Maximum speed of the NuEnterprise

Does that really make sense to you that someone announces "We're at maximum warp" a day and a half later? And that Chekov makes an announcement to the crew three minutes before they reach their destination after a whole day and a half has already passed by?

The way the entire scene is structured and edited, the trip to Vulcan is so short that as soon as they have reached maximum warp, it takes them only about 4 further minutes to get there. And the shipwide announcement to the crew about what the hell this unplanned mission actually is about can only be done 3 minutes before they arrive.

And I somehow can't see Pike having to spend a lot of time to review a more detailed version to come up with the following three lines.

Yeah, I noticed that, and it's another funny thing. Kirk was already leaking and whatnot, yet McCoy took the time to let him redress instead of taking him right to sickbay, yet he himself did stay in his red cadet suit?

Apparently as long as it takes a starship to accelerate to maximum warp. Which in the original universe would be like one or two minutes. I don't know if they really need hours or days to do so in the new universe, but I think it is intended to be pretty fast, just like in the original shows and movies.

Another thing that might support my version is that we see how fast the symptoms of Kirk's various diseases come and go, and that McCoy says to him "Well, those symptoms won't last long." before he becomes unconscious. His swollen hands and numb tongue, for example, come and go in less than two minutes. So the mild sedative might also have been just for like 5 minutes to stop Kirk's whining.

So you don't think 15 minutes to Vulcan is too short? So what amount of time would you assume? Still hours? Days even?

 

Perfectly. Potentially playing out as:
<Pike enters bridge, sits in command chair>
Pike: Status report.
Sulu: We're at maximum warp, on course for Vulcan.
Pike: <Nods, yawns> Russian Wiz Kid, begin mission broadcast to the entire ship.

Considering how bored he looks by the entire chore, I doubt this is the first time he's made this broadcast. But as I said, the scene is somewhat badly edited.

To wit...

Indeed, the way the scene is edited it makes it look as if Kirk boarded the Enterprise, changed his clothes, got sedated, slept for a minute and a half while McCoy very quickly changed his clothes and started doing something else for about twenty seconds just in time for Kirk to suddenly wake up and decide they're warping into a trap. It's not the worst such mistake in Trek history, but like most such instances it bears fan rejustification.

 

Maybe there really is a wormhole or transwarp conduit connecting Earth (or Sol system) to Vulcan's system. The Enterprise would probably have to pass though it in normal space and then engage warp drive as necessary on the other side; hence Chekov's comment.

The trip in the movie takes hours at most. Seconds before arrival at Vulcan, Kirk refers to the anomaly referred to by Uhura as having happened "last night", an unambiguous term. The Enterprise has therefore covered 16 light-years in significantly less than 24 hours, and probably a small fraction thereof.

 

This is one of the problems one runs into when dealing with a cookie-cutter plot that was put together with little thought regarding actual story structure.

 

And the second one gets a preview in ST:TMP.

Actually, since this is the first time he has to enter his credentials, I think we have good proof he hasn't given any prior PA speeches on this ship...

That much is likely. How significant is significant, though, depends on multiple factors. Kirk's internal clock is probably off by quite a bit, due to the sedatives and all, so his "last night" could have taken place 23 hours ago, or as few as 5-6 (assuming he stayed late with the Orion, his test was before sunrise, his trial at sunrise, and the shuttle ascent to the ship in early morning, and the trip to Vulcan took very little time).

A trip of some hours, in any case, not of some days. Unless we assume Kirk's "last night" was several days ago, and he simply slept over those. But the rest of the events don't support this: they demand a few hours for the onboard events, but don't really allow for several days on Vulcan where Nero should have been deploying his drill ASAP and only seemed to be delayed in this by the arrival of the starships.

Timo Saloniemi

 

In which they are very, very careful because the engine hasn't even been tested yet. Yeah, there it took like a minute or two to get from Warp 0 to Warp 1.

Yet if you look at the viewscreen when the nuEnterprise jumps to warp (you know, in the Star Wars jump to hyperspace rip off shot), the ship accelerates from Warp 0.0 to Warp 1.0 in about one or two seconds.

That's another thing. Nero was in orbit for hours, yet the Vulcan's didn't do ANYTHING about it? Making contact, firing planetary defense systems, heck, sending a ship/shuttle/probe from the other side of the planet to inform Starfleet about a giant Romulan ship hovering in orbit firing a laser beam into the crust.

 

Which is probably true of the engines of the STXI ship as well. Pike speaks of a maiden voyage, which may or may not mean Starfleet has complete faith in the performance of the new engines across the envelope. Pike probably does not, though.

It would make quite a bit of sense if the new ship were significantly faster than her older siblings, meaning Pike could take it easy at first and get a feel of the engines, then rev them up to full and catch up with the rest of the fleet.

Although, as pointed out above, it might be that the ship had already been at maximum warp for hours if not days when Sulu made the announcement. He might have made that announcement every full hour for all we know.

If they did the first two things, we wouldn't know; Nero would simply have obliterated the futile resistance. I guess Nero somehow made sure they couldn't do the third thing, either. Note that when Earth was asked to help with what was at least publicly considered a potential humanitarian crisis, Earth sent eight warships and zero civilian vessels. Perhaps civilian interstellar vessels are extremely rarely found near these planets, and wouldn't be available for any Paul Revere rides even if Vulcans attempted one and Nero allowed one?

Timo Saloniemi

 

In TMP, acceleration from 0 to 1 takes a minute because it's a refit that has never been tested. In nuTrek, it takes a second. That's the facts. I can't see characters having no faith in the ship in nuTrek. On the contrary, it is the best ship in the fleet. Everyone wants to be on it (for example Uhura) and Pike calls it the flagship. And it is implied that Pike has overseen the construction, too (in contrast to Kirk in TMP, who had no idea how his ship worked because Captain Decker oversaw the refit).

Looked like an intended formation flight for me, until Sulu fucked it up. So no catching up intended here.

SULU: Engines at maximum warp, Sir.
PIKE: Thank you, Captain Obvious.

 

This is actually quite a problem for the plot. If the fleet takes even a few hours to get to Vulcan (and it should take about a day at TNG warp 9) and the drill was the cause of the seismic disturbances reported then the Vulcans do look curiously passive.

The Vulcans are a logical people. Nero has only one ship, which must remain stationary to use the drill so there is no reason why Vulcan ships couldn't escape using the planet (or rather moon) itself as cover. If they did escape, they would only have to escape jamming range in order to give the Federation an update on their situation. Three ships warping off in different directions at the same time while masked by the planet could have done this quite easily.

Having said that, it makes sense that any ships sent to attack the drill itself would be shot down and while the Vulcans may have been aware that the Narada was drilling, they would not have known automatically that this would pose a threat to the entire planet. Plus any ships capable of landing on a planet would probably have had a fairly limited warp speed (starships couldn't land). It is possible that Nero could have chased them down easily enough but it seems far less likely that he could have done so before one of them could get off a distress call.

 

That really annoyed me too. That all goes back to the argument that the abramsverse version of planet Vulcan has absolutely zero planetary defenses or monitoring of any kind. I find that hard to believe. They apparently can't even see a gigantic tentacled Romulan death machine drop a drilling platform from a 20 km orbit and start drilling a hole in their planet. Even though Amanda can see the damn thing from her balcony. And although we know the drill's signal disrupts communications and transporter abilities, there is no mention of sensor disruption. If NuVulcan has any satellites at all in orbit (you know, communication, DishNetwork, astronomy/observation, etc.), someone in the Vulcan military/government should have been able to monitor space traffic in the vicinity of the planet, and thus noticed the giant octopus drilling a hole into the planet. At that point, a communication could have been sent from an orbiting satellite on the other side of the planet beyond the line-of-sight disruption of the Narada's drill. That entire sequence of events from the announcement of the distress call at the Academy to the Falcon arriving at Alderaan scene made no sense to me.

 

And....I don't buy that it took the Fuglyprise 3 minutes to get to Woolcan. But, I do think that the editing of that scene was meant to convey just that. Starfleet receives a distress call. All cadets get to their respective ships asap. Ships take off and get to Woolcan really quick. If it really took them several days or even hours to get there, the crisis could very well be over by the time they arrived. The choppy editing in that scene was meant to lead the (general, non-Trekkie) audience to believe that they got there lickety-split to help the poor, defenseless Woolcans with their seismic problems.

 

Zim, I believe they edited it the way they did to keep the pace and energy up for that sequence. To keep the story moving.

 

Now THERE'S an interesting thought. The Enterprise in this movie had yet to have a shakedown cruise either, and the delay between Enterprise' arrival over Vulcan is considerably more than the delay caused by Sulu's "parking break" fiasco. Makes you wonder if Chief Olsen had some trouble getting the ship up to full throttle while he was working out some teething issues with an equally untested ship.

 

Which is why I still maintain that the DRILL wasn't the cause of those disturbances. I'm leaning more towards the theory that Nero himself faked the distress signal to lure Starfleet into an ambush so he they wouldn't get the wrong idea (or the right one) when Vulcan comm traffic suddenly and permanently vanished.

 

That doesn't solve the basic issue, though: regardless of whether Nero started jamming Vulcan at timepoint T, or started drilling Vulcan at that timepoint, the ships would only arrive at timepoint T+X. For the duration X, we in both cases have to assume that Vulcans did nothing that would have resolved the movie prematurely.

Which of course doesn't mean Vulcans did nothing at all. Say, Nero could have fought Vulcan defenses for X hours, then taken a quick breather, then fought starships from Earth (probably a much softer target!) for Y minutes, then given the hero ship a warm welcome, and then he finally had the time to proceed with his actual work of destroying Vulcan.

Come to think of it, Y could basically be hours, too. We don't know by how much the Enterprise really was delayed, after all. When Pike first queried about it, he was simply told that the other ships had arrived at Vulcan but weren't communicating. Theoretically, the Truman might have been there several hours before the Enterprise, and everybody would simply assume the comm silence would be due to the same, ultimately benign causes that had silenced Vulcan.

However, that's probably not a profitable line of speculation. Pike did seem to think the Truman would still be in a position to receive an advance warning when he contacted that ship.

Although the scene could also be read differently: Kirk spends time and effort in trying to convince Pike that something is amiss, and Pike listens, yet buys none of it. He proceeds to draw an obvious ace from his sleeve - he opens communications with ships that are already known to be there, expecting that they will utterly debunk Kirk's wild theory. Yet there is no reply... That version paints a picture of a more laid back Pike, not worried in the slightest about what awaits ahead, and not even bothering with contacting the lead ships before that particular scene. And of course Greenwood plays Pike "laid back", confident as all hell. Perhaps it's not an act on Pike's part after all?

Timo Saloniemi

 

And to hell with keeping anything resembling a coherent plot line.

 

It's been done before. Or have we forgotten Kirk and crew flying from Vulcan to Earth in a Klingon bird of prey entirely on impulse power?

 

Interesting... What in ST3 would suggest the use of impulse power for the trip? Obviously the ship was warp-capable, as evidenced by the later time warp.

Is it just because the ship might have been out of warp when receiving the news of Earth's plight that you deduce she wouldn't have gone to warp at any point? Starships commonly drop down to impulse long before reaching Earth. And Kirk was in no hurry to arrive...

Timo Saloniemi

 

The only thing I can offer is that Sulu estimated "1.6 hours at present speed." Whatever "present speed" is. Certainly didn't look like Warp 9, but I doubt it was impulse power either. It was at Plot speed.

 

The Movie era FX were remarkably consistent with depictions of impulse and warp drive. In fact, nearly every time we do see the BOP at warp it is shown streaking through space with a yellow tail behind it, so we can know for sure when it is and isn't at warp.

What actually got me was the fact that the Bird of Prey's launch is depicted as being very near to the time the probe entered Earth orbit. The very next scene after this, we have Sulu reporting "Estimating Planet Earth, one point six hours present speed." If the Bird of Prey is going at half the speed of light at this time, that would put the ship well inside the orbit of Jupiter. Which is, I think, a LITTLE late to start wondering where your escort is.

In either case, it's the same issue as in STXI, where it appears the entire voyage is edited out except for the last leg of the trip just before their arrival. The question here involves the editing of the scene: did the probe arrive over Earth at the same time the Bird of Prey took off, or did the probe arrive over Earth only a little before Kirk would have? In the former case, it would mean the President watched the Probe rip Earth a new asshole for a couple of days before he decided to put out that planetary distress signal. In the latter case, it means that Starfleet sat there and watched the probe speeding towards Earth and didn't put out a warning to any other Federation members--Vulcan included--or give any other indication that Kirk and crew would have intercepted during the two to three day trip to Vulcan (and he WOULD have picked it up, since Chekov had programmed the onboard computer to interface with the Federation memory bank).

The only solution that works here is that the scenes worked out the way they were depicted: the probe really DID arrive quickly and with little warning, entering Earth orbit just as Kirk was leaving Vulcan. This means that the Earth-Vulcan run only takes a couple of hours at impulse and a matter of minutes at warp.

And not that things aren't complicated enough, but I might as well invoke the now infamous "Four days there, four days back" to the Klingon Homeworld in Enterprise. The pattern is that warp drive is--under certain circumstances--alot faster than we've been lead to believe, so much so that five to ten minutes between Earth and Vulcan may not be that much of a stretch after all.