Watch the movie again. You'll hear the name Narada mentioned a number of times.
Romulan mining vessels.
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Watch the movie again. You'll hear the name Narada mentioned a number of times.
The biggest problem with ST09(overlooking the lack of any name or way to distinguish it from other movies) was yeah, you had to read the backstory just to understand why Nero was doing what he was doing. He just came off with a nutcase with a crazy grudge who somehow has a crew that's going along with twiddling their thumbs for 20+ years.
I didn't read Countdown until after I'd seen the movie, and I understood Nero's motivations just fine. His planet was destroyed, his pregnant wife killed. He blamed Spock and the Federation, believing they deliberately allowed Romulus to be destroyed before stopping the supernova. This is all in the scene where Nero interrogates Pike. He waited 25 years for Spock to emerge from the black hole, so he could aquire the Red Matter, which would allow him to take revenge. That's spelled out in the mind-meld.
But then, why does he wait 25 years for Spock and the Red Matter? Nero commands a fucking Space Octopus that is more powerful than anything the current galactic powers have and can drill down to a planet's core no problem. He can cause enough damage without Red Matter.
Of course, then you take into account the deleted scenes where Nero and his crew are captured by the Klingons. They now have a fucking Space Octopus that is more powerful than anything the current galactic powers have and can drill down to a planet's core no problem. But they sit on it for 25 years and allow Nero and his crew to take it back when they grow bored of prison and escape.
And let's not even get started on the Nero comic series where it is in fact Narada, being controlled by its own Borg technology that breaks Nero and his crew out of prison so it can take them to the Delta Quadrant on a spiritual quest to find V'Ger...
Of course, then you take into account the deleted scenes where Nero and his crew are captured by the Klingons. They now have a fucking Space Octopus that is more powerful than anything the current galactic powers have and can drill down to a planet's core no problem. But they sit on it for 25 years and allow Nero and his crew to take it back when they grow bored of prison and escape.
And let's not even get started on the Nero comic series where it is in fact Narada, being controlled by its own Borg technology that breaks Nero and his crew out of prison so it can take them to the Delta Quadrant on a spiritual quest to find V'Ger...
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Bingo, we know Orion ships can be heavily armed, Romulans that far from home on a mining ship would have to fend for themselves, bringing home dilithium, pergium etc that other races would be more than willing to hunt ships like the Narada down for. Arming her with several multipurpose torpedo launchers that can work as a mining tool or a defensive weapon is hardly a stretch.
My bad. It was once when Nero "invited" Pike to come onboard.
Not enough for his liking. The damage possible with Red Matter is infinitely more than could be done with a starship.
Wouldn't the drill make a good Xindi type weapon for destroying key targets? And since its a mining ship, the Narada should be able to toss a few decent size asteroids at the Earth (and each successive Federation planet in turn). Enough to cause a "nuclear winter" as well as the impact damage, thus sending its inhabitants back to the stone age if not wiping them out completely (add asteroids to taste!). This would have the advantage of leaving the planets available for the Empire given time or re-terraforming.
Sure, red matter might be faster and cleaner but would he really be willing to wait 25 years for a small extra mostly psychological finality? Unlikely if he's that fanatical. The phase "any means necessary" comes to mind, assuming you buy he is that crazy.
So red matter really isn't an issue. There should be a number of ways for him to do effectively the same job.
By the way, unless we have both missed something, it seems to me Timo (post 18) did a good job of summurising the time line of events around the destruction of Romulus.
Also it still seems ridiculous to me that Spock would fall into a black hole (he created!) accidentally. Even if he did, it appears to me unlike he or Nero would pass through it cleanly enough to survive.
I don't need to watch the movie again. The name was not mentioned in that scene.
Whatever, buddy. You're wrong, but argue the point or not as much as you want.
You really just contradicted yourself. The movie never mentioned his pregnant wife. He has a giant ship that can blow anything away today. He could take revenge right then and there without the red matter. Or if he just HAS to have Spock Prime watch, he could go to the Romulan empire, set himself up as Praetor and THEN wait for Spock. By then he could have conquered the Klingons and be ready to overthrow the Federation.
No you just see him... staring at the wall apparently for 25 years. So it gives you the impression he's stupid and his crew just is going along with it because the script says so. As for the deleted scenes... they're just that. Deleted. You shouldn't have to do digging for deleted scenes and backstory for things to make sense. And man, if the Narada was that damaged that the Klingons could capture them, it was awfully nice of them to fix it up for them and just leave it there within their ability to escape and sieze it. Yeah...
No getting around the fact the movie was poorly presented. Nero could have been an epic villain instead of seeming like a mentally unbalanced Romulan with a crazy grudge.
Yes,it did.
"I chose a life of honest labor. To provide for myself and the wife who was expecting my child."
The Narada is not mentioned in that scene.
"In my time, where I come from,this is a simple mining vessel."
As best as I'm able to tell, the name of the ship is given in dialogue as Narada only the one time, in the line cited here by SonicRanger. Salvor Hardin has adequately rebutted the other claims in his post immediately preceding mine.
Yeah, it did. See above.
He could blow up some cities from orbit or some spaceships in space. Not wipe a planet or star from the face of the universe. It's a *huge* leap.
Or someone else could have stopped him. Why take those risks, when after a few years you get a weapon that would give you infinitely more power? And why would he want to set himself up as Praetor?
Or because he's waiting for the perfect weapon and the perfect revenge.
You don't. I explained it all within the context of the film itself, no deleted scenes, no expanded universe stuff.
Regarding the uses of the mining rig in mass destruction:
It seems to work agonizingly slowly, and is vulnerable to small arms fire. The only "key target" it seems capable of hitting is a spot of undefended desert. Kirk's TOS ship was probably far better equipped to rain death-ray destruction on planets, and Kirk's STXI ship might be postulated to be at least as capable and probably more so.
The smaller Xindi beam seemed to be about as potent as the Romulan and Cardassian beams in "The Die is Cast" in creating ugly scars on the surface of a planet - probably comparable to what Kirk or Picard commanded, then. But it was steerable, and steering seems to be one of Nero's bigger problems... The bigger Xindi beam was way bigger, capable of shattering moons and planets in a matter of seconds.
VOY "Rise" suggests that asteroids can be stopped fairly easily even by a single starship. And reaction time is probably going to be very long... "Paradise Syndrome" arguably gives us a relativistic-speed asteroid almost the size of the Moon, and Spock still almost manages to render it harmless with a single ship at a distance of two months of travel time (he just overtasks his ship while getting to the worksite, resulting in failure).
If Nero wanted to shorten reaction time, he'd have to come close to the target planet by conventional means, and we have seen his ship is far from invulnerable to conventional weapons in competent hands.
I think Nero would indeed think like a miner and use dirty tricks relating to mining - but when he knows he can get red matter, he'd use that first, knowing it gives him much better chances of success than anything else. He probably understands he can't survive long after his first attack, so he has to make that count.
Timo Saloniemi
It seems to work agonizingly slowly, and is vulnerable to small arms fire. The only "key target" it seems capable of hitting is a spot of undefended desert. Kirk's TOS ship was probably far better equipped to rain death-ray destruction on planets, and Kirk's STXI ship might be postulated to be at least as capable and probably more so.
The smaller Xindi beam seemed to be about as potent as the Romulan and Cardassian beams in "The Die is Cast" in creating ugly scars on the surface of a planet - probably comparable to what Kirk or Picard commanded, then. But it was steerable, and steering seems to be one of Nero's bigger problems... The bigger Xindi beam was way bigger, capable of shattering moons and planets in a matter of seconds.
VOY "Rise" suggests that asteroids can be stopped fairly easily even by a single starship. And reaction time is probably going to be very long... "Paradise Syndrome" arguably gives us a relativistic-speed asteroid almost the size of the Moon, and Spock still almost manages to render it harmless with a single ship at a distance of two months of travel time (he just overtasks his ship while getting to the worksite, resulting in failure).
If Nero wanted to shorten reaction time, he'd have to come close to the target planet by conventional means, and we have seen his ship is far from invulnerable to conventional weapons in competent hands.
I think Nero would indeed think like a miner and use dirty tricks relating to mining - but when he knows he can get red matter, he'd use that first, knowing it gives him much better chances of success than anything else. He probably understands he can't survive long after his first attack, so he has to make that count.
Timo Saloniemi
It's bound to be "relatively slow" drilling to the centre of a planet.
However anything on the surface should be easy meat. But as I said, and as per your example, there are bound to be less exotic ways of doing the same thing (or close enough) as red matter. Besides, you saw the movie: The only ship around, apart from the Enterprise (which Nero should have destroyed) was one Nero let nuSpock and nuKirk steal (back) from him! I'm thinking of Earth of course. Vulcan faired worse no matter how many ships might have tried to intervene.Naturally Nero would want to shorten reaction time. Not that there seems to be any really (reaction that is). But just in case he would tractor beam one or two asteroids in close to the target planet with a high velocity then make sure no one interferes.
What do you mean? The Narada was nearly invincible, even on a bad day, such as when the plot demanded the Enterprise was suddenly able to destroy evey missile it fired! The only thing that could take it out (we assume) is the very red matter Nero had to wait 25 years for and presumably had no idea Spock was carrying! Not unless he somehow knew Spock had a doggy bag full of the stuff. Even then, why wait? To rub Spock's nose in it? Then why not destroy the rest of the Federation first and save a completely vunerable Vulcan for last when Spock finally arrived? Point is he doesn't need red matter.
Besides, how is sitting relatively motionless just outside the upper atmosphere of the target planet, for as you said an "agonizingly" long time, to drill the apparently necessary hole, less vulnerable than a "close" fly-by at high speed? I can see why you had to make that strange assumption about not surviving his first attack, but its contradicted by his stated aim of destroying the rest of the Federation as wel.
Not based on what we saw. A single starship on which Nero had the ultimate drop was able to ram the mining rig into total inoperability - no weapons, no directional control, no propulsion. Given a bit of time to digest the news, another single ship was able to shoot down 100% of what Nero could spit out from his missile tubes. It seems that the loss of the partially cadet-crewed fleet was mostly down to surprise factor and incompetence, then - or perhaps Nero had been able to lay ambush with red matter or some other unseen dirty trick that worked better than his feeble missiles.
Nero's greatest offensive advantage was his ability to pierce shields with those missiles. He had no defensive advantage we'd know of. And his only known planet-killing weapon made him a sitting duck. He might have had aces in his sleeves, and he might have won offscreen victories with different weapons and tactics. But what we saw him using would seem to strongly indicate that red matter was his best hope, and that without red matter he didn't have a prayer.
Why should we think he thought he could achieve his stated aim? He was on a suicide mission with no hope of anything he'd accept as "success" - he had lost everything already from the very start.
And he did try and kill Earth the same way he did Vulcan, which as we saw was impossible: a single small craft left flying would defeat him, and Earth was bound to have millions of those. Nero did not have a great plan of victory (which only makes sense as he was no soldier and had no weapons), he only had a great plan of going down in a blaze of glory.
Timo Saloniemi
The Kelvin was at rest relative to the Narada originally or nearly so. It must have had some propulsion and control or Kirk’s father could have abandoned ship like everyone else. And you think word of him wiping out 47 Klingon ships was exaggerated or due to cleaver (red matter?) tricks? Yet despite being warned, the Enterprise couldn’t take out enough of those same missiles at Vulcan, which it later had no problem with, to prevent Nero destroying it if he wished? That we did see.
You say Nero had no defensive advantage? He survived combat with numerous ships and even being rammed by one (well two but we won’t count that since it wasn’t the ship that did the damage.). As I pointed out, the only thing that could touch him was red matter. He would have been better off with out it! By the way, didn’t I just mention that Nero’s red matter delivery system made him vulnerable? But that’s just a reason to get rid of the red matter. Being able to kill Vulcan with such a poor system and survive anyway just adds to his "invincible" status. After all he was able to set up the drill twice (see below). We both know he could have done it better and yet you still claim he didn’t have a prayer with out red matter? On the contrary, he should have succeeded without red matter.
Yes, there should have been a lot of small ships at both Earth and Vulcan but we didn’t see them. Either they never existed or Nero destroyed them. Either way, given what happened at Vulcan Nero had every reason to believe destroying the rest of the Federation would be a cake-walk. I mean he was so contemptuous of his opposition he didn’t even bother destroying the Enterprise when it was at his mercy.
I agree he probably wouldn’t have minded going down with his ship, but only after he got his revenge, which he obviously thought he could achieve easily. Nero didn’t need a great plan. Besides, he wasn’t destroyed, they only damaged the drill. He could have found a new delivery system or started throwing asteroids (if it wasn’t for nuSpock having the red matter). In ST09 only Kirk and Co could defeat him. In the end Nero was vanquished more by inconsistent writing, than opposing forces.
Sorry, I meant the Kelvin deprived the Narada of all propulsion, control and armament (as the ramming ended Nero's quest to catch or destroy the shuttlecraft and left the mining ship spinning and leaking jetsam).
For all we know, Nero had to spend the next 25 years repairing what he could, and was still left with a much weakened ship.
I rather think Nero made that one out of whole cloth. No Klingon ships were destroyed - it was just a ruse to get Starfleet to go to Laurentius to meet the imaginary threat.
OTOH, it did happen exactly one hour after Nero had acquired red matter from Spock, if Starfleet's intel on the events was correct...
Only red matter is known to kill planets in that movie. And the asteroid-tugging trick was never demonstrated; we have no real reason to think his ship would be capable of towing a rock large enough that Starfleet couldn't un-tow it. An absolute prerequisite for asteroid bombardment, then, would be the elimination of Starfleet. Which Nero was only able to achieve by creating the Laurentian diversion, one way or another; he could never have seriously hoped to kill more than two planets that way until Starfleet caught up with his very slowly moving vessel. Indeed, him managing to threaten Earth was a major mystery in the movie - why would the main fleet have been that slow to react to news of Vulcan being lost, when the Enterprise, reduced to warp four and doing all sorts of stupid diversions, so easily outran Nero?
I mean, if the fleet went to Laurentius in response to the supposed Klingon calamity, we know when they left. And we know when Nero reached Earth, in terms of the time of the day at San Francisco. By turning around when Vulcan was lost, they should have preceded Nero to Earth.
...Unless we assume the fleet went to Laurentius well in advance of Spock delivering the red matter to Nero, for a completely unrelated reason. Nobody did seem to require any explanations when the Admiral at the Academy said "With our main forces deployed at Laurentius". Perhaps there was a war going on there? But that would mean the arrangement at Earth, with ships lacking crews, was permanent rather than temporary, which would be odd. Moreover, that would mean Nero didn't send the fleet to Laurentius, which would mean he had absolutely phenomenal luck. It doesn't make sense that way.
Nero lost the first round, with Kelvin, although Starfleet lost it as well. Nero won the second round at Vulcan. And then he lost the third round at Earth, reacting in panic and rage at a single tiny vessel that had just fired its peashooters and achieved an effect comparable to handgun fire - that is, blasted his only known planet-busting weapon to pieces. Nero had no plan, no weapons, and no hope.
Which is good writing when your villain is a civilian madman, rather than a hardened warrior. The one odd thing there is that Nero spent 25 years being a madman and not wisening up - but we can chalk that up to him being a Romulan, with centuries of life to spare.
Timo Saloniemi
The fact a starship could collide with the Narada and it survived is significant here. Of course not the least of things that make no sense is the fact Nero’s missiles ripped through the saucer section but left the engines intact. In fact the Kelvin should have been shredded long before it got under-way, with the damage it was taking. Given how powerful Nero's "much weakened ship" was, this is even more inexplicable. I mean Nero appeared to be more interested in attacking the shuttles which could have been mopped up at his leisure once the Kelvin was destroyed. Even after a collision course was set, Nero still had a minute to wipe it out.
I’m not sure I can counter "evidence" that is only based on what you would "rather think".
It never seemed to me that the Laurentian excuse was connected with Nero. At one point you say he is just a miner. Here you give him too much credit in my view. How is a miner supposed to convince Starfleet that 47 Klingon ships have been destroyed without actually destroying them? Is the Laurentian system a Klingon prison colony by the way? Why would Starfleet send most of its fleet there without finding out a few more details?
Come on, really? So nothing else can be contemplated and is therefore impossible? Not exactly the rule you seem to be operating by.
Besides, "killing" a planet need only involve effectively destroying its intelligent life forms, not removing it from the universe.No reason to think Nero could tow a rock? A mining ship that couldn’t move a relatively small asteroid, a mining ship that has no tractor beams? Heck if nothing else it could grab one with its squid arms! Beats me what else they are for. And once again, you saw the movie. There was no opposition to Nero deploying the drill at Earth or Vulcan. But even if there had been a few starships around they would never get close enough to stop an escorted asteroid in the few seconds available after release. Not if they had to get through Nero’s missile screen first and hadn’t already been destroyed. This, of course, is assuming he couldn’t use even better ways of achieving the same end. He seemed to have a good database and a fine machine shop.
The answer to some of your questions is that Nero had little to fear from Starfleet. The rest I can’t help you with. I will grant you that Starfleet is made to look pretty poor in ST09, but I have a hard time believing they would be so easily fooled in to sending the kitchen sink to support the Klingons, of all er "people", solely on the basis of a faked message from Nero! On the other hand, as you point out, we would have to believe Starfleet’s absence is yet another massive coincidence.
Actually Nero survived the Kelvin ramming (which should never have happened). He destroyed Vulcan and came within a millimetre of doing the same to Earth (and would have done so if, as he admits, he had finished the Enterprise when he had the chance). Only massive coincidences and rabbits out of hats prevented it, even if there seemed less opposition than there should have been at both Vulcan and Earth, despite the absence of capital ships. The damage to his drill was miner, ops, I mean minor. He only panicked when he faced the very substance he should have stayed well clear of. Obviously he could have built more missiles assuming he couldn’t just reload more. And as soon as he did reload, the Enterprise would have been dead meat (in the absence of red matter and an inconsistent plot of course). Red matter was an unnecessary double edged sword he should never have picked up.
Anyway, the fact remains: The Narada is portrayed as nearly invincible and certainly took and gave damage no other ship could have. Even Pike, who despite being warned fell in to the same ambush as the other 7 ships, was under no illusion as to the Narada's power. It took trans-warp beaming and an implausible plot to beat it. I’m not seeing much good writing here.
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