
What does this even mean? Of course there's a reason to believe in the Hobus star. That's the star that goes supernova. A scenario which ignores the Hobus star "explicitly contradicts the movie" and "cannot take place in the same reality". Unless, of course, Spock is a very silly person - but I don't get that vibe from Spock.
Any star other than the actual Romulan homestar could explode freely and create no problems for the planet Romulus for the next fifty years. Only the homestar explosion could create a shockwave that pulverizes Romulus during Spock's trip from Vulcan.
And while there may be "subspace shockwaves" and the like in the Trek universe, we actually see the wave that destroys Romulus. There's nothing superluminal about that one!
Besides, if the shockwave pulverizes planets, how could Spock fly through it? He would have to deliver his red matter from the outside - and delivering it in a star system different than the one where the explosion occurred would mean delivering it lightyears away from the actual source. How could it be of any help in negating the entire explosion, then? (This regardless of how it's supposed to negate anything in the first place...)
I'm not entirely convinced that warp factors scale the same way in the Abrams timeline.
How would that be relevant to anything? We hear that the
Enterprise is "limited" to that speed, regardless of what the speed is - the hero ship is crippled. And despite this, she overtakes Nero. It's not a matter of warp factors, it's a matter of cripples speeding past the mining rig.
But is that what we see in practice? When the Narada follows the Jellyfish into warp, does the Jellyfish leave the Narada in its wake?
No - but if she did, she would have failed in her mission. After all, Spock wants to goad Nero away from Earth, and he couldn't do that if he escaped from Nero during the first three nanoseconds of the chase.
We never get a good measure of the speed of the Jellyfish, leaving things nicely ambiguous. She goes from Vulcan to Romulus (not Hobus or Bogus or any such nonsense) in a trip of unknown duration. She is chased by Nero into a timehole at the very moment she departs from that timehole, offering us no opportunity to observe a chase or to compare speeds. And she is received by Nero at the other end again at point blank ranges, immediately tractored, and not allowed to demonstrate her propulsive capabilities. So the "fast Jellyfish model" and "slow Jellyfish model" are both valid speculation - it just seems that assuming that fast really means fast by 24th century standards is the simpler way to go.
We appear to see similar performance from the two late-24th-century ships.
But as with all chases, one side chooses the speed. And barring special circumstances, the one doing the choosing is the faster party. When we see a chase where the prey is not captured, then the prey is the faster party, and we can't tell whether by a small or large margin.
Timo Saloniemi