Something I never understood in ST2009

[David cgc]

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?

Well, we know... ("We encoded four minutes"/"Time?" "Three minutes, thirty seconds" "Distance from Reliant?" "Four thousand kilometers"; (4000÷3.5)*4≈4,600)... that four and a half thousand kilometers from Reliant (tops, we don't know how far apart they were when the clock started, so Enterprise is almost certainly going significantly slower) is too close, but that's well within the radius of Earth, so if the Genesis Effect just plopped a full-sized M-class planet around its epicenter without touching anything else, the Enterprise still would've been entombed. So, we don't know much. Even the friendliest, most limited take on Genesis would still have eaten our heroes for breakfast.

 

[Captain Delgado]

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,

Well even at full impulse, that is still 0.9 of warp 1 or sub light speed. Don't know if that would have been enough to hold the ship where it was. Getting the ship so close was a bad writing mistake as I am sure most of us saw that coming. I wouldn't have let the ship that close, and I am not sure if they had tried to beam out anyone from Narada how the black hole would have affected the transporter or the beam.