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Was the ship Romu...

Captrek

Vice Admiral
Admiral
Kirk frantically asks Uhura whether the ship that attacked the Klingons was Romulan.

How did he know the Kelvin was attacked by Romulans? Nobody has ever seen a Romulan, they didn’t identify themselves as Romulans, and the Narada doesn’t match any known construction.
 
25 years passed between the Narada's attack on the Kelvin and the attack on Vulcan. It's very probable that in this alternate universe humans found out that Romulans were angry Vulcans.
Remember that survivors would know that a bald, angry, tattooed Vulcanoid appeared on the Kelvin's screen.

Nerada does have some vague similarities with the Romulan drone ships from Enterprise. The control consoles inside were similar, too. It's possible the Kelvin's sensors detected some similarity in weapons' signatures or power output (or whatnot technobabble), which may have led to Federation/Romulan contact in the aftermath.
 
I just imagine there was a missing scene just before Ayel instructs Robeau to come aboard the Narada, where he says "This is the Romulan vessel Narada", or something to that effect.
 
I just imagine there was a missing scene just before Ayel instructs Robeau to come aboard the Narada, where he says "This is the Romulan vessel Narada"
Technically it isn’t a Romulan vessel. It’s just a vessel that happens to be crewed by Romulans. Nero states explicitly that they “stand apart” from the Empire.

Yes, I’m being pedantic.

Because I feel like it, that’s why.
 
They had 25 years to figure it out. Tactical information saved from the Kelvin on the shuttles, etc.
 
Audio, video and scans of all sorts. Earth/Starfleet fought a war with the Romulans and negotiated a peace treaty with them 70 years prior. Its not like its their first encounter. UFP/Starfleet Intelligence probably went over the Kelvin's records/reports with a fine tooth comb. Wouldn't take a genius to link the Narada to the Romulans based on that.
 
My gripe with that stretch of dialogue/story is the idea that a Romulan ship would destroy 80 bazillion Klingon ships and it wouldn't be "news" in the Federation. At least something that a command officer like Pike would know about.

Yes, I realize that Uhura intercepted the transmission, etc, but doesn't that sound like something fairly important that would have been passed up the flagpole?
 
I'm fairly certain it was passed up the flagpole, just not to Pike who wasn't her CO at the time. Space is huge, and there are probably a dozen minor wars and invasions going on between local species at any one time (kinda like the Federation/Cardassian war that was supposedly going on at the start of TNG but we didn't hear about until later). The Klingons losing 47 ships, while newsworthy, probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you're called to help evacuate Vulcans experiencing a "natural disaster".
 
My guess is that when Nero hailed the Kelvin, he hailed them using standard Romulan frequencies similar to the ones intercepted during the Earth-Romulan war. Also, Nero probably had a Romulan accent (if there is such a thing).
 
Maybe it's as simple as the language that the UT translated from the Nerada being the same as the language identified as Romulan stored in the historical database. There must have been some Romulan chatter picked up and recorded during the Earth-Romulan War.
 
I'm fairly certain it was passed up the flagpole, just not to Pike who wasn't her CO at the time. Space is huge, and there are probably a dozen minor wars and invasions going on between local species at any one time (kinda like the Federation/Cardassian war that was supposedly going on at the start of TNG but we didn't hear about until later). The Klingons losing 47 ships, while newsworthy, probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you're called to help evacuate Vulcans experiencing a "natural disaster".

It may be classified information shared on a need-to-know basis. At the time the incident occurred, Pike was teaching at the Academy, and then went on a mission to render assistance to Vulcan during a (presumed) natural disaster. There’s no reason he’d need to know about the Klingon incident in either capacity. (It did turn out to be relevant to the Vulcan mission, but nobody could have anticipated that possibility.)

Especially if Uhura intercepted a coded transmission that the Klingons didn’t know the Federation had broken, it would have been played VERY close to the vest. During World War II, the Allies sometimes allowed their own troops to walk into ambushes to protect the secret that they had cracked German and Japanese codes.
 
If it were classified Uhura would not have been telling her roommate :)

Unless, being a cadet with no access to such classified information, she cracked the code herself and did not realize the code crack was classified. In the Abramsverse, the Big Seven are all übergeniuses, except when the plot requires them to do something stupid. :)
 
I just imagine there was a missing scene just before Ayel instructs Robeau to come aboard the Narada, where he says "This is the Romulan vessel Narada"
Technically it isn’t a Romulan vessel. It’s just a vessel that happens to be crewed by Romulans. Nero states explicitly that they “stand apart” from the Empire.

Yes, I’m being pedantic.

Because I feel like it, that’s why.

He's speaking politically, of course. Not connected to the Romulan Government.

If Countdown is any indication, Narada is a civilian mining vessel outfitted with experimental romulan/Borg weapons technology. It's appearance is due to regeneration gone haywire.
 
It's appearance is due to regeneration gone haywire.
Hmm. I would say it's more or less material growing rather than regenerating. And since it's experimental, it grows and builds onto itself with no pre-determined shape or form to which to grow into. There's something about the Narada that just reminds me of a horrible condition that a man named Dede (aka the treeman) is enduring.
 
Then again, oil rigs of today look pretty much like an ugly ship caught a horrible deforming disease and then mated with another ugly ship that had even worse diseases, after which the Thing from outer space ate the litter of offspring and merged it into a big lump. The Narada might represent the standard looks for Star Trek spatial mining rigs; her axis-symmetric (rather than up-down-bow-stern) design is reminiscent of the Earth mining rig seen in "Demons"/"Terra Prime"...

As for Starfleet knowing the identity of Nero's folks, it seems easy enoug to assume that they were identified because they spoke Romulan. TOS stated that Starfleet didn't know (officially at least) what Romulans looked like, but it never suggested Starfleet didn't know what Romulans sounded like. They had negotiated a treaty with Earthlings, after all. And ENT confirmed that their half of the negotiation could have proceeded in the Romulan language, because that language was used and interpreted in the episode "Minefield".

Nero would have little reason not to use the Romulan language with Robau. He wasn't trying to keep his identity secret or anything. There isn't much indication that Robau wouldn't have known him for a Romulan from the very start, really... There's just no dramatic reason for Robau to reveal his knowledge to the audience.

We don't know how much of the Nero/Robau chat was relayed to the Kelvin survivors, beyond Robau's heartbeat. But even if none of it ever got through for some reason, George Kirk had still heard Nero's spokesman hail them, and the outgoing transmission might well have been in that guy's native language rather than pre-translated to English. Nero wasn't expecting to face a Starfleet vessel, so he wouldn't have carefully prepared for speaking in English; whether he'd bother rigging up the translation when confronted with such a ship is debatable, and IMHO rather unlikely.

Timo Saloniemi
 
We don't know how much of the Nero/Robau chat was relayed to the Kelvin survivors, beyond Robau's heartbeat.

Well, if they did hear what was going on, the Federation's technology at this time is way better than the Next Generation's comm badges. I doubt they heard anything.
 
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