The Narada could've simply had shields up prior to the drilling preventing any beaming.
Assuming this civilian mining vessel had shields that would make a difference.
The only time the shields of the
Narada are mentioned at all is when the ship is being sucked into the final black hole and losing power. This is apparently a new development; the shields appear to have been up previously, but that didn't stop Spock from ramming the ship, or Scotty from beaming up Pike and Kirk. The shields may have been up when Kirk and Spock infiltrated the ship as it passed Titan, too; it's not unknown in Trek for strong transporters to get through weak shields.
The big question mark is how the drilling head, which was so demonstrably vulnerable to conventional attack both over Vulcan and over Earth, survived for so long. We can assume that Nero had the defense codes for both Vulcan and Earth to keep the big guns at bay - but any hotshot cropduster pilot or sharpshooting ancient artillery enthusiast could have done what Spock did and blasted the drill to bits, either over Vulcan or over Earth.
What kept the defenders from doing that? On Vulcan, we may argue that Nero had space superiority over the drilling spot and prevented Vulcans from approaching by any means. But the Sarek residence was almost directly below the beam and supposedly was accompanied by various vehicles and technologies that could have destroyed the drill. Why did Amanda live to see the drilling start? What good would Nero's defenses be if they allowed the threat of the Sarek villa to continue existing?
On Earth, the beam hit in the middle of San Francisco. There must have been tens of thousands of threat vehicles within range, yet none approached the drill within the minutes we saw, and none appeared to be deterred from doing so by (missile?) fire from Nero's ship.
Should we attribute the lack of resistance completely to Nero's highly effective jamming, which would leave the defenders totally confused and unable to comprehend the threat?
Timo Saloniemi
That's too much! But yeah he did better in AU!
But yes, the movie's plot is pretty close to the surface at times. Getting the codes from Pike was just an excuse to give Kirk and Spock someone to save instead of being able to beam explosives into the Narada's engineering area etc.
