, respond to Bey Schaefer's discovery of the Core Explosion by buying a planet-moving stardrive from the Outsiders and flying their five homeworlds at high sublight speed out of Known Space.

At least, that's what it appears they're doing. One of the characters in the Ringworld series realizes that if the Puppeteers have a stardrive that can move planets at high sublight speeds, they also have shielding to protect their planets from the hard radiation and debris those planets are going to fly through. What the Puppeteers are actually doing is running... until they turn into the Core Explosion wavefront and return to Known Space, many thousands of years from now, and claim the now sterilized worlds for themselves. They have to run out to the rim, and by the time the wavefront reaches them, Known Space will be burned clean. It's why the Ringworld terrified them; the way it was constructed hardened it against the wavefront, so trillions of Pak descendants could ride out the Core Explosion and potentially claim the sterilized worlds before the Puppeteers returned.

It seems to me that the SCE could have done something similar for the Romulan worlds. The Core worlds are goners, obviously, since the star goes supernova, but for nearly worlds, within about 100 light-years and at risk of sterilization from the wavefront, the SCE could build giant planetary shields, thousands of emiters flying in tandem that would be oriented between the inhabited world and the Romulan supernova, to create a shield that would take the radiation.

 

If there were a Dyson sphere around Eisn before the supernova occured, I cannot easily see how the radiation from the sphere would indicate a supernova is coming soon.