Enterprise arriving after the main battle over Vulcan

Well, that can be said for just about the entire movie really, couldn't it? One of the reasons I have trouble accepting it as canon.

 

It can be said of every Trek series that there has ever been. It's why nitpickers' guides are so entertaining!

 

The Kelvin had it's shields up, and the Narada was disoriented, and they did not in the first volley intend to destroy but cripple her.

We see at the end of the film how the Narada can loose off a couple of dozen of her torpedoes in one salvo, if it did that at the little Fed fleet with their shields down, it is hard to believe they could survive.

 

As an aside (and ignoring the casual way that interplanetary distances were disregarded in the film) what it shows is that Federation worlds need to rely on their own planetary defences and intelligence/scanning reports to make sure their ships are in the right place at the right time. If the Narada could cloak it would explain how it could sneak up on Vulcan but not why Vulcan's defences didn't merit a mention nor why, if the Narada could cloak, it had to worry about Earth's defences...

Essentially, unless they see them coming there is no way a federation fleet can cross interstellar distances in time to be of any use at all.

 

But the stupid thing is the assumption that a ship can warp into orbit in the first place.

The Narada must have started attacking the planet for there to be seismic reactions, thus it could not have been cloaked when the fleet came out of warp.

We're being expected to believe:

1) That it is safe to warp through a solar system (with planets, moons, comets, gravitational forces, asteroids, other ships, and satelites).

2) That 6 ships came out of warp in such close proximity to each other and in such close proximity to the planet that they were all in torpedo range and none of them had the chance to raise shields.

3) That the Narada has an unlimited supply of 24th century torpedoes on board (enough to destroy a klingon fleet and federation fleet) despite being a mining ship and despite being held by the klingons for 20 years.

4) That all the ships were destroyed pretty much straight away.

 

If you could be more specific, I'll be happy to clarify.

While the trip took 3 min, 50 sec, even in the unlikely event that every ship was as fast as the Enterprise, and assuming the ridiculous velocity presented of 359 times faster than Roddenberry had indicated the maximum speed of a starship ought to be, then Pike & company would be 44 sec. behind the lead vessel.

The idea that Starfleet would not be prepared for a fight when receiving a suspicious distress call while already engaged in multiple conflicts (Klingon hostility, serious fighting in the Laurentian system), is pretty silly.

Exactly!

A bit dumb? I think one or two small errors could be called a "bit", but just this segment seems to have "really" dumb premises for its setup.

True, but I think this one is in a class by itself in terms of bad writing, although Undiscovered Country may come close. I will need to see Nemesis again to see if it seems to justify its frequent use as an example of how bad Trek can get.

Pauln6, I responded before reading your excellent points in posts 24 & 25. Well done, and thanks for pointing those out as well!

 

What gets me is how pretty much everyone (including the writers) unanimously agrees that "Threshold" is completely apocryphal due to its huge inaccuracies, and yet ST XI has MASSIVE errors such as the ones we've discussed, and the majority of people insist that it's canon, that it's the best Trek in years, that it's heretical and stupid to criticize it, etc.

 

We've seen ships warp into and out of orbit before. For example, TNG 'The Schizoid Man'. The Enterprise warps into orbit for just long enough to beam a party down, then leaves just as fast.

As far as I recall, the only reference to there being any risk to in system warping came from TMP. That could have been due to the engines being new and untested, rather than any inherent problem.

 

Warp drive actually WARPS space. You aren't travelling in subspace so you still have to avoid objects. Now in deep space (dark matter notwithstanding) there isn't much to hit. In a solar system, not only is there a lot of stuff to hit in a relatively small area (just think of the asteroid belt and Kaiper Belt in our Solar System), you would be travelling too fast to go around it. Plus what effect does warping space have on stellar bodies? I don't imagine its healthy.

I'm not saying that warping into a star system is impossible (and warping out of one would be a lot easier since you can plot the course safely with short range scanners). I just think that there are dangers that would appear to make it sensible not to use warp in a star system except in extreme cases.

On the other hand, like Khan I may be guilty of 2-dimensional thnking... I can think of no logical reason why a vessel couldn't move away from the galactic plane to avoid debris and warp in from above... dunno how long that kind of course would take though.

And on the subject of sensors, has anybody postulated why Nu Trek ships are faster than TNG ships with massivley superior trnasporters, but have vastly inferior shields, weapons, and sensors (and how are their transporters so good if their sensors are so bad). Why didn't the fleet's short ranged scanners pick up what was going on at Vulcan as they approached?

 

The odds of hitting anything, even along a course directly along the planetary plane is astronomically small. We've flown Cassini directly through the rings of Saturn and although stars, planets, and other matter seems plentiful, it is only because we do not notice the huge vacuum that appears invisible to our eyes.

If you just went to warp in a straight line away from Earth on a random heading, your odds of hitting the most likely objects (either the sun or moon) would be about 1 in 518,400; in other words, you are more likely to die from almost anything else on that day rather than flooring a starship while wearing a blindfold. So, if you and your descendents did this everyday for a thousand years, they'd be more than 50% likely to die during that millenium.

I stand by the hypothesis of "criminally negligent inattention" during the writing phases, and lack of control of revisions during production.

 

Well, you guys are kind of missing my point... my whole point was that it did NOT take merely a few minutes for the fleet to reach Vulcan. Remember... this is a movie... the pacing of the story is set for a movie... as I stated in my own post, we had Kirk running around the ship, trying to convince people that the fleet was warping into a trap.

However, we saw a few shots of Kirk running through corridors and such, but we never stayed with Kirk for the time it would take for say, a turbolift ride to another deck, and so on, exactly because of the fact that as a movie, that is not "important" action to show on the screen, so certain elements that took time were left out, for film pacing. That is why I am maintaining that the time elapsed from warp-out to arrival at Vulcan was actually quite a bit longer than what we actually saw on the screen, and that the Narada could have done that damage.

YES, the rest of the fleet was only a few seconds ahead of the Enterprise... I am in no way disputing that. I am simply saying that the time elapsed was longer than what we actually saw on-screen, due to the pacing of the film.

 

And, of course, ships have navigational deflectors to shunt all the small stuff out of the way (and 'small stuff' includes everything from dust to asteroids). Any bodies larger than that could be detected far enough away to navigate around.

 

I'm not sure that can be supported based on what's onscreen. For example, the arrival of Kirk and McCoy in sickbay suggests the film actually went backward in time to show that arrival from the turbolift from engineering. Although Kirk's clothes are changed, when we cut back to the bridge, Sulu reports Pike's previous order for max warp has been carried out. Continuity is only broken with the Narada drilling scene, but when we return to the Enterprise, Kirk is still in a sprinting chase with McCoy and Uhura, with dialog indicating they are continuing their previous (lack of?) conversation... Perhaps a few seconds escaped, but more than that seems implausible.

If the fleet is at warp enroute to Vulcan, they cannot be getting attacked by the Narada, so the total elapsed time of the trip to Vulcan is immaterial to whether the Narada could have done all that damage to the Starfleet group, only the lead time matters, i.e.: from the time the other ships had arrived with the Enterprise still on its way, to when the Enterprise dropped out of warp is the only window available for the "battle" to have occurred.

 

Do I have to quote what you said again? It would seem to be obvious.

 

I agree with most of all of this. I would only grant an extra minute or 2 for the time it takes Kirk and Mcoy to get to the 'tank room' to find uhura, other wise the continuity is spot on.

 

Do you intend to propose that "Huh?" is a meaningful, well-formed question? Are we really supposed to know which of the infinite misunderstandings possible you have chosen? Do you then suggest that reprinting my 2 paragraphs again will make the meaning of "Huh?" more obvious?

I'm sorry, but I feel I should ask you to please show more respect for your readers if you want your posts to be taken seriously, as these last 2 posts appear indistinguishable from trolling.

 

I want the portion of your post quoted above my "Huh?" translated from clever smartass to something worthy of response. How much verbosity do you require before you can take it "seriously".

 

The original post did make sense although it was grammatically obtuse. I believe the gist was that it was ludicrous to suggest that Starfleet Command had insufficient experienced officers to place a fully qualified command crew on a measly 7 ships even if the majority of the remaining crews were cadets.

Essentially, the method of involving the principle characters was heavy-handed and overly contrived to the point of being insulting.

I still enjoyed the film but it was a pretty dumb film in a lot of places.

 

I thought in the case of Enterprise most the Command crew (Pike, Spock,Olson, McKenna ect) were taken out of the picture for various reasons as well as the CMO, Dr Puri. I also had the impression that Sulu and Chekov weren't part of the cadet crew.

I got my dumb stuff list too.

 

I fear you guys are still missing my general point here... what I am driving at, is that during the whole time that Kirk and Bones were scurrying to get to Uhura, and then the Bridge, we never see ALL of the action, like the time spent in the turbolift, for the ride to the Bridge, etc, because they don't need to show that action for the movie's pacing.

Think of it like this...

In the TNG episode "The Best of Both Worlds", when Riker calls for Geordi to evacuate Main Engineering, Geordi does so, the isolation doors come down, and then what happens? As soon as Geordi escapes from under the door, we CUT to a shot of the Main Bridge, where Geordi steps out of the turbolift, and tells the computer to transfer Engineering command to the Bridge. So, did all that happen in realtime?

Of course not... Geordi probably spent a few quiet minutes inside the turbolift, en route to the Main Bridge. But we never saw that, because it was in no way critical for the story, or the flow of the action... it was "useless" action. But to us, the TV viewer, we "bought" that all that was happening in "realtime". It's the same with the scene in JJ-Trek... there WAS more time spent in-warp than people think... plenty of time for the Narada to have taken out the fleet, EVEN given the Enterprise's temporal proximity to the fleet... because there were some things that transpired that the viewer never saw, due to the needs of the film's pacing.

That's all I'm trying to say.