Well, yes, that's what "retcon" means in the purest sense. It's short for retroactive continuity, not discontinuity. It means new information that fits in with what we already know, recontextualizing it without contradicting it. The problem is that people tend to use it sloppily to mean new information that contradicts what came before, which is not what it actually means.
No, but they're like earthquakes -- you can tell that one is likely to come in a certain span of time, but you can't predict it to the moment, so it'll still be a surprise when it comes.
See, that's what confuses me. The attack can't have been between the supernova and Romulus's destruction, since -- again -- if it was Romulus's own primary star, those events would've been minutes apart. Also, ST'09 said the supernova was in 2387, and apparently the "Children of Mars" attack was two years before that. So the supernova can't have happened yet; at most, it would've been anticipated, with plans underway to prevent it or evacuate the people before it did. I haven't seen the episode yet, but it sounds to me like the Mars attack delayed the UFP's relief efforts and that's why the Romulans weren't evacuated.
So technically, since the Dev's over there are always checking with CBS for approval of what They are doing, it is the closest thing to Canon that a game can get.
Every tie-in does that. That's a basic requirement of doing tie-ins, no more so for STO than for the novels, comics, or anything else. Every outline, every manuscript, every comics page, every game campaign, it all gets sent to CBS for approval, and it all strives to be as consistent as possible with the canon as it stands at the time of approval.
But "close to canon" is not canon. No matter how faithful a pastiche of the original work is, it's still a pastiche. An exact replica of the Mona Lisa will never be the Mona Lisa.
Ha. For most of the history of film and television SF, that's been the exception, not the rule. When I was growing up, Star Trek was essentially the only SFTV show that even made a token effort at scientific literacy. Everything else was so inept that they assumed you could travel to other stars using conventional rockets and had no idea what the word "galaxy" even meant. There are more shows and films doing their science homework today than there have been for most of my lifetime. So your nostalgia is backward.
And of course, there's always been a mix of hard SF that was scientifically literate (though almost always in prose up until recent years) and soft SF that was more fanciful. Science fiction has never been just one thing.
