Narada Tech Specs

[blssdwlf]

^ "Errand of Mercy" had the two ships fight at a distance (where effectiveness drops off). The Klingon's weapons were less effective than the Enterprise's. However the Enterprise did score and destroy the Klingon ship with her "pulse" phasers.

What TOS has shown was that during the series the Federation had significantly better shielding and stronger structures than her enemies. Phasers at full power (but at a distance) in "The Ultimate Computer" mission killed the Excalibur but didn't vaporize her.

In "The Ultimate Computer", a pair of photons was enough to vaporize the Woden. In "Elaan of Troyius", 4-6 photons enough to cripple a Klingon Battlecruiser. In "Day of the Dove", 4 phaser hits inside of transporter range vaporized another Klingon Battlecruiser.

Now, there were some one-shot-one-kill superweapons but they only had superiority for an episode. Remember the Romulan plasma weapon in "The Balance of Terror"? By "The Deadly Years" the Enterprise could shrug off multiple hits.

For ST11, the 24th century Narada should've been like the Enterprise in "The Ultimate Computer" mowing down the Woden. A couple of shots and "boom", nothing there.

 

[Timo]

^ "Errand of Mercy" had the two ships fight at a distance (where effectiveness drops off).

Never established in the episode.

What we hear is that automated systems observe a "body approaching", at which time the heroes apparently see nothing yet; the ship is fired upon; and Kirk orders return fire, "100% dispersal pattern", suggesting he still can't see his opponent. And this dispersal helps with destroying the enemy, rather than diluting the effect of the return fire.

That's the classic description of a sneak attack by a small cloaked vessel, actually. There's very little reaction time, and only machines manage to react at all before the enemy fires - but firing back blindly and broadly is enough to destroy the enemy, who probably hasn't been able to raise shields after emerging from under his cloak.

What TOS has shown was that during the series the Federation had significantly better shielding and stronger structures than her enemies.

Better than Klingon or Romulan stuff, certainly. On par with Gorn and probably also Tholian defenses and offenses, though. Possibly the "classic enemies" were big, nearby empires engaged in a rat race with the Feds and ready to apply quantity over quality, while other opponents may have been technologically advanced but distant from the UFP and thus only pitting single high quality ships against our heroes, not churning out masses of cheapo warships for staying apace.

In "The Ultimate Computer", a pair of photons was enough to vaporize the Woden. In "Elaan of Troyius", 4-6 photons enough to cripple a Klingon Battlecruiser. In "Day of the Dove", 4 phaser hits inside of transporter range vaporized another Klingon Battlecruiser.

Interestingly enough, the first and last example would seem to concern unshielded targets.

Remember the Romulan plasma weapon in "The Balance of Terror"? By "The Deadly Years" the Enterprise could shrug off multiple hits.

Or the Romulans were firing weaker weapons, possibly to increase their rate of fire.

For ST11, the 24th century Narada should've been like the Enterprise in "The Ultimate Computer" mowing down the Woden. A couple of shots and "boom", nothing there.

The obvious saving grace, logically and dramatically speaking (not to mention in the sense of saving our heroes' asses), is that the Narada wasn't a warship. She was probably barely armed or perhaps even unarmed by the 24th century definition.

The movie could OTOH have given us a Narada that was about the size of a shuttlecraft and still capable of wiping the floor with Klingon and UFP armadas. A bit like the 29th century tech timeship (more like timeboat) that defeated the Voyager in "Future's End". But making the Narada both big and powerful enough for her size and for her futurism would have been double overkill and dramatically uninteresting.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

^ "Errand of Mercy" had the two ships fight at a distance (where effectiveness drops off).

Never established in the episode.

What we hear is that automated systems observe a "body approaching", at which time the heroes apparently see nothing yet; the ship is fired upon; and Kirk orders return fire, "100% dispersal pattern", suggesting he still can't see his opponent. And this dispersal helps with destroying the enemy, rather than diluting the effect of the return fire.

That's the classic description of a sneak attack by a small cloaked vessel, actually. There's very little reaction time, and only machines manage to react at all before the enemy fires - but firing back blindly and broadly is enough to destroy the enemy, who probably hasn't been able to raise shields after emerging from under his cloak.

Not exactly. Kirk also orders the phasers to be "locked on" which would not be the case for a cloaked ship. We know in "The Doomsday Machine", phasers at point-blank work better than at a distance so in "Errand of Mercy" her phasers didn't have the same effect against a ship locked onto by phasers outside of visual range.

What TOS has shown was that during the series the Federation had significantly better shielding and stronger structures than her enemies.

Better than Klingon or Romulan stuff, certainly. On par with Gorn and probably also Tholian defenses and offenses, though. Possibly the "classic enemies" were big, nearby empires engaged in a rat race with the Feds and ready to apply quantity over quality, while other opponents may have been technologically advanced but distant from the UFP and thus only pitting single high quality ships against our heroes, not churning out masses of cheapo warships for staying apace.

Maybe and maybe not. For the Gorn they were probably on par but perhaps not the Tholians. They had fired at each other at 90,000km. The Enterprise with a single hit was able to dissuade further direct attacks from the Tholian ship(s).

Interestingly enough, the first and last example would seem to concern unshielded targets.

Technically, we don't know if the Woden had any shields (although on a old freighter it shouldn't matter ) The point is that the TOS phasers and torpedoes work very nicely in blowing up ships

Remember the Romulan plasma weapon in "The Balance of Terror"? By "The Deadly Years" the Enterprise could shrug off multiple hits.

Or the Romulans were firing weaker weapons, possibly to increase their rate of fire.

Possible. Although there were TEN Romulan ships present in that battle so ROF probably wasn't a concern for them

For ST11, the 24th century Narada should've been like the Enterprise in "The Ultimate Computer" mowing down the Woden. A couple of shots and "boom", nothing there.

The obvious saving grace, logically and dramatically speaking (not to mention in the sense of saving our heroes' asses), is that the Narada wasn't a warship. She was probably barely armed or perhaps even unarmed by the 24th century definition.

Are you suggesting the "menacing giant" have a gentle, yet soft-spoken voice so there can be an interesting contrast for the audience? Let's say the setup where the Narada "destroys" 47 Klingon warships and a bunch of Federation ones too kinda deflates that idea.

I'm leaning towards the development of Ancient-like drones in the 24th century replacing old-school explosives

 

[Timo]

I'm just saying that a regularly future ship kicking 23rd century asses is logical and dramatic; a giant ship kicking those same asses is logical and dramatic; but a giant ship from the future merely kicking the asses is unconvincing underkill, as the heroes will still weather the first shot. Making the giant ship a weakling allows for each and every ship (including the hero one) to survive long enough to make a dramatic difference, even if not long enough to make a difference in the outcome of the battle.

Nero took his sweet time hurting Pike's ship with those missiles; perhaps he had the means to deal with the fleet of seven somewhat faster? At that point, he'd possess plenty of red matter... And, interestingly enough, he would have been in possession of that red matter when dealing with the 47 Klingons already, although apparently only with a single hour to spare.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

The Narada effortlessly blew up 47 Klingon warbirds and seven Federation ships. The one and only hit that the Enterprise took put shields down to 33%, crippled the warp drive (max speed: warp 4), caused radiation leaks in the lower levels, blew up half of sickbay and had Sulu report "we can't take another hit like that!"

Even the NX-class Avenger survived the first few hits from 23rd century USS Defiant.

 

[Vincent Law]

And yet the Kelvin managed to take quite a few hits. Of course the size of the ships tended to vary in the movie, too.

 

[That Weirdo In The Corner]

Why wouldn't the Romulans just send a warbird. it was Romulus the was destroyed not the entire Romulan fleet

 

[Forbin]

The Romulans didn't send anyone. Nero was on a personal vendetta.

 

[Timo]

...And he didn't as much embark on such a vendetta as he was forced on one. Apparently, he got sucked into the past by complete accident, when chasing Spock.

We don't know how much time transpired between Spock failing to save Romulus and Spock & Nero getting sucked into the past. But it can't have been long: it happened when Spock (according to his own words) was flying back from his failed mission, in a very fast ship, across the short hop that supposedly separates Romulus and Vulcan. There would have been no time for the Romulan Star Empire to prepare any sort of a response; it's just bad luck that even one Romulan ship stumbled upon Spock and got sucked into the Spock-created time portal (the location of which we don't know but can speculate to have been somewhere near, if not within, the Romulan system).

Indeed, it's something of a plot mystery how Nero knows who Spock is. There isn't really time for him to learn this during the Romulus-saving mission, so we probably have to assume Spock became a celebrity and his mission a public event some time before Romulus was actually lost. The timeline in the Countdown comic doesn't meet the specs, but that comic's idea of Spock being an advocate of preempting a threatening future calamity, and of basically everybody else opposing him, would fit the bill quite nicely. Say, Spock thought there'd be a supernova soon, and made his concerns public. Others thought there'd be no supernova, or perhaps a supernova much later, and when they were proven wrong, there was much blame being cast around, and much hatred, and most of it misguided...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

^"I promised the Romulans that I would save their planet" - a massive publicity stunt gone horribly wrong. The Federation ambassador was meant to save the day, and instead it looked like he waited until after Romulus bit the dust to save the rest of the galaxy.

And yet the Kelvin managed to take quite a few hits. Of course the size of the ships tended to vary in the movie, too.

I say the first attack was to disable, not destroy - and then by the time the second attack started, Kelvin was using all her firepower (including turrets) to shoot down Narada's missiles, defending the shuttles and critical areas of the ship, buying the 6 or 7 minutes extra they survived.

 

[Timo]

We're still left wondering how none of the seven cadet ships had time to mount a "full defense" which would have protracted their fight quite a bit, and how Pike's ship, supposedly at "full defense" mode thanks to Kirk's warning words, was nevertheless so quickly brought down to 2/3 strength or one shot short of total destruction.

We probably shouldn't argue the Kelvin was stronger than the Enterprise. We might argue that the Narada was weaker in the first encounter, though, and not only when holding back but also when desperately trying to repel a ramming attack. Perhaps the difference was that Nero was initially taken by surprise and/or his ship damaged by the wormhole passage, but he and she managed to recover in the intervening 25 years?

It could also be that the improvised (?) missiles had aquired more potent warheads after 25 years of scavenging. It's not impossible that Nero had provided them with half a drop of red matter each, even, making all the difference. For all we know, the thing fired down Vulcan's newly drilled throat was yet another standard missile of Nero's, merely the only one we saw up close.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Enterprise had her shields up and weapons ready. None of the other ships were execting attack - they thought they were evacuating Vulcans from earthquake zones.

They probably only had time for "What the...?" once they dropped out of warp and saw a load of missiles swarming toward them. Even if one or two got their shields up in time, they wouldn't have survived the second round of fire. The Kelvin crew would have had several minutes between attacks to analyze the Narada's firing patterns and compute defensive-fire countermeasures.

 

[Vincent Law]

Or we could simply dismiss it as a bad movie.

 

[The Inquisitor]

^ I was waiting for an Abrams bash. It was bound to happen at some point.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Or we could simply dismiss it as a bad movie.

Dismiss and dislike the film all you like - but don't try and pretend the space battles are any less consistant than those in the rest of Star Trek.

 

[kkozoriz1]

And yet the Enterprise was once again the only ship in range (or the quadrant).

 

[Vincent Law]

Or we could simply dismiss it as a bad movie.

Dismiss and dislike the film all you like - but don't try and pretend the space battles are any less consistant than those in the rest of Star Trek.

Maybe, but I still call things the way I see them, and the way I sw it, Kelvin had just as much warning as any of the ships responding to Vulcan's distress call, yet they were all wiped out within minutes. Enterprise was actually ready for an attack, yet it also suffered nearly the same fate very quickly, yet Kelvin, an older, lesser ship, lasted longer. This was done entirely out of convenience for the writers, so it is somewhat pointless to try to explain the inconsistency as being a case of the ships being unprepared for the attack they suffered.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The Narada effortlessly blew up 47 Klingon warbirds and seven Federation ships. The one and only hit that the Enterprise took put shields down to 33%, crippled the warp drive (max speed: warp 4), caused radiation leaks in the lower levels, blew up half of sickbay and had Sulu report "we can't take another hit like that!"

Even the NX-class Avenger survived the first few hits from 23rd century USS Defiant.

More evidence that what the Narada was firing at them weren't proper weapons as such, but probably the 24th century equivalent of an I.E.D.: they are built on the cheap using available components and optimized (to the farthest extent capable) for penetrating an enemy's shields/armor. They may not be all that effective in avoiding enemy jamming and/or defensive screening fire which--apart from hero shielding--would seem to explain why Kelvin was able to put up that much of a fight while the Fleet at Vulcan did not.

The Klingons may have had the same problem; if 30 of those 47 ships were landed Birds of Prey coming to drop off recently captured Romulan prisoners from the re-conquest of Narendra Three, Narada would have nailed them Pearl Harbor style on its way to doing whatever the hell it was doing in that sector to begin with.

 

[Timo]

...And if they weren't, then Starfleet would have every excuse to spend 99% of its ships to deal with this huge problem at a location they mistook for the strategically important one in this case.

Perhaps Nero attacked those Klingons specifically to lure Starfleet to Laurentius? Or perhaps no attack in fact took place, and Nero simply sent this misleading message to clear his path to Vulcan?

In any case, this is probably the best Star Trek excuse (out of the lamentable many) for having the hero ship go to the fray without much Starfleet backup.

This was done entirely out of convenience for the writers

True.

so it is somewhat pointless to try to explain the inconsistency as being a case of the ships being unprepared for the attack they suffered.

Nevertheless, much of the effort in this thread and in this forum is dedicated to explaining things from the in-universe perspective. And since "writer convenience" is a constant in the out-universe part of Star Trek, in-universe explaining is also in constant need and no less justified here than in the case of other movies or episodes.

We might argue that the Narada never really wanted to hurt the Kelvin. In the first attack, Nero was confused and wanted prisoners for interrogating, so he didn't shoot to kill. In the second one, he wasn't worried about the Kelvin and its impotent peashooters, but was worried about letting witnesses escape, so as soon as he spotted the fleeing shuttles, he concentrated his fire on them, no longer firing at their mothership. Which was a bad move because he then didn't have time to reload when the Kelvin suddenly did turn into a threat (remember the "Fire everything!" bit that suggests that about 20 missiles is the most he could muster at a time?).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Vincent Law]

If that is the case, then he certainly wasted a lot of ordinance on the Kelvin and was still unable to disable that ship's weapons or propulsion systems.