The whole idea of a "Hobus star" sounds silly to the extreme. Only a supernova in the Romulan home system could produce the effects we saw: a slowly moving wave of flaming destruction that carries what looks like lumps of rock with it, and painstakingly slowly tears Romulus to further lumps of rock - and takes the Romulans by surprise. A supernova in some other star system could not produce any of those effects: the destruction wave would either allow Romulus to be evacuated, with years if not centuries to spare, or then be so quickly moving that it could never turn planets into rubble in the manner depicted.
The comic is just plain stupid, and is in gross contradiction with the movie. The Narada isn't some small skiff with Borg stuff grafted on, capable of warping back and forth between star systems in a matter of hours. It's a giant mining platform that in the movie moves perhaps a hundred times slower than the damaged hero ship. Nero doesn't have time to arm his skiff, declare war on the Federation, and then go meet Spock. In the movie, Spock sees the destruction of Romulus, stops the explosion with the black hole bomb, and is immediately confronted by Nero, after which both are sucked to the past; the timescale here is explicitly in minutes, not days.
Better forget the comic, then, and concentrate on what actually happened in the movie. A star exploded, took the Romulans by surprise, and killed them all. A black hole created right next to Romulus transported first Nero and then Spock to the past. Nero emerged next to a big, cool giant of a star, which may or may not have been the star that exploded; Spock emerged somewhere else completely.
Near Nero's point of emergence, Klingons were a concern but Romulans weren't. Could that be the Romulan home star nevertheless? In "Balance of Terror", the Romulan Neutral Zone appeared to surround just the Romulan star system and not much else; perhaps the Kelvin was at the edge of this system, still in UFP territory, and was unconcerned with Romulans because they had been silent behind their RNZ ever since the 2160s? A bit far-fetched but theoretically possible. Not dramatically necessary or defensible, though.
The movie doesn't feature the storyline where Nero and his ship were captured by Klingons for a quarter of a century - it was cut for time, leaving only one flashback image of Nero swinging a pickaxe in what may be a Klingon prison camp but may just as well be one of Nero's mining enterprises, and the odd mention of Nero attacking a Klingon armada next to a Klingon prison planet. But we may choose to believe that Nero was indeed caught by the Klingons, perhaps not for 25 years but for some length of time anyway. In that case, it would make sense for the star to be Klingon, and for the Kelvin to be intruding in Klingon space to study this remarkable phenomenon (or to study this remarkable phenomenon while intruding in Klingon space for other reasons). After George Kirk rams the Narada, the Klingons would come in and take the wounded ship and her crew captive. Nero would swing that pickaxe, but would later manage to escape. And he might return to take revenge on the prison planet and on Klingons when time was ripe - not immediately, so as not to blow his cover while waiting for Spock, but only when he was ready to reveal himself to the world.
Timo Saloniemi
