How does red matter stop a supernova?

[Captain Robert April]

No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney.

 

[BolianAuthor]

No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney.

Aye, it was total bullshit. The really sad part of it is that if they had actually CARED enough about Trek to watch a couple TNG Romulan episodes, the JJ team would have known that Romulan ships are basically powered by small contained singularities, so...

All the Romulans would have had to do, is fly an unmanned Warbird into the supernova...

 

[Plecostomus]

No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney.

Aye, it was total bullshit. The really sad part of it is that if they had actually CARED enough about Trek to watch a couple TNG Romulan episodes, the JJ team would have known that Romulan ships are basically powered by small contained singularities, so...

All the Romulans would have had to do, is fly an unmanned Warbird into the supernova...

Hm. Good point. Maybe the warbird singularity method was what the Romulans were banking on and it didn't work.... and they left themselves with zero time for any other option.

 

[Plecostomus]

Here's what I think on red matter, the vortex it creates, and the Hobus supernova.

Basically, the Hobus supernova was NOT the cause of the potential galaxy-destroying wavefront...at least, not by itself. Rather, the star was sitting on a right smack on a spatial/subspace/temporal rift. The star's explosion was kind of like blowing up a nuke in a fault line--which may not cause that sort of effect in real life, granted, but the imagery works. The energy of the supernova screwed up the rift it was sitting on, and THAT is what allowed the explosion to propagate much further, and with much greater force, than it should've been able to do in that amount of time had it been just the supernova itself. You may even have had energy coming out of the rift itself, adding further fuel to the fire.

Enter red matter. I don't think that what we see is all there is to red matter, because it must operate on extradimensional levels. Whatever its nature is, it's capable of doing the exact opposite of the rift I described, and therefore being able to reverse the explosion if deployed quickly enough and in the right spot. It also demonstrates the ability to at least temporarily open what may be colloquially referred to as a black hole, but is in fact something other than that (despite having intense gravitational forces and an "event horizon" at least in the sense that there's a point where, once crossed, a ship is forced into free fall into the rift and cannot hit escape velocity)--it's a spatiotemporal rift that, instead of exploding outward, pulls inward.

Yes, it's convoluted...but it's the only way to get things to make sense.

This is the kind of plot-hole patching I approve of. Just throwing one's hands up and saying "man what"... I just don't dig that at all.

 

[Ronald Held]

Yes Romulan scientists and engineers should understand singularity Physics well enough to combat the problem on their own.

 

[ALF]

I just tried experimenting with red matter to stop a champagne supernova.... the results were unsettling.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I just does. It's the law. Likewise, green matter STARTS a supernova and yellow matter forces it to accelerate unpredictably before the matter turns red.

 

[Myasishchev]

And blue matter is effective against Bizarro Superman.

 

[Captain Robert April]

And crystal matter is only effective against plants.

 

[ALF]

And Family Matters is only effective against.... ____________?

 

[BolianAuthor]

If only I could get this damn gray matter to work...

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

Here's what I think on red matter, the vortex it creates, and the Hobus supernova.

Basically, the Hobus supernova was NOT the cause of the potential galaxy-destroying wavefront...at least, not by itself. Rather, the star was sitting on a right smack on a spatial/subspace/temporal rift. The star's explosion was kind of like blowing up a nuke in a fault line--which may not cause that sort of effect in real life, granted, but the imagery works. The energy of the supernova screwed up the rift it was sitting on, and THAT is what allowed the explosion to propagate much further, and with much greater force, than it should've been able to do in that amount of time had it been just the supernova itself. You may even have had energy coming out of the rift itself, adding further fuel to the fire.

Enter red matter. I don't think that what we see is all there is to red matter, because it must operate on extradimensional levels. Whatever its nature is, it's capable of doing the exact opposite of the rift I described, and therefore being able to reverse the explosion if deployed quickly enough and in the right spot. It also demonstrates the ability to at least temporarily open what may be colloquially referred to as a black hole, but is in fact something other than that (despite having intense gravitational forces and an "event horizon" at least in the sense that there's a point where, once crossed, a ship is forced into free fall into the rift and cannot hit escape velocity)--it's a spatiotemporal rift that, instead of exploding outward, pulls inward.

Yes, it's convoluted...but it's the only way to get things to make sense.

This is the kind of plot-hole patching I approve of. Just throwing one's hands up and saying "man what"... I just don't dig that at all.

All I can say is...I'm a fanficcer. I can't help myself--plothole patching is what I do for fun!

 

[superstring01]

How does red matter stop a supernova?

One of my issues with the movie (and I had a lot of them).

Don't insult my intelligence by creating gimmicky plot devices just to make a segment more digestible. There were better ways to weave this into the story. Simply call it an "artificial singularity" and leave out the "red" matter.

~String

 

[ALF]

How does red matter stop a supernova?

One of my issues with the movie (and I had a lot of them).

Don't insult my intelligence by creating gimmicky plot devices just to make a segment more digestible. There were better ways to weave this into the story. Simply call it an "artificial singularity" and leave out the "red" matter.

~String

That's fine for us, the literate Trek savvy audience, but that doesn't work for Joe Six Pack, for whom the movie was intended to ca$h out on.

"Arty-fishal whut? Come on Loloene, let's get us some walmart brand whiskey and got back to th' camp fer some what fer."

Someone's intelligence must be insulted if filmmakers are going to make any money.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ I'd rather they insult the intelligence of illiterate rednecks by keeping the plot device simple than by insulting the intelligence of the FANS by spitting out some ghastly word salad like "Deploy the graviton matrix modulation device."

"Deploy the red matter" is simple enough. We don't know what red matter is, and we're not really supposed to know until we see what it does to Vulcan. What's interesting is that, having seen the movie from the audience perspective, we actually know slightly more about red matter than Starfleet does.

 

[Timo]

Agreed. "Red matter" sounds like the sort of jargon a real future organization might use, as opposed to "artificial quantum singularity". The latter is too close to somebody today saying "horseless carriage" when meaning a car!

That is, unless the future organization is NASA. One thing I'm grateful of is that we never hear idiotic abbreviations like EVA in Star Trek. "Spacewalk" is real, plausible spaceman-speak...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Agreed. "Red matter" sounds like the sort of jargon a real future organization might use, as opposed to "artificial quantum singularity".

Yep. No one would say that, and no one would type it into a script except to impresse a fanboy somewhere.

 

[Plecostomus]

Here's what I think on red matter, the vortex it creates, and the Hobus supernova.

Basically, the Hobus supernova was NOT the cause of the potential galaxy-destroying wavefront...at least, not by itself. Rather, the star was sitting on a right smack on a spatial/subspace/temporal rift. The star's explosion was kind of like blowing up a nuke in a fault line--which may not cause that sort of effect in real life, granted, but the imagery works. The energy of the supernova screwed up the rift it was sitting on, and THAT is what allowed the explosion to propagate much further, and with much greater force, than it should've been able to do in that amount of time had it been just the supernova itself. You may even have had energy coming out of the rift itself, adding further fuel to the fire.

Enter red matter. I don't think that what we see is all there is to red matter, because it must operate on extradimensional levels. Whatever its nature is, it's capable of doing the exact opposite of the rift I described, and therefore being able to reverse the explosion if deployed quickly enough and in the right spot. It also demonstrates the ability to at least temporarily open what may be colloquially referred to as a black hole, but is in fact something other than that (despite having intense gravitational forces and an "event horizon" at least in the sense that there's a point where, once crossed, a ship is forced into free fall into the rift and cannot hit escape velocity)--it's a spatiotemporal rift that, instead of exploding outward, pulls inward.

Yes, it's convoluted...but it's the only way to get things to make sense.

This is the kind of plot-hole patching I approve of. Just throwing one's hands up and saying "man what"... I just don't dig that at all.

All I can say is...I'm a fanficcer. I can't help myself--plothole patching is what I do for fun!

Long-running table-top RPG. Often times I re-write entire episodes/moves to fix them then feed them to my players.

For example we totally re-did Nemesis. Just a little bit of adjustment and VOOM most of it was fixed. Had a huge fleet-battle at the end, and Data still mostly died.

The biggest plothole I patched there was I had Shit-On go after the Romulan homeworld rather than earth so we ended up saving our arch-enemy from themselves... which made the destruction of Romulas in the new movie even more horrifying.

 

[ALF]

This is no Laughing Matter.

 

[Zaku]

Umm, but how about answering my question? Sorry to be a bother, but I'd really like to hear the actual dialogue and not to hear the bits from the comic.

Timo Saloniemi

From the blu ray subtitles:
890
01:16:49,521 --> 01:16:51,981
One hundred twenty-nine years
from now,

891
01:16:52,065 --> 01:16:56,110
a star will explode
and threaten to destroy the galaxy.

892
01:16:57,237 --> 01:17:00,865
That is where I'm from, Jim, the future.

893
01:17:05,329 --> 01:17:11,459
A star went supernova,
consuming evertyhing in its path.

894
01:17:12,169 --> 01:17:15,630
I promised the Romulans
that I would save their planet.

895
01:17:20,927 --> 01:17:23,179
We outfitted our fastest ship.

896
01:17:24,598 --> 01:17:27,058
Using red matter,
I would create a black hole

897
01:17:27,142 --> 01:17:29,101
which would absorb the exploding star.

898
01:17:30,896 --> 01:17:33,731
I was en route,
when the unthinkable happened.

899
01:17:35,192 --> 01:17:38,277
The supernova destroyed Romulus.

900
01:17:44,076 --> 01:17:45,743
I had little time.

901
01:17:48,413 --> 01:17:52,291
I had to extract the red matter
and shoot it into the supernova.

902
01:18:09,101 --> 01:18:11,560
As I began my return trip,
I was intercepted.

903
01:18:11,895 --> 01:18:15,815
He called himself Nero,
last of the Romulan Empire.

904
01:18:16,316 --> 01:18:20,486
In my attempt to escape, both of us
were pulled into the black hole.

I hope that's enough