This would also perfectly explain why Spock was in such great hurry to eject his tiny glass tube with the drop of red matter in it after the supernova had already destroyed Romulus. The big sphere would be safe enough, but the tiny droplet would kill Spock in a matter of minutes if he didn't get rid of it.
But Spock's "jellyfish" was slow as molasses. Hell, even Nero's lumbering mining rig could pursue it!
We probably need to define "their" here. Spock was crying wolf in every direction and getting no results: the Romulans hated him, the Vulcans hated him, and nobody was acting on the supernova threat. So perhaps the only "they" Spock could get a ship from were the Vulcan Science Academy, or even just the Sarek family.
As already pointed out, no pressing need to ditch the line - if the homestar of Romulus blows, "the galaxy" certainly is at risk, since with this major political entity mortally wounded, all sorts of nastiness will no doubt erupt. Romulans sound just like the sort of people to believe in doomsday devices and armageddon plans; OTOH, they are the balancing factor in many a conflict, and if SF Intel and S31 in "Inter Arma" were anywhere near correct, their relative importance has only grown with the Dominion War. (And I doubt Shinzon's palace coup affected them much - those things must be happening there every second Tuesday anyway.)
It's not a good timeline to begin with. And it's not actually given in a single phrase, it's just a collection of events and potentialities that summarize why Spock Prime is there and what Nero wants.
A better way to put it all together would be that the star threatens to blow, and Spock wants to save Romulus. Nobody else wants that, though: Vulcans don't want Romulus saved, and Romulans don't want Romulus saved by Vulcans. That only makes sense if the blowing up of the star is a possibility, not an already established fact. And that also explains how Spock would be a tad too late.
I mean, it makes no sense to "outfit" (a process taking hours at the very least, by the looks of those scaffoldings and missing hull plates) a fast ship to outrun an already moving wave of death when any Vulcan could calculate that the ship will be X minutes too late. But it makes perfect sense for Spock to hope against hope that action will be taken against impending doom, while at the same time preparing for the highly likely event of the powers that be being slow with their decision - hence the need for a fast ship that he hopes will outrun the processes inside the death star, processes he cannot calculate down to the last minute.
Having already pulled the pin on the red matter grenade, Spock had to get rid of it. Using it for its intended purpose would be the logical way to do that, don't you agree? Especially considering that real supernovae certainly are a risk to neighboring star systems - after a few years or decades, that is. Stopping this one where it started would be doing a great service to the galaxy.
Yet ST:NEM established Romulus and Remus to be on orbits with virtually the same radius from the central star, so that the two worlds would come to within shouting distance every now and then (a nice and fixed schedule for slave rebellions!). Spock would indeed have very little time to act - something like half a second!
Probably so. But to save the rest of the neighborhood, the black hole might do well to contain the remaining core of the star - supernova explosions are sequential things, and many variants involve multiple successive spheres of expanding destruction, the early ones being slower and less deadly than the later ones.
In any case, a black hole generated by red matter gives disproportionate pull: the one that collapsed Vulcan was affecting the Enterprise at a distance greater than anything justifiable by the mass of the thing being collapsed, and so was the one that collapsed Nero's ship. Creating one of those suckers within the Romulan system might well contain everything that needed to be contained.
Although the problem with that is that such containment would not save Romulus from destruction, even if done in time. A black hole replacing your star is not immediately deadly - you can evacuate in the hours or days remaining before your atmosphere starts acting weird. But a super-duper black hole that swallows star-system-wide supernovae isn't good for your health if you happen to be a planet within said system!
Yes, the planet would be in some danger eventually. But starships at least should be immune to tidal forces and gravitic pull to a degree; in that sense, VOY "Parallax" is surprisingly correct.
A ship capable of FTL should be okay inside the lightspeed event horizon, all the way down to the warp event horizon defined by the performance of the ship's FTL engines (assuming the SIFs handle the increasing tidal stresses).Spock didn't get swallowed until after Nero started pestering him. Which I can certainly see happening: an unarmed and slowish little craft trying to evade Nero's mining monster might well try to capitalize on her agility, and a tiny miscalculation could well send her into the hole she was trying to exploit for cover. At which point her pursuer would also fall in, either through sheer clumsiness in hot pursuit, or then deliberately...
Incidentally, the fact that Nero caught Spock after the latter had departed the scene of carnage in his "fast" ship, and managed to drive Spock back into the black hole, is further proof that "fast" here is a highly relative term!
I'm not sure I got your meaning here, but I agree that Nero was pretty close to the sucker. Although Kirk's phrasing IMHO is more like twisting a knife in the wound with nasty understatements.
What is Kirk saying in that scene, BTW? For once, the Chakoteya transcripts fail us - the line there is jumbled beyond recognition.
Timo Saloniemi
