Earth to Vulcan in 30 minutes - a possible solution?

[Kpnuts]

Fair enough if you want to suggest warp highways, but to then suggest that they 'collapsed' for no reason? I just find it a bit random that's all.

The entire film is very random, Kpnuts. Come on, all the original characters ending up on the same ship at the same time? Supernovas endangering whole galaxies? Kirk going from Cadet STRAIGHT TO CAPTAIN?!!

Those aren't random. Those are plot points that happen in the film.

A fanboy suggesting a magical, totally uncanon, method of transport (warp highways), with absolutely ZERO onscreen evidence.... And then suggesting that this fanboy invention 'collapsed' (hey why not, these things just happen right!) because it doesn't fit with the movie...

Well I just find it funny that's all.

 

[Pauln6]

A fanboy suggesting a magical, totally uncanon, method of transport (warp highways), with absolutely ZERO onscreen evidence.... And then suggesting that this fanboy invention 'collapsed' (hey why not, these things just happen right!) because it doesn't fit with the movie...

Well I just find it funny that's all.

The bigger the plot hole the more desperate the measures to plug it. Trek is fun but fun doesn't also have to be dumb. Oooh shiny object!

 

[Timo]

This whole "Nero got help from the Borg" bit sounds utterly silly to me. Nothing of the sort is suggested in the movie. No encounter with the Borg is mentioned, nor is there room for one in the timeline, or any sort of rationale for why Nero should emerge victorious and get a shipload of Borg loot. It would perfectly suffice that Nero gets his supervillain strength from three simple facts:

1) His ship comes from the 24th century.
2) His ship is massive and can thus take much more pounding than the Starfleet midgets, while also carrying a much bigger warload of weapons that need not individually be especially powerful.
3) His ship carries red matter.

The latter point is the only treknologically and dramatically interesting one here, really. Does he get all his red matter from Spock? If so, did he have red matter available when he destroyed those two score and seven Klingon ships? Or did he achieve that before capturing Spock, solely by the "natural" strength of his mining rig? From the scene where Nero extracts enough red matter from Spock's cache to destroy Vulcan, we learn that he would have had enough to destroy hundreds of planets and still plenty left over to destroy thousands of starfleets...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JarodRussell]

It would perfectly suffice that Nero gets his supervillain strength from three simple facts:

1) His ship comes from the 24th century.
2) His ship is massive and can thus take much more pounding than the Starfleet midgets, while also carrying a much bigger warload of weapons that need not individually be especially powerful.
3) His ship carries red matter.

Argument against his superpower is: he is just a simple miner, and the Narada is supposed to be a simple mining ship. Why would it carry any powerful weapons? The beam makes sense, but not the missiles/torpedoes.

 

[SalvorHardin]

It would perfectly suffice that Nero gets his supervillain strength from three simple facts:

1) His ship comes from the 24th century.
2) His ship is massive and can thus take much more pounding than the Starfleet midgets, while also carrying a much bigger warload of weapons that need not individually be especially powerful.
3) His ship carries red matter.

Argument against his superpower is: he is just a simple miner, and the Narada is supposed to be a simple mining ship.

Mining ships carry valuable cargoes and may often have to operate in locations far away from civilization and help in case of emergencies.
Therefore they have to be strong, armed and fully capable of defending themselves from enemies, pirates, unknown threats etc etc.

As for the simple miner angle...He's still the captain of a starship and thus more than likely a highly educated and smart man.
Not some high school dropout entrusted with using a shovel digging holes or something.

This whole "Nero got help from the Borg" bit sounds utterly silly to me. Nothing of the sort is suggested in the movie. No encounter with the Borg is mentioned, nor is there room for one in the timeline, or any sort of rationale for why Nero should emerge victorious and get a shipload of Borg loot.

For what it's worth, there's no such thing as "Nero got help from the Borg"

The whole Borg angle comes from the tie in Countdown comics which show that Romulans at some point got their hands on Borg technology and by studying it in a secret military base managed to adapt it and use it in Romulan designs.
Thus they also fit the Narada with it, as a prototype and test to see how it works after Romulus is destroyed and Nero murders the surviving senators.

 

[Timo]

Sounds a bit more plausible than Nero personally acquiring it, yeah. But there's nothing particularly Borg-like about the Narada, unless one counts the use of greenish weapons fired by a blackish ship as evidence...

An additional argument about the mining rig: while one today isn't heavily armed, one today can be more heavily armed than any comparable piece of naval hardware. It's hellishly difficult to bolt a reasonably sized gun onto a cruise liner, or to retrofit a missile launcher to a bulk cargo ship. It's nearly trivial to bolt a dozen five-inch gun turrets onto a drilling rig, or draw a few new power lines from the already sizeable generators to fire up a missile launcher or even a railgun. A mining rig has room, structural strength and power to burn.

Really, if mobility were no issue, drilling rigs would be great for naval warfare. The idea of "arsenal ship" that was bandied about at the end of the Cold War is closely related. Probably the second best thing today would be to use a large and thus virtually unsinkable container ship, and bring aboard containerized weapons... That beast would have hundreds of times the firepower of the mightiest cruiser, at something like one-tenth the inherent vulnerability, and probably higher cruise speed as well. And "homemade" concrete armor would make her even less vulnerable, basically immune to all antiship missiles save for nuclear-tipped ones. Something like that might easily have been done to the Narada, either in the 24th century or then (more probably, given the events) in the 23rd.

Now, which one of us is going to direct the straight-to-DVD movie about a drilling rig that goes a hundred years back in time and wins the Battle of Skagerrak all by itself?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nerys Myk]

Yes, that's exactly the point. There's no difference between a Deus Ex Machina and "ships that travel at the speed of plot". Both is bad writing.

Are.

Oh, a smartass.

If you play the game....

 

[Plecostomus]

Now, which one of us is going to direct the straight-to-DVD movie about a drilling rig that goes a hundred years back in time and wins the Battle of Skagerrak all by itself?

Timo Saloniemi

Naval Ops Warship Gunner II for Playstation II has a mission where you take on an enormous oil-platform refit with a solar-cannon.

Hardest boss in the game. Even the final boss is easier than that one.

Oh and it's spelled Jutland not Skagerrak..

 

[M'Sharak]

However, since Delta Vega isn't in orbit around Vulcan (mind meld telepathic flashback notwithstanding) it is also arguable that they were not as far away from Delta Vega as they were from Vulcan. However, it seems likely that Delta Vega is in the Vulcan solar system unless there is another star very close by (Alpha Centauri is our closest star and it is several light years away). I'm not an astronomer so I don't know if that's true of Epsilon Eridani or not.

I'm not an astronomer, but this would indicate that, while Epsilon Eridani doesn't have a neighbor quite as near as is Alpha Centauri to Sol (~4 LY), it does have other stars reasonably close by - say, within 8-12 LY. Whether any of those would be likely to have habitable planets orbiting them is another question, however, and one for which I do not know the answer (in the Trekverse, I seem to recall Tau Ceti (at 11.8 LY) figuring more than once.)

 

[David A. Sobral]

Well, I believe it has been stated that Vulcan is about 16 light-years away from Earth, so even if they were going at Warp 9 the entire time (which seems improbable, given what we've been told about travelling at warp speed), it still should've taken them at least three days to get there.

I guess we just have to conclude that in this timeline, Starfleet found a way to make Transwarp drive viable by the mid-23rd century (or something like that). Now, who wants to explain how the Enterprise-A got to the centre of the galaxy in such a short time in The Final Frontier?

Actually (and this is according to Gene Roddenberry), Vulcan orbits the star Epsilon Eridani which is 10.5 light years away. Forgot where I read that but, it was in an "official" publication...To be truthful, I want to know where the hell the Leonard Nimoy/Spock was (the ice planet) when he witnessed Vulcans' destruction. According to EVERYTHING I've seen in TOS & read in the novels, Vulcan has no moon (discounting the "temporary" matte painting used in the original release of TMP). From Spocks' vantage point, it looked like Vulcan was as close to the ice world as the Moon is from Earth. If he was on another planet, man, that's a TIGHT solar system!

 

[Sci]

Well, I believe it has been stated that Vulcan is about 16 light-years away from Earth, so even if they were going at Warp 9 the entire time (which seems improbable, given what we've been told about travelling at warp speed), it still should've taken them at least three days to get there.

I guess we just have to conclude that in this timeline, Starfleet found a way to make Transwarp drive viable by the mid-23rd century (or something like that). Now, who wants to explain how the Enterprise-A got to the centre of the galaxy in such a short time in The Final Frontier?

Actually (and this is according to Gene Roddenberry), Vulcan orbits the star Epsilon Eridani which is 10.5 light years away. Forgot where I read that but, it was in an "official" publication...To be truthful, I want to know where the hell the Leonard Nimoy/Spock was (the ice planet) when he witnessed Vulcans' destruction. According to EVERYTHING I've seen in TOS & read in the novels, Vulcan has no moon (discounting the "temporary" matte painting used in the original release of TMP). From Spocks' vantage point, it looked like Vulcan was as close to the ice world as the Moon is from Earth. If he was on another planet, man, that's a TIGHT solar system!

It would actually be physically impossible for there to be an ice-covered planet that close to a mostly-desert planet like Vulcan. Roberto Orci has said that we should take that sequence as being "expressionistic" or symbolic -- a visual representation, not a literal representation. Which is fair enough, since it was in a mind meld and not reality.

TOS's "The Immunity Syndrome" established that when large numbers of Vulcans die unexpectedly, they are capable of leaving a telepathic death cry that can be detected by Vulcans many light-years away. Spock detected the death of the all-Vulcan crew of the U.S.S. Intrepid this way in that episode. I would infer that the mind meld sequence was a visualization of Spock's telepathically detecting the death cries of six billion Vulcans.

 

[David A. Sobral]

I've often wondered about the proximity of different Federation and non-Federation planets. I get the idea that Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, and humans are all pretty close together, but no one official has ever made a map, so it's impossible to be sure. One aspect of this question that fascinates me is the three-dimensional nature of everyone's location with respect to everyone else. One way the show made something seem far away was to situate events in the gamma quadrant or the delta quadrant, but there are places in the alpha quadrant that are immensely distant as well. I suspect that much of the alpha quadrant remains a mystery. Since star density and radiation increases as you approach the galactic center, the probability of life going inwards decreases. Indeed, most life must be concentrated in worlds whose stars have circular orbits around the galactic center and are in the outer fringe of the galaxy.

I would be thrilled to see a definitive spatial arrangement of the major places in Star Trek in some sort of three dimensional map, but I think that in every series and episode, spatial arrangements are modified to conform to the needs of the story. Time and speed are left vague on purpose to make the story more plausible and so as not to inhibit future stories.

Thus, thirty minutes or three days, no one can be sure. Your guess is as good as mine, and I think there's neither a right nor a wrong answer.

It's something of a rarity as it was published around 1980 (can't remember if it was Bantam or Pocket) but, there was a publication called "Star Trek Maps" which contains exactly what you're looking for...fold-out maps of the Federation. Whether it can be considered "canon" or not is up to the individual. Once the movies started coming out, it seems the writers of both the films & the publications kind of lost each other. For example, in 1980 Pocket published a beautiful book called "Starfleet Chronology" which was basically a history of the Federation & Stafleet. It ends with TMP. The conflicting info is quite glaring...from Cochrane's first warp trip (aboard the Bonaventure), which the Chronology has a VERY different date from "ST:FC", as does the novel "Federation". Both good reads but, definitely NOT definitive!

 

[JarodRussell]

Are.

Oh, a smartass.

If you play the game....

What game did I play, Grammar Nazi?

 

[Sci]

I've often wondered about the proximity of different Federation and non-Federation planets. I get the idea that Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, and humans are all pretty close together, but no one official has ever made a map, so it's impossible to be sure. One aspect of this question that fascinates me is the three-dimensional nature of everyone's location with respect to everyone else. One way the show made something seem far away was to situate events in the gamma quadrant or the delta quadrant, but there are places in the alpha quadrant that are immensely distant as well. I suspect that much of the alpha quadrant remains a mystery. Since star density and radiation increases as you approach the galactic center, the probability of life going inwards decreases. Indeed, most life must be concentrated in worlds whose stars have circular orbits around the galactic center and are in the outer fringe of the galaxy.

I would be thrilled to see a definitive spatial arrangement of the major places in Star Trek in some sort of three dimensional map, but I think that in every series and episode, spatial arrangements are modified to conform to the needs of the story. Time and speed are left vague on purpose to make the story more plausible and so as not to inhibit future stories.

Thus, thirty minutes or three days, no one can be sure. Your guess is as good as mine, and I think there's neither a right nor a wrong answer.

It's something of a rarity as it was published around 1980 (can't remember if it was Bantam or Pocket) but, there was a publication called "Star Trek Maps" which contains exactly what you're looking for...fold-out maps of the Federation. Whether it can be considered "canon" or not is up to the individual. Once the movies started coming out, it seems the writers of both the films & the publications kind of lost each other. For example, in 1980 Pocket published a beautiful book called "Starfleet Chronology" which was basically a history of the Federation & Stafleet. It ends with TMP. The conflicting info is quite glaring...from Cochrane's first warp trip (aboard the Bonaventure), which the Chronology has a VERY different date from "ST:FC", as does the novel "Federation". Both good reads but, definitely NOT definitive!

For what it's worth, in 2002, midway through ENT's second season, Geoffrey Mandel, who had previously worked on Star Trek Maps, and Pocket Books published Star Trek: Star Charts, a sort of atlas of the Star Trek Universe based upon the canonical information that had been established up to ENT Season Two. The novels published since have tended to make heavy use of the Star Charts.

 

[M'Sharak]

Ships travel at the speed of plot.

Not in a good movie, in my opinion.

My own personal view is that they should set the limits of the technology and write the story around them rather than changing them to gloss over a hole in the plot.

Yes, that's exactly the point. There's no difference between a Deus Ex Machina and "ships that travel at the speed of plot". Both is bad writing.

Are.

Oh, a smartass.

If you play the game....

What game did I play, Grammar Nazi?

I see one person who insists upon taking wry observations and humorous asides far more seriously than they warrant, and who engages in name-calling when this is casually pointed out.

Lighten up, okay? Ships do travel at the speed of plot, whether you happen to think it's a good idea or no, and can you really not see the humor/irony value inherent in a statement like "Both is bad writing"?

 

[pookha]

Well, I believe it has been stated that Vulcan is about 16 light-years away from Earth, so even if they were going at Warp 9 the entire time (which seems improbable, given what we've been told about travelling at warp speed), it still should've taken them at least three days to get there.

I guess we just have to conclude that in this timeline, Starfleet found a way to make Transwarp drive viable by the mid-23rd century (or something like that). Now, who wants to explain how the Enterprise-A got to the centre of the galaxy in such a short time in The Final Frontier?

Actually (and this is according to Gene Roddenberry), Vulcan orbits the star Epsilon Eridani which is 10.5 light years away. Forgot where I read that but, it was in an "official" publication...To be truthful, I want to know where the hell the Leonard Nimoy/Spock was (the ice planet) when he witnessed Vulcans' destruction. According to EVERYTHING I've seen in TOS & read in the novels, Vulcan has no moon (discounting the "temporary" matte painting used in the original release of TMP). From Spocks' vantage point, it looked like Vulcan was as close to the ice world as the Moon is from Earth. If he was on another planet, man, that's a TIGHT solar system!

It would actually be physically impossible for there to be an ice-covered planet that close to a mostly-desert planet like Vulcan. Roberto Orci has said that we should take that sequence as being "expressionistic" or symbolic -- a visual representation, not a literal representation. Which is fair enough, since it was in a mind meld and not reality.

TOS's "The Immunity Syndrome" established that when large numbers of Vulcans die unexpectedly, they are capable of leaving a telepathic death cry that can be detected by Vulcans many light-years away. Spock detected the death of the all-Vulcan crew of the U.S.S. Intrepid this way in that episode. I would infer that the mind meld sequence was a visualization of Spock's telepathically detecting the death cries of six billion Vulcans.

you know i am sure someone has to thought of this before.

but prime spock could have picked up what new spock was seeing when vulcan was destroyed.

being boosted by what all the other surving vulcans where seeing.

but i dont see nero taking a chance onthat.
rather to make sure spock would "see" it nero probably left behind a projection device of some type.

and things happening quickly isnt new either. obsession, arena????
did people actually watch star trek the series.

I was thinking more in terms of Federation space stations and listening posts. I think its unrealistic that an unidentified vessel could pass from Klingon Space into the heart of the Federation without someone noticing. How rubbish are they supposed to be? Not hard to explain away though, Borg technology blah blah. Although that then begs the question why they didn't cloak to get to Earth. I don't recall the Borg ever using cloaking technology either in spite of assimilating Romulans in season one or two of TNG so maybe they're not compatible.

I don't recall anything specific in my nitpickers guide but yeah, Trek has always been full of holes. Two wrongs don't make a right though!

Stargate used military advisors, Trek should use nerd advisors. Simples.

one of the odd things about balance of terror is how the listening outpost didnt know the romulan ship was there until just as they attacked.

why for some odd reason enterprise was able to track the romulan ship.

the narada was a romulan ship.
while not a warship she evidently had an extensive library and very possible military vets among the crew.

they had enough time to create a crude for them cloak that would have been more sophisicated than anything of the past time period.

as to why still get the protection codes..
well just the physchological impact that the planets are mostly defenseless with their destruction looming.
nero was very big on the drama of psychology.

 

[OneBuckFilms]

One thing to consider, as has been pointed out before, is that there is a lot of Time Compression, and we literally don't know how long many of these journeys took for either vessel.

Based on what is on screen, we have no hard facts.

I said before, the trip from Earth to Vulcan takes just a little longer than 3 minutes in this movie. Because there is no time bypassing cut. Sulu says they reached maximum warp, and in the very same scene Chekov makes the announcement that they arrive at Vulcan in 3 minutes.

Unless you want to argue that it maybe takes hours to reach maximum warp. But I think that can be excluded.

Again, McCoy's quick change, and Kirk's unconciousness come into play.

Chekov's announcement came exactly when? I actually missed it.

 

[OneBuckFilms]

Well, I believe it has been stated that Vulcan is about 16 light-years away from Earth, so even if they were going at Warp 9 the entire time (which seems improbable, given what we've been told about travelling at warp speed), it still should've taken them at least three days to get there.

I guess we just have to conclude that in this timeline, Starfleet found a way to make Transwarp drive viable by the mid-23rd century (or something like that). Now, who wants to explain how the Enterprise-A got to the centre of the galaxy in such a short time in The Final Frontier?

Actually (and this is according to Gene Roddenberry), Vulcan orbits the star Epsilon Eridani which is 10.5 light years away. Forgot where I read that but, it was in an "official" publication...To be truthful, I want to know where the hell the Leonard Nimoy/Spock was (the ice planet) when he witnessed Vulcans' destruction. According to EVERYTHING I've seen in TOS & read in the novels, Vulcan has no moon (discounting the "temporary" matte painting used in the original release of TMP). From Spocks' vantage point, it looked like Vulcan was as close to the ice world as the Moon is from Earth. If he was on another planet, man, that's a TIGHT solar system!

The location Gene Roddenberry gave of Vulcan is not on-screen canon. Bear that in mind.

 

[OneBuckFilms]

one of the odd things about balance of terror is how the listening outpost didnt know the romulan ship was there until just as they attacked.

why for some odd reason enterprise was able to track the romulan ship.

the narada was a romulan ship.
while not a warship she evidently had an extensive library and very possible military vets among the crew.

they had enough time to create a crude for them cloak that would have been more sophisicated than anything of the past time period.

as to why still get the protection codes..
well just the physchological impact that the planets are mostly defenseless with their destruction looming.
nero was very big on the drama of psychology.

The Enterprise tracked the Narada because it was not a cloaking vessel, and had no claking capability.

The Narada did not cross into Klingon space, but emerged on the edge of Klingon space where the Kelvin was investigating the exit point (lighning-storm in space).

Deleted scenes from the movie, and dialogue in the movie, indicate that Nero and his crew were on a Klingon prison planet for 25 years, meaning they had NO time to install/build a cloaking device.

Also, we saw no indication that there were any military vets in Nero's crew, though there might have been, but it would be extremely fortunate for them to have a military vet with the engineering capability to build a cloaking device.

 

[pookha]

i thought nero was being held prisoner.
but that some of the crew had escaped with the narada and came back later to free him.
on something like a mining ship i suspect one would find several engineers with interesting backgrounds.

i could see some ex military type out there hoping to strike it rich.
especially in the possible turmoil of a post nemesis romulan empire.