Regarding Nero and Romulus

[Set Harth]

Though the issue seems to have certain exceptions in canon like a lot of technological issues in ST, it does seem like they shouldn't have been able to beam through the Narada's shields. However, since the beaming occurred at a point when the Enterprise was hidden from detection, it may be that Nero's confidence in the Narada's overall strength manifested in not raising shields in the absence of an apparent threat. According to Countdown, the Narada did have a cloaking device, which makes sense given its Romulan origin. If the ship had been cloaked when in Earth orbit, as it probably should have been, that would neatly explain the lack of active shields; unfortunately, the film does not depict any cloaking.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Speaking of Countdown, don't the Borg of "Best of Both Worlds" use "subspace fields" instead of regular shields, which our TNG heroes could beam thorough until the Borg decided they were a threat?

If Narada was pimped out with Romulan/Borg ubertech...

 

[Timo]

...But she couldn't be, because Nero would not be given any of that tech before Romulus went boom, and he would have no time to get it afterwards.

True, the Borg seem to keep all their ships open to beaming as default, just like their ships don't appear to be "pre-adapted" to other standard Starfleet threats such as phasers. But the Borg can afford that, in the general case. Romulans shouldn't.

It would be pretty natural to assume that the drill indeed interferes with shielding. After all, it interferes with pretty much everything else. The Kelvin crew ask themselves "Were our shields even up?!" - and this may be a very good question. Quite possibly Nero's missiles penetrated so well because Nero's mining gear was already weakening everybody's shields with its emissions...

It would be foolish for Nero to drop his shields before his drill went active, though. And as pointed out above, the idea of a "cutting it close" is dramatic but not too plausible, since none of our heroes make mention of such a narrow time window.

Blaming the beaming-through-shields categorically on 24th century transwarp beaming magic seems the easiest way to go, really.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Set Harth]

...But she couldn't be, because Nero would not be given any of that tech before Romulus went boom, and he would have no time to get it afterwards.

According to Memory Alpha:

In the Star Trek prequel comic book miniseries Star Trek: Countdown, the Narada's advanced weaponry and appearance are explained as being the result of the ship being retrofitted with salvaged and reverse-engineered Borg technology. The Tal Shiar in the 24th century had been experimenting with Borg technology, and Nero's ship was the experimental vessel used. The Borg nanoprobes allowed the ship to grow and repair itself, and also take on a much larger and more menacing appearance. This information also appeared on the Blu-ray release of the film in the supplement section "Starships".

It would be foolish for Nero to drop his shields before his drill went active, though.

Not really that foolish if he detected no potentially dangerous enemy ships nearby, given the overall strength of the Narada. In the Star Trek script found on IMSDB, Nero doesn't order shields to be raised until the Enterprise shows up.

 

[Timo]

But the Narada isn't particularly strong, defensively speaking: mere handguns had nearly destroyed the drill in the previous encounter, and a single small spacecraft destroyed it in this one. Earth must have tens of thousands if not millions of small spacecraft, and Nero's jamming doesn't stop spacecraft from flying or firing. And Nero doesn't have tens of thousands of missiles: the best he can launch ("Fire EVERYTHING!") is about twenty.

After destroying the local starships and possible orbital fortresses, how does Nero survive the other defenses of Vulcan or Earth? It's not the surprise factor, because in both cases, he spends minutes drilling, and Starfleet can respond faster than that. It's not just the jamming, because that doesn't stop small craft or handguns. It's not the shielding, because that (whether raised or not) didn't stop small craft, handguns, or even transporters. It's not the missile coverage, because that's sorely lacking.

It might be information warfare: with defense codes (which Nero tortures out of Pike for attacking Earth, and probably tortured out of somebody else for attacking Vulcan), the local defenses could be silenced relatively effectively. The big guns might be told not to fire, or to fire at each other, while the smaller units might be given confusing orders that prevent them from approaching the Narada while the drilling is proceeding. That's one field in which the civilian miner Nero might get full advantage of the fact that he comes from the future (and has 25 years to acclimatize himself to the present): his ship wouldn't come armed with the latest 24th century military wonders as default, but his computers might still house a few advanced attack programs as default.

As for the Borgifying of Nero's ship, in the comic it happens because Nero becomes the official imperial champion for revenging the lost homeworld - he has time to fly to a secret base and get upgraded. The movie tells us this is flat out impossible, because Nero gets sucked into the timehole created by Spock when saving Romulus. This must happen mere minutes after said creation, before Spock gets back to Vulcan in his superfast ship.

...It could still happen if there was further time travel involved, I guess. And if Spock lied about the sequence of events to Kirk in the mind meld. But mere omission of this further time travel isn't plausible; it has to be a deliberate lie. And it doesn't make much sense, because Spock emphasizes that he was in a hurry and was too late - neither of these are concepts that would apply to a frequent time traveler.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Set Harth]

It's not the shielding, because that (whether raised or not) didn't stop small craft, handguns, or even transporters.

When the shields are not in fact raised, the ship's susceptibility to these things is not a meaningful strike against the shields. But the argument that raised shields were ineffective doesn't exactly help the position that Kirk and Spock were beamed through shields, since it would seem to give Nero even less motivation to have shields up in the absence of a detected enemy threat.

But the Narada isn't particularly strong, defensively speaking: mere handguns had nearly destroyed the drill in the previous encounter, and a single small spacecraft destroyed it in this one.

Yet it wiped out a Klingon fleet as well as the Starfleet ships that arrived at Vulcan. It's not a pushover. Part of the Narada's strength is its size.

And Nero doesn't have tens of thousands of missiles: the best he can launch ("Fire EVERYTHING!") is about twenty.

He had enough to destroy 47 Klingon ships.

 

[Timo]

Yet it wiped out a Klingon fleet as well as the Starfleet ships that arrived at Vulcan. It's not a pushover. Part of the Narada's strength is its size.

But the tender wiggly spot of this bully is such a big overall weakness that it is difficult to understand how Nero survived two attacks against defended worlds. How difficult would it to be to take down Muhammad Ali if he attacked you by sticking his testicles through a hole in the wall?

He had enough to destroy 47 Klingon ships.

...Assuming we can trust Klingon transmission intercepts. Might be pure propaganda.

More relevantly, we don't know how Nero did that. He had red matter at that point - perhaps he bombed the opposing fleet with black holes? However, when attacking Earth, he demonstrably only has twenty missiles, possibly enough to take down the two or three older and weaker starships in the vicinity, but not enough to oppose the thousands of small craft. We can speculate that there were more arrows to his quiver, such as special weapons for defending against fightercraft, but then we'd have to wonder why he used none of them against Spock's ship.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Yet it wiped out a Klingon fleet as well as the Starfleet ships that arrived at Vulcan. It's not a pushover. Part of the Narada's strength is its size.

But the tender wiggly spot of this bully is such a big overall weakness that it is difficult to understand how Nero survived two attacks against defended worlds.

He didn't. Spock went straight for the drill the second time around, possbily after the mind meld with the Romulan officer made him aware of some of the Narada's inherent tactical weaknesses. Such as, for example, a piss-poor targeting system and a total lack of energy weapons.

 

[Timo]

Yet the amazing thing is that he was the first to do so. Vulcan supposedly had a good supply of small craft - we even saw some flying around in the establishing shots early in the movie. If all it takes to stop Nero is a suicidal hovertaxi, how did Nero manage to destroy Vulcan?

Okay, so perhaps the spot he chose over Vulcan was devoid of hovertaxis; perhaps the Sarek mansion was deliberately located out in the sticks for luxurious isolation, and stripped of technological comforts for the same reason, and there were no other enclaves of technology anywhere near. But that argument doesn't hold for San Francisco Bay, where we'd not only have the necessary "grassroots" technology to cripple Nero's drill, but also the hundreds of suicidal volunteers indoctrinated with national defense ideas. It wouldn't take complex thinking, or mind-meld-provided intel, to launch an attack against the drill with the San Francisco area resources - it would take complex thinking to decide not to launch such an attack immediately.

And it would take a very sophisticated attack to paralyze all the "grassroots" defenses of San Francisco. Or then a very blunt one, such as nuking the entire state out of existence before lowering the drill. But we didn't witness a blunt attack, and the city didn't appear particularly paralyzed anyway. Pike's codes may have silenced the big anti-starship cannon and grounded the primary interceptor wings, but we still lack an explanation for the silencing of the smaller guns and things-applicable-as-weapons that much have dotted the area.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Set Harth]

How difficult would it to be to take down Muhammad Ali if he attacked you by sticking his testicles through a hole in the wall?

Do his testicles require a suicide attack to take them out?

Assuming we can trust Klingon transmission intercepts. Might be pure propaganda.

Well, we know what he did to the Starfleet task force wasn't propaganda.

 

[Timo]

Do his testicles require a suicide attack to take them out?

There didn't appear to be anything suicidal about Spock's attack: nobody tried to resist it in any observable way.

Nor was Kirk, Sulu and Olsen's attack particularly risky-looking. They weren't intercepted on their way down, and the only reason those two Romulans got to fight them was because they fumbled their approach instead of neatly landing and planting their explosives. Had they come in firing their hand phasers and not worrying about Olsen's explosives, they would probably have taken out the drill on the first pass, as the vulnerability of the drill to hand weapons was amply demonstrated soon thereafter.

Well, we know what he did to the Starfleet task force wasn't propaganda.

Taking out seven ships at a time the way he (almost) took out Kelvin seems borderline plausible. Yet Nero technically lost his battle with the Kelvin! Taking out 47 war-ready ships at a time might require the use of red matter rather than just those missiles - so Nero might have used red matter there. Still, it would be more logical to think that Nero just sent the message that he had defeated a Klingon armada, so that Starfleet would send its own armada in the wrong place (the Laurentius system) to counter this new threat...

This is sort of beside the point, though. Whatever means Nero used for dealing with the earlier threats, he didn't use for dealing with the threat posed by "grassroots" defenses on Earth. There were no fields of debris there, no trails of smoke from fallen aircraft, no cratering, nothing to indicate the sort of battle that took place on Vulcan's orbit. Nor did the surface of Vulcan earlier on show any signs of stamping on resistance. There simply wasn't evidence of resistance. Why not?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kemaiku]

The Narada pulverised a Federation task force almost instantly, the attack on the Kelvin followed directly after a difficult temporal transition escaping a hypernova, which was briefly haulted giving the Kelvin time to defend itself against a smaller scale assault, that still ripped huge pieces of her away like cardboard.

 

[Timo]

Perhaps Nero's weakness is reaction time? He didn't manage to do anything much to stop the Kelvin from doing a ramming run, and he didn't manage to stop Spock's strafing run, either; that's plausible behavior for an "arsenal ship", a vessel whose only combat asset is the ability to deploy large numbers of guided missiles while receiving (but shrugging off) enemy hits. There's no close-in defense system, there's no way to ramp the firepower up or down. But if there's time to get all the "birds" flying, then the enemy stands no chance.

One still has to wonder. The Kelvin shot down 100% of those missiles that were aimed at the shuttles instead of the ship; the Enterprise did likewise when Spock's ship was threatened. Looks like a standard Starfleet capability, then. The missiles should be no threat if the defender can use the standard firepower of prepared starships...

The seven-ship flotilla was caught by surprise, so a Kelvin-style attack might still plausibly destroy it. How could 47 Klingon ships be similarly surprised, though? The loss of the first 20 ought to give the rest plenty of time to prepare a defense. Unless Klingons depend on their shields and don't have missile shootdown capabilities - something the Kobayashi Maru simulation might suggest, even though its very idea was that the Klingons there were reprogrammed to behave unlike real Klingons.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Set Harth]

There didn't appear to be anything suicidal about Spock's attack: nobody tried to resist it in any observable way.

Suicidal in the sense of being a ramming attack intended to destroy the ship doing the ramming.

Nor was Kirk, Sulu and Olsen's attack particularly risky-looking.

In the analogy, I don't think the drill works very well as Ali's testicles. It's in the weapon category.

 

[Timo]

Suicidal in the sense of being a ramming attack intended to destroy the ship doing the ramming.

Spock didn't need to ram anything. He just fired his guns, like Kirk and Sulu had fired some handguns earlier on.
And you tell Ali his testicles aren't a deadly weapon!

The thing is, we saw twice that attacking the drill was a risk-free undertaking, doable with low-grade weapons that should have been available in great numbers at both the attacked locations and unlikely to have been tied to a central command network that Nero could paralyze with his codes.

In the Vulcan case, we might well have missed some devious trick Nero pulled to crush all resistance before our heroes arrived. In the Earth case, the camera was there from the start, and still failed to show any such trick in action.

...I guess we could take the fallback position that handguns really did not pose a threat to the drill. By sheer coincidence, the drill over Vulcan might have failed due to overheating or some other internal problem at the same time Kirk and Sulu's shots ricocheted harmlessly off its casing. In that case, perhaps only 24th century weapons could harm the drill, and Spock's small craft in practice possessed much more firepower than the 2258 Earth and Vulcan combined.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kemaiku]

The drill emitted a large dampning field that prevented any kind of weapons lockon, the closer any ship got to the Narada to try the closer they would have been to her missles...

The only way to get to the drill was to attack it by brute force impact, requiring something like a shuttle large enough for the Narada to target, or people. And as we saw, it even had troops inside as well in that event, Kirk's away team got lucky, in that they didn't all die spectacularly fast and messily. By the time they attacked the drill, it had already finished, so not much success there, Vulcan go boom anyway.

 

[Set Harth]

Spock didn't need to ram anything. He just fired his guns, like Kirk and Sulu had fired some handguns earlier on.

We're talking about different things here. When you said the tender wiggly spot of this bully is such a big overall weakness that it is difficult to understand how Nero survived two attacks against defended worlds, I thought you meant the weak point of the Narada itself, and I don't think the drill qualifies.

 

[Timo]

None of the above appears too likely.

Spock's small ship faced no resistance - no forcefields, no jamming, no weapons being fired at him. Why would any other small ship have been treated differently? Spock's beam weapons cut into the drill without effort, so why wouldn't other weapons from Vulcan or Earth be just as destructive? And why would there be no such weapons within range of the drill, when Spock fired from just as far away as the distance between the drill and the Starfleet Academy courtyard?

Shuttles shot down? With what, when the Narada could only fire twenty missiles at a time? Surely e.g. Starfleet Academy could launch more shuttles than that, from the vast hangar we saw.

Troops inside the drill? There wouldn't have been standing room. And the two guys didn't really make a difference anyway, as far as guarding the installation went. More probably there was a transporter inside the drill, allowing workers to come and go; hardwire that into the supporting cable and you avoid the jamming effect.

We're talking about different things here. I thought you meant the weak point of the Narada itself, and I don't think the drill qualifies.

Granted that you can't destroy the mining ship by destroying the drill. But you can stop the mining ship from hurting your planets by destroying the drill, which should be enough to earn you a few medals and a fat pension. Without the drill, the Narada appears rather harmless, unless you happen to be inexperienced, taken by surprise and short on starships.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kemaiku]

And yet Vulcan is gone, and Earth has severe damage to the San Francisco Bay basin, go figure.

 

[Timo]

So we have narrowed down the location of the plot hole. Now to plug it...

...Should we simply do the obvious and decide that no Federation planet is ever defended by anything besides the hero starship plus a "planetary defense system" that has an off switch? And that non-hero defenders of a Federation planet have the reaction time of a 92-year-old sloth, just without the number of active neurons? Or is there some alternate, more flattering explanation to Vulcan and Earth's failure to defend themselves?

Timo Saloniemi