Romulan mining vessels.

[Timo]

I take the ships offensive capability to be repurposed exposives meant for heavy mining of asteroids, moons etc just as the drill was.

Indeed, even the comic shows mining charges being used as weapons (albeit with them beamed aboard unsuspecting UFP ships), and apparently attempts a graphical likeness with the missiles we see.

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.

There is one interesting nuance there. He couldn't bring his wife back - tampering with time more than a century before the events would probably lead to the wife being erased from history no matter what. But he did claim to Pike that he had "prevented genocide". He certainly hadn't accomplished that by destroying Vulcan. But he could accomplish this by using his red matter against the star that would in another timeline consume Romulus, and he could well have done so before launching his campaign against Vulcan and possible other worlds.

For all we know, it was the star of that Klingon prison planet that Nero needed to kill with red matter in order to prevent the genocide... We know that the killing of planets is a deadly threat to starships in the vicinity (or at least Spock seemed to think so), so the killing of stars might mean destruction to a nearby armada of Klingon warships, too.

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

As said, he could already have had some other victim to interrogate. Although he seemed to want them to come aboard via shuttle, even in the teaser where transporters weren't being jammed by the drill. Perhaps he was so accustomed to transporters not working that this influenced his habits? A victim could not have been secured via shuttle in the short time available on Vulcan orbit.

The thing is, though, without secret codes and whatnot, it should not have been possible for him to deploy his extremely vulnerable drill anywhere. He would have to eliminate all systematic and centralized defenses, something he could perhaps do by using the codes to send out shutdown orders, orders for one defense to fire at another, orders for defenses to engage false targets, or outright destructive software weapons. He would also have to eliminate all sporadic and impromptu defenses, though, as we saw that even the weakest handgun could destroy his drill. It's a whopper to swallow already, and "Nero has the codes" is something of a minimum requirement for plausibility here.

What he wouldnt have expected is that Pike would use it to his advantage

Which again shows that he isn't much of a military tactician, nor really a sneaky civilian bastard, even, but rather just a decent regular guy with an obsession.

It also shows his ship lacked even rudimentary defensive sensors, as he couldn't see the three brightly colored projectiles (one with an explosive signature, the sort that Spock's sensors sometimes were able to read in TOS) headed towards the drill. He couldn't even see them depart the shuttle! Now, does Pike's use of said attack tactic mean Pike realized Nero was no soldier and Nero's ship was no warship? Possibly so. Or possibly it was a desperation measure. Or perhaps the tactic would have worked against warships, too, in these circumstances of heavy jamming which Pike was very aware of.

(Incidentally, when Kirk and Sulu are yelling at Olsen to deploy his chute, and Olsen is yelling out of sheer adrenaline high, are the three still under communications silence? Or are they expecting Olsen to really hear their pleas?)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[UFO]

It is a major departure from what has happened previously especially in TOS.

I think most people just feel there is no difference.

Thats the strange bit because the difference is clearly night and day compared to what normally happened (although see my comments below re "Schitzoid Man").

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.

Yes, TMP started the flashy warp business, but I don't recall it every making a difference to the fact you could see the surrounding universe (though I could be thinking more of TOS) including other ships at warp and planets etc.

Given that ships don’t approach star system anymore but now instantaneously appear in norm space

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).

Thanks for that example. I doesn't actually show the same instant appearance effect (the planet actually moves slowly into shot from the left and under the saucer section. I will concede that stopping quickly form high warp could look like the effect we see in ST09 upon closer examination (the graphic before dropout didn’t look like space at warp to me, but apparently was supposed to be). Unfortunately something that effectively duplicates the effect of jumping blind into normal space has all the same problems of doing so. It is obvious that in that situation, and from what little they did know about what was going on at Vuclan, the Enterprise definitely did need to approach more slowly. And as I pointed out the fleet also had adequate reason for the same degree of caution (no communication with Vulcan etc).

But whether warp drive ships can do something similar or not, you would never want to do it into the orbit of a planet with even a modest amount of traffic. Moreover I have mentioned in my last post why it seemed as though the Enterprise couldn't tell the positions of the rest of the fleet.

unless a ship was hiding behind a planet

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...

The Narada and the Enterprise/rescue fleet are on the same side of Vulcan and should be visible to each other from a considerable distance if the Federation ships had approached at a sensible speed. That's before you take into consideration the size of the Narada, the lack of other traffic and the jamming and other emissions from its drill. I would have been obvious something was up.

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.

Well its consistent with your own assumption anyway. Besides, there were some ship sized pieces of reckage not just "shrapnel".

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.

My point is that SF would be inviting an ambush by jumping into unknown situations like that, not that ambushes aren't a problem. They certainly could be a problem if an opponent committed enough firepower.

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.

It's more than reasonable for Pike/Kirk to assume the Narada wasn't military for the reasons already given. As for their other guesses they were based on almost no information unlike all the clues they had concerning the Narada's civilian status. Scotty was guessing blind about the ship's layout, although that intended as a joke anyway.

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.

The excuses don't hold water. Even if nothing changed they had enough time to arm their weapons. But clearly Pike would have been wise to slow the ship (at warp) to make sure they weren't heading into the situation they actually did.

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 does not seem logical. And the question is whether Nero's threat was represented fairly in light of how easily the Enterprise was later able to destroy his missiles when it counted.

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.

They knew the missile would kill them. They had to prioritise and address what was in front of them. But even so they did have time to cover all bases if they hadn't been star gazing. Its not as though Pike should have been completely surprised at seeing the ship Kirk had just described. You believe the Narada's shields are a joke but what evidence is there for that bearing in mind the shields wouldn't cover the drill or can't be assumed to do so. Further at least a few of the missiles should have taken out the Jellyfish if the plot had played out reasonably.

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.

If you are not going to modernised Star Trek believably what is the point? As for tactical data, every shuttle should a have been receiving live tactical updates of the man sensors adn ship systems. It's not far-fetched. It would be incompent design not to given the kind of tech they should have available and it would be vital info to preserve at all costs.

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.

We don't know Kirk is the leading expert on the Narada. He just happened to remember reading Pike's disatation on it. But assuming he went further and studied all the data available maybe that's why he was so worried about attacking it head on? What's more something changed Starfleet considerably including the size and production date of the Enterprise. That, we know for certain. It is unreasonable to imagine those changes would happen in isolation. And there was no lack of reaction time, just a lack of reaction and reasonable precaution. If the shuttles got away everthing they collected got away, which explains why this universe change so much compared to the original timeline. Remember that it is only because of those changes that pretty much everyone's personel histories changed as well and allowed them to come together so much sooner (apparently). So your conclusions are contradicted by the basic premise and explanation for the events of the movie.

And I wonder what he would have done re access codes if he hadn't got them from Pike?

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...

So he already had the codes but decided to get them again from Pike? Well Ok. Maybe he needed confirmation but it doesn't sound that critical to his plan.

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.

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).

Yes haste. Lets rush into situations we don't have a clue about. That will help. Lets overlook that they should never have "jumped" to low Vulcan orbit in the first place and the problem of lack of further communication. The Enterprise got two, no, three warnings.

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?

Ah, the old this Trek is no worse than past Trek excuse? I don't think he should have had to arm defensive phaser fire control either. When the missiles came it it should have been automatic (modernising ST!) or at most one command is all that's needed. Clearly no one could shoot down missiles under manual control, not even if they are as slow as has been claimed. As for a) above, yes I agree.

I think the crew did as ordered but its kind of interesting that if you are going to blame crew failure for some of these problems, it becomes harder to believe Starfleet would put every last one of them back on the bridge!

For all we know, it was the star of that Klingon prison planet that Nero needed to kill with red matter in order to prevent the genocide... We know that the killing of planets is a deadly threat to starships in the vicinity (or at least Spock seemed to think so), so the killing of stars might mean destruction to a nearby armada of Klingon warships, too.

And the prison planet itself presumably, which then sent out a distress call about the warships but not the star or its own demise? Of course if the message was a fake by Nero ... but why? Starfleet might be very interested in that but certainly wouldn't react by sending most of its fleet to the boarder.　

It also shows his ship lacked even rudimentary defensive sensors, as he couldn't see the three brightly colored projectiles (one with an explosive signature, the sort that Spock's sensors sometimes were able to read in TOS) headed towards the drill. He couldn't even see them depart the shuttle! Now, does Pike's use of said attack tactic mean Pike realized Nero was no soldier and Nero's ship was no warship? Possibly so. Or possibly it was a desperation measure. Or perhaps the tactic would have worked against warships, too, in these circumstances of heavy jamming which Pike was very aware of.

Well Pike had reason to guess it wasn't a warship by then but I like your heavy jamming idea better. Though you would think the shuttle would be under visual observation and Nero could see anything falling out of it so ... ?

 

[UFO]

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.

Which would prove my point that he couldn’t tell where they were or which way they were going. They did seem to know the ships had emerged from warp however. If you are arguing that that happened to quickly to adjust his course, that also proves my other point about approaching more slowly. Besides, most of those ships seem to be going backwards (or as I believe, the Ent is going forward).And it looks more like they ended up in the middle of the debris field. A shot from in front shows quite a bit of crap behind them.

Warp signatures are easy to track, but individual vessels in space are not, unless you know exactly where they are ahead of time.

Its not as though they didn’t know where to look. All sensors must have been trained on Vulcan and the drill must have lit up the Narada like a beacon assuming that was necessary which I doubt.

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.

How far a way were the Vulcans at the time do we know. I thought they might be on the edge of the system at least.

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.

Well at least we agree that is one of a number of factors arguing against it being a warship.

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.

Sure, and as I said, once he heard Nero’s reply he probably guessed it wasn’t. But it didn’t change his reaction because he knew how powerful it was. What would Pike have done differently after coming out of warp at Vulcan if he had known it wasn’t a warship? Remember he could be pretty confident it was primarily armed with missile and he did nothing with that knowledge (see your question below).

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.

Scotty scanned the Narada but still couldn’t tell it wasn’t a warship (especially since at that stage it seemed pretty likely it wasn’t anyway)? Think how many "cargo bays" it must have had for a start!

But not enough time to arm the phasers, which would have required more time than he had to power up and acquire a target.

If you look at the video again you well see that there was. He only had to ask someone else to do that. "Arm phasers", there done. Should have been done earlier anyway. If you can’t ask for phasers and have them available within a few seconds you need better systems because no one will give you that kind of break.

he knew he was being attacked with missiles which could be destroyed with phasers.

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.

It's not a one or the other situation. Pike made no attempt to use phasers dispite knowing from the start the Narada had missiles and presumably knowing fire control was better than in the Kelvin's day.

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.

Maneuvers? You mean he turned around and went to warp before the missiles could reach him. Not exactly the missiles fault nor does it suggest they lost lock before he "jumped". Was the Enterpriese even close enough to see what happened? You have just finished claiming they can’t see starships at that range but can see missiles (well enough to get data on them)? A little consistency would the good. No, they got better data at Vulcan.

Now [Nor] 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.

That’s not an answer. There’s a lot of wiggle room between those extremes, but the film gives the impression he had already come close to doing just that against the Klingons, which is part of my argument. Unless we assume it’s subterfuge of course and at best that’s a hindsight theory and remains inconclusive. Nero came across Pike by accident even if we assume Timo’s alternative explanation.

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.

The interesting thing about all these extra explanations and assumptions that are necessary to support your convoluted theories is how they sometime conflict with each other. For example, on the one hand Nero is a mastermind of preplanning and misdirection in somehow getting Starfleet to send most of its ships to a system I have never heard of for reasons unknown (but probably really just an exercise). Then he decoyed the remaining ships at Earth to take them out of the picture when he later attached that planet. Otherwise it would be safer not to have them at Vulcan and BTW, is so contemptuous of them that he drilled his hole in Vulcan all the while. But when he does something that doesn’t quite fit, you come up with the ad hoc excuse that he doesn’t think that far ahead (?).

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.

A blackout from all likely sources just after a call for assistance (which in itself much have been a big deal or the Vulcans would have managed it themselves)? I don’t think so. Despite the number of coincidences in ST09 you can’t expect Starfleet to anticipate that that is one. BTW, I assume you mean the, the opponents you mentioned would not be a problem for eight Federation ships. Would they be a problem for the local Vulcan forces? But since SF expected to find a possible evacuation in effect (not to mention normal traffic), coming out of warp in low Vulcan orbit would never be 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?

Certainly. Kirk had just finished telling Pike he believed the ship was the same one that attacked the Kelvin and that ship was armed with missiles exclusively, as far as anyone could tell. Didn’t you say above that "No one in Starfleet knows more about Narada than Christopher Pike …"? Perhaps you should discuss that with Timo though. He thinks Kirk’s the expert.

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).

Thinking about what's on the other side of those wrecks is part of getting his ship out of danger.

No-one is going to put an inexperienced helmsman on the bridge of a flag under those cercumstances. Either Sulu was good enough or he wasn’t. The writer’s decided to have a "joke" at his expense. As someone else said, letting him manoverue the ship would have let him redeem himself but Pike makes him look like a monkey. As I said above, he is apparently good enough to be left on the bridge at film’s end. Is Kirk going to instruct Sulu whenever things get sticky and if so, who is going to instruct Kirk?

Pike’s job as Captain is to tell Sulu what he wants in generally terms and let him get on with doing it. If he has to pilot the ship too, well, the result should have been worse than what we actually saw. Spock didn’t seem to have much to contribute, perhaps because he knew little about what they were up against so it was down to Pike.

BTW guys, any replies to further posts will not be of this length (its getting out of control!), so you can take that into account when deciding how much effort to put into them, or not.

 

[Timo]

I don't recall it every making a difference to the fact you could see the surrounding universe

Indeed. Which is why it's consistent that our heroes can see the surrounding universe in STXI, too - they can tell the other ships have arrived at Vulcan (and subsequently disappeared), and they can hear local communications or absence thereof, without having to drop out of warp.

Actually, that's more awareness than we typically get in Star Trek. Especially considering that our STXI heroes were in more hurry than is typical for Star Trek.

the Enterprise definitely did need to approach more slowly.

Possibly the fleet needed to approach more slowly. Perhaps they did. But the Enterprise was already late from the party; Pike made a judgement call on how to act on Kirk's stunning revelation, and it was to get right there right now. It's not particularly un-Trek.

you would never want to do it into the orbit of a planet with even a modest amount of traffic

...Although you could do it safely enough if you weren't expecting Armageddon or the Spanish Inquisition: in normal conditions, every planet might well have a designated approach corridor and safe downwarping range for emergencies. Space is cheap and plentiful, after all.

If Nero knew where this emergency range was located, he could make his ambush all the more effective, of course. And it would also make sense for him to be drilling at a location that wasn't particularly well defended, that is, near the Sarek manor which in some universes at least is located in the hind end of nowhere - and for the designated downwarping range to also lie above such a "harmless" patch of real estate.

Alternately, Nero could tailor the emergency call to indicate a specific area of seismic disturbance (either the real one where he'd be drilling, or a suitable decoy) so that the ships would be instructed to approach a specific spot: "We have cleared the orbit for you, please exercise all due hast-"

The reason we can try and patch together a reasonable plotline out of all these illogical fragments we're presented with is clear: the fragments are given indirectly. We can't tell what Uhura really overheard, or what Vulcan supposedly told Earth, or what Pike wrote in his analysis of the teaser events. A string of assumptions is needed to stitch together a plot - but a string (or a dozen) of assumptions can be made because of the way the plot is structured.

The Narada and the Enterprise/rescue fleet are on the same side of Vulcan

...Indeed, at point blank ranges, and virtually touching the surface.

and should be visible to each other from a considerable distance if the Federation ships had approached at a sensible speed.

Not if they approached from behind the horizon. FWIW, the speculative safe downwarping range wouldn't be a spot directly between Earth and Vulcan, but a spot where a slightly delayed braking wouldn't send the ship plunging into Vulcan bedrock, i.e. the arriving ships would be on a tangential course and thus would need to clear the horizon to see the low-lying drilling platform.

the jamming and other emissions from its drill

Which negate themselves as they preclude localization or analysis. The ships came in expecting this sort of trouble, intent on finding out what it was and why it was causing the planet to shake. It would not have been a telltale sign of something being different from what they expected.

Well its consistent with your own assumption anyway. Besides, there were some ship sized pieces of reckage not just "shrapnel".

The inability to see such half-kilometer inert objects at a distance is well founded in TOS already; you need an energy signature or a clear background to find a dead starship before you are practically on top of her.

My point is that SF would be inviting an ambush by jumping into unknown situations like that, not that ambushes aren't a problem. They certainly could be a problem if an opponent committed enough firepower.

This assumes a) an opponent (which this particular force didn't count on) and b) the ability of the opponent to do damage from an ambush position (which never seemed to be a factor in TOS or TNG, and would hardly be one when the good guys are arriving in seven formidable starships). A single vessel might be worried about downwarping into crossfire, but that's not what we're seeing here.

The excuses don't hold water. Even if nothing changed they had enough time to arm their weapons. But clearly Pike would have been wise to slow the ship (at warp) to make sure they weren't heading into the situation they actually did. [/qujote]

The weapons did appear to be armed; it was only the firing response that we failed to see. But really... You are expecting to see a rapid firing response in Star Trek? That would be inconsistent! It always takes time, even with a trained crew (and we see Kirk extensively drilling his all-professional crew on the very matter in "Corbomite Maneuver"), and Pike's failure to fire amidst all the chaos isn't exceptional even if it's frustrating.

The old movie convention of the villains weakening as the plot progresses is actually fairly logical. Prepared heroes are more effective heroes!

You believe the Narada's shields are a joke but what evidence is there for that bearing in mind the shields wouldn't cover the drill or can't be assumed to do so.

Well, they can't even stop Kirk and Spock from transporting over... Which is the only job they could plausibly be doing halfway decently at that point of the movie, as we have already seen they aren't stopping rammings or protecting the drill.

As for tactical data, every shuttle should a have been receiving live tactical updates of the man sensors adn ship systems. It's not far-fetched.

But it's not Star Trek, either. If automation like that did exist, the whole idea of crewed starships would be suspect.

What's more something changed Starfleet considerably including the size and production date of the Enterprise. That, we know for certain.

Nope. All we know is that a different ship received the name Enterprise.

Pike's new command did not differ from the standard, pre-Narada Starfleet stock in any observable way other than color of surface finish. We can't tell if the color was changed as a "response" to Nero's original appearance, but that doesn't appear very likely...

If the shuttles got away everthing they collected got away, which explains why this universe change so much compared to the original timeline.

Except that nothing has changed save for the color and cut of ships and uniforms. If anything, Pike feels Starfleet is more complacent than ever. Unless that's just the skilled drafter's way of luring in gullible young men.

Remember that it is only because of those changes that pretty much everyone's personel histories changed as well and allowed them to come together so much sooner (apparently). So your conclusions are contradicted by the basic premise and explanation for the events of the movie.

To the contrary, trying to argue that Chekov being four years younger is proof positive that Starfleet fears powerful nine-kilometer-long warships is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of everything the movie attempts to say.

Of course, the whole point of this discussion is that whatever the movie attempts to say, it doesn't say it very well. The details of the plot are ill thought out, and the audience has to fill the gaps to remove or hide illogic. It's our choice whether to do that in a way that supports consistency with preceding Trek (which is possible) or in a way that supports consistency with the associated comic (which I feel is impossible) or in a way that is simply contrarian (which is certainly possible but IMHO not very fruitful or interesting).

So he already had the codes but decided to get them again from Pike?

No, he always kidnaps highly positioned people and he thus supposedly already has one waiting, but this time he drops the one and goes for Pike (who has been handed to him on a platter) because Pike is even higher-ranking.

modernising ST!

The problem with that is that it kills all the Star Trek plotlines. You can't have the isolated shuttlecraft, the blindly operating landing parties, the military engagements that conclude in fisticuffs.

The further problem is that Trek is only half a step away from generic scifi anyway. If we insert phaser CIWS in the name of realism, it's as bad as taking away the transporter in the name of realism. There's nothing left if we substitute Trek with realism.

if you are going to blame crew failure for some of these problems, it becomes harder to believe Starfleet would put every last one of them back on the bridge!

The plot was explicit in describing the crew as incompetents. The plot was also a growth story of sorts. Essentially, the heroes get rewarded for outgrowing their inborn incompetence - except Spock never gets a reward, which only goes to show he was the only one not born incompetent!

And the prison planet itself presumably, which then sent out a distress call about the warships but not the star or its own demise?

One of the less likely possibilities, yes. Then again, we never heard what Uhura overheard exactly...

Of course if the message was a fake by Nero ... but why? Starfleet might be very interested in that but certainly wouldn't react by sending most of its fleet to the boarder.

If something can wipe out 47 starships, and this takes place near UFP territory (say, at the location of the teaser, because why would this hole in time be in different places at different times?), it becomes imperative to send at least 48 starships to identify and hopefully negate the threat! The closer the threat, the less viable it would be to first send just one starship and then the remaining ones; all we need to assume (and all Nero would have to calculate in the allocated 25 years when he's fuming in his nonmilitary ship and waiting for the red matter to arrive) is an optimal distance between the looming threat and the UFP region of vulnerability. Nero could have calculated that this prison planet and Laurentius would be the elements meeting his requirements, without needing to be a military genius or anything.

Though you would think the shuttle would be under visual observation and Nero could see anything falling out of it so ... ?

Well, we saw what Nero saw - and the image was rather fuzzy.

Really, Nero is virtually blind, that much is again consistent in the movie. His ship is probably built to scan for objects the size of small moons at a distance, not for small rapidly moving targets nearby.

(Again, I wonder whether Pike spat out the skydivers by using a gravitic slingshot device of some sort, or simply by giving the shuttle a bit of downward thrust at the right moment. The visuals are consistent with either take, and it's anybody's guess which of these would be more observable by Nero's existing or perceived sensors under that jamming.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

tl;dr

The Narada was awesome-o. That is all.

 

[UFO]

Hmmm, I’ll try Hugh’s suggestion as a "shortening agent".
　
So, in responce to Timo's previous post (#104):

Re the surrounding universe, I was referring to the visual before coming out of warp. It looked more like the tunnel effect in TMP.
　
Re Ent not slowing at warp: Its Pike’s judgment calls that are largely the problem it seems.
　
You keep complaining that this or that is inconsistent with previous Trek. A) The phasers firing with the speed and accuracy they did etc, is also inconsistent with previous Trek and B) Shouldn’t a modernised Trek be more in-line with what makes sense in the real world. Isn’t that why we don’t see tricorders etc? Since when is doing things as badly as previous Trek may have occasionally done an excuse (stupid question I know, as the date was at least mid 2009, maybe earlier)?
　
A "down-warping" corridor is a good idea and would probably normally be controlled by a traffic management system. But where communications have failed or can’t be confirmed, having such a corridor that close to a planet is not at all cleaver. It invites Mr Stuff-up big time (indeed we saw exactly that, corridor or not).
　
If the Narada and the rescue fleet were below the horizon, taking a higher orbit would have been prudent, which with not surprise, is what I have always argued for. The jamming etc would act as a warning at greater range and the drill’s emissions would be very localised. Almost a lighthouse effect. I don’t buy for a second you can only see half-kilometre objects at very close visual distances in TOS. Not without a reference to this "well founded" principle anyway.
　
An opponent was more than a possibility and given what the did know it would be a powerful one and the "ambush position" is, as stated, a by-product of a fast "down-warping". And if Pike only had to say "fire phasers" where is the problem? If by the Narada's weakening as the movie when on you mean going from "awesome" (thanks KingDaniel) to crap in a nanosecond then yeah, I guess they followed that "weakening" tradition.
　
We don’t know nero had the shields up when Kirk and Spock beamed over. Why would he with no apparent oppersiton. It makes sense to me to assume his shields would be as good or better than those of the Enterprise (whose shields couldn't even repel slow moving wreckage!). And you have given no reason to suppose they would be designed to protect the drill. Certainly not against the Jellyfish’s contemporary weapons.
　
You mean we never saw the type of automatic data transfer between a ship and it's shuttles in Trek, but we can easily imagine it now and once again this is not supposed to "your father’s trek". Why would it be worse than we can do now? Stop living in the past!
　
The Enterprise was bigger by most assessments I’ve heard and the fact a different ship got the same name at a different time implies major alterations up and down the line. Actually I wasn’t even thinking of Checkov! Try explaining the changes in Pike's or Spock’s careers for starters (Mitchell’s and a lot of others too I suggest).
　
Actually the point of this discussion is whether the Narada is a pussy-cat that got luck etc or is actually the threat it is painted as for most of the movie. You appear to be saying that if there is a loop-hole however unlikely, we should just grab it. If so, why didn’t you say that to being with!
　
IMO good SF is usually based on imaginative extensions to current science (as this movie was, in a limited way, with branching theory). If you are updating Trek why not do that? I’m sure the previous series did that to some degree. Nor do I see it ruling out the things you claim it will and anyway should open up other opportunities.
　
I don’t recall the plot being explicit in describing the crew as incompetents! Sure, Sulu was made to look and be a joke (which was unbelievable in the extreme) but Uhura was supposed to be brilliant and McCoy was a mature doctor. Even Scotty was qualified, he just choose the wrong dog for his experiment! Which itself unbelievable. You seem to be altering the facts to fit your story.
　
You just came up with a reason to believe the 47 Klingon ships destroyed wasn’t a threat to the Federation. The UFP would certainly want to make sure before provoking the Klingon’s in their already agitated condition by sending almost all of the fleet to the neutral zone! Anyway Nero couldn’t be sure what the UFP might do. They might have decided to reinforce Vulcan as one of the closest capital planets (I assume, but if not its just an example of unpredicability).

Nero is blind?! MAGNIFY!!! The shuttle was coming towards him so no real tracking problem. Twenty 24th C optics should be able to do a lot more than they might be usually called upon to. Besides, a mining ship would probably want to know if small fast objects were on an intercept course for obvious reasons so tracking them shouldn’t be a problem.
　
By the way, gravity should be enough to expel the space-divers. Like the Narada and Ent, the shuttle was effectively hovering over Vulcan. Gravity would be a bit less at that hight of course.

Dammit! That’s still too long.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If you are not going to modernised Star Trek believably what is the point? As for tactical data, every shuttle should a have been receiving live tactical updates of the man sensors adn ship systems. It's not far-fetched. It would be incompent design not to given the kind of tech they should have available and it would be vital info to preserve at all costs.

That would be inconsistent with believability. NASA, for example, uses simulations based on new data to train for unexpected situations; their astronauts spend six to ten MONTHS running those simulations in order to figure out what works and what doesn't. Same with the Air Force and the Navy, who on encounters with a new weapon or some new data on that weapon, spend months or years running drills and simulations to teach their pilots how to cope with it.

Even Starfleet uses traditional simulators to train its cadets, in a variety of scenarios and in a variety of ways. So what exactly gives you the impression that a group of raw cadets is even CAPABLE of programming a realistic simulation -- let alone running it enough times to matter -- in the handful of hours between the destruction of Vulcan and the fight over Earth?

There's only one time in all of Trek history that anyone ever tried to run a simulation purely on a computer, and that was Booby Trap. This is explicitly a special case because Geordi was proposing turning the entire ship over to computer control and wanted to see if the computer would be able to do it based on the variables involved. In the end, he was forced to conclude that it could NOT, and Picard wound up flying the ship out of the asteroid belt by hand.

Note that this was something only Picard could have done with his greater insight and experience. No amount of simulation practice would have mattered. It's something to consider that for a crew with literally ZERO combat experience, it's fairly unlikely they had a proper estimate of Narada's tactical capabilities.

They did seem to know the ships had emerged from warp however. If you are arguing that that happened to quickly to adjust his course, that also proves my other point about approaching more slowly.

Again: what reason did he have to take further precautions than he did? Dropping out of warp with shields up was more than sufficient to survive the collision with the first ship and the glancing blow from the second.

Warp signatures are easy to track, but individual vessels in space are not, unless you know exactly where they are ahead of time.

Its not as though they didn’t know where to look.

They didn't. Space is big. Ships are small. Even a ship as large as the Narada would barely register relative to Vulcan's much greater mass and emission signature, even without that incredibly noisy drill filling the airwaves with interference. They knew the fleet had dropped out of warp only because they'd been tracking it the whole time; they had no idea the condition of any other vessels in orbit of the planet or the surrounding solar system.

How far a way were the Vulcans at the time do we know. I thought they might be on the edge of the system at least.

Riker said they were "passing through" the system, evidently a survey mission of some kind. Since they were probably surveying the PLANETS of the solar system, then they were at least inside the orbit of Neptune, although they could have been as close as Mars or the Asteroid Belt.

More importantly, they managed to enter Earth orbit without taking notice of the Enterprise-E and were not particularly alarmed by that ship's sudden leap into a space time portal. So again, ships are hard to spot at sublight speed unless they're very close to you or unless you know ahead of time where to look for them.

What would Pike have done differently after coming out of warp at Vulcan if he had known it wasn’t a warship?

1) He would have called Nero a criminal and told him to surrender and submit to arrest.
2) He would have fired directly on the drill, figuring that the Narada probably couldn't extend its shields to protect it and whatever it was probably wasn't really military in nature.
3) As an alternate to #2, he probably would rigged his shuttle with a high-powered explosive device (tricobalt devices or something) figuring that Nero's sensors wouldn't be able to tell faked lifesigns from real ones.

To be sure, if he had known anything definite about the Narada other than "it is powerful" he could have explored other options. He did not, however, and his "on the fly" thinking produced the longshot of a space jump of a small team to disable the "high energy pulse device" whose nature and capabilities were still unknown.

Scotty scanned the Narada but still couldn’t tell it wasn’t a warship?

No, he couldn't. Apparently he didn't know enough Romulan to read the words "Romulan mining vessel" prominently printed on the hull.

Here's an example. Look at this picture. This vessel has no guns, no long-range missiles, no torpedoes. It is armed only with some basic air defense systems and some ECM gear. The only thing that stands out about this vessel is that it has a large flat deck and an open space below decks which, between the two of them, carry a suspiciously large number of military aircraft.

So prove to me that this is NOT a warship.

If you look at the video again you well see that there was. He only had to ask someone else to do that. "Arm phasers", there done. Should have been done earlier anyway. If you can’t ask for phasers and have them available within a few seconds you need better systems because no one will give you that kind of break.

This is Star Trek, dude. They ALWAYS get that kind of break.

Historical question: how long did Kirk continue to play chicken with the First Federation marker buoy before arming phasers? For that matter: how long did Kirk wait to arm phasers against the Fesarius? You'll find that in NEITHER case did Kirk order the phasers armed until he was 100% sure he was going to have to use them.

I could go down a long list for you, but Trek has enormous precedence that "Arm Phasers" is not -- repeat, NOT -- an appropriate response for any random scary situation. You warp into a debris field? Shields up. Weird space ship appears in front of you? Evasive action. Chased across the universe by godlike entities? Hail them.

You arm phasers when someone is shooting at you, not a moment sooner. Even Robau didn't arm his weapons the moment he saw the Narada, he waited until AFTER Narada had started firing on him. Interestingly, Kelvin probably would have fared better if Robau had focussed all of his shields directly forward and given himself more time to respond, rather than make his phasers snap to attention and screen those torpedoes at point blank range.

It's not a one or the other situation. Pike made no attempt to use phasers dispite knowing from the start the Narada had missiles and presumably knowing fire control was better than in the Kelvin's day.

Not with the amount of warning he had (virtually none, from spotting the Narada to their first shot). That he doubled up on his shields is probably the only reason Enterprise was able to remain (at least partly) in the fight.

You have just finished claiming they can’t see starships at that range

UNLESS they know exactly where to look, which they did.

There’s a lot of wiggle room between those extremes, but the film gives the impression he had already come close to doing just that against the Klingons, which is part of my argument.

The film doesn't give the impression that he took out the Klingon homeworld in a stand up fight. Only that he bombed a Klingon prison planet for some unknown reason and destroyed a whole lot of ships. How, why or exactly when are never made clear.

We know from background, of course, that the "attack on the prison planet" is just a last-minute dialog change from Nero's escape from Rurapenthe, and the film isn't WRITTEN to give any sort of impression from that encounter other than "Nero's back." The number "47" is a number pulled out of a hat by writers as an overt "47" reference and isn't meaningful beyond that; otherwise, it's perfectly explicable as the shooting of a chunk of red matter into an unsuspecting Klingon shipyard.

But when he does something that doesn’t quite fit, you come up with the ad hoc excuse that he doesn’t think that far ahead (?).

I'm unable to locate the part of my post where I suggested Nero was a pre-planning mastermind. In fact I'm pretty sure I described him as a half-crazed terrorist.

But I'm with Timo on this one. Nero spent 25 years planning the attack on Vulcan and his ultimate revenge with Spock; from his point of view, the Story of Nero ends with Vulcan spiraling the toilet bowl. Everything after that is a sort of "icing on the cake" plan that even his crew might not have been prepared for. There is, in fact, a scene in the script where Ayel challenges Nero for control of the ship, telling him that the attack on Earth is pointless and they've already done what they set out to do and it's time to go home to Romulus; Nero responds by stabbing him in the face.

A blackout from all likely sources just after a call for assistance (which in itself much have been a big deal or the Vulcans would have managed it themselves)? I don’t think so.

So you're the commander of an aircraft carrier. You're sent to relieve New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. You're three minutes away from launching your rescue helicopter to start airlifting relief supplies. Suddenly a highly disoriented midshipman who hasn't completed basic training and isn't even supposed to be on board stumbles onto the bridge and starts screaming "New Orleans isn't experiencing a natural disaster! It's being attacked by Soviets! I saw it on the internet last night! Somebody set off a nuke at a Chinese shipyard and it was reported the missile was fired by a HUGE Russian battlecruiser! There's Communists waiting for us at New Orleans, I promise you that!"

First officer says, "You know, he might not be wrong. Also, we're not getting any radio traffic from New Orleans."

This, to you, is reason enough to put the ship at battlestations and arm your fighters for an airstrike?

But since SF expected to find a possible evacuation in effect (not to mention normal traffic), coming out of warp in low Vulcan orbit would never be appropriate.

Are you that much more familiar with Starfleet evacuation protocols than I am? Just wondering.

Certainly. Kirk had just finished telling Pike he believed the ship was the same one that attacked the Kelvin

And Pike didn't believe him. Did you forget that part?

Thinking about what's on the other side of those wrecks is part of getting his ship out of danger.

And is a secondary concern to AVOIDING those wrecks in the first place.

Pretend, just for a second, that aren't talking about a movie. Pretend it's real life, and you're driving down the street when you get a phone call from a high school student who warns you that Iraqis are attacking your city. You don't believe him... until three minutes later, when suddenly the car in front of you explodes. You swerve to avoid the wreck, then two more. On avoiding the third wreck, your car runs head-on into an Iraqi T-72 tank which proceeds to riddle your car with bullets.

The specific reason you didn't anticipate the tank is... what?

No-one is going to put an inexperienced helmsman on the bridge of a flag under those cercumstances.

It's a rescue mission. It's about the only set of circumstances where they WOULD put a rookie at the helm.

Unless it's TNG, of course, where they stick Wesley in the driver seat to take on the fucking Borg.

Pike’s job as Captain is to tell Sulu what he wants in generally terms and let him get on with doing it. If he has to pilot the ship too...

You don't know what a "helmsman" actually does, do you?

 

[starburst]

Soon as Pike had heard from a combination of Kirk, Uhura and Spock and knew there was the possibility that something was going on he ordered the shields raised and the ship to Red Alert, this was literally moments before the ship dropped out of Warp so its unlikely they could have done much to change course or reduce speed.

Just because Pike did a dissertation on the Kelvin it doesnt mean he was an expert on the ship which destroyed it just the same as you could write a dissertation on the Bismarck or Titanic but its doesnt mean you would know classified information on them. Its probable that what Pike wrote, and Kirk read, was more a historical piece on what happened.

None of this states that Pike by writing it, or Kirk for reading it, would then be an expert on what this 'huge Romulan ship' could do.

While we dont know the status of the Enterprise shields after they cleared the debris the first missile took them down to near 30%, most other more hostile actions would likely lead to a "to hell with it, destroy that ship" approach from Nero.

Pike new his ship was outmatched in this engagement no matter if he thought Nero was a warrior or a used car salesman.

 

[UFO]

I’m not sure I see your problem with the idea that shuttles might have black boxes that are constantly updated form their mother-ship’s main systems and scanners, at least in emergency conditions. The situation I was outlining referred to data from the Kelvin which they had 25 years to analysis so that doesn’t seem worth objecting to on the grounds you did (lack of time) either.

As far as running simulations on the fly goings I was relying on one of the main assumptions of science fiction, namely progress. Two hundred plus years of it in this case. The computers would do most if not all the work anyway as they are the systems that will be called upon to react better next time unless we are to believe that Sulu and his "playstation controller" can shoot down 20 or more missiles by the seat of his pants. That would seem to me to be unbelievable.

As I inquired of Timo, why is everyone so happy with an "updated" Star Trek but so keen to want it to live in the past? Yeah I know, Computers couldn’t replace Kirk either, god help us when they take over driving our cars eh? Mind you, all I’m suggesting is an extension of what they do now, ie. Controlling weapon systems so that’s no big deal given 200+ years surely?

Pike should have been more cautious because he didn’t know if the same weight of missiles you suggest surprised the rescue fleet, was baring down on him or not, if he emerged in a similar position etc. That’s straight forward isn’t it? He was lucky to be hidden by the debris, but I don't know why Nero didn't pick him up at warp after the fleet was destroyed.

The drill is one of two main reasons they would concentrate on Vulcan. They could certainly "discern" the Narada at a much greater distance than the "point blank" visual range they confronted it at. Even radar could have done better. I believe I replied to Timo on this very issue. "Very close" is a relavtive thing and should still be thousands of kms if not more. Not right off the starboard bow.

.... He would have called Nero a criminal and told him to surrender and submit to arrest.

Now that’s amusing! Would he call him a dirty rat fink as well?

I don’t know that its fair to use things we knew but before we knew them. Regardless, even we didn’t know how good Neros sensors might be, coming from the future and all. As far as shooting the drill was concerned he should have known it was pretty darned important anyway and he could have expected to be destroyed in response, whatever the Narada’s status. Of course we did know that later the Ent would completely wipe out his best missile attack (but not whether that would work if aimed at Pike’s ship) for what that’s worth. Moreover Nero didn’t give Pike a lot of time to "explored other options" which you have claimed wasn’t his job anyway. That’s takes longer that issuing a couple of helpful commands like: "Fire at those damned missiles you lily livered heathens!"

Well "[Simple] Romulan mining vessel" was probably written in a later dialect that even Uhura couldn’t have understood, so I will give you that one. But no warship would have the kind of empty space the Narada should have had. Even your aircraft carrier would have been filled with military equipment of various sorts (not sure what you are trying to prove with that really) unless it had just been launched or refitted.
　
I always liked that Kirk was not trigger happy but that’s not the same as not being prepared. We are talking about having phasers ready for defensive purposes not offensive. But your long list of examples of not arming phasers is irrelevant given Pike knew the Narada’s reputation for attacking on sight, right? You know as well as I do that Robau didn’t have the Kelvin example to guide his response. You clearly won’t accept the phasers should have been armed at some earlier point even knowing what they were up against so that seems a dead topic, except to say Timo seems to agree that arming phasers wasn’t necessary anyway, just firing them (under computer control of course).
　
I am not saying Nero could take on Starfleet by himself, just that it didn’t make sense for him to be the pushover you feel you have to claim he was. Well I guess your "overt 47 reference" is as closes as you will come to admitting they went overboard in building up the Narada and therefore made its demise seem deus ex machina.
　

… it's perfectly explicable as the shooting of a chunk of red matter into an unsuspecting Klingon shipyard.

No, it really isn’t, and you know it. You would do better claiming the Klingon’s ambushed themselves the way the Federation fleet and Pike did. Apparently that works great.

Re "pre-planning mastermind", I understood you agreed that Nero was manipulating Starfleet like he was a puppet master. I am not familiar with the "stab in Nero’s face" scene and probably neither was Pike.
　
As far as your analogies go, neither of them fairly captures the situation Pike was in IMO. The first one doesn’t even mention the first rescue helicopter they sent out which didn’t come back and is not responding! The second one is particularly wayward in that no mention is made of shared historical evidence (this is missing from the first analogy as well) or the fact the tank was a few hundred metres up the road.
　

The specific reason you didn't anticipate the tank is... what?

Obviously only a complete idiot wouldn’t anticipate something nasty ahead if they saw three cars blow up in front of them. So if the last part of that analogy does anything, it actually makes my case for me. Pike had more than enough info to anticipate the tank, I mean the Narada.
　
In fact Pike did believe Kirk about the Narada. Enough to put the ship on red alert certainly, because other evidence made Kirk’s claim look a real possibility if not likely (another point not captured by your analogies). Problem was he didn’t slow down to discuss the matter and thus didn’t give himself enough time to take other necessary precautions.

The rescue mission they were on was never a cakewalk. Some weird shit was going down man and put your trainee helmsman on a destroyer if you must, not a flagship. I can only imagine Wesley was a better pilot than Sulu (was made out to be). Sulu couldn’t remember to deactivate "the external inertial dampener"!? Something he would have to do every time a ship goes to warp. You can’t even claim it was new to the Enterprise. Hell, there's probably a check list on his consol.

You don't know what a "helmsman" actually does, do you?

Of course not. What’s your point? Actually I can guess your point but the helmsman should know what the ship can do and has the quickest reactions. He shouldn’t have to wait for Pike’s specific direction in such a situation which could come too late. Why didn’t Pike just flip up his little joystick and do it himself anyway? Lets ignore the fact that a ship that has just been travelling many times the speed of light and is now barely drifting can’t be thrown it into reverse or just stopped (relative to the debris)! Maybe Sulu forgot how to use reverse?
　

Pike new his ship was outmatched in this engagement no matter if he thought Nero was a warrior or a used car salesman.

That's certainly the impression the film gave us at that point. But we are now being asked do believe that if only Pike had the time to fire his phasers at Nero's missiles, Vulcan could have been saved!

OK: This ... is .. the last ... post of ..... this length.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

As far as running simulations on the fly goings I was relying on one of the main assumptions of science fiction, namely progress. Two hundred plus years of it in this case. The computers would do most if not all the work anyway

In which case the Enterprise wouldn't require a helmsman OR a navigator and could operate normally with a crew of 50 or less.

Star Trek has always been VERY conservative about projecting the feasible capabilities of computer automation, so why would you expect the Abramsverse to be any different?

As I inquired of Timo, why is everyone so happy with an "updated" Star Trek but so keen to want it to live in the past?

Star Trek takes place in the future, not in the past. Evidently it's a different future than you would expect... but that's ALWAYS been true of the future, isn't it?

Pike should have been more cautious

Correction: Pike could have been more cautious. Under any circumstances other than "the worst thing that could possibly happen" his actions would have been perfectly appropriate. It just so happened that almost anything Pike could have expected to be waiting for him at Vulcan would have been an understatement.

But no warship would have the kind of empty space the Narada should have had. Even your aircraft carrier would have been filled with military equipment of various sorts

The Narada WAS filled with equipment. How would you have identified it as non-military in nature without ever having seen it before?

I always liked that Kirk was not trigger happy but that’s not the same as not being prepared.

Exactly my point. You're implying that Pike wasn't prepared to face hostile action at Vulcan. I'm saying that he WAS prepared: the ship was on red alert with its shields up, which is all the preparation a ship needs in situations like this.

But your long list of examples of not arming phasers is irrelevant given Pike knew the Narada’s reputation for attacking on sight, right?

Are you still overlooking the fact that Pike didn't expect the Narada to actually BE there?
　

I am not saying Nero could take on Starfleet by himself, just that it didn’t make sense for him to be the pushover you feel you have to claim he was.

Why not? At the end of the day, he WAS kind of a pushover. For all his firepower and weaponry he was outmaneuvered and defeated by a shipload of raw cadets and an emotionally compromised Vulcan.

To that end, Nero was a considerable threat to the Federation in the same way that Osama bin Laden was a threat to the United States: highly malevolent, and dangerous if he catches you off guard, but hardly a formidable combatant.

Well I guess your "overt 47 reference" is as closes as you will come to admitting they went overboard in building up the Narada and therefore made its demise seem deus ex machina.

You miss the point. The intention wasn't to "build up" the Narada at all, its only intention was to replace a line of dialog that read "some prisoners escaped." Having it blow up a bunch of ships identifies it as the Narada and not a random act of violence by the Ferengi or something; the exact number destroyed doesn't really matter (and anyway, it's Klingons; 30 of them could have been Raptors).

… it's perfectly explicable as the shooting of a chunk of red matter into an unsuspecting Klingon shipyard.

No, it really isn’t, and you know it.

Yes, it really is, and I know it.

The second one is particularly wayward in that no mention is made of shared historical evidence (this is missing from the first analogy as well) or the fact the tank was a few hundred metres up the road.

"Historical evidence" is equivalent in both cases: the Kirov WAS one of the most formidable surface combatants in the Soviet Navy; as of this moment, it hasn't been seen or heard from in about 22 years and no one is entirely sure what happened to it (which would be why I mentioned it by name). Similarly, it's been about 21 years since Desert Storm, during which the Iraqi Army fielded a huge number of T-72 tanks.

In either case -- if your thinking is correct -- the very suggestion that an enemy from two decades ago has been seen in the area is irrefutable evidence that you're about to be attacked. But this is why I prefaced the analogy with "Let's pretend this isn't a movie." Because we both know that 99.9% of the time, when someone walks up to you and says "We're about to be attacked by a Soviet battleship! I saw it on the internet!" we can safely assume that person is either severely over-medicated (which Kirk was) or jumping to conclusions (which Kirk ALSO was) or just doesn't know what he's talking about (which, let's face it, Kirk didn't). IOW, if this had been anything OTHER than a Star Trek movie, Pike's skepticism would have been entirely justified, especially when you consider the enormous logical gap between "The Romulans attacked the Klingons last night" and "The Romulans are going to ambush us at Vulcan".

In fact Pike did believe Kirk about the Narada.

No he didn't. His response to Kirk's warning was to 1) Scan for any transmissions in Romulan and 2) try to contact the Truman. His first clue that something had gone wrong was radio silence around Vulcan and his inability to reach the Truman. Kirk claimed "It's because they're being attacked!" but Pike is an experienced line officer and isn't going to jump to spurious conclusions.

He didn't believe the Narada was at Vulcan until the moment he saw it himself. That would be this moment, appropriately framed by a look of dread and/or astonishment.

The rescue mission they were on was never a cakewalk.

It was, actually. Starships warp into orbit, beam down relief crews, beam up the wounded, rinse and repeat. Not much skill required in those kinds of maneuvers, except for formation flying, which any academy greenhorn is qualified to do.

I can only imagine Wesley was a better pilot than Sulu

You can imagine it, but it doesn't change the fact that Sulu was an academy trained helmsman close to graduation while Wesley took the helm for the first time without ever having graduated from high school. That should tell you a little about what Starfleet considers "qualified."

You don't know what a "helmsman" actually does, do you?

Of course not. What’s your point? Actually I can guess your point but the helmsman should know what the ship can do and has the quickest reactions.

The helmsman's reaction time is irrelevant. His job is to translate the Captain's orders directly into vessel motion commands, changing the ship's course/trajectory/orientation when and how he is told to do so. He has this job because the Captain has other responsibilities in addition to steering the vessel and it is hazardous for the man who actually holds the proverbial "wheel" to become distracted with other things.

Mind you, the helmsman position exists in the first place ONLY because a computerized interface is not currently reliable enough or dynamic enough to take those commands automatically. Thus in naval vessels -- particularly on submarines -- you have the "order/readback" dialog where the Commander will shout something like "Rudder amidships, ahead two thirds, bow planes ten degrees up." His helmsman will immediately reply, "Rudder amidships, ahead two thirds, bow planes ten degrees up, aye sir."

I'd be the first to admit that by the 23rd century that position SHOULD be computerized, with the option to have the computer system take actions it deems necessary WITHOUT waiting for the Captain to tell it what to do. But this is Star Trek, and the bridge of the Enterprise just wouldn't be the bridge of the Enterprise without Sulu at the helm.

He shouldn’t have to wait for Pike’s specific direction in such a situation...

But he does, because he is a helmsman (see above).

 

[UFO]

No human could control phasers in a situation where missiles are coming at you that quickly and its is only a slight change to have that same guidance system look at recorded missile behaviour and ask it if it could have destroyed them or not. No big deal. This does not imply the whole ship should be automated.
　
My objection is not that the future might be different to what I expect but that what I’m seeing doesn’t take advantage of what we know from he present.
　
Pike had strong evidence that something very nasty was happening at Vuclan. But even if he wasn’t 100% certain about Kirk’s claim, the possibility was more than sufficient to consider the best way of handling it, if true. That would only be prudent. He certainly knew enough bout the Narada to make reasonable preparations for dealing with it, but he didn’t. Besides, its one thing to know intellectually something is going to (or may) happen, but it’s still understandable to feel "dread and/or astonishment" when it actually does.

By the way, you did not mention a ship called the "Kirov" by name. Beyond that it was predictable that the elements missing from your analogies would result in further fuel for disagreement. I will just stand by my previous comments thankyou very much.
　
The movie portrayed the rescue mission as a cakewalk so no-one would wonder why starfleet wasn't asking the obvious questions. But Vulcan’s seismic disturbances must have been extremely bad to need external help. Worse is the fact that just after that message, all communication is lost with the whole system! Combine those two facts and the problem is not just nasty but something very unusual. This is a situation demanding extreme causation all by itself. But Starfleet wades in like they are on a school trip and all but ambush themselves. You seem rather selective in your scepticism.
　
So the first time Wesley took the helm was in a battle against the Borg. Hmmm, I don't recall that. Or could you have moved the goalposts just a little to make your "qualified" point?

I imagine you are technically correct about helmsmen, but as you say "this is Star Tech". Who would complain if Sulu got them out of trouble in a response to "a general command"? Pikes inattention wouldn’t have been so bad if Spock had known how to counter the Narada. There's a fault in the system somewhere.

… it's perfectly explicable as the shooting of a chunk of red matter into an unsuspecting Klingon shipyard.

No, it really isn’t, and you know it.

Yes, it really is, and I know it

I see, then you are telling me the first thing that came to mind when you heard a ship assumed to be the Narada had destroyed 47 Klingon ships was that Nero had use red matter to blindside them? Or, did you imagine they had been destroyed in battle? You see it all about how hearing of that destruction portrayed the Narada as being overwhelmingly powerful, not whether you can come up with another explanation three years later. Context, that's the key.
　
(Well it’s a bit shorter!)

 

[Crazy Eddie]

No human could control phasers in a situation where missiles are coming at you that quickly and its is only a slight change to have that same guidance system look at recorded missile behaviour and ask it if it could have destroyed them or not.

Which assumes your guidance system is equipped with an AI capable of answering that sort of question. The fire control systems on modern CIWS weapons -- which ARE tasked with shooting down incoming missiles -- do not. It's a valid assumption of yours that such a thing is POSSIBLE on the Enterprise, but you're here assuming its existence based on no evidence at all and then getting frustrated with the crew for not validating your assumption.

My objection is not that the future might be different to what I expect but that what I’m seeing doesn’t take advantage of what we know from he present.

What we know from the present is that simulations require A LOT of detailed data and several months of lead time to setup and run derivative scenarios in order to produce any meaningful information from them.

The Enterprise had less than 24 hours.

What do we know about today's technology that implies it MUST be possible to simulate anything/everything at a moment's notice with only a bare minimum of hard data?

Pike had strong evidence that something very nasty was happening at Vuclan.

Correction: Pike had reason to believe that something had gone wrong. There is, again, a huge leap from "something went wrong" to "something horrible is happening to Vulcan." Any other day of the week -- that is, if this had been an episode and not a movie -- they would have dropped out of warp to discover that some sort of technobabble science experiment had gotten out of control and had slightly disturbed Vulcan's orbit. Normally, this can be solved by tasteful application of Starfleet courage, Spock querying the library computer for warp field theoretical papers, and liberal application of [tech] that miraculously saves the day.

But this is a major motion picture, so it turned out to be nothing NEARLY that benign.

But even if he wasn’t 100% certain about Kirk’s claim, the possibility was more than sufficient to consider the best way of handling it, if true.

Indeed. And the best way of handling it was to raise shields and put the ship on red alert. The only reason you assume he SHOULD have done more is because you -- a viewer of the movie -- knew ahead of time what was waiting for him. Pike didn't, and had no way of knowing that Kirk's half-baked theory was anything more than a bizzare coincidence.

By the way, you did not mention a ship called the "Kirov" by name.

Interestingly, neither did Kirk. "One massive ship" could ONLY mean the Narada... right?

The movie portrayed the rescue mission as a cakewalk so no-one would wonder why starfleet wasn't asking the obvious questions. But Vulcan’s seismic disturbances must have been extremely bad to need external help.

Indeed. And "a highly experience helmsman" is NOT near the top of the list of "things you need to deal with a severe Earthquake."

Worse is the fact that just after that message, all communication is lost with the whole system! Combine those two facts and the problem is not just nasty but something very unusual. This is a situation demanding extreme causation all by itself.

That would be why Pike raised his shields, no?

So the first time Wesley took the helm was in a battle against the Borg.

No, the first time Wesley took the helm he had NO FORMAL TRAINING OF ANY KIND and had never seen the inside of Starfleet Academy. Contrast with Sulu, who was either a cadet in Kirk's class or a recent graduate (probably the former). He is, in other words, about as qualified as Wesley WOULD have been if he hadn't washed out of the Academy in Season 7.

Pikes inattention wouldn’t have been so bad if Spock had known how to counter the Narada. There's a fault in the system somewhere.

Exactly. The fault in the system is that it isn't perfect, nor is it designed to be perfect, and despite their rather fatuous depiction in Voyager, Starfleet officers are neither clairvoyant, nor superhuman. Getting ambushed by Nero was literally the last thing Pike ever expected to happen at Vulcan, even with Kirk's half-crazed "warning."

No, it really isn’t, and you know it.

Yes, it really is, and I know it

I see, then you are telling me the first thing that came to mind when you heard a ship assumed to be the Narada had destroyed 47 Klingon ships was that Nero had use red matter to blindside them?

Actually, the first thing that came to mind was the opening scene from the Wing Commander movie where Kilrathi fighter squadrons buttfucked the entire Confederation fleet in about forty five seconds. In fact it was that EXACT scene, replacing the Kilrathi supercarriers -- rising over the horizon of an asteroid they'd used to cover their approach -- with the Narada and the fighters that suddenly swarm into the unsuspecting Confederation shipyard with swarm after swarm of Romulan missiles.

Then, after seeing the movie for the sixth time, I thought, "Why would he waste ammo on a setup like that?" and I thought of the last scene where Narada gets sucked into a black hole, only with an asteroid instead of the Narada and about forty Klingon ships spiraling the drain as they're ripped, helpless, out of their docking ports.

Either way, it's not exactly mysterious.

Or, did you imagine they had been destroyed in battle?

That is, in fact, the only thing that didn't come to mind.

You see it all about how hearing of that destruction portrayed the Narada as being overwhelmingly powerful

Except "the narada is powerful" isn't the point of the scene. It's supposed to read "the narada is BACK." Context, as you say, is key; Kirk doesn't come to the conclusion that Vulcan has already been destroyed, or that they're warping into a situation Enterprise can't handle, or even that they need to call in reinforcements. The point he's hammering on is that the Romulans are doing stuff... PERIOD. That's what Uhura's message is supposed to mean, and plot wise, that's all it was EVER meant to mean, even in the early draft (and the scene as actually filmed) when the message includes no mention of destroyed ships and only refers to the escape of a prisoner.