...Which is in direct contradiction of the movie, where Nero and Spock meet mere seconds after the destruction, and immediately get thrown to the past.
One wonders what role in the mining ship's military prowess was played by its onboard red matter supplies. We only saw the missiles used against two solo vessels - the
Kelvin and the
Enterprise. When fighting the cadet fleet, Nero already had access to red matter, and might have slaughtered the fleet with that. And arguably he also had red matter when he destroyed the bigger Klingon fleet (perhaps he even sailed into Klingon space specifically to get that red matter, assuming Spock emerged at the same spot where Nero had originally emerged - that spot had Klingons in the proximity, as per the walla aboard the
Kelvin).
Although we could also argue that no Klingon fleets were really destroyed: Nero would have been able to (and inclined to) fool Starfleet into sending its fighting force to Laurentius by sending false messages of massive unrest in that direction.
In the final analysis, the
Narada wasn't militarily all that impressive. That is, her defensive abilities were, due to her great bulk, but her missiles were useless once Sulu could take potshots at them from the side, rather than from the position of the would-be victim. It was Nero's rabid aggression that made all the difference, reducing the
Kelvin to a wreck in a very short time...
And with replicators, they'd likely have an infinite supply.
Indeed. But it's telling that the ship could still only launch a maximum salvo of about twenty missiles, in the conclusion of the movie. Clearly, there were fatal bottlenecks in the process of launching, reducing the ship's potential as a fighting vessel.
Timo Saloniemi
