Something I never understood in ST2009

Hello everyone. First time poster, long time lurker.

I wanted to ask something that I have never quite understood. At the end of ST2009, when the warp core's were ejected, wouldn't the ship have immediately fallen out of warp? They were traveling at warp speed at the time just to keep from falling into the black hole. In my mind, once the core's were ejected the ship should have fallen out of warp and been sucked in.

Thoughts....

 

I never thought about it before, but I think you might be right.

 

Didn’t the blast of the exploding warp cores throw them clear?

It’s not my favourite of the movies, so I’m a bit fuzzy on the details.

 

The blast did push them clear. However, had the ship dropped out of warp the Enterprise should have been pulled in at a similar rate to the core's. The blast alone would have destroyed them. In the movie the ship appears to never loose distance from the black hole.

 

I can’t get my head around the physics of a ship at warp standing still. We’ve seen ships without warp engines retain velocity until the warp field collapsed, such as Encounter at Fairpoint.

Maybe the release from the black hole’s gravity was like a rubber band snapping, flinging the ship clear,

 

Good point. As soon as they ejected, they should have been sucked in. I even remember people pointing out the level of detail in that shot, that they had the nacelles go dark because they had no power to them but nobody thought of that!

 

Yup.

And the Genesis device shouldn't have created a planet out thin space.

Welcome to Star Trek.

 

Maybe Scotty only ejected some of the cores.

 

It didn't, it used the mass from the Mutara Nebula to create the Genesis Planet.

 

No.

 

Well, the Genesis Device was programmed to turn a lifeless planet into a lush one. And the very maker of the thing thought he couldn't cram one extra byte of programming into the Device, so there probably wasn't a lot of flexibility there (unless flexibility is what was consuming the memory/computing power).

So odds are that it did exactly that. There was at least one planet there for the taking - the rock they called Regula. It's not seen afterwards. And Regula is small, while the horizon of the Genesis Planet is basically close enough to touch, too...

As for the topic, why "immediate" falling into the timehole? We should see an acceleration, dependent on the pulling force (which probably is greater than the pull of a mere planet, considering Spock escaped that when Vulcan collapsed, and indeed probably escaped more, as Vulcan wasn't sucking them in before the Red Matter upped the ante somehow). But what sort of an acceleration?

Warp supposedly produces nearly infinite acceleration from zero to past-lightspeed. Impulse isn't peanuts, either - we have seen Kirk more-than-skyrocket from Earth in ST:TMP, at thousands of gees. So the failure of both of these drives to clear the heroes of the mess made by the Red Matter is unlikely to be because they offer fewer gees than the suck of the timehole provides. More probably, the two drives both fail to work properly because the gravity gradient messes up their subspace fields or whatnot. In which case the actual gees put out by the timehole need not be all that significant, and the minimal acceleration we observe (for a minimal time) is fine.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Nothing implies that the Enterprise is really at warp speed in that scene. In fact it can be clearly seen that the ship is not moving so the obvious conclusion is that the gravity of the black hole disturbs the formation of a warp field regardless how much warp energy Scotty transfers to the engines. So on the part of the energy management the Enterprise is at warp but it has no physical effect outside the ship due to the gravity well.

As warp drive is useless anyway and there is nothing to lose by detonating the cores (or components of one core) behind the ship to catapult it away from the black hole and to escape by using the impulse drive which already was all that prevented the Enterprise to get crushed immediatly.

 

All we are really missing here is the exact mechanism by which the timehole disrupts the attempt at using the warp field for propulsion.

Contrary to popular belief, Trek has never supported the classic scifi idea that high gravity would prevent hyperdrive. We see ships warping right from the orbit of planets, sometimes from the atmosphere of planets, even; from the orbit of stars; and even from the inside of black holes, which indeed ought to be the no-frills, ho-hum way to escape those (VOY "Parallax").

However, warp close to high gravity in Trek is very slow. That is an obvious dramatic conceit: if we see a source of gravity such as a planet in the same view with a starship, the speed differential can't be too extreme! But in practice this means that high warp gives a sublight speed close to stars and the like (something we see especially clearly in those "time travel slingshot" adventures). Would the pull of the Red Matter timehole be enough to slow high warp down to a standstill? Even when a more ordinary black sucker in aforementioned "Parallax" posed no difficulty to a standard warp drive as such, there only being an issue with a weird topographic feature blocking their path?

Or does the exotic timehole indeed hurt the warp drive by a different mechanism, not just by slowing it down the "usual" way?

If the former, then shutting down warp would indeed mean losing the battle and getting pulled inside, as warp is the mechanism (feebly) fighting back the pull. If the latter, then warp may play no role at all, and it's just the impulse drive Kirk is (simultaneously) running that keeps the ship from being pulled in but cannot achieve more, not without the boost from the kabooms.

Of course, it may be that maintaining a warp field helps the impulse engines - we have every reason to suspect a key role is played by subspace field gadgetry that lowers the mass of the starship, and this gadgetry might just as well be the warp drive itself. Losing this advantage would briefly make the impulse engines struggle more - but OTOH it would return inertia to the starship, making the job of the timehole in accelerating the ship towards her doom harder, too.

Basically, technobabble from preceding Trek offers endless explanations for what happens here. And our heroes ought to be on top of most of that technobabble, even if the Scotty or Kirk of this movie never did a slingshot maneuver in their careers, or orbited a collapsing Psi 2000, or fought a black star. It boils down, then, to whether the scene appears intuitively acceptable or not.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Put it down to JJ Science like how a planets destruction can be visible from another star system

 

Correct, he only ejected cores behind the aft nacelle.

 

Just because the cores were ejected, doesn’t mean there wasn’t any warp plasma still in the nacelles. There ought to be a time lag between losing the fuel processing unit and the already processed fuel running out.
How long that takes is a matter of speculation, though.
We haven’t seen too many instances where ships lose their core in mid warp.

 

Technically any engine housing is a nacelle so he could be referring to an impulse engine or even a thruster assembly.

 

Yeah, it kinda did, because the Mutara Nebula completely disappeared when Genesis was created. The inherent problem with this scenario, however, is that the Genesis project was not designed to do that; it was designed to convert a planet, not a nebula. One could have used that idea to justify why the planet ended up being unstable, but instead they just came up with some bullshit to make David look bad.

 

Protomatter. Blame it on the protomatter.

 

What the various visuals signify is not all that clear, and any intent involved might be safely ignored.

The nebula disappears - because of Genesis converts it, or just because the starship blows up? There are smoke rings in the wake of the hero ship as she flees - because the Genesis effect is chasing her (with odd directionality), or because that's what warp drive leaves behind in a dense nebula? There's a planet and a star there - because Genesis made them, or because, you know, there always was a planet and a star there?

We can decide what to read into all that stuff, if anything. And sometimes it's fun reading. In the next movie, sunrise and sunset happen on the very same stretch of Genesis Planet horizon, say...

Slightly on topic (in terms of a parallel timeline with its parallel peril anyway): how fast does one have to go to escape the Genesis blast? And how far? Would lightspeed suffice, or 1/4 impulse if the ship could manage that? Does the effect propagate in vacuum or only along the nebula? What else was affected besides the area where we later see the Genesis Planet?

Timo Saloniemi