I have been told many times before that to include the entire block of an OP's post, when answering one specific section, is poor netiquette - whether you prefer one way to the other, or not.
Romulan mining vessels.
- Thread starter Ship's Computer
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I have been told many times before that to include the entire block of an OP's post, when answering one specific section, is poor netiquette - whether you prefer one way to the other, or not.
It was described by Kirk as an "attack", not by Uhara. She just said a Klingon armada was destroyed, no other details. Maybe the writers just liked armadas but that term implies to me a purposeful military force, not a group of ships in dock or taken completely by surprise. Worse, as pointed out, missiles, unless cloaked somehow and these one weren’t, are not the best surprise attack delivery system. I’m still not sure how you turn Red Matter in to a surprise assault system either. All we know for sure is the Narada is capable of unparalleled destructiveness.
Actually it wasn’t. The Narada was destroyed by Rad Matter igniting on contact with it. I don’t think the Enterprise ever fired a shot at the Narada until that unfortunate incident toward the end of the movie where the Navarda couldn’t shoot back and even then achieved no noticeable damage beyond what the blackhole was already doing.
I'm not sure why you gave those examples. The first two are things both Scotty and Spock would have admitted to not being sure of and they had nothing to do with their, or our, assessment of the Narada as a threat. As I pointed out, Kirk and Co knew more than enough. The had the records of the Kelvin. They had the destruction of the Klingon and rescue fleets. They had what the Narada had just done to the Enterprise. Or are Robau, Pike and Co just lousy captains who made the wrong calls? Wasn’t there one good skipper on any of the Narada’s victims? So what, of relevance, do we know that they didn’t? Nero telling Pike, a little too late of course, that the Narada was a "simple mining vessel"? How would that have made the missiles any less powerful? OK, what else was behind the forth wall that would have made an actual difference?
As I mentioned above, they were plenty ready. Maybe too ready!? I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense. Anyway, you believe these "slow" missiles were never-the-less on top of the rescue fleet before they knew what hit them? When the fleet first arrived, there would have been surprise on both sides, so its not as though they would have popped into normal space and been immediately overwhelmed by a hundred missiles, three seconds later. Heck, it still took Nero one minute before he discovered the Enterprise and ordered it destroyed and another before it was actually hit. Even it we assume the timing in the film is not totally accurate, Pike still knew what was going on and had time to respond (badly it appears). So where’s the surprise? I mean, were Starfleet’s targeting systems so "shocked" at how slow the missiles were there were no contingency procedures in place to shoot at them accurately with phasers and the crew had to reprogramme their computers while travelling between Vulcan and Earth? The Kelvin saw the missiles coming too but couldn’t seem to destroy them effectively until Nero started targeting the shuttles! Clearly nothing was done to rectify that problem in the next 25 years but it was fixed by Kirk and Co. Anyway combine that with the Jellyfish ramming business and I stand by my claim.
Yes, that’s probably true of a lot of films so we can forgive it now and then, though I think, even for Star Trek, they went way over their quota. What we shouldn’t forgive is the Enterprise, forewarned, arriving in the same spot just so they can get an "action shot". That’s just stupid.
You raise and interesting point. Do we really know if Romulus is a militaristic society? Can we be sure that what we have seen is representative? I can’t recall we if we know enough about them to decide.
Yes, even I find the 47 Klingon ship business a little hard to believe so perhaps the Narada's shields are better than we think? I mean, do you recall when they were penetrated? I guess the Kelvin is an example but who else actually did any damage to the Narada (excluding the drill of course)before the blackhole? I know the Jellyfish shot it up a little from the inside.
I wouldn't say Spock is obviously a much better person after he gave in to his base emotions. Are you’re suggesting that all Vulcans (well, those that are left!) should come out of their emotional closets too? Even if giving up on logic and reason whenever it’s convenient to do so is a good thing for Spock (and I doubt it), its yet another leap away from the best parts of TOS and not a message that needs to be spread in my view.
By the way, is there a list of these "pretentious" stories? I would hate to enjoy anything pretentious.
Indeed, why wouldn't a ship carrying anything of value not have weapons? Especially in the world of Star Trek where pirates, marauders and villains of other stripes lurk in every nebula.
In the real world, ships carrying valuable cargo in pirate-infested waters deliberately leave all weapons ashore, as the presence of these weapons would merely agitate the pirates into using deadly force first and presenting an ultimatum thereafter. Plus, the weapons add to the prize; the shipping company definitely doesn't want to hand expensive miniguns to the pirates.
Some ships try to use their water cannon (necessary firefighting equipment) to deter boardings, often with success. The principal defense is the maintaining of high speed that prevents boarding, though.
Regarding the surprise on low Vulcan orbit, we can rest assured that Nero was not surprised in the slightest. After all, he must have personally invited the Starfleet task force in!
Note that Vulcan sends a vague distress call mentioning seismic troubles long before those troubles actually begin! The tremors come from Nero's drill, which doubles as a jamming device. But the drill only goes active fairly late in the story, making Amanda rush to the balcony of the Sarek estate; at that point, the fleet is already on its way. So the message from "Vulcan" must have been a ruse.
Whether the message from "Klingon prison planet" was also a ruse or not, remains unknown. But story logic essentially requires it to either be one, or then be one of the incredible coincidences that supernaturally bring our TOS heroes together despite there being no TOS. I'd simply be happier with it being a ruse, as it fits Nero's pattern, is something he could plausibly pull off, eliminates one incredible coincidence - and OTOH does not really appear to be necessary for bringing our heroes together, from the predestination angle.
Timo Saloniemi
Some ships try to use their water cannon (necessary firefighting equipment) to deter boardings, often with success. The principal defense is the maintaining of high speed that prevents boarding, though.
Regarding the surprise on low Vulcan orbit, we can rest assured that Nero was not surprised in the slightest. After all, he must have personally invited the Starfleet task force in!
Note that Vulcan sends a vague distress call mentioning seismic troubles long before those troubles actually begin! The tremors come from Nero's drill, which doubles as a jamming device. But the drill only goes active fairly late in the story, making Amanda rush to the balcony of the Sarek estate; at that point, the fleet is already on its way. So the message from "Vulcan" must have been a ruse.
Whether the message from "Klingon prison planet" was also a ruse or not, remains unknown. But story logic essentially requires it to either be one, or then be one of the incredible coincidences that supernaturally bring our TOS heroes together despite there being no TOS. I'd simply be happier with it being a ruse, as it fits Nero's pattern, is something he could plausibly pull off, eliminates one incredible coincidence - and OTOH does not really appear to be necessary for bringing our heroes together, from the predestination angle.
Timo Saloniemi
Star Trek doesn't operate in the real world. At it's core it's an action-adventure series that takes a lot of its cues from the age of sail films and books. In the world of Star Trek cargo ships are armed. Not a whole lot of "action-adventure" in sitting around singing Kumbaya while pirates strip your ship to the bones. 
We know that even hospital ships are armed in the Trek universe. It's just that we've seen fairly little of transport ships, too little to tell whether armaments would be typical or atypical. Perhaps tellingly, the Cardassian one from "Return to Grace" was armed, but to such a low standard that she could not defend herself against a small unshielded Klingon raiding ship. And this episode would have been the perfect vehicle for mentioning a merchant crew triumphing over pirates, if such a thing were part of the Trek universe. Alas, we heard nothing.
However, this is not particularly relevant to the issue at hand, as real world transports have frequently been armed to the level of mightiest battleships. Perhaps most famously, the German merchant raider Kormoran managed to defeat the Australian light cruiser Sydney with her hidden "military-level" weaponry of six-inch guns and antiship torpedoes in what should be described as a "fair fight". The Kormoran wasn't armored worth anything, though, and was ultimately also lost in the fight - a problem Nero wouldn't have to worry about, as the sheer bulk of his vessel was able to absorb the ramming attack of a full-sized starship.
Timo Saloniemi
However, this is not particularly relevant to the issue at hand, as real world transports have frequently been armed to the level of mightiest battleships. Perhaps most famously, the German merchant raider Kormoran managed to defeat the Australian light cruiser Sydney with her hidden "military-level" weaponry of six-inch guns and antiship torpedoes in what should be described as a "fair fight". The Kormoran wasn't armored worth anything, though, and was ultimately also lost in the fight - a problem Nero wouldn't have to worry about, as the sheer bulk of his vessel was able to absorb the ramming attack of a full-sized starship.
Timo Saloniemi
"Governor, I just got a message from our base on the second moon. They reported they were under attack, and then the signal cut off abruptly. The reinforcements we sent over there are saying the entire Dak'Tag anchorage has just disappeared into a black hole."
The look on the governor's face? That would be surprise.
What, the red matter just happened to appear out of nowhere and crash into Narada by accident? Or was this the result of coordinated tactics including a boarding action, clever maneuvering and timely application of suppressive fire by a single Federation starship and its crew?
What it boils down to is that the Enterprise destroyed the Narada all by itself. You might wish to chalk it up to a fluke just because we know the details of that engagement and know it wasn't a brute force affair... but then, neither was the Narada's attack on Vulcan, and the attack on the Klingons is unlikely to be as well.
That's kind of a non sequitor; the point, obviously, is that the main characters AREN'T always right, and their assumptions are only as valid as the information at hand. Likewise, Spock continues to talk about the "black hole device" right up until the moment he mind-melds with a Romulan and discovers the "device" isn't a device at all, but actually a substance carried on a ship.
LOL no they didn't. They knew next to NOTHING about the Narada except that it was big, its weapons were powerful and it was crewed by Romulans. They didn't even realize it came from the future until Spock deduced as much from their black hole technology.
Without a doubt. Funny thing about war, though: a live rookie is always better than a dead veteran.
We know Narada was a mining vessel, we know he operates without official sanction of the Romulan Empire, and we know he's been entirely on his own for the past 25 years. These are three things that only PIKE knew, and Pike only knew them because Nero told him this after he'd been captured.
Think about this: Scotty says "If there's any sense in the design of that ship I should be putting you down somewhere in the cargo hold." We already know this assumption is wrong, so why doesn't the Narada's design make sense to Scotty?
Because Scotty, like everyone else, thinks the Narada is a battleship. If it HAD been a military vessel, his assumption probably would have been correct.
It wouldn't. It would have lead Pike to conclude -- correctly -- that the Narada had a limited supply of them, and that furthermore the guidance systems on those missiles probably weren't as sophisticated as their original predictions. More importantly, it tells us that Nero's ship lacks military-grade defenses: standard shields, no disruptors or beam weapons, and probably lacking any ECM/ECCM equipment. It would, in other words, reveal the Narada's myriad weaknesses, all of which would be otherwise unknowable.
Ready for a rescue mission, yes. "Ready" meaning the portion of the crew that was expected to go into action were the medical and relief crews, shuttle pilots and transporter operators. Shields down, no weapons armed, no tactical scans, no torpedoes loaded, and the first sign of trouble is a cloud of missiles that suddenly appears just outside your viewscreen.
Kelvin at least had a visual on the Narada, enough to know that a massive space vessel was sitting in front of them. The Vulcan relief fleet didn't even have that much; at best, the three or four ships at the back of the formation dropped out of warp just in time to see the expanding fireballs from the ships in front of them; IF they had time to get their shields up before they collided with the hulks in front of them, it's all they had time to do before they took the next hit.
No, just Starfleet. Ayel walked up to Nero minutes before they arrived and TOLD him "Seven Federation ships are on their way."
Actually, the only one that came as a surprise was Enterprise, running way back behind the rest of the formation. Narada's sensors either missed it or it was obscured behind the warp signatures of the other seven. Either way, Narada didn't immediately target Enterprise because unlike the rest of the fleet, they didn't see Enterprise coming.
Pike had time enough to arm his weapons for a fight... AFTER he'd been hit by one of Nero's missiles. That Enterprise was only hit with a single shot is the only reason the ship survived long enough to get its weapons online; if Nero hadn't hailed them to taunt Spock, Pike would have been forced to go down fighting, then discovered to his pleasant surprise that the Narada wasn't as tough as it looked.
No attempt was MADE to shoot them down before the Enterprise did at the end of the film. Circumstantial evidence suggests they would have been successful given any opportunity to try it.
In the end, even Pike never got that chance.
Except Kelvin was a much older design, fighting at much closer ranges, and even then DID manage to screen a good portion of Nero's missiles from hitting. If it hadn't been for its phaser screen, Nero's second attack would have obliterated them in seconds.
SEVERAL ships, working together in formation, would have been able to put down a more effective screen. The more advanced Enterprise probably could have done it single handedly.
Only in hindsight. Pike didn't completely believe Kirk until the instant Enterprise dropped out of warp into a debris field; I think even Spock half expected them to come out of warp and find the entire fleet sitting there in formation, with the CO of the Truman hailing to ask "Hey guys... why are your shields up?"
It's how Spock described them, and how plenty of them have described themselves. It COULD just be their propaganda at work, but I also think this is somewhat reflected in some of the D.C. Fonatana novels that Orci and Cruzman used as source material.
Escort vessels?
Assign a small military vessel to every civilian mining vessel in the entire empire on a rotating basis to protect them from threats that may or may not actually manifest for half of them.
OR
Tell the miners to buy their own damn weapons and conduct their businesses like respectable adults and not schoolchildren who have to hold somebody's hand to cross the street.
I wonder which one the Romulans prefer?
OR
Tell the miners to buy their own damn weapons and conduct their businesses like respectable adults and not schoolchildren who have to hold somebody's hand to cross the street.
I wonder which one the Romulans prefer?
Presumably the surprise was that the Narada was able to get close enough to said base to somehow deploy a blackhole in its midst. It’s the mechanics of doing that that are the problem, not the fact a blackhole could destroy it once there. I mean because its, well black, they don’t "see" it coming? And if you set your blackhole up beforehand, how do you sustain it on route to the base? How big would it get with no mass to consume? Lots of issues we don't know the answers to. Of course if sneaking up on a base in ST is that easy, a blackhole would be unnecessary overkill. The missiles would have done the job.
The undeniable implication of Hugh Mann comment was that "Fleet battleships around 1900 absolutely would be able to comfortably defeat any such armed merchantman from our time period." Ie. Without gimmicks like red matter or commando tactics etc. Your comment was therefore wrong when you made it and you are now wasting our time trying to defend it. The fact is the way the Narada was destroyed had little to nothing to do with the relative merits of the two ships involved. Even the ability of Starfleet ships to destroy Nero’s missiles varied with the plot requirements and wasn’t a consistent feature.
I thought about it. The ship looks like nothing Scotty had seen, battleship of not. So no, not helpful. If anything he probably should have guessed it wasn't a battleship. As for the rest, its hard to see why you brought it up. It adds nothing to your argument and just demonstrates a point I would happily accept in principle but not in this discussion. But maybe your next point will ...
Sadly that’s incorrect. There's no way Pike could tell that and we don't even know it! Look at the size of the thing and with twenty five years to reproduce them he could have had thousands of missiles. There’s no reason to suppose otherwise that we, or the characters, know of. If anything the bottleneck appeared to be his launch capability. But even that possible "restriction" wouldn’t have helped the Enterprise given he could take out seven ships requiring at least one to two hits each. We know that "fire everything" looked like 20-30 missiles and that could have just been one salvo rather than this entire stock. Anyway you look at it, the Enterprise would have been toast at Vulcan or Earth, as far as anyone knew, if the plot was consistent.
It doesn't necessarily tell us any of that. The assumption is that so-called civilian weapon systems of Nero's time, including shields etc (why not?), "could" have been better than those of 125 years earlier. How do we or Pike know otherwise? If Kirk and Co had that info and had assumed they weren't, based on their current knowledge of such ships, they could have been truly stuffed if they had gone toe to toe with the Narada at Earth.
And like I said, they had records from the Kelvin to work most of that out had they looked, but even if they didn’t have that detail, it wouldn’t have mattered at all. You have yet to come up with something that would have made a difference to their decision making, or ours.
So you think that ignoring my previous explanation of why that wouldn’t have happened is the best way to rebut it eh? Makes me wonder why I bothered looking at the scene in question and timing events etc when all that’s needed is imagination and the willingness to ignore what the other person has just pointed out. But then to be fair, you are apparently relying on the artificially created problems associated with this new version of warp travel to allow Nero to spring his trap, which I'll address below.I saw that, but how did he know? A disturbance in the Force? Maybe the fleet had dropped out of warp further away and were approaching in normal space which, surprise, would make sense. Oh, a "simple mining vessel" can track the "warp signatures" of starships but can’t be seen itself? That whole business doesn’t sound like TOS to me. More like the worse possible combination of Star Trek and Star Wars. Arriving everywhere blind and vulnerable is certainly the best argument imaginable to have all ships at battle-stations whenever they come out of warp irrespective of their mission. And when you have even the slightest hint that all is not well, where is Pike’s excuse? He should have been court marshalled. But even ignoring such incompetence, if it takes between one and two minutes to get a flagship’s systems armed when you already have your shields etc up, it’s a wonder Starfleet has any ships left. If you put your shields up, why not arm your weapons at the same time, especially if they that that long? That whole thing is just ridiculous.
But, crazy as it is, it does explain how Nero destroyed the 47 Klingons. He could just put one or two hundred missiles in their path as they warped towards him.
So if the "Truman" asked "Hey guys... why are your shields up?" the answer would be "In this universe we can’t see where hell we're going so its standard bloody procedure. Don’t ask stupid questions!".
The writers seemed to have changed the dynamics of warp travel without realising it should change the tactics of ships using it. To be fair, they probably thought they were just copying TMP because it was more visually impressive than the TOS system. But that's just another example of how they haven't taken Star Trek even remotely seriously. And yes, I'll take the standard excuse as read.
In summary, the idea that the Enterprise could have taken on the Narada in straight combat is only a possibility (certainly not a given) if we assume it had pitifully slow defence systems or incompetent leadership on its first encounter with the Narada. Either of those argues against success of course. Catch 22 really.
It will come as no surprise either that I am not prepared to concede that point yet.
Starfleet gets the message about Vuclan and "immediately" sends ships. No one seems to know how long it takes to get there, but it might only be two hours all up. That could be how long it takes to drill to a planet's centre? Actually Amanda walks to the balcony and we don't know if that’s the first time she did so. Others may have seen the drilling earlier. Her action seems to take place roughly half way through the rescue fleets trip. I do accept you raise a good point though. And if the case it does add credence to the idea Nero somehow got rid of the rest of Starfleet. At least it fits together even if it doesn't seem likely to me.While doctrinal choices and unseen events in the movie may be difficult to figure out, treknology issues like this are fairly easily put in context. The inability to see a starship close to a planet until one is practically on top of it is a consistent feature of Trek from TOS on - as is the fact that warp signatures are easily detected at a distance whereas even structures of immense size are darn difficult to see when they don't have a warp signature.
There is nothing surprising about the ability to see when a formation of ships is approaching at warp. About the only time this did not happen was in "The Search II" where Jake and Nog were surprised by the cavalry approaching, and only because they had wrecked their own craft beyond the ability to give automated warning.
Yet here we have consistency with preceding Trek, too. Nobody ever volunteers to come out of warp with shields up - so there must be a (so far secret) treknological or treknotactical reason for this. Yet scanning on local conditions, be they planetary environmental status or orbiting starships, is only effective deep insystem, or indeed at final planetary approach.
Ambushes happen in Trek. It's just that the ambushed probably can do touch-and-go if he feels intimidated but doesn't feel dead yet. And it usually takes some time to get a starship killed - a perfect ambush in "Errand of Mercy" barely dented Kirk's ship, for example.
Yet in STXI, something killed the Starfleet task force extremely rapidly, far faster than the Kelvin died. It's not just a matter of onscreen timing (the 40-second "handbrake" delay is subject to interpretations of cuts), but of the fact that all the wreckage is in a fantastically tight cluster. Apparently, the fleet did not maneuver at all, but either braked to a standstill or downwarped to a coherent formation with uniform velocity and vector. And since the debris field is static vs. the necessarily geostationary (that is, hovering) Narada, the former seems to be the case.
Is that consistent with precedent or technobabble? Well, when our heroes learn of trouble on a planet, they beam down on the very spot of trouble. Transporters are line-of-sight devices, unable to penetrate much rock and thus not used beyond horizons. So we can infer that ships are indeed in the habit of parking above trouble spots (perhaps this hovering or figure-eighting or whatnot is what is known as "standard orbit"?).
Now, Nero holds all the trump cards. He is hiding in low hovering orbit. He is at the very location that is drawing in the task force. He knows where to aim and when to fire. Hell, he may even have predeployed his ordnance, in the form of a field of explosives (mining ship, remember?), mere shrapnel (which evidently shreds starships, including the fully shielded Enterprise), or a drop of red matter (which hurts starships, although nowhere near as badly as it hurts planets when deployed deep underground). The two bad cards he's holding, his unyielding anchorage with a highly vulnerable anchor chain, don't matter much. He still consistently has the classic Star Trek drop on the enemy - only he has decisive weapons, rather than the Horatio Hornblower style nibble-to-death weaponry that counts as conventional weapons in Trek.
Pike did arm, again consistently with TOS (it takes about that time for Sulu to usually report "phasers ready", even if the TV show failed to show us how the little people press buttons, pull levers and insert charges). But the others not arming is pure TOS as well. Evidently, staying armed, or shielded, is detrimental to a starship.
It's a funny universe, really. You can't see beyond the horizon (unless what you're looking at sparkles like the smokestack of a struggling paddle-wheeler); you can't keep the powder in the cannons indefinitely; you can't keep the hammocks and water barrels on the railings for protection forever; you can't tell whether a fort has been taken or destroyed until you sail next to it; and the only real way to verify a telegram is to send somebody to look. It's so exotic it looks almost familiar...
Timo Saloniemi
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How close does it have to be? Seems like anywhere in orbit would do, especially if they're not trying to take out the whole planet. But even then, there's not much to stop Nero from sticking some red matter on a probe and firing it at the base from a million kilometers away. Klingons see this one lone object zipping towards it and assume it's a missile or a torpedo or something and immediately raise their shields... fat lot of good THAT will do them.
How big was the black hole that nearly swallowed the Enterprise, and how close together were the Klingon ships?
Sneaking up on ANY military base is relatively easy, especially if that base is close to a civilian population center. The hard part -- the part that requires sneaking -- is getting a WEAPON SYSTEM within attack range of the base before their defenses can respond.
This is one of the reasons why terrorists like to use suicide bombs. A guy runs up to a base with a hand grenade, he'll get shot and killed a hundred feet from the gate. Guy walks up empty handed and seemingly calm, he'll get a hell of a lot closer.
Commando tactics are par for the course in Starfleet; move the analogy a little farther back, and you find that the early 19th century warships would consider a boarding action as a natural followup to a cannon barrage, especially if the enemy ship can no longer maneuver. That is MUCH less common in modern times, but it's practically SOP in Star Trek.
It's basically Nelson's Victory vs. the Titanic with 50 Panzershrecks. Victory probably isn't going to blow the Titanic out of the water, but if Horatio Nelson gets a chance to lead a boarding action, you bet your ass he'd do it.
Does it EVER?
Neither did the Klingon D-7, but Scotty was able to reliably put Kirk down in a vacant hallway out of sight of any Romulans. Suffice to say, military vessels follow certain common design expectations that civilian vessels do not (the location of the bridge, for example).
It would be reasonable guess based on the civilian nature of the ship. It COULD be wrong if Narada had some advanced replicator technology that remained outside of Pikes (and our) perception, but in the end the assumption is vindicated since the Narada did, in fact, fire off the remainder of its arsenal trying to kill Spock.
The very simple step of arming their phasers BEFORE the Narada fired at them probably would have changed the entire dynamic of the engagement. Even Kelvin didn't have this advantage, and by the end of the film Enterprise demonstrated the ability to screen Narada's entire missile spread with concentrated phaser fire. It's likely they would have been able to do the same if those missiles were fired at THEM, and Nero would run out of missiles long before the Enterprise ran out of phaser power.
But again, there weren't in a position to KNOW this until after the Narada was already circling the drain.
Yes, they could have. IF they had been wrong. Circumstantial suggests they would not.
And the only two people on the entire ship who knew anything about the Narada were Pike and Kirk: Pike because he wrote a dissertation on it and Kirk because he READ it, and Kelvin's scans utterly failed to deduce either the true origin of the Narada nor the exact nature of its weaponry. Spock MIGHT have gotten something out of going back and reading Pike's dissertation if he had time (it does not appear that he did) but in the end they got less information from the Kelvin's sensor logs than they did from fifteen seconds of conversation with Nero.
I didn't ignore it at all. You said "They were plenty ready. Maybe TOO ready." The section you're replying to is in reference to the fleet that was destroyed over Vulcan, which was in NO WAY prepared to defend itself from a conventional attack, let alone the decidedly unconventional attacks used by the Narada. Perhaps you were talking about something else and were too busy being witty to make that clear?
Sensors. Duh.
It's easy to track an object moving at warp. Hell, that's one of the major plot points of First Contact: the Vulcans were only able to detect the Phoenix because it was at warp, and failed to detect the Enterprise-E because it wasn't. This simple axiom is true even of cloaked vessels, which have to run slower than normal or their engines will give them away even though the cloak. Hell, even as early as TOS we have the Romulans AND the Enterprise both stopping their engines on occasion as a way to avoid detection from the other's sensors.
Anyway, why would you even debate that issue? A space ship moving through space with its engines blazing is going to be more visible than a ship that is stationary, engines cold. It's intuitive and actually pretty well established in Star Trek.
Maybe, maybe not. More importantly, though, NONE of them thought they were warping into a combat situation, so the procedures are a bit different.
Vulcan, FYI, was NOT viewed as a potential combat situation until Kirk stomped onto the bridge. It is, in fact, a major Federation member that hasn't been under threat of hostile action... well, ever. It's not as if they were dropping out of warp at an uncharted planet with who knows what waiting for them.
"Pitifully slow" doesn't qualify here, since those defenses were not even ACTIVE when the Narada opened fire on them. More importantly, do not confuse competence with omniscience. There are a lot of things Starship commanders are expected to be prepared for, but Romulans-out-of-fucking-nowhere generally isn't one of them (just ask Commander Hansen).
Doesn’t anyone shoot first and ask question later anymore? Since you put the base on a moon I imagined there would be a damned big exclusion zone plus defensive stations further out. But yes, fix bases would be the best case for black hole attack, but then again if you can’t intercept "probes" at a reasonable distance then bases would be pretty pointless things. I guess this is why they put them on moons so as to keep unauthorised traffic out.
Yeah I should have known better than to ask that given the "all things to all men" nature of red matter.
Never the less that was not the implication of Hugh’s comment and therefore not what happened to the Narada. However I do apologise for being short with you.
So Scotty saw a ship that looked nothing like a warship but still thought it would have the internal arrangement of one? I don’t think so, and Scotty’s comment tells us he was guessing and therefore already knew that either it wasn’t military or didn’t have normal military internals. Thus knowing it's status wouldn’t have helped.
As I pointed out "fire everything" could just mean what was currently in his launch tubes. Those have to be limited and seem to take time to reload. But even twenty or thirty should have finished the Enterprise, or so everyone would have thought, even if they had known the exact number. I’m still looking for info that should have meaningfully changed how they would have reacted
So you are saying it was Pike’s incompetence, because arming weapons should have been done anyway. If so, then it wouldn’t have been done no matter what they knew. The other problem is they got a good look at the capabilities of the missiles at Vulcan and they knew what their own systems could do, yet no-one even questioned the ability of those missile to kill them in a straight fight. No-one even ran a simulation etc, or if the did they weren’t encouraging. The 100% success ratio at the end was the kind of rabbit out of a hat result that was going on all movie, irrespective of what made sense or what we and the characters had been lead to believe.
I don’t you what you are referring to. Modern hunter’s can buy guns that are better than soldiers had 125 years ago (especially in the US). So chances are the info you want them to have would be more of a danger than a help.
But the scans (and implications based on them) they took away (and they must have had something) could have been helpful and would have been in every starship’s database.
No, actually I made the mistake initially missing the fact that Nero knew when the fleet would arrive and that, when compounded by the apparent ignorance of anything in front of them, visually at least, would indeed make them as vulnerable as you described. Before that I thought they would have as much time as the Enterprise did, which was oodles given what Pike knew and saw. On top of that (and to be perfectly honest) I’ve misplaced the passage I thought you were ignoring!
Oh well, it was wrong anyway. But even so there doesn’t appear to be anything unconventional about the Narada’s methods, just the overwhelming power of its weapons. Unless you mean supposed decoying methods.Well yes, fair enough. The writers may have turned the tradition "warp drive" in to a kind of "warp jump", where the ships are now blind and defenceless but still able to be tracked, which wouldn’t likely be the case with jump dirves. It just seems a bit too plot driven and unfair to me despite Timo’s claims that all is normal. I don't agree.
I accept your comments about starships engines in the traditional ST universe but has anyone ever seen a ship come out of warp like the Enterprise in ST09 did? It turns starship in to submarines who might be able to detect another ship at warp, or not, but seem to know nothing about the rest of the normal universe. Has this issue been discussed here before?
Its closer to that than you seem to think. And my point is they should have been more cautious, especially given the way warp drives now work. Worse, they couldn’t even contact Vulcan to get more details. That doesn’t ring alarm bells? Obviously more that "seismic disturbances". The strange jamming signal or radiation coming from Vulcan was no big deal? BTW, why didn’t that (Nero’s drill) stand out like a beacon on ship sensors? They could detect a lack of communications apparently. The drill was working during that time of course.
By "pitifully slow" I meant in becoming active. What harm is there in taking the precaution of arming your systems the minute you see a ship’s graveyard where empty space should be? Or if you are too shocked, when you first see the ship that probably did the deed? Instead Pike was too busy telling his pilot how to suck eggs. Has he never heard of delegation and concentrating on the big picture?
Timo, sorry for not responding to your comments directly but some are hopefully covered in the comments I have made above.
Only on Voyager.
Pretty much. It can swallow an entire planet or punch a hole through time and space, so it can probably eat up a Klingon space dock if Nero needed it to.
More or less. For example, if Narada had been a warship, we would have expected it to have a bridge or a command center built into one of its "tentacle" protrusions, way out at the front of everything amid sensor arrays and some weapon emplacements. The cavernous shuttlebay would be adjacent to a main cargo bay which in turn would be close to the ship's engineering section, and smaller cargo holds would be near the external areas of the ship with access to loading doors.
But Narada is a mining vessel, so it doesn't really have a proper cargo hold as such, they just stack their consumables wherever they can find room. The big cavernous bay in the middle of the ship is a humongous ore refinery, those large spaces near the outer hull are workspaces for the crew (probably the ONLY workspaces for the crew) and the bridge is tucked into the very rear of the ship, practically right on top of its engine core.
Says you. Christopher Pike is a trained line officer with years of experience and a clear understanding of Starfleet's operating procedures... and he still can only make decisions based on what he knows. It again remains the fact that by the time the Enterprise knew it was under attack, Nero's missiles were already on the fly.
That's just it, all they got was a LOOK.
By all accounts, those missiles LOOKED really impressive, so much so that Starfleet continued to doubt their chances right up until the very end of the movie (Kirk orders Sulu to fire on the Narada "If you think you have a tactical advantage." Sulu never recognizes such an advantage, even when the Narada is fully distracted fighting the Jellyfish, which suggests that everyone on the bridge still assumed the Narada was a highly formidable combatant).
The characters had been lead to believe that Nero's missiles were extremely powerful and extremely sophisticated. In the end, they were only half right.
It occurs to me, however, that the first time Enterprise saw the MANEUVERING capabilities of those missiles was when they were fired at the Jellyfish. Prior to this they were seen only firing at starships -- Enterprise, in particular -- and it wasn't known to what extent the missiles were capable of evading phaser fire. Seeing them track and fail to hit the Jellyfish might have given Sulu and/or Chekov one of those "Wait... I can do this!" moments.
Because knowing you're up against a hunter with an advanced futuristic weapon means you're not up against a SOLDIER with an advanced futuristic weapon. That bit of info can make a world of difference when considering your tactical situation.
Why would they have been in every starships database? After Kelvin rammed it, the Narada was never seen or heard from again; after twenty years of inactivity, they probably never expected it to make another appearance.
More to the point: without knowing what information the Kelvin actually collected on the Narada, those scans could very well BE meaningless and yield useful information only when someone really smart spends a few months analyzing the crap out of them for his dissertation.
The decoy thing I'd considered before. Seems the most likely explanation IMO, especially if you consider that Nero would want to sucker punch Starfleet by hitting them when they were least expecting it instead of trying to sneak up on them with his bigass mining vessel and risk getting shot down in a stand up fight. That suggests -- at least to me -- that Nero's estimate of Narada's capabilities was considerably lower than those of his enemies (as a second datapoint, there's the need to capture Pike; Sulu assumed that Nero wanted "details about Earth's defenses," but Nero actually wanted access codes to disable them altogether).
Also, I don't think it's his tactics that are unconventional, but his weapons. Unconventional in this sense because the missiles do not behave like missiles OR photon torpedoes (no glowy fireball fields around them), and are thus "unconventional" in the same sense as, say, a truck bomb or an IED strapped to a door.
Not Star Trek, but there is this. Granted, the Mass Effect universe seems to work in the opposite direction: a ship traveling FTL cannot be tracked, but it can still (more or less) see objects directly in front of it. Star Trek is a bit different because they have those convenient FTL sensors that can tack objects in realtime several light hours away (subspace radar or some such) which means a ship traveling at warp CAN be tracked, even if it can't see anything except what's directly in front of it.
I think that the Enterprise WAS able to scan the fleet and identify their locations, but couldn't tell their condition. Similar thing happens in "Best of Both Worlds" where Worf can detect several vessels ahead of them but they can't tell they're the dead hulks of the fleet until they make visual contact.
Totally unrelated, but more and more I've gotten the feeling that STXI is drawing almost as much inspiration from Mass Effect as it is from Star Trek itself. There's more than just the fact that the interior of the Narada (actually, the exterior too) bears a suspicious resemblance to the Collector Vessel, but there's also this scene. Frankly, I think Star Trek becoming more like Mass Effect wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
It DID ring alarm bells. Specifically, the Red Alert that Pike ordered right before they dropped out of warp. There's rather broad line between "Shields up, let's exercise caution" and "Arm all weapons and be ready to fire!" Especially for Starfleet, which is already notorious for refraining from actually arming their weapons until AFTER someone has already fired on them.
Delegation of responsibilities? That's what the first officer is for, isn't it?
Fully granting that somebody dropped the ball on their battle readiness thing (Kirk would probably agree, and remedy the situation with a series of battle drills). But there's a difference between a reasonable expectation of how they would respond and an ideal expectation for how they ought to. Starfleet officers do not always respond perfectly, especially if half of those officers are fresh out of the academy with no experience to speak of.
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I’m surprised the new way warp travel is depicted in ST09 hasn’t apparently been discussed more. It is a major departure from what has happened previously especially in TOS. And there would definitely be implications for the ships using it. Given that ships don’t approach star system anymore but now instantaneously appear in norm space (rather like a jump drive), it would be stupid in the extreme not to have your shields up as a matter of course. The old system didn’t require that, because you could see what was in front of you all the way in. Sure, there could still be ambushes but the new system is like building an ambush in to the operation of the drive. The other obvious problem is that you would never want to "jump" into a close planetary orbit with a drive like that for exactly the kind of reason the Enterprise experienced. There is too much chance of hitting other traffic.
Now newtype_alpha suggested that perhaps the Enterprise could "see" the rest of the fleet with some kind of FTL radar, but not be able to tell their status. Unfortunately if that were the case, why did Pike decide to emerge in the middle of them? No, it looks like in order to get a fun visual, Star Trek now uses a drive more akin to Star Wars, where you effectively jump from on place to another without knowing much about what happens in between. Strangely you can still hear communications. Perhaps it’s a "hybridrive"?
I believe Tin Man was visible at least half an AU (probably a lot more) so I think unless a ship was hiding behind a planet they could probably be detected at significant distances even when not a warp. What’s more I don’t think the Klingon ambush in "Errand of Mercy" was a serious example. The ship was a pushover apparently.
You may have thought the bridge would have been build into one of the "tentacles" but I wouldn’t and why have so many that all looked the same if it had been a warship? Camouflage? Weren’t their any number of things that told them it wasn’t a warship anyway? I’m pretty sure they knew that. Of course even if your "this will be close to that" business is correct, it still doesn’t tell Scotty where any particular section will be, much less where a deck in that section is, hence his comment. The ship is basically oval. Its components could be placed anywhere even if you know which ones it’s likely to have.
Actually Spock let Pike know the Narada had a missile lock before they were launched and Pike had enough time to muck about with the shields before they got underway. What he still didn’t say was "Get those damn weapons online" despite the fact shields would be more effective and more urgent against phasers, whereas he knew he was being attacked with missiles which could be destroyed with phasers. All this ignores the fact all defensive systems should have been online already.
When you put the data from those missiles through your tactical simulator you get exactly the same result you would have if you had actually fired real phasers at them. A LOOK (ie a comprehensive data scan) was all they should have needed. If they still thought the Narada was too tough, that’s because it was. There was no talk about the missiles not looking that hard to hit but what else might they have? They obviously knew from the Kelvin and from interrogating the black boxe(s) from the rescue fleet that missiles were all it appeared to have. To be honest I should have thought you would be in a better position that me to point out all this bread and butter stuff.
If that was truly the case simulations would have made it painfully obvious. Well except in a pure action adventure film perhaps.
Hmmm, well, just in case you aren’t joking, maybe I had better say that, as mentioned, their simulations would have told them how good the missiles would be at avoiding phaser fire. Further, in the movie I saw the missiles tracked and failed to hit the Jellyfish because, and this is the key part, they were blown out of space, rightly or wrongly. Then too, I’m pretty sure Chekov would have had an "Are you kidding me? That’s a job for our automated fire control" moment.
A) Neither would make a difference if their weapons are good enough and B) Did Nero and Co look or act like soliders in front of Pike or Kirk etc? Did the ship look like a warship? Did it act like one? I’ll save you some typing: No. I'm pretty sure they already knew the Narada wasn't military anyway (or strongly suspected it). Nero even said he wasn't linked to the Empire and the other things he said to nuSpock etc. When you add everything up its pretty obvious really.
A) Because there is room for just about everything and B) more importantly that encounter changed the shape history.
And are you really trying to tell me everyone whose job it was wouldn’t have been pouring over everything they could get their hands on about that incident and have it analysed six ways to Sunday. Oh and see "B" above.
Unfortunately you’re using the assumption of his alleged use of decoys as evidence of his lack of power which explains why he would use decoys which is evidence of how feeble he really is which … .
Moreover Nero never gave the impression, even to his own crew, that he had any doubt about the Narada’s capabilities. And I wonder what he would have done re access codes if he hadn't got them from Pike? Its not as though he planned on getting them from any of the ships that reached Vulcan and he didn't know the Enterprise was coming. He told his crew to destroy it. He didn't ask if it was the Enterprise first.
And yes, those "glowy fireballs fields" do make all the difference.
Though I suspect they are similar in other ways or doesn't ST have guided missiles (the film refers to them as torpedos). Thing is the Enterprise couldn’t see anything directly in front of it until it emerged from hyperspace, oops, I mean dropped out of warp. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, but it does make for a better visual than small dots becoming the hulks of the fleet and in that case there’d be even less excuse for Pike not to arm weapons.
Well actually I meant contact the Vulcan planet/system but there is the "contact their fleet" thing too. When Earth couldn't contact Vulcan for more details etc the problem had to be more than what was reported. Therefore the need for caution. Besides, I pointed out a number of other prompts for raising shields. Also if phasers can be used for defensive purposes (which the can against missiles) then their arming is more than justified. Although I would have thought there should have been dedicated point defence phasers for that which would come online when the shields did but who knows.
Delegation of responsibilities? That's what the first officer is for, isn't it?
Fully granting that somebody dropped the ball on their battle readiness thing (Kirk would probably agree, and remedy the situation with a series of battle drills). But there's a difference between a reasonable expectation of how they would respond and an ideal expectation for how they ought to. Starfleet officers do not always respond perfectly, especially if half of those officers are fresh out of the academy with no experience to speak of.
Thanks for that, however it wasn’t the cadets who dropped the ball. They appeared to do what Pike asked them to. Pike was steering the ship when he should have been concentration on how he was going to deal with whatever did the damage to the fleet. He also knew that if it was the Narada, it did tend to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all.
I think most people just feel there is no difference. Ships launch to FTL speeds in a flash of light (in all Trek incarnations but TOS, which told when it couldn't show), proceed to a destination at plot speed without en-route events, drop out of warp, and Spock spends a few seconds coming up with a description of what lies at the destination.
Ships did that when they were in a hurry to reach a planet (say, "Schitzoid Man"). It's just that old-style Trek seldom featured any hurry. Nothing about STXI suggests the ships couldn't do a more sedate approach if they for some reason needed to. And nothing suggests they couldn't scan what lies ahead in the routine Star Trek fashion: Pike's lieutenants can scan Vulcan for communications and tell him where the Starfleet ships last were before they disappeared (i.e. became debris clouds).
But that's what the Narada explicitly was doing. Basically, she had landed on Vulcan, or to within a hundred kilometers or so of the surface at any rate. Tin Man was floating in interplanetary space with a star as a backdrop...
It's consistent that a vessel or a shrapnel cloud on low orbit would only be observable when one gets really, really close; a shrapnel cloud in deep space, such as in "Conspiracy", is a wholly different challenge to sensors, and apparently detectable at a distance.
All Klingon ships were. Only superbeings had first-shot lethality, and they wisely chose to save it for a rainy day and preferred to toy with our heroes.
Nobody says so, at any rate. Or otherwise indicates this. And the fact remains that most of their educated guesses were dead wrong, and only Kirk had serendipity or predestination on his side where expertise fell short.
But the plotline lays out a string of excuses for why this would not be the case. Kirk's advice is taken too late; Pike has no time to supervise whether his orders are being followed; and Pike's crew is incompetent, consisting mostly of the likes of the cupcake-hater - even his commissioned officers leave the handbrake on or fumble the intercom.
A lot is done to artificially give Nero an advantage here, in the name of playing up the threat in the first half of the movie, as is customary. This thus is consistent with Nero being fundamentally weak, regardless of whether this was writer intent or not.
That would be a dangerous assumption to make about a warship. And the default assumption would be that this is a warship, so of course it must have multilayered, balanced defenses like any combat vessel. Except it turns out the ship's shields are a joke, there are no defenses against small and maneuverable threats, and fire control cannot even notice let alone target the most pertinent such threats.
As for these "simulations", they have never been part of the Star Trek universe, and probably rightly so: the enemy is always one step ahead of you anyway, with secret weapons and surprise tactics and alien ways of thinking. I find it extremely far-fetched that any sort of "tactical data" would have survived of the Kelvin encounter, and that any sort of credible simulation could be based on it.
Remember that Chris Pike is the leading expert on all things Narada, and yet he demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding and a state of unpreparedness. It's sheer fallacy to think that the Kelvin encounter ever was anything more than an odd footnote in Starfleet history or in any way influenced Starfleet thinking or technology, or that our misfit bunch of heroes had sufficient foreknowledge and skill to compensate for the lack of reaction time they faced at Vulcan. Starfleet would know way more about, say, the Crystalline Entity (as the ship encountering it returned intact) or the Dominion Battleship (as it falsely believed that its conventional intelligence-gathering means were in action) than about some random threat that comes, wins and disappears.
Good question. Since it is his modus operandi to capture and interrogate people he thinks are in the know, one would expect that he interrogated somebody about Vulcan's defenses before attacking that world, and likewise had a prisoner for his designs on Earth ready, when fate handed him a more valuable prisoner (a flagship CO) and he could dump the first one...
Or perhaps for haste, if the call for help was suitably formulated. It does sound as if it were a ruse rather than a real thing - but even if Vulcans did hail Earth for real, Nero would have been in a position to chop that message at a point he chose, with his superior jammer (read: incredibly noisy piece of industrial machinery).
Regarding the arming of phasers, Pike did that - or at least he felt he didn't need to specifically order any arming when he subsequently said "prepare to fire all weapons"... The reason why he didn't try to shoot down Nero's first missile must be sought elsewhere.
a) Pike was too slow to come to grips with the events?
b) the cadet crew and the unfinished ship added up to an inability to fire phasers, except ineffectively and as a last resort - a fairly realistic scenario in today's terms?
c) Shooting down incoming missiles calls for far more more breathing room and reaction time - nicely consistent with the rest of Star Trek, such as ST2:TWoK, and with the fact that the Kelvin could not protect herself and could only shoot down missiles that had already flown past her?
Timo Saloniemi
He didn't. He dropped out of warp BEHIND them and was caught off guard by the fact that one of those ships had been propelled backwards by the impact of Nero's missiles.
Another thing that needs to be considered here is that those ships probably weren't totally destroyed by Nero's barrage. Suffice to say they were in horrible shape when Enterprise dropped out of warp, but considering the actual designs of those ships it appears Nero managed to blow off their engines and thoroughly disable them. At least one of those ships was probably still partially intact and inhabited, but merely dead in space with no power to speak of.
Well, the same thing happened in Enterprise when NX-01 was warping towards a Vulcan ship that was supposed to be backing them up but dropped to impulse only to discover that the Vulcan ship was actually adrift in space, having been shot to hell by the Tholians.
This is, again, not always or even usually the case. First Contact is a major datapoint, since the Vulcans could not detect the Phoenix OR the Enterprise while neither of them were at warp.
Warp signatures are easy to track, but individual vessels in space are not, unless you know exactly where they are ahead of time.
Who knows? I'm talking about design conventions and assumptions based on them. Narada would be a very weird ship in that regard, IF it was a warship. As a mining vessel, however, its design makes a lot more sense.
I'm absolutely positive they didn't. How do I know? The first thing Pike says to Nero is "You've declared war against the Federation. Withdraw, and we'll arrange a conference with Romulan leadership at a neutral location..."
No one in Starfleet knows more about Narada than Christopher Pike, and even HE assumes the Narada must be a Romulan warship.
I doubt Scotty would have blindly beamed them into the ship without knowing where he was sending them. Presumably he was able to scan the interior and identify a broad open space in the right location for what would -- IF it had been a warship -- be a cargo bay.
But not enough time to arm the phasers, which would have required more time than he had to power up and acquire a target.
He knew nothing of the kind. Again, they didn't find that out until their last engagement with the Narada. Pike probably assumed that Narada's missiles would be able to evade most of his phaser fire (as they did against Kelvin) and doubled up on his shields to give himself more time to fight back.
And it is exactly what they did not get as far as Nero's missiles. They might have gotten better data on the Narada from the Kelvin's scans (during the standoff with Robau aboard) but of the missiles they knew nothing except for their power and some guesses about their accuracy.
Simulators aren't magic, dude. Computers can only process the information you give them: Garbage in, garbage out. If you feed them wrong or incomplete data you will get wrong or incomplete results.
IF they knew anything about the missiles other than their speed and power. You can't simulate a black box quantity like that and expect real-world results.
There's also the question of whether or not they had time to setup and run any simulations, and the question of whether or not the results of those simulations would have been useful to a crew of raw cadets who haven't even graduated from the academy yet.
Not the first salvo. Spock pulled some evasive maneuvers to give himself time to jump to warp and avoid their range. That would have given them a much better look at the actual performances of those missiles, at least enough for Sulu to come up with an idea.
A) It makes a pretty huge difference if YOUR weapons are inferior. You'll take any advantage you can get.
B) The first clue they got that Nero wasn't a soldier was when he told them "we stand apart" from the Romulan Empire. That conversation gave them a strong clue to Nero's motivations, but not enough to form a definite conclusion.
Again, PIKE thought they were, and he is the only one on the entire ship who could have known better. Afterwards there was surely some speculation, but only Spock and Kirk were anything but clueless.
A) Just because there's room for it doesn't mean it's in the database. References to the encounter would be indexed, of course, but the detailed information may not be.
B) THEY didn't know it changed the shape of history. From their perspective, it's just another of those weird random incidents that resulted in the loss of a starship. Probably filed away in the same category with the Daedalus, the Horizon and NX-02.
I'm sure they did. None of them, however, were on board the Enterprise.
Now did he give the impression that he expected to be able to tackle the entire fleet in a stand-up fight. There's the obvious implication, though, that WITHOUT the access codes he would not have been able to survive long enough to deploy red matter on Earth.
Doesn't seem to have mattered. He would have to get them from SOMEONE, sooner or later, but since he'd decided to spare the Enterprise so Spock could watch, Captain Pike would be a choice of convenience.
OTOH, Nero doesn't strike me as the kind of person who would have thought that far ahead. HAD he destroyed the Enterprise, it would have occurred to him a few hours later that Starfleet's border protection grids would be a problem and he probably should have spared one of them to get data from its crew. OR he would have forgotten about the grids entirely and the Narada would be shot to pieces as it passed Jupiter Station.
Suffice to say, Narada's torpedoes are fundamentally different from the weapons used by just about everyone else in the 23rd or 24th century. Starfleet calls them torpedoes, but Spock's ship -- which is contemporary with Narada -- calls them missiles. The latter is probably more true, especially if you consider the possibility these are the same types of weapons mounted on the Batris (which were, at the time, referred to as "rockets").And yes, those "glowy fireballs fields" do make all the difference.
Yes, and they WERE cautious. In the real world, there are a million other things that can go wrong to cause a communication blackout; "surprise attack from time-traveling Romulans" is FAR from the most likely.
Consider that if Vulcan had been under attack by, say, the Suliban Cabal or a rogue Andorian faction, Pike's response would have been perfectly appropriate.
It's not known yet if they can be used against normal torpedoes; future movies will tell.
Is there any specific reason Pike should have expected to be attacked by missiles or torpedoes?
And while Pike was doing that, who would be steering the ship? Why, that would be Sulu, a last-minute replacement for the ship's regular (and apparently far more experienced) helmsman.
Pike's job is to get the ship out of danger as quickly as possible. His job is NOT to step back and brainstorm while the crew takes control of the ship and all its duties (that is, in fact, the job of the science officer).
Only one minor point of disagreement there:
Nero prepared for the destruction of Vulcan for years. He executed a plan that appeared to depend quite a bit on timing. Perhaps he never expected to pull it off, and for that reason did not particularly plan for a next step - but if he did, he'd probably not do something elaborately different from his first attack. If the first attack worked, then an identical second one would probably work as well (thinks a miner, even if a soldier might disagree); if it didn't, the extra plans would be wasted.
Which sort of makes it a "default" step for Nero to kidnap further defense code holders, and not a clever and smart step that indicates his strategic genius and forward thinking.
Timo Saloniemi
Yet he seemed to be exactly the sort of person to stick to a pattern. And his pattern seemed to work all right in the Vulcan case - while the interrogation of individuals like Pike would both fit the pattern from the Kelvin case and provide at least some sort of an explanation to how things did work all right, despite all the assumed defenses. (And yes, we really, really need such an explanation!)
Nero prepared for the destruction of Vulcan for years. He executed a plan that appeared to depend quite a bit on timing. Perhaps he never expected to pull it off, and for that reason did not particularly plan for a next step - but if he did, he'd probably not do something elaborately different from his first attack. If the first attack worked, then an identical second one would probably work as well (thinks a miner, even if a soldier might disagree); if it didn't, the extra plans would be wasted.
Which sort of makes it a "default" step for Nero to kidnap further defense code holders, and not a clever and smart step that indicates his strategic genius and forward thinking.
Timo Saloniemi
The Romulans may make a habit of building their mining ships with heavy armour and shielding, the offensive capabilities seem to be limited to missiles as we never saw anything resembling disruptor fire which would be what defensive weapons you would expect.
Ignoring the Borg upgrades suggested in the comic I take the ships offensive capability to be repurposed exposives meant for heavy mining of asteroids, moons etc just as the drill was. These could be all that would be needed to destroy ships of the the eras shown in the film and possibly even the time it came from.
As for tactics I think his plan was simply to use the red matter and destroy every Federation planet he could and blast anything that tried to get in his way until he was done or someone beat him.
He seemed intelligent but due to his background used tactics which rely on brute strength!
Kidnapping someone for defense codes was obviously not a part of the original plan and only came about as he decided not to destroy the Enterprise, so he took the opportunity to remove the ships Captain and get something he could use. What he wouldnt have expected is that Pike would use it to his advantage as well as Kirk and Spock being able to outsmart him later.
Ignoring the Borg upgrades suggested in the comic I take the ships offensive capability to be repurposed exposives meant for heavy mining of asteroids, moons etc just as the drill was. These could be all that would be needed to destroy ships of the the eras shown in the film and possibly even the time it came from.
As for tactics I think his plan was simply to use the red matter and destroy every Federation planet he could and blast anything that tried to get in his way until he was done or someone beat him.
He seemed intelligent but due to his background used tactics which rely on brute strength!
Kidnapping someone for defense codes was obviously not a part of the original plan and only came about as he decided not to destroy the Enterprise, so he took the opportunity to remove the ships Captain and get something he could use. What he wouldnt have expected is that Pike would use it to his advantage as well as Kirk and Spock being able to outsmart him later.
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