If Starfleet Scanned The Narda And Reversed Engineered It ....

[Nerys Myk]

Not for another decade.

 

[Timo]

Hey, Khan popped up prematurely!

But it's a bit difficult to accept that Starfleet wouldn't be losing ships left and right in every decade of every timeline. None of the threats Kirk faced appeared to be new conceptually - it was just the identity of the individual monsters that was novel to Starfleet whenever Kirk ran into those.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[starburst]

I don't think even the Vengeance owed anything at all to that long-forgotten Kelvin-vs-aliens-somehow-identified-as-Romulans encounter. The motivation for that ship was the Klingon threat, and the means was revealed to be Khan.

Marcus explicitly states that both the incident with the Kelvin and the threat of the Klingon Empire was why ships like the Vengeance were needed.

Seeming that in background and cut material which was backed up at least by having her destroy a number of Klingon Warbirds at a prison planet, we can assume Starfleet believed that the Narada had been in Klingon hands.

With that an already war bent Marcus would assume the worst and so the Vengence seems to be the answer to this.

Reverse-engineering any information from the Narada doesn't make it as potent as the Narada itself. Even in the Prime Universe, the E-D's analysis of the Borg cube didn't do much for Best of Both Worlds. Even the mighty Defiant, which was built specifically in response to the Borg, was nearly destroyed in First Contact.

Defiant seemed designed and built to work in small groups to defeat the Borg threat swarming the larger enemy... She did much better than those at Wolf 359 seeming she made it from the very start of the battle all the way to Earth.

 

[Cyke101]

I don't think even the Vengeance owed anything at all to that long-forgotten Kelvin-vs-aliens-somehow-identified-as-Romulans encounter. The motivation for that ship was the Klingon threat, and the means was revealed to be Khan.

Marcus explicitly states that both the incident with the Kelvin and the threat of the Klingon Empire was why ships like the Vengeance were needed.

Seeming that in background and cut material which was backed up at least by having her destroy a number of Klingon Warbirds at a prison planet, we can assume Starfleet believed that the Narada had been in Klingon hands.

With that an already war bent Marcus would assume the worst and so the Vengence seems to be the answer to this.

Reverse-engineering any information from the Narada doesn't make it as potent as the Narada itself. Even in the Prime Universe, the E-D's analysis of the Borg cube didn't do much for Best of Both Worlds. Even the mighty Defiant, which was built specifically in response to the Borg, was nearly destroyed in First Contact.

Defiant seemed designed and built to work in small groups to defeat the Borg threat swarming the larger enemy... She did much better than those at Wolf 359 seeming she made it from the very start of the battle all the way to Earth.

Defiant did better than the ships at Wolf 359, sure, but one could argue that Starfleet also sent a much larger fleet with lessons learned from Wolf 359, if they were fighting the Cube in the same amount of time it takes the Enterprise to cross from the Romulan Neutral Zone all the way back to Earth. And even then, the Cube still threatened to conquer Earth had it not been for Picard and his connection to them. No Picard = assimilated Earth, and that's not purely a tech advancement.

In any case, my point is that there's precedence in Trek for Starfleet to prepare against a vastly superior foe yet still not enough development to actually overcome them through brute force. There's only so much Starfleet can do with its resources, after all, to the point where a tech gap is simply too large to bridge.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, Starfleet faces such formidable foes even in calmest peacetime that there's no real reason to assume it is deliberately slacking. If starships could have been made stronger, they already would have been...

We learn little about the defensive capabilities of the Vengeance. She's faster than the Enterprise, and carries more weapons (while probably leaving something else ashore), but only the former sounds like a case of advanced tech. The latter is simply a matter of scale. Would the Vengeance have been able to resist the phasers and torpedoes of Kirk's ship? We'll never know.

Nor can we really tell whether the Narada would have fared better or worse against the guns of the Kelvin than against those of the Enterprise. Neither Robau or George Kirk got any shots in as far as we can tell - and Jim Kirk only shot at Nero after the latter's ship had been chopped up by red matter.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[M'Sharak]

Dang. We really need an online transcript of the movie...

It's not a proper transcript with every line of dialogue identified by character, but there's this (probably copied from the closed-caption file.)

 

[F. King Daniel]

to build new starships. Why didn't the Enterprise or any of the other starships get in some good shots. The writers of the movie basically said that the reason the enterprise looked so much more advance then the TOS enterprise was that they Starfleet had scanned the narda and the engineers reversed engineered the narda to incorporate the advances into their starships. The thing is it doesn't seem that they reversed engineered anything that helped them against the narda. I wonder if they really thought of this when they wrote the movies or just came up with this explanation to quell nitpickers such as myself. What do you all think?

I think 25 years of divergent evolution is easily enough to explain away most differences in the new movie. Whether there were scans of the Narada, or important people died on the Kelvin, or it just led to warmonger Admiral Marcus commanding Starfleet instead of peacenik Admiral Nogura. The Butterfly Effect.

 

[Timo]

...Who knows, perhaps the two Starfleets really are identical, and the nuFleet has deployed its tiny Constitution class frontier scouts to explore strange new worlds while leaving the huge combat vessels close to home - just like the primeFleet?

Oh, a few names and registries have been differently attributed (perhaps nuEnterprise is actually of the Constitution class, while the frontier scouts on nuFleet are of the Paul Revere class and have registries in the O700 range), but the numbers and types of ships might be the same nevertheless.

there's this

Much obliged! Punching in the DVD time and again to get specific lines of dialogue is getting a bit tedious. But only a bit... The eye candy on this one is really sweet!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nerys Myk]

Hey, Khan popped up prematurely!

It happens to a lot of guys.