star trek online has a mission where you drop a scientist off who is confused about the hobus star and how they're investigating it.
Dunno about the comics, but the explanation given in Star Trek Online is, that the shockwave unexpectedly traveled through subspace, increasing in strength proportional to the amount of annihilated matter in its wake. In the game, you also find out that the supernova was deliberately caused by the Iconians who are getting ready for their return.
The guys who wrote the script are pretty big fans of Trek who not only watched the shows but develed into the novels for ideas. So I think they might know their canon.
Although the film shows little evidence of this, they might. Nevertheless, when considering the number of canonical errors as well as internal contradictions in the film itself, and the schedule for the writers, schedule constraints seem the most likely primary cause for the poor quality of writing, of the theories I've heard.
When errors would those be? Most of the film takes place in an alternate reality where "canon" is not a factor. . What are the internal contradictions?
True, that. What a horrific disregard for science it would be to use the old universe to try and predict events in the new universe. I've seen posts like "But they can't remake Khan, Kirk hasn't even found the Botany Bay yet." Wrong universe, Bub. .
My standard example is in the first minute with visuals contradicting the dialog about looks of the anomaly out of visual range, next the CHIEF engineer says he's "never seen anything like" a "knocked-out warp drive", and in the next sixty seconds, Robau issues a number of poorly defined orders which are disobeyed, and ill-advised orders (also unclear about "autopilot"), enemy mining ships can now take over Starfleet viewscreens, and the film goes on and on with such nonsensical and completely unnecessary errors easily prevented with some time and care spent on thinking about the writing, which was put on a crash schedule according to Abrams. His team seems spread far too thin to do a good job, and this film has a steady stream of flaws one would expect from someone pulling an all-nighter to finish the paper and no time to rework the mistakes in either plot or dialog. Consider Robau's behavior aboard the Narada or everyone on the Kelvin, it makes no sense for who each of them are supposed to be and their situation in the film.
It's Hollywood writing in general. I think a lot of Americans have become desensitised to drivel. In '2010' you had very similar leaps of illogic. So instead of having some engineers on duty in engineering, they get passengers to do the work and unqualified people to run all the way down from the bridge to help them. They then spend time hugging while a woman is slowly drowning in the next chamber and the crew stares blankly at a screen before cheering inanely when they should be steering the ship. Crazy dumb.
I don't remember that film very well, just a few good SFX and the redemption of HAL, but I have to wonder how the book treated the plot... Desensitized seems a good explanation for much of the failure to perceive significant contradiction and breaches of common sense that literally gush onto the screen during the 90-odd minutes of this film.
Just a brief recap of what we know about supernova and FTL. Science currently forbids any meaningful form of FTL. We know virtually nothing about Supernova. Therefore any claims that a FTL Supernova is impossible while allowing Warp drive is simple nonsense. Think of this as a Super Volcano - Currently we can't predict when(or if) it's going to go off, we can't prevent it when it does and it defiantly has the potential to wipe out everything on earth. Thats what 21st century science says.
Meh - a line of technobabble would have covered exactly this. They used language that they knew would make sense to 'lay people' (black holes, supernova) while giving them properties that are inconsistent with those phenomena. It's swings and roundabout but calling it a 'subspace supernova shock wave' would probably have covered them.
Given Star Trek's notoriety when it comes to bad technobabble, Abrams and his cohorts probably wanted to avoid the blank stares and confused masses that terms like 'subspace supernova shock wave' cause.
And instead have people who actually understand something about the phenomena cringe and groan in despair? You can't please all of the people all of the time. I'd prefer it if they plumbed for scientific accuracy and made up phenomena if they want them to exceed the laws of physics. I don't think that miseducating people who don't understand astronomy is a good thing!
In the end you have to look at it from the perspective of making money. A splosion makes money. Make it a huge-ass galaxy-threatening splosion, to up the stakes and make it "exciting." Call it a supernova so that the audience knows it's a "space thing." That's the end of that. Anything more complicated would have scared potential audience members away, with the decreasing ratings of the Trek shows after TNG used as a precedent.
Would you seriously want others to judge you this way and mislead or miseducate you so that you wouldn't be scared? Since I don't want to be treated this way, it seems unethical for me to justify others doing it. Besides, the real science nearly always makes SciFi more interesting, IMO...in addition to making an educational investment in the viewer. The problem is that it costs things like time, effort, and caring. These were things unavailable to Abrams, K+O to put in the film because of the system for film production, so in one way the profound defects do not seem entirely their fault, even though I tend to blast them.
Oh...I don´t think the sience is soooo bad. I have an episode of an old show called "Raumpatroullie Orion" (Spacepatrol Orion) where who ever was the sience advisor (if they even had one) mixed up a supernova and a comet. In the episode they talk about a "supernova" moving towards earth and what´s really on screen is bad representation of a comet And they also keep calling the thing a "Schnelllaeufer" (fast runner)...????