Can I ask a few dumb questions?

The show is called Star Trek: Picard, not Star Trek: Romulans. The story is about Picard dealing with the baggage of his past, including Data's death and his ordeal with the Borg. They tied him in with the Romulan supernova because it was a major (well, the only) established event in post-Nemesis continuity, so they couldn't ignore it. But they still made it about Picard, about his mistakes and regrets that he now has to confront. And they connected it to androids and the Borg so that it would link to the other bits of Picard baggage they wanted him to confront.

 

...So basically the only thing we're left wondering about is what other established angle they could still exploit to make Picard be about Picard. The Borg, the Spock/Sarek/Vulcan-Romulan unification thing, Data, those we have in the mix now. Picard was a sucker for lost causes, so the Bajorans might get a mention even though Picard's current fancy is the Romulans. But Picard was a huge name in the Klingon business, too.

This connection has been mentioned in the passing in PIC, yes. And I doubt the season has enough space for anything more. But it's a pretty obvious angle to bring in for Season 2.

What else? Picard's interest in archaeology is at least as much a part of his character as this vineyard thing that Season 1 seems hesitant to leave behind. Things from the distant past are always a good new thing to introduce! It's just that there's nothing specific about the distant past that would interest Picard, so we can't really make predictions.

Then there's always Q... A bit silly, perhaps, but PIC has already done wonders with things that used to be on the silly side in the eighties.

That's about it, though. Other things and people in Picard's past are mayflies. But they did bring back Bruce Maddox!

Timo Saloniemi

 

In The Picard Countdown comic, Picard notes that it was 2381 when the Romulans asked for Federation assistance and then only because the Federation had given them proof that they knew about the supernova. I wonder how long the Romulan government had actually known about it, but had been keeping it to themselves (super secretive society and all that)?

 

Except that's impossible. It's a star. You can diagnose its condition from its light alone, the same way we know in real life that Betelgeuse or Eta Carinae is close to going supernova (though "close" in this context means within a million years or so). It's something that's in plain view for any observer to see, impossible to hide. So while the Romulans could hide the truth from their own people by suppressing the findings of their astronomers, they couldn't physically block the star from Federation astronomers' line of sight, so they couldn't prevent them from discovering it independently. Maybe it would've been a little easier to detect the early warning signs at close range, to pick up subtle variations starting to appear, but the Federation has very good long-range sensors that work at FTL, and lots of very smart scientists to interpret the data. So I can't believe the Romulans knew it for any significant length of time before the UFP found out.

 

But can Federation astronomers detect changes in the star via subspace? We don't really know how the FTL sensors work on stuff that isn't ships.

 

Data had no trouble detecting stellar changes in real time in Generations. Long-range sensors have always been depicted as being capable of detecting anything you could pick up at close range, even visual information.

 

That was a simulation, IIRC

Most of the world only found out about Chernobyl after Sweden found unusually high radiation that didn't come from their own plants and winds suggested a SE origin. The desaster was only acknowledged after international pressure and clear evidence. And people in Pripyat were evacuated very late and were told they're only leaving for a short time. Governments like do downplay mistakes...

 

The Star Trek Online novel The Needs of the Many put Hobus a totally bonkers 500 light years from Romulus. The Stellar Cartography book of star charts puts it around 14 light years from Romulus although since the maps are 2D that's only the bare minimum.

ST: Picard establishes it as being the Romulan sun itself that goes nova.

Except Star Trek has magical scans that can give whatever forwarning the plot requires.

 

I know. It obviously wasn't a natural event (probably something to do with synthetics or the Borg or a Romulan experiment gone wrong, who knows), but yes the Federation knew the sun was going to go supernova before the Romulans admitted it. The Federation could detect it and they had intercepted Romulan communications about the supernova. The Romulan government refused to admit to it publicly until 2381, when it was no longer possible for them to carry on trying to hide the truth. But I wonder how long the Romulan government had known and been hiding it from their people and denying it to everyone else (or simply ignoring them). Perhaps they thought, as it wasn't a natural event, that they could reverse it, or perhaps they simply refused to believe that their empire could possibly be destroyed by anything.

 

Not the same thing. Radiation in the air is hard to localize to a specific point of origin. But we're talking about a single specific star here. Any Federation astronomer who happened to be monitoring it would detect any changes in its spectrum as soon as they occurred. And since it's the home system of a rival power, I'm sure the Federation monitors the Romulan system constantly for any kind of anomalous energy readings that could tell them about what's going on there.

That's not an "except," because it supports my point rather than refuting it. I'm the one arguing that the Federation would know right away as soon as the star began to act up. You can't hide a star from outside observers, not unless you can build a Dyson Sphere around it, and that's pretty much a dead giveaway that you're hiding something.

That's my point -- they couldn't have hidden it from the Federation, because stars are the most fundamentally visible things in the galaxy. Any astronomer able to see the Romulan home star, provided they had Trek-style FTL sensors, could've detected the warning signs of an impending supernova practically as soon as they began. The Romulans could only have hidden it from their own people by suppressing the findings of their own astronomers. But they couldn't prevent Federation or Klingon or Cardassian or other astronomers from seeing it and reporting it. Their neighbors would've found out almost right away.

 

@Christopher to refute your point, while it's true civilian and spy installations could detect changes in the makeup of the romulan sun, don't discount the Romulan governments ability to downplay the data. Romulans are very good at hiding what they want hidden.
Eventually, the Federation would find out, you are correct. But it would take them time to refine their data, especially if they have no reason to be specifically monitoring their sun. My argument is that the Romulans would have several years of stonewalling before the Federation figures out what's really happening.

 

Again, yes, they could obviously hide their own astronomers' findings from their own people, but how could they possibly hide it from Federation or other astronomers? For the umpteenth time, we are talking about a star in the sky. You cannot physically hide that from outsiders' observations. The evidence would be plain as day to any astronomer in two quadrants, and Federation astronomers would be free to publish their findings.

No. My whole point is that it could not be anywhere near that long. The Romulans wouldn't have any power to "stonewall" the communication of scientists in a free society like the Federation, or in a rival state like the Klingon Empire. They could only hide it from their own people, not anyone else. So there's no way they could've known for years in advance. I can't believe it was any more than a matter of weeks, months at most.

 

Unless the earliest instabiity was only evident under a technobabblic scan, of a type the Federation would have zero reason to think necessary but Romulans, for what ever reason, ran.

 

Except that's not how astronomy works. We can tell that very distant stars are within a few hundred thousand years of going supernova just by using present-day detection methods. It is ridiculous to postulate that the technology 400 years from now would be incapable of registering the same things we're already fully capable of detecting today.

And really, why is this even on the table? What is gained by the Romulans having years more advance warning than the Federation? Why is that a desirable premise at all? If anything, it makes more sense the other way around, if the Romulans were slow to notice and react. The fact that they were caught unprepared is a key part of the story. Giving them some magical, scientifically nonsensical means of having years of extra warning actively undermines the credibility of the scenario rather than benefiting it.

 

Real life astronomy hasn't often had much to do with how things work in the Trek universe. And I'm not arguing that they should have more warning time, just that if they wanted to go that way with the plot for whatever reason, they'd just invent some babble to justify it.

 

main sequence stars are pretty stable. the entire supernova idea was kind of silly, but whats done is done. I am hoping eventually Picard deals with whether the event was generated on purpose by someone, an accidental event caused by a bad experiment or something else. It could have been a binary with a blue supergiant and a main sequence secondary, but again, why would the Romulans have bothered colonizing anything there, much less making it their home world.

 

Supernovae in populated star systems are an established reality in the Trek universe going back to TOS -- Minara, the Fabrini star, Beta Niobe. At least it's consistent.

 

Also the one with the atavacron

 

That's Beta Niobe.

 

Still, I'm betting a slip of latinum that the Hobus/Eisn/whatever supernova turns out to be artificial, and both it and the suppression of knowledge of it in the Romulan Star Empire turn out to be the work of somebody with a really nasty grudge against the Romulans. Or another front of the Temporal Cold War. Or both.

Of course, since latinum doesn't exist, that amounts to a "gentleman's wager" at the very most.