Enterprise arriving after the main battle over Vulcan

Discussion in 'Star Trek Movies: Kelvin Universe' started by EJA, Feb 19, 2010.

  1. EJA

    EJA Fleet Captain

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    That's not really the point. My point is that Kirk was on Delta Vega, and the Enterprise was en route to the Laurentian system, for what must have been a good couple hours, at least. Logically, it would take the same amount of time for the Enterprise to double back, and another few hours to reach Earth. There's simply no way they could have reached the Sol system only a couple of minutes after Nero did.
     
  2. SilentP

    SilentP Commodore Commodore

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    My point was trying to say that the Laurentian system isn't necessarily in the opposite direction from Earth when you start from Vulcan. i.e:

    V


    L
    E

    (V= Vulcan, E=Earth, L=Laurentian system)

    so that the Enterprise would have to go one way or the other, so when Kirk ordered the change, there's no doubling back.

    Admittedly there is a timing issue here, though we don't know how fast the Narada travels, whether or not it instantly drops into orbit around Earth first, or takes its time to take out any defences Earth may have, etc. All we see of the Narada is that at one moment, it's warping towards Earth as Nero begins his torture of Pike, the next, it's in orbit over San Francisco.

    I will admit, the timing is problematic, we're not given any speeds for our ships to work from, or timeframes that these things happened in, so we can't be definite one way or the other. However, your points are valid, I'm only offering possibilities. :shrug:
     
  3. Pauln6

    Pauln6 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I concede that 100 years CAN make a difference for one species. But what about the other species who developed superior tech 100 years before that or 100 years before that?

    I'd have less of a problem if Romulans had previously been portrayed as more advanced than the Federation. In spite of using gravity technology to power their ships, they were too dumb to foresee the threat of the supernova and needed Vulcans to invent a gravity weapon to bail them out.

    I know the Narada was meant to incorporate borg tech - which would be advanced compared to early to mid 23rd century. Hey - maybe the borg tech automatically produces torpedoes like a queen bee laying eggs - that would have been more interesting. I really wish they'd sent across a proper away team to fight the romulans and explore the ship instead of just Kirk and Spock to save the day at the end.
     
  4. OneBuckFilms

    OneBuckFilms Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Actually, the Borg form the get-go has always had self-repair capabilities, and the Narada may have the same.

    It stands to reason, for me at least, that weapons are either numerous already, or the Narada may have weapon's replication on board.
     
  5. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    Tone? Its a word followed by a question mark. My "tone" was puzzlement, followed by a need to understand what you were trying to say. Brevity is not a bad thing.
     
  6. Pauln6

    Pauln6 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    How's this for brief? Move on guys.
     
  7. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    And you know this how?

    Really? You're unconvinced that a three-mile long mining vessel with enough power to slice holes in planets has the capacity to smelt ore into the a crude bullet-shaped projectile containing a rocket and a warhead?

    I mean, we're not talking about the Narada building Romulan warbirds from scratch. They're just torpedoes. THey're not even sophisticated torpedoes, they're just really really powerful.

    Is it anything they couldn't have bought off the Romulan internet?

    Imagine a troop of Hamas members materializing in 1890s. Palestine. These guys know how to make Qassams and Kalashnikovs, the local population has flintlocks and hand grenades.

    120 years makes a big difference if you have 25 years to think about how to use that technology.
     
  8. Pauln6

    Pauln6 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    It's how transporters work. It takes power to use them (and they often have to boost that power). Replicators work on similar principles and the bigger or denser the object, the more power they need for the conversion.

    I suspect that industrial replicators could be modified to construct torpedoes but standard replicators couldn't 'construct' the energy needed to power the explosion.

    How much of that 3 miles is for ore storage, the energy required to power the drill, and the ship's self repair tech? My point is it's not a warship. I don't doubt that they could replicate the components for torpedoes but energising them will take specialist equipment, a lab, trained weapons experts, scientists etc.

    They might order stuff off the romulan internet (subject to delivery dates and the distraction of romulan porn) but it's daft to say that making something more powerful is so simple. If the tech existed people would already have powerful torpedoes. Compare the cars of today to the cars of 100 years ago. This isn't transparent aluminium...

    My brother worked as a gunsmith. I think your time-travelling Hamas would have a hard time finding components of sufficient quality to manufacture the machinery they need to construct their modern weapons let alone access to the raw materials. Modern Taliban doesn't manufacture its own weapons for similar reasons, despite having access to the knowledge. They import them in from nations with the technology. They tend to be limited to making crude explosive devices on their own.

    We can theorise that the borg tech is programmed to energise weapons or that they traded/stole the tech (which would lead to torpedoes of power roughly equivalent to current era torpedoes) but if they were held on a prison planet there's not much time to do any of that. It's all a bit muddled.
     
  9. OneBuckFilms

    OneBuckFilms Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Pauln6,

    The assumption that it is not a warship negates possibilities for upgrades and changes prior to going back.

    I know it's not Canon, but Countdown postulates a combination of Romulan/Borg technology was grafted onto the ship after Romulus was destroyed.

    The Drill would need a lot of power, yes, but we are talking about vessels that are capable of bending spacetime into a bubble to facilitate FTL travel (warp speed), and Replicators are common, as are Transporters, on far less powerful vessels than the Enterprise D.

    There are also other possibilities, such as a Black Market in the 24th Century where self-replicating weapons could possibly be obtained.

    The Son'a used isolytic subspace weapons, certainly illegal and powerful, and they were not a major military power.
     
  10. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Actually, I was asking you how you know the Narada does not have massive amounts of energy.

    Which again begs the question of how you know the Narada doesn't have an industrial replicator.

    It further complicates matters that you are under the mistaken impression that replicators make physical materials out of pure energy. They don't; even industrial replicators can only rearrange raw materials into a desired finished product. The hard part, actually, is finding the materials; you'd need a gigantic mining ship and twenty five years of nothing-better-to-do just to think about it.

    You're right, it's a gigantic industrial platform designed to capture and process asteroids as the first input of whatever-it-is the Romulans use that ore fore. Essentially, it's a giant factory ship.

    If we were talking about a warship, you might have a point (warships usually have to return to their home port to rearm and refuel). The Narada is somewhat unlikely to have this problem, both because of its size and industrial nature.

    I will not even enquire as to how you know this, since you have no idea what the warheads are made of or how they are primed.

    For all we know the Romulans were using ordinary bilitrium; if they took the time to obtain an antimatter converter in the 24th century (or even stole one from the Klingons in the 23rd century, which would explain the attack on Rura'Penthe) then they could have made as many torpedoes as they wanted just by finding a plentiful source of bilitrium ore.

    Being from the future, they would have known where to find a plentiful vein of that ore that no one else (yet) knew about.

    More powerful than what? There's nothing to indicate a 24th century Starfleet ship would have done anything but laugh at those torpedoes. But even a pipe bomb looks like a formidable military weapon if you're using it in the 1850s.

    Are you aware that the Narada is a MINING vessel? Meaning it is implied that the ship has both the machinery and the capacity to get those raw materials in part of its design?

    What they don't have--unlike Nero--is access to a gigantic mobile platform packed with industrial equipment and 25 years of spare time to figure out the most effective way to use it.

    Narada's torpedoes looked rather crude to me, especially since they were drop-launched from what were essentially bolt-on missile silos attached to the arms of the ship.
     
  11. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    I imaqge the Narada is equipped to extract, refine and transport what they mine. The probably have variety of tools to get this done including lasers, torpedos, grapplers, drills and who knows what else.
     
  12. npsf3000

    npsf3000 Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    Imagine if an Oil Platform managed to transport it self back 1 hundred years - before WW1.

    It has access to a vast amount of Fuel, and has trained engineers and mechanics, At least one Fully equipped machining room etc.

    Given 25 years if they wanted they could make themselves a fair few awesome weapons - ranging from napalm to fuel air explosives.

    Imagine a couple of these in the pre-WW1 era:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xCgNdZPKk
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i20zvZ-3MMw&feature=related

    And modern military frigate has tons of explosives on board, machining shops and experienced machinists. They could do far worse.

    And while the Narada isn't a Frigate, a lot of modern mining use high quality modern explosives, you would assume the Narada has some.

    Also no one said that the Narada destroyed all 7 ships one by one. With Unshielded ships so close together a single fell ship could quite easily take them all out in an antimatter blast. Considering that they warped in with no sensors or communications into a "hot' zone could quite easily manage an accidental collision, before a single shot from the Narada impacted.
     
  13. Pauln6

    Pauln6 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Yes - it's not impossible for the Narada to ludicrously awesome and it's true, if they had time to locate and graft borg tech AFTER Romulus was destroyed, they would have time to gather weapon-making equipment. I'd thought that the ship was designed with borg tech. Mind you, it took 18 months to refit the Enterprise, I'm not sure that incorporating borg tech should be such a quick and hitch-free process.

    It's true, we don't know how all 6 ships were destroyed over Vulcan but it does appear that we have to assume that all of the captains made numerous tactical errors in order to be completely destroyed so quickly. Kirk got nobbled in TWoK because he ignored Starfleet Protocols. I think it's unrealistic for the Narada to be so powerful and the captains to be so stupid in just the right amounts. I thought the universe was trying to fix the problem here...
     
  14. npsf3000

    npsf3000 Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    First, its 7 ships.

    Second, As I just said the footage indicates that they left in close proximity and got destroyed in close proximity. Its nothing new for a a dying ships antimatter blast to be dangerous, especially near other unshielded ships.

    You only need one helmsman - who is blind - out of the 7 to collide with another ship and Nero has that majority of the job done for him in seconds.

    Even if they managed to have shields, and not collide - concentrated fire on one ship (without Point Defense initiated) would destroy it in seconds, still giving Nero the antimatter blast benefit.
     
  15. Crazy Eddie

    Crazy Eddie Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Actually, they would only need to make ONE mistake, and that would be the mistake of not dropping out of warp with their shields up and their weapons charged and ready.

    As it stands, Captain Pike is the only commander who didn't make that mistake, and it appears Enterprise survived the first attack ONLY because her shields were raised and at alert stations thanks to Kirk's warning. The other ships had no such warning, in which case a single torpedo would have been sufficient to cripple or destroy them.

    On the other hand, the only reason Enterprise survived at all is because Nero recognized the registry number and decided it would be a good idea to capture Pike and make Spock watch him destroy Vulcan. If he hadn't recognized the ship, he would have simply added an eighth hull to the debris field two minutes later.
     
  16. Therin of Andor

    Therin of Andor Admiral Moderator

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    The first rescue worker killed in 9/11, IIRC, was a fire brigade chaplain who was hit, just before entering the tower, by a suiciding person leaping from high above. All the precautions in the world can't prevent every possible bad thing from happening.
     
  17. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    If the Enterprise both left and arrived with the same lag time (@44 sec.), neither catching up or lagging back farther, then the fleet didn't arrive at Vulcan as a group. The Fleet didn't leave Earth as a single group, they were staggered in departure by a few seconds. This would have allowed the Narada to briefly concentrate it's fire on each individual ship as it dropped from warp.
     
  18. Pauln6

    Pauln6 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Meh - 44 seconds is still a really stupid amount of time to take out so many ships. Further, if the ships and/or Vulcan's defences got some licks in and damaged the Narada, it goes some way to explain why she doesn't spot Enterprise immediately, why they feel the need to bypass Earth's defences, and why she takes so long to reach Earth later on.
     
  19. EJA

    EJA Fleet Captain

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    Could the Enterprise have dropped out of warp for some reason during its journey for just a few minutes, which is why it was a little behind the rest of the fleet? I seem to remember something like that happening in the novelisation.

    And on the subject of the Enterprise catching up with the Narada so quickly, is it plausible that the Narada's warp drive was operating at a lower capacity due to damage of some sort? The Enterprise had to be at maximum warp to take full advantage of the (hypothetical) warp highway to reach Vulcan, so could the Narada travelling at a low warp factor mean that while its journey was still considerably speeded up from what it would be normally, its trip was not quite as fast as it was for the Enterprise?
     
    Last edited: Feb 28, 2010
  20. SilentP

    SilentP Commodore Commodore

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    For all we know, the Narada either has damaged warp engines*, or is quite slow at warp by design.

    *I wonder how critical the damage to the Narada was that the Kelvin inflicted upon it by kamikazying.