They DID NOT just destroy... [SPOILERS]
- Thread starter StarFleetVeteran
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Given that Romulus was destroyed by a supernova some distance away, I would say it would be more like the destruction of Veridian III in Generations.
And not at all like the destruction of mirror Ferenginar, which of course was done by dear Mr Mack in a manner rather reflective of Veridian III...
Wait, DS9forever - do you want it to be destroyed deliberately?
When a blast front that should have taken forever to get to Romulus at STL speeds blows the planet away with little warning, I think there is something hinky going on...
^Except we do have precedent for cosmic explosions' effects propagating faster than light in The Undiscovered Country and Generations. I even used FTL propagation of radiation as a plot-hole patch in "Brief Candle" in the Distant Shores anthology, justifying it with a handwave about "subspace tunneling."
Sure he could have, easily! Spock would have been the only one on that ship at that point who was partly Human, just scan for Human DNA and BANG! There you go!
ST VI, I'll buy that as faster than light, but not Generations as the film clearly shows Enterprise outrunning the shockwave only at Warp 1 so by that reckoning, I'd suggest the shockwave had to be moving slightly slower than light speed.
Sure he could have, easily! Spock would have been the only one on that ship at that point who was partly Human, just scan for Human DNA and BANG! There you go!
ST VI, I'll buy that as faster than light, but not Generations as the film clearly shows Enterprise outrunning the shockwave only at Warp 1 so by that reckoning, I'd suggest the shockwave had to be moving slightly slower than light speed.
To say nothing of if the Amargossa/Viridian explosions were FTL, they'd have hit the planet in seconds, if not instantly. As things stand they had enough time to rescue Data and for Picard and Soran to get scooped up. Very convienent plot device.
The biggest problem with Generations is how a chemical rocket launched from Veridian III reaches the sun as soon as it's out of sight.
You're forgetting the Stellar Cartography sequence. Data determined that the trajectories of starships dozens of light-years away were instantaneously affected by the Amargosa supernova, as was the course of the Nexus. Soran's whole plan -- to "steer" the Nexus by blowing up stars so that the gravitational changes would alter its course -- depended on the supernovae's gravitational effects propagating through space instantaneously, or at least far faster than light. Otherwise he would've had to blow up those stars decades before the Nexus arrived.
(Of course, realistically, not only would the gravitational effects have propagated slower than light, but there wouldn't really have been any gravitational effects. Even if a star blows up, all its mass is still there in an expanding cloud whose center of mass is pretty much exactly where it was before, unless it's an asymmetrical supernova as sometimes happens. From the perspective of a star parsecs away, that expanding supernova remnant is still going to be a gravitational point source for years or decades after the explosion. My personal fix for that is to assume that Soran was really going for the gravity waves from the explosions, rather than the "disappearance" of their mass as the script assumed.)
Well, the rocket could've cut in a micro-warp drive once it was launched. The problem is that it should've taken several minutes for the light from the explosion to reach Picard & Soran's eyes. I like to imagine they cut out several minutes of the two of them just standing there waiting for the inevitable.
^
PICARD: Shit! I failed!
PICARD: So...you like...books?
SORAN: Shut up, Picard.
A few minutes pass...
PICARD: Sure is taking a long time...
SORAN: SHUT UP, PICARD!
BOOM!
The biggest problem with Generations was why the heck didn't Picard just instantly leave the Nexus, return to the Enterprise at Amargossa and have Worf toss Soran in the brig.
How would he justify that one?
Then I'd say it's just a screw up of the movie. It's another example of the bad writing in the film. I understand what you're saying about what they were saying about the gravitational effects in the areas of space around the Amargosa system and that shouldn't have happened as you say cause also as I understand it, if the Sun somehow collapsed into a black hole, but kept the same mass, no orbiting body would be affected by the change other than near instant freezing.
BUT... that being said... I STILL maintain that the Amargosa shock wave had to be slower than light because if it were faster then there is no way at all that the Enterprise should have been able to outrun it at Warp 1, period. That shock wave should have overtaken the ship and destroyed it.
As I understand from reading somewhere and I don't remember where, that's exactly what happened, it was just meant to be several minutes later, after the rocket had traveled to the sun and the light from the collapse had traveled back. I remember someone who was a scientist saying what was shown was pretty much right, when the light got back to the planet, it would start getting dark pretty quick and then the shock wave (at least as depicted in the film) would be right behind the light.
I suppose it would be easy enough, that Picard could tell what happens, but Ron Moore and Brannon Braga, in their audio commentary for the film, said these are the kind of questions that you hope your film is compelling enough that the audience doesn't start asking them. Why didn't he just go back a month or two, catch Soran in the bathroom and just shoot him? It's the same thing with say, The Terminator, why didn't The Terminator just wait for Sarah to be somewhere quiet in a bathroom and take her out then?
The difficulty the T-800 had in locating Sarah Connor in The Terminator is actually perfectly plausible. SkyNet knew what city Connor lived in, and had a good idea of what year to send the T-800 back to, but it obviously had no historical records to draw upon to establish her day-to-day movements and locations. (How could it, given both Sarah Connor's relative anonymity in 1984 and the dearth of surviving historical records post-Judgment Day?) Indeed, the T-800 didn't even know which Sarah Connor he was looking for, so it was forced to assassinate as many as it could find before locating the proper target.
Time travel does not equal temporal omniscience.
(The better question is why SkyNet didn't send T-800s into multiple years of Sarah Connor's life from the same point in 2029 -- say, have one attack her the day she was born in 1965, another attack her as a defenseless ten-year-old in 1975, another attack her as a 15-year-old in 1980, etc. Unless it did, and they were all stopped by separate Resistance members who were much better at keeping themselves and the Terminators' existences a secret from the downtime Sarah Connors.)
What's there to justify? He's already morally alright with altering the timeline by going back with Kirk. So any timeline damage has already been dismissed by Picard.
As for what to arrest Soran for? If you wanna do things by the book, just don't let Soran go back to the observatory, confine him to quarters and after Data and LaForge find his trilithium -then- arrest him.
Worse case scenario that forces the Duras sisters to attack Enterprise, which they'd lose without the shield frequencies. More than likely they just abandon them and are still at large.
So yeah, saving Amargossa his ship and not getting Kirk killed seems like a win-win to me.
Well, we're talking about a couple of different things. What they referred to incorrectly as a "shock wave" in GEN (shock waves cannot exist in vacuum, by definition) would've more likely been the expanding front of radiation and expelled stellar atmosphere from the exploding star. Perhaps that could very loosely be considered a shock wave because it was expelled by the shock waves within the star itself that tore it apart when the core collapsed. In any case, that would propagate slower than light, and is different from the phenomenon I'm talking about, which is the gravitational "ripples" propagating FTL through subspace and affecting the trajectories of starships and the Nexus. The subspace ripples were not destructive in themselves; what the ship was fleeing from at Warp 1 would've been the radiation front propagating at lightspeed or less.
Now, obviously what the 2009 movie alleged to have happened to Romulus is not exactly the same as that, but that's where Praxis comes in. There we did see something described explicitly as a "subspace shock wave," clearly travelling faster than light and depicted as having harmful or destructive effects. That's not exactly the same either, but it and GEN do demonstrate that it's at least potentially possible for the effects of a supernova or cosmic explosion to propagate faster than light. So while the Romulus situation of 2387 is distinct from those events in a number of ways, those events do provide precedent for that general class of events, i.e. cosmic explosions that have some effects propagating faster than light through subspace.
I tend to assume that they couldn't go just anywhere, but had to come out within a certain spacetime distance of where the Nexus was. Sure, Guinan said "you can go anywhere, anytime," but to the best of my knowledge she's not a subspace physicist, and the Nexus isn't a sentiently governed entity that would provide its inhabitants with an instruction manual; so just because she asserted it, that doesn't mean it's absolutely truthful and accurate. All we know for sure is that it's what Guinan (or her Nexus echo) believes or imagines to be true.
Which probably isn't really right either if I'm thinking right. I've studied a lot on my own about astronomy and everything I've seen points to stellar collapses other than supernovas, which this clearly was, so unless it's got to do something with the weapon that Soran launched, what should have happened is instead of that shock wave/radiation front/whatever it was lol, we should have seen the beginnings of a planetary nebula, which, if I'm remembering right, would be just as deadly, the outer shell of the star coming outward at thousands, perhaps millions of degrees, it'd cook anything in it's path while the star itself collapsed down to at least a white dwarf.
A subspace shock wave emanating from a star, especially one that was apparently large and massive enough to cross interstellar space relatively quickly and destroy the Romulus system, yeah I can believe that. But Praxis? Yes, I understand what you're talking about, I suppose you could say maybe the dilithium in the moon helped cause that, but on the one hand, if something like that could really occur, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near it! Can you imagine the kind of detonation necessary to cause it? Whew!! Also, it seems to me that the damage to the Qo'noS system would have been far more extensive than just decimating the planet's ozone layer. One would think there should have been huge asteroid and meteoroid bombardment and probably ground quakes and all sorts of natural cataclysms that the movie doesn't mention. Not to mention the beginnings of formation of at least a temporary ring system.
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