Re: What was Nero doing for 25 years?
I'm glad they deleted those scenes and left it mysterious; as others have said, the Klingons would have reverse engineered the Narada in that time. The only way it might have made sense (I'm not saying they did this, just speculating) would be if:
1) The Narada limped away to some concealed location;
2) Nero and members of his crew went out looking for parts, and were discovered by the Klingons;
3) Nero realizes that breaking out then will only mean they have to fight the Klingons for years, so...
4) Before they are captured, he orders the Narada to sit tight and only break him out when Spock is due to show up.
5) two decades later, the now fully-repaired Narada detects the anomoly, and attacks Rura Penthe, while Nero and his men stage a breakout from within.
But yeah, sometimes writers are better off not explaining certain things - the more information you provide, the more you risk exposing plot holes.
All of those scenarios seem pretty plausible, but generally I agree with your final sentiment. Some things are best left to the imagination to reconcile.
Still, I can't help but wonder how much of that time Nero would have really spent in prison.
Klingons are known for their brawn and not their brains.
My thought too.
Didn't Orci or someone say that the
Kelvin's scans of the
Narada helped Starfleet engineers develop their tech in the aftermath?
Was the Narada that badly damaged? As powerful as the ship was, I don't see that happening by anything other than the black hole that eventually killed it.
True, it took all of the red matter detonating inside it at once to destroy it, but to be sure all of the red matter detonating inside of
anything would destroy
anything.
I don't think the fact that the
Narada defeated 47 Klingon ships really proves anything. A kamikaze collision from another starship (presuming warp core breach) should have hurt them at least a little, no matter how strong they were. Indeed, do we really know how hurt the ship was after it came out of the black hole? The fact that it could beat the
Kelvin, a one-nacelle survey ship,may not mean anything, etiher. I'd say the
Narada almost had to have been at least temporarily crippled to not destroy those shuttles. Secrecy was their friend, no matter where they were.
My question is this: do we expressly know where the
Kelvin encountered the
Narada? Was it the past/alternate version of the Hobus system? If so, perhaps this system is so remote and overlooked that the
Narada could have simply been left there. Then again, it seems like Starfleet might have sent an armada looking for it after it picked up the
Kelvin survivors if it was.
And, if it was the Hobus system, wouldn't Nero have bothered to use the red matter to destroy the Hobus star and prevent the future cataclysmic supernova, hell-bent on revenge or not?
