What if the Zhat Vash had never sabotaged the rescue fleet?
- Thread starter Garak234
- Start date
Then some more Romulans would be saved.
Thaddius Riker would have lived.
You would think Riker would have taken Thaddius outside the federation for treatment.. ...
Yep, more romulans would have lived, Picard would still be in starfleet, Thaddius living probably about to start the academy. Relations with the romulan remenants would be better, better law enforcement in the new romulan sectors, not lawless.
Basically better all around.
Yep, more romulans would have lived, Picard would still be in starfleet, Thaddius living probably about to start the academy. Relations with the romulan remenants would be better, better law enforcement in the new romulan sectors, not lawless.
Basically better all around.
Almost like they were the villains or something.
I mean the Federation is the most advanced scientifically. Who is going to go to? The Klingons?
"The boy is weak! Let him die!"
The Romu...ooo, wait.
Consequences:
- Picard and Musiker - among many others - would still be in Starfleet.
- Thad Riker would still be alive.
- Narissa and Nedar would still be in place as deep-cover agents of the Zhat Vash within Starfleet Intelligence.
- Rios might still be an officially-disgraced ex-Starfleet officer, on the run from his own past as orchestrated by Nedar.
- Mars would be intact, as would the Utopia Planitia Yards.
- Millions of Romulan lives would added to the rolls of those who survived the destruction of its core systems, living on other worlds which would be more secure for the resettlements having had better support. Indeed, there might still be a unified Romulan star-nation.
That I find suspect, largely because I imagine that both Spock and Picard would have had to push some of the hardliners very hard to get them to accept Federation help. Indeed, I have a feeling that Oh's infiltration in to Starfleet was partially facilitated by Spock's overtures of reunification and Picard's rescue efforts. The Romulans are not going to just accept a handout without some measure of payback that supports them, including against their own people who accepted outside help.
Also the Kelvin timeline just plain would never have been created.
^ The Zhat Vash, as far as we know, had nothing to do with the actual supernova. So the Kelvin timeline would still come about, because the supernova would still happen.
No, because Spock's goal was to save Romulus. The nova was an event that happened regardless of political organizations machinations.
It's unlikely Spock would've done the red matter quest (I think the new "Autobiography of Spock" retconned it now to just be absorbing a small amount of the supernova to recollapse it into a star rather than destroying the Romulan sun itself) if the Romulan system were already fully evacuated.
Certainly if Nero and his family were evacuated, he wouldn't waste his time chasing Spock, or destroying Kelvin Vulcan or even the USS Kelvin. Without the red matter, he wouldn't even be able to time travel to begin with.
That depends on the Romulan government saving the poor people. Doubtful.
Nero's family died in the Kelvinverse. In Regularverse, the supernova was known about well in advance; we have no real reason to think Kelvinverse would have differed there. So the Romulan government did fail to save at least some poor people there.
The fine timing was apparently unknown, because Spock could be late. All the more reason to evacuate well in advance, and all the more evidence that the government (or the people?) didn't want to.
Of course, we now know that Spock blew up the star and let Romulus die, after learning in "Unification I/II" that diplomacy would never unite his two peoples, and thus achieved "Unification III" by his more active means...
Timo Saloniemi
The fine timing was apparently unknown, because Spock could be late. All the more reason to evacuate well in advance, and all the more evidence that the government (or the people?) didn't want to.
Of course, we now know that Spock blew up the star and let Romulus die, after learning in "Unification I/II" that diplomacy would never unite his two peoples, and thus achieved "Unification III" by his more active means...
Timo Saloniemi
As far as we can tell, they are the same event. We simply learned little in the movie; learned more, but completely in contradiction with what the movie told us, in the adjoining comic; and finally learned "the truth" from PIC.
The truth thus apparently being that the supernova was predicted years in advance; Starfleet wanted to help with the evacuation, but stuff happened and they didn't; others probably helped evacuate, and Romulans themselves did, but not everybody had left when the star blew; and Spock tried to do something about that at the very last hour, but was late.
But both supernova and nova are misleading terms, devised by folks who had little understanding of what they were naming. In Trek it would seem that a nova is a small supernova, and a supernova is a big nova, both describing a terminal event in the life of a star. And thus the meaning of "nova", the more misleading of the two ITRW, has been completely changed, while the latter is whatever Trek wants us to think it is, but probably covers a lot of ways for a star to die.
We don't know what Spock tried to do exactly (although, as I said above, killing Romulus might be what he wanted to achieve), but we see the visuals. In those, Spock drops a small amount of Red Matter into the wavefront after it has swept past Romulus, and a ring-of-fire effect starts spreading and eating away at that wavefront.
We might expect the effect to eventually remove that wavefront from existence altogether, which would be good news for planets because the front pulverizes those. We also hear that a black hole is created in the process, and that it becomes a timehole. We see all the action taking place in the Romulan home system, up to and including a zoom-in past planet Romulus to the local star and then a zoom-out back towards Romulus.
If the wavefront is the only danger to planets inside and outside the system, Spock really saved everybody who wasn't already dead. But that wavefront didn't look like it could be FTL, so it never was much of a threat to the rest of the galaxy directly, and not an immediate threat to anybody outside the system in any case. So we have to creatively interpret at least three parts of Spock's narration:
1) We still don't know how literally we ought to take his "Using red matter, I would create a black hole, which would absorb the exploding star" statement. A spherical shell of death two AUs across can't readily be eaten by a single black hole deployed at one point on its surface, so even though a black hole was created and the explosion absorbed, this might be an oversimplified description of what was achieved. Or then a description of what was attempted, but Spock failed because he was too late and had to create the hole at the 1 AU radius rather than back at the star itself.
2) We have to assume that his "129 years from now, a star will explode, and threaten to destroy the galaxy" is poetic license, the threat to the galaxy being indirect (anything happening to Romulus always has galactic consequences politically) rather than due to the blast wave.
3) We have to assume that his "I had little time", spoken after Romulus is already dead, refers to the mechanisms of how to stop the slow but inevitable threat from the snail-paced wave of death, rather than to a hurry in saving some specific party that otherwise would die within a few minutes. That is, if Spock waited for ten minutes here, nobody additional would die for the next ten years, but their deaths could no longer be prevented.
Or then we can assume that Spock lied. After all, he was trying to motivate Kirk into specific action. And he's a veteran of melding, so instead of sharing the complete truth, he could be projecting a lie (this whole "projecting" being an all-new way to use the mind meld anyway).
That Spock only attempted this thing at the last hour, combined with the PIC revelation that the event was known well in advance, suggests to us that Spock never thought his actions could save everybody. For all we know, they would necessarily kill everybody, but more slowly than the supernova would - so the Red Matter trick would only be applicable at the very last moment, postponing death so that a final spree of evacuation could proceed. The star could be dead as a dodo afterwards anyway, and so would Romulus, only not quite so quickly and violently.
Timo Saloniemi
Last edited:
It's a matter of interpretation for the most part still, but I for one appreciate the PIC take on it, and I feel it's not in contradiction of anything shown in the movie. We just have to think Spock wasn't telling the exact and complete truth there - and brevity is a valid motivation for him, there being no need to plead malevolence.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
The Fenris Ranges would still operate in the Qiris sector as it would be less chaotic for them and not stretch their resources thin. With also means no power vacuum for smugglers and warlords to move in on in their absence.
Bruce Maddox would still be alive, allowing him to continue his research with Dr. Jurati.
No first contact with the extra-galactic Synth beings.
As a Physics major who studied under two Physics Nobel prize winners, I'm not going to deny that the Trek 2009 supernova is a completely unscientific (even for Star Trek) mess. However, Picard clarifying the supernova was the Romulan sun (as opposed to the faster than light magical supernova outside of the Romulan system that threatened the galaxy as implied in the 2009 movie itself, and outright described in the now non-canon Countdown comic book) created the plothole that Spock would be making things worse by outright destroying the Romulan sun with red matter. So adding more gobbledygook non-science but "logical" sounding handwaves was really the only way to fix this mess, even if that meant changing supernova science.
The movie wasn't that bad - the mind meld visuals actually showed us the Romulan homesun blowing, with the camera tracking the STL action all the way from that star through some asteroids to the homeworld (and having previously done the opposite run).
Where PIC helps is showing that Spock could well have aimed at destroying the Romulan sun by turning it into a black hole. At that point, it would do no additional harm, and would at least give the planet a few extra weeks to evacuate - and at the very least, the prime excuse not to evacuate, "It's all fake news, the Sun will not blow!", would be rather decisively gone.
Of course, Spock's original plan might have merely stabilized the star, "absorbed the explosion" as Spock says, but Spock was late to that party. And if his medicine only works on a dying patient and otherwise is worse than the disease, it really makes sense for him to cut it close and risk failing that way. And since PIC shows he's not the only hope of Romulus, but merely the last best one for its left-behind poor and downtrodden, it makes great sense that he'd have to go it alone.
(...Would the Fenris Rangers even exist if not for chaos in the former RSE? We hear of no real history for the organization.)
Timo Saloniemi
