Narada Tech Specs

[Timo]

Well, he was able to disable both in his first attack. But the Starfleet crew was somehow able to restore weapons functionality very quickly, so that some of the guns came back almost immediately after the engineer said they had gone offline... (A case of bad editing, I guess.)

In the second attack, Nero aimed at the shuttles almost exclusively, until Kirk began the ramming run - and for some reason or another, Nero didn't manage to fire at the ship at that point. Out of ammo, perhaps, or then proximity problems.

That balances the equation a little bit. It doesn't explain completely why the Kelvin was so much more durable than ships 25 years later. We're probably best off claiming that Nero improved his warheads or aim, although we could also argue with Pike that Starfleet had started to get lax on matters of carnage, and perhaps now fielded ships with inferior damage control capabilities.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ It's worth considering at this point that Kelvin was first attacked with shields up and weapons active with plenty of warning if incoming fire, and her phasers managed to intercept a large portion of the Naradapedo's submunitions, and they were able to do so again when hostilities resumed; in the second exchange of fire, the main phaser banks had become active and Kelvin was able to fire back, apparently doing some damage.

With that core missile and the smaller sub-warheads it seems like two missiles alone would be enough to wreck an entire starship (or at the very least, blow off its nacelles and knock a big piece out of the saucer). Enterprise took a direct hit with full shields but didn't have weapons online yet; a second attack would have encountered Enterprise's advanced main phasers--clearly more accurate than Kelvin's, given their performance in the end of the movie--and the fight would have dragged on a bit longer.

 

[Cicero]

It's also possible that the Narada's crew improved their weapons sometime during the quarter century between the Kelvin's destruction and the rest of the movie. The missiles fired at the Kelvin may have been the original mining charges carried aboard the Narada, and the weapons used against the Klingons and the Enterprise significantly upgraded versions produced in the intervening years.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

They don't seem to be all that upgraded. Again, they had the same effect against a shielded Enterprise that they did against a shielded Kelvin; their effect against unshielded Klingon/Federation ships is apparently devastating. We have a certain lack of comparison since Enterprise never had to take Narada head-on like Kelvin did, but I tend to think Enterprise would have fared considerably better in a direct confrontation (short of actually winning it, they might very well manage to fight Narada to a stalemate).

In the Abramsverse there seems to be more to defense than just shields, phasers contribute somewhat as well in a point-defense fashion. Enterprise' phasers would have put up a pretty impressive screen; the same MIGHT have been true of the rest of the fleet had they arrived with their phasers armed and ready.

 

[Timo]

Just out of curiosity, was the CGI model for the green missiles the same as for the red matter delivery probe (merely lit), or different? Are there any good glimpses of the missile mesh in "Art of" books or other such resources?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Just out of curiosity, was the CGI model for the green missiles the same as for the red matter delivery probe (merely lit), or different? Are there any good glimpses of the missile mesh in "Art of" books or other such resources?

Timo Saloniemi

They look totally different to me. There aren't any pics of either in the art book.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The red matter probe was a spinning helicopter type thing where the Naradapedos were diamond-shaped thingies that looked kinda like this, with a bunch of submunitions attached to them that sort of resembled tholian ships.

 

[Forbin]

Did the Naradapedos like little boys?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

No, but they were very aggressive in the pursuit of smaller space craft.

 

[Nightfall to-Ennien]

No, but they were very aggressive in the pursuit of smaller space craft.

...

Midgets?

 

[F. King Daniel]

I was flicking through the novelization and came across this interesting tidbit, that meshes nicely with Countdown's Borg-ish Narada upgrade:

Continually expanding, never to be finished, the Narada's automated contructors labored in the cold and silence of deep space to add still more capacity to the vessel's interior while rendering it's appearance ever more intimidating.

 

[Timo]

...If the constructors achieved nothing visible in 25 years, they don't appear particularly Borgish to me...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

^Use your imagination, Timo.

 

[Timo]

Why?

"For making the movie compatible with the novelization" is hardly a worthwhile goal...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Forbin]

That movie does not engender deep thought.

 

[Vincent Law]

If the movie could not accomplish something for itself, it has failed. One should not have to read a novel or a comic book to get the full effect of something in a movie. The movie should stand on it's own, no matter what it is.

As for this instance, personally I find it rather laughable that the authors of the comic book and novelizations should attempt to explain the ship's appearance. What does it matter? Attempting to connect the rebooted universe to the "prime" universe is pointless, and attempting to explain why a giant space octopus-shaped ship commanded by a human-named Romulan and crewed by his biker gang actually looks that way is even more pointless. The ship was designed to look scary, and considering the lack of depth the movie has, why should a novel made from the movie attempt to add any? What does it add to the story?

Personally I've seen to much anime to find the design to be anything other than humorous, but that is a personal aside.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The movie, and the Narada, did stand on their own. The tie-ins here are no different than they have been for the last 40 years of Star Trek - optional extras for die-hard fans. Does it "matter"? Not really, but it's fun (for some of us, at least) - and that's all that matters.

Btw, the tie-ins aren't what connect the movie to Prime Trek. Leonard Nimoy did that.

 

[blssdwlf]

Btw, the tie-ins aren't what connect the movie to Prime Trek. Leonard Nimoy did that.

Good thing it wasn't James Doohan - otherwise we wouldn't have to guess at whether Kirk lived after Scotty retired in TNG or died while they were visiting the Enterprise-B as seen in "Generations". There's Prime Trek, and well, "Prime" Trek - whatever that is

 

[Vincent Law]

The movie, and the Narada, did stand on their own.

They do and they don't. There are all those plot holes, after all, but on its own as a crappy, mindless action space adventure movie, yes, it stand on its own. If only for the want of a Schwarzenegger cameo and one-liner. And as a big scary tentacle monster raping every planet and ship it comes across, Narda certainly does the trick in this dumbed down action space adventure movie.

The tie-ins here are no different than they have been for the last 40 years of Star Trek - optional extras for die-hard fans. Does it "matter"? Not really, but it's fun (for some of us, at least) - and that's all that matters.

The problem comes in when fans try to use these extra sources of information which aren't in the movie to explain aspects of the movie, when asked about aspects of the movie. As for the tie-ins which actually were in the movie, to be frank those were some of the biggest weaknesses of the movie. If the idea is to reboot it, why not simply reboot it? The only people who would be upset by that were already the people who didn't like the movie the way it turned out anyway, so it's not like they were going to lose any of their audience.

Btw, the tie-ins aren't what connect the movie to Prime Trek. Leonard Nimoy did that.

Not really. Aside from not being all that much like the Spock from the previous franchise, there really is nothing to say he actually was from the "prime" universe from the previous franchise. In fact, given the technology we saw on the Narda and what could be seen of the Kelvin prior to it's rape by the giant tentacle monster, every indication is that there is no real connection to the "prime" universe and that everything was already an alternate universe to begin with.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I thought the in-universe reboot was a clever idea, and much prefer it to a clean break with the old. But I like STXI.


There's nothing to say any Star Trek episode or movie is from the same universe as the ones before or after. Even when direct references are made (like Nimoy reusing lines from Wrath of Khan in STXI, and mentioning his Kirk's time travels), you can argue "something similar may have happened in that timeline"

I could say the same about Wrath of Khan - Khan acts differently, he's dressed differently (when we meet him in WoK, he's wearing a belt buckle around his neck from a uniform that ...assuming it is the same timeline... won't exist for 15 years after his exile), his henchmen have changed and since Khan knows Chekov when Chekov clearly wasn't a member of the Enterprise crew during "Space Seed", I would have ample "proof" to back up my claims.