JJ-Trek Question

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Okay, so in the JJ-verse-timeline-whateveryouwantittobe Spock launched the Red Matter into the Hobus star too late and Nero tried to mix it up with him but they both fell into the Black-Worm-Storm-Hole instead and came out and then you could make a movie off of what happens next!

But what if Spock actually made it in time to save Romulus and launched the Red Matter into the hole? Wouldn't he, and presumably other nearby ships if there were any, still fall into the Black Hole and end up ~120-150 years in the past anyway?

So would Spock just end up encountering the Kelvin and be all 'Sheeet, I gotta hide out somewhere so the timeline doesn't get fucked' or something? Or would some random Romulan pickets not captained by insane revenge-obsessed baldies fall in and run off to Past-Romulus if the Hobus Star had gotten close to Romulus by the time Spock saved it?

Or am I crazy?

[Bounty]

But what if Spock actually made it in time to save Romulus and launched the Red Matter into the hole?

In the original plan from the comic, he had enough time to get out of the way and not get swallowed by Hobus. It's only because he was too late and Romulus had already been starburped out of existence which made Nero angry which made him show up to ruin Spock's day that he fell in.

[Stark]

I'm not sure nST really wants to take the REST of that comicbook setup along with the explanation, however.

[Bounty]

I'm not sure nST really wants to take the REST of that comicbook setup along with the explanation, however.

Yeah. Just sayn', it'd be pretty dumb for Spock to not have planned for getting out of the way of the black hole. It's not like the red matter insertion is a delicate procedure, you just toss the canister out an airlock.

[Stark]

In terms of the movie, his explanation is pretty daft. Maybe we can put it down to Vulcan loony disease that he wasn't clearer when talking to Kirk.

[Simon_Jester]

As a specific example of such a loony disease:

Perhaps what we see is Spock's perception of events, highly summarized and delivered in terms of qualia, not in terms of truly objective facts. As anyone who's ever listened to old veterans tell war stories can attest, a person's qualitative experience of what it was like to experience traumatic events may not match even well known, historically documented facts about what happened during those events.

[Ted C]

But what if Spock actually made it in time to save Romulus and launched the Red Matter into the hole? Wouldn't he, and presumably other nearby ships if there were any, still fall into the Black Hole and end up ~120-150 years in the past anyway?

Presumably no, since the Enterprise was able to get away from the black hole, and other ships starting from a reasonably safe distance shouldn't have any trouble, either. I would have to guess that Nero and Spock fell in because their combat maneuvering took them too close, and they had power diverted from their engines to weapons and shields.

Realistically, any ship capable of exceeding the speed of light shouldn't have much trouble getting away from a black hole from anywhere outside the event horizon (where the escape velocity equals lightspeed). They might have to orbit it for a while to build up speed, but they shouldn't have trouble getting away unless they have really pathetic acceleration (and, seeing how quickly the Enterprise and other ships accelerated to warp speed in the movie, the gratuitous "we're about to fall in" scene at the end was... well... gratuitous).

[Simon_Jester]

Stripping out as much technobabble as possible, warp drives appear to operate by altering the shape of spacetime around the ship; the whole "bubble" concept sounds at least vaguely like an Alcubierre drive or some mutant version thereof.

The trouble with something like that is that general relativity is nonlinear: the spacetime metric due to two effects in the same area is not simply the metric due to each object separately added together. If something else is creating a significant gravitational field in the area, it could interfere with your ability to assemble a warp bubble.

In which case Trek ships may well have difficulty reaching full speed near a black hole.

[Bounty]

(and, seeing how quickly the Enterprise and other ships accelerated to warp speed in the movie, the gratuitous "we're about to fall in" scene at the end was... well... gratuitous).

On the other habnd, there's just something viscerally cool about a ship getting sucked into a maelstrom and escaping. Especially when it's doing something as ridiculous as riding the shockwave of its own exploding fuel

[Stark]

ITT Ted C believes nST features black holes.

[erik_t]

What a meaningful contribution, Stark. Many thanks!

[Darth Wong]

But what if Spock actually made it in time to save Romulus and launched the Red Matter into the hole?

There was no hole. IIRC, there was a nova of some sort, and the idea of the red matter was to turn the star into a black hole (or at least the bizarre phenomenon that the movie referred to as a black hole), which would magically reach out instantaneously and suck in the matter and energy that it must have already released years earlier since it was mere moments away from consuming Romulus, many light-years away.

Realistically speaking, even if he had successfully deployed the canister, Romulus would still have been destroyed, and the Vulcan Science commission would have been forced to explain how the fuck they could have possibly thought this would ever work.

Wouldn't he, and presumably other nearby ships if there were any, still fall into the Black Hole and end up ~120-150 years in the past anyway?

If the scheme actually worked, then yes. If the scheme worked, then the black hole must have the magical ability to reach out across light-years at enormously superluminal speed and instantly draw in the mass/energy of a supernova at that range. Of course, this begs the question of why Romulus itself would not have been massively disrupted by the super magic Black Hole.

[Stark]

What a meaningful contribution, Stark. Many thanks!

Want to demonstrate that there are any black holes in nST and that the known properties of black holes should be considered relevant? PS, 'big black cloud of space lightning' is not a black hole.

As Mike highlights, the setup is so stupid the prequel comics had to invent some crazy idea that the star basically fired FTL death rays at random, because the nova/black hole explanation given in dialogue just doesn't work.

[erik_t]

Of course there are, any time a sufficiently large star reaches that stage of its life. Without a damned compelling reason, I don't see why we should toss that aspect of physics out the window.

Now, was the red-matter-generated... object... a black hole? Certainly not as we understand them, no. As you say, Mike gives many reasons why the object was not a classical black hole. They've been known in this forum for a number of months. You could quite easily look them up and repost them, or just link to the relevant thread. Why you chose to say "LUL TED IS DUMB" instead of listing those reasons, ie supporting the statement you're making as the plebes are encouraged to do... I dunno, why a senator does that is beyond my pay-grade.

[Ted C]

Whatever relationship the "red matter phenomenon" has to a real black hole, it obviously can't be too hard to escape, since both Nero's ship and Spock's ship had *already* escaped it at least once. Yeah, they fell in fighting each other, but they subsequently pulled right back out. Presumably Spock's ship would not have fallen though it if everything had gone according to plan in the first place.

[erik_t]

I see no reason to assume the wormhole-ness, or indeed the entire phenomenon, is isotropic. From the very beginning, there is an imposed directional bias to the hole - one end is the red matter initiation point, the other is... somewhere else. I don't see any reason to assume that it has to be a two-way road; "escape" by Spock and Nero might have been the only possible outcome, even if their ships were stone cold.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Alright, folks, I think it can be generally acknowledged that the deep space plot devices of JJ-Trek go beyond usual Trek-science to the point where they're totally incomprehensible (how the fuck can a Supernova threaten a Galaxy? What the hell is the time-storm? Why does it react differently with everything it touches? What in the fuck is going on here?) and so we're more or less left with the mad certainty of the characters of how things ought to work, but I think arguing about that is quickly going down a really pointless road. They call it a Black Hole because it... Sucks stuff... Sometimes... But sometimes it ejects stuff instead and with its visibility and lack of event horizon it would be more accurately described as a naked singularity (as 'accurately' is appropriate for something that also has visible electrical discharges in space, sends some things back in time intact, tears apart other things, and... um...) and the Supernova would be best described as some kind of souped-up FTL Gamma Ray Burst that can be somehow stopped by this... Black Hole... But not send those deadly, deadly rays back in time to destroy old Romulus either... And all in all it's just a pair of terms that laymen audience members will recognise that basically just boil down to 'Fucking magic', kind of like Subspace and Quantum once did.

I was just curious if Spock's plan would have entailed him Crossing the Streams even if he hadn't waited for Starfleet to build him a new fastest ship for one time-sensitive mission or he'd decided not to stop at the Roadside Barbie Museum or whatever slowed him down.

[EyebrowZing]

In a futile attempt to explain these incomprehensible things, what if the red mater had an unanticipated reaction to the supernova/gamma ray burst? Could it have been that the red matter really does produce a black hole like Spock said. Vulcan certainly seemed to collapse in on itself in a representation fairly consistent with what we know a black hole should be. No lightning storm there. But what if something about the supernova/GRB coupled with the red matter didn't create the expected black hole, but the lightning storm time portal, a completely different and unexpected phenomenon than what the red matter was intended for.
Though, it still doesn't solve the problem of a black hole somehow saving Romulus.

[Samuel]

The Vulcans had no intention of saving Romulous and wanted to get back at them for the attempt to invade Vulcan?

[Bounty]

The Vulcans had no intention of saving Romulous and wanted to get back at them for the attempt to invade Vulcan?

Comic Vulcans sure did.

[Darth Wong]

The Vulcans had no intention of saving Romulous and wanted to get back at them for the attempt to invade Vulcan?

That doesn't explain why the Romulans would be satisfied with this plan, which they must have been if they had no plan of their own. Of course, we're presuming that this story was actually supposed to make sense, as opposed to some half-assed bullshit a writer thought up while sitting on the toilet.

[Simon_Jester]

Perhaps the Vulcans presented the Romulans with a sane plan, one that honestly sounded like it would work, and then proceeded to actually carry out a useless plan to keep the Romulans quiet.

[And_Atom_JT]

The Vulcans had no intention of saving Romulous and wanted to get back at them for the attempt to invade Vulcan?

That doesn't explain why the Romulans would be satisfied with this plan, which they must have been if they had no plan of their own. Of course, we're presuming that this story was actually supposed to make sense, as opposed to some half-assed bullshit a writer thought up while sitting on the toilet.

Amen to that. Honestly, the sfx were good, the actors were spot on, the production was good, the pacing was good... Why is writing the most likely variable to be ignored? It wouldn't have taken that much effort to clean up the script so you can keep everything good but lose or modify the stuff that didn't make sense.

[Patrick Degan]

That doesn't explain why the Romulans would be satisfied with this plan, which they must have been if they had no plan of their own. Of course, we're presuming that this story was actually supposed to make sense, as opposed to some half-assed bullshit a writer thought up while sitting on the toilet.

Amen to that. Honestly, the sfx were good, the actors were spot on, the production was good, the pacing was good... Why is writing the most likely variable to be ignored? It wouldn't have taken that much effort to clean up the script so you can keep everything good but lose or modify the stuff that didn't make sense.

Hollywood, as a collective entity, has never really given a fuck about the quality of writing for a script. They'll literally produce anything if it looks like a moneymaker, no matter how moronic it may be.

[And_Atom_JT]

That doesn't explain why the Romulans would be satisfied with this plan, which they must have been if they had no plan of their own. Of course, we're presuming that this story was actually supposed to make sense, as opposed to some half-assed bullshit a writer thought up while sitting on the toilet.

Amen to that. Honestly, the sfx were good, the actors were spot on, the production was good, the pacing was good... Why is writing the most likely variable to be ignored? It wouldn't have taken that much effort to clean up the script so you can keep everything good but lose or modify the stuff that didn't make sense.

Hollywood, as a collective entity, has never really given a fuck about the quality of writing for a script. They'll literally produce anything if it looks like a moneymaker, no matter how moronic it may be.

They keep forgetting the basic rule of movie making: A movie is made three times. When it's written, when it's shot, and when it's edited. Screw up at any one stage and the whole thing suffers.