Kit doesn't refer to an adaptor kit, it's military slang for equipment. IE: the torpedo's used existing equipment to fire. As for the power generation and space, we know next to nothing about the ship itself. The entire thing could be chock full of mining gear for all we know and all they had free was the equipment to fire mining charges or probes.
Ah, sorry about that, not much up on military slang.
I would hope the thing was full of mining gear, being a mining vessel. And yeah, we don't know much about the ship in terms of numbers for it's space use and power, but just by going off the sheer size of it, it would seem very likely that they could squeeze a few disruptors on it. Energy weapons have a great advatage over ballistic weapons in that as long as you have power, you have ammo. On a mining ship, which shouldn't be getting into fights all that often, not having to set aside space for ammo would be a nice thing. More room for whatever your harvesting.
I think you'll find that they want movies to be entertaining to a broad audience, how many folks in the general populace even know what a supernova or a black hole are?
But here's the thing, making it so the science makes at least some sense doesn't make the movie less entertaining to that broad audience. As you said, the general populace might not even know what SN or BH are, so what does it matter to them either way?
Movie with bad science
Average joe: That was awesome!
Nerd: That made no sense!
Movie with good science
Average joe: That was awesome!
Nerd: That was awesome and made sense!
Whilst I liked the look, you have to wonder what happens to the user if a malfunction triggers the wrong crystal in those pistols.
That depends on which setting the phaser is suppose to be on I guess.
There are theories that you could use a rotating black hole to go back in time. Why that makes a difference I couldn't say, and it would almost certainly be very different from what we saw in the movie... but meh. There's a theoretical possibility there, I'm happy enough with that.
Never heard that before, so I guess I'll have to keep my mouth shut until I know more.
Whilst a black hole would destroy the planet just as easily from the surface, I took it to be that the red matter doesn't make a black hole unless it's in or close to the middle of whatever it's in. Every time we saw it used it was at the centre of the object it consumed - the supernova, Vulcan, Nero's ship.
Actually, having been thinking over it for a while, I came up with an idea on it. The red matter might work as a sort of gravity accelerator. Through whatever technobabble BS method, it makes gravity more intense, so that a given object has a stronger gravity field than it should for it's mass. By planeting it in the middle of the planet (assuming that vulcan has a molten core) they can ensure that the black hole will "grow" properly, that is more and more matter will keep falling into it during it's developmental stage where it might not have the gravity yet to pull in solid objects. As for the end of the movie black hole, it was formed by all the red matter being released at once, so it resulted in a greater intensifying of the gravitation constant, and thus needed less matter to form it's "fully grown" black hole.
So Vulcan could have been destroyed without the drilling, but it would have taken more of the red matter to do it. As Nero had many more worlds to destroy, he was just being conservative with what was a limited supply of superweapon
Actually you are dead wrong on this one. Black holes are like anything else; how much gravity they have depends on their mass. If the hole had massed fifty times what the sun does then yeah, it would throw the whole solar system into chaos. But if it massed a ton then it wouldn't have any more effect on the sun or planets than any one ton mass would.
If you made the Earth into a black hole, the event horizon would be about the size of a pea; but if you went out and stood where the surface used to be, the gravity of that black hole would still only be 1 gee. And if you went to the moon, it would be whatever it was before there, as well. In fact if you converted the Earth into a black hole right now then, gravitationally speaking, the rest of the solar system wouldn't really notice any difference. It certainly wouldn't send planets flying all over the place.
It does raise an odd question, though, because red matter seems to create quite large black holes without the need for large masses. A hole miles across - like the one we saw at the end - would need something getting towards a solar mass to create it, but that little red ball can't sensibly have been that heavy. Red matter seems to circumvent the need for mass in black hole creation, which is intriguing and very impressive.
I think I answered off all this in my above reply.
No wait, you said I was dead wrong, but then contradicted yourself
. Yes, a black hole only has as much gravity as anything else of equal mass, it's just packed in to a much much much smaller space. As you said, the black hole we saw was massive, hardly your pea sized earth mass. So that would have been a heavy gravitational body that suddenly opened up, which certainly could have screwed with the planetary orbits. Hell, the Ent couldn't get away from it at full warp, which I'm more than certain would be enough to break orbit from earth, which certainly seems to suggest the black hole had a greater gravitational pull than earth, and probably many many times greater.
Ignoring the Borgification backstory, I find it acceptable to believe that what the ship was using were mostly either mining charges intended to break up asteroids, or that they stopped off at some place they could stock up on weapons and took whatever was on offer at the time, which happened to be a few torpedo launchers.
Possibilities certainly, though those would be some very unusual mining charges. I think this one might be more of a personal thing for me...I just find it very screwy that they only seemed to have ballistic weapons.
Sometimes technology comes with a downside. For those who work on heavy machinery, it's a pain in the ass that it is so noisy that it can actually physically damage you. Why don't they just make quiet machines? Because they wouldn't work as well. It's a pain in the ass that airplanes throw out colossal amounts of CO2 and are so noisy that nobody can live near the places they take off and land, but we just live with it.
Point. Still, the drill just seemed to be a big plasma thrower, or some other kind of energy shooting device, and those don't normally seem to screw with things...you know, unless you're on the other end of the emitter.
Personally my complain with the drill was... what is the point of the thing? You drill a hole into a planet from space. Okay. Then.... what? What do you do with that hole when you aren't out using red matter to suck the planet up?
It would probably be used to drill a hole in large space bodies of mostly worthless material to get at precious materials on the inside.
Actually, strictly speaking it's not established that the promotion scene happens right after the Narada is destroyed. It could easily be weeks or months later.
True, but it sure didn't feel that way, did it? Hell, Pike was still in a wheelchair. Weeks maybe, but months of starfleet medicial and he's still chair bound, I doubt that. Either way, way too soon to be captaining Kirk.
That said, it is dumb how they treat ranks and promotions in this movie. One of the things I've noticed having watched it repeatedly is just how OFTEN a CO walks out on his command with a casual "you're in charge". Robau does it to Kirk at the start of course, but watch the scene over Vulcan. Pike turns the ship over to Spock. Within ten minutes Spock turns it over to Chekov. Within five minutes of that Chekov turns it over to somebody we don't even know and runs off the bridge. And we have Kirk the academy cadet who isn't even on active status being put in as second in command... and so on. Daft.
It is rather amazing how nonchalantly you can pass off the responsibilities of command so you can go do whatever you want.
Pike: Man, I don't want to deal with this, Spock it's your problem now.
Spock: Screw that, Chekov, alls yours now, good luck.
Chekov: Oh no you don't, I'm out of here! You *points wildly* Command is yours! *bolts*
Still. Starfleet is not the US Navy. It's rooted in a culture that is likely at least as different to us as the 1700s are to today, if not far more so. There's no reason to suppose it will adhere to anything like the present day standards of career path and promotion
No, but I'd like to think it would at least adhere to a standard of common sense. Pike tells Kirk he could make captain in 8 years, 4 in the academy, 4 in service. Kirk doing the academy in 3 you can forgive, but squashing 4 years down to just a few weeks max?
The bald and tattooed thing doesn't bother me. They had stubble, so clearly bald was intended to be a choice on their part, not a species characteristic. Tattoos likewise; clearly something they did themselves, not a species marking. (I love the backstage explanation for this, wish it had made it to the screen.)
And what was the backstage explanantion?
As to the ship looking different... the vast majority of the ships we have seen from any power are military/Starfleet. And EVERY Romulan ship we have ever seen is military. I don't even know what a Federation mining ship would look like, I certainly can't say what a Romulan one should.
It wasn't that the ship just looked different, it looked VASTLY different. As in not one bit of it looked to be of romulan orgin. I'm not saying I wanted to see a hint of warbird to it, it just didn't seem like something I'd picture romulans building. I guess that's really just my view on things though, isn't it?
I tend to think all those big pointys open up like a claw and clasp a large asteroid, which is then gradually ripped up and processed and pure material spat out the ass end of the ship. It's the only way I can really see that design working.
Makes sense to me.
Spock being bullied by other Vulcans as a child is straight from TOS. In Journey to Babel his own mother said "When you were five years old and came home stiff-lipped, anguished, because the other boys tormented you saying that you weren't really Vulcan... I watched you knowing that - that inside... that the human part of you was crying ... and I cried, too."
I know, but as I said before, just because it's canon doesn't mean it makes sense.
As to why... it's generally been painted as an experiment the other boys were running. They weren't being cruel as such, at least in their mind. They were interested in how Spock's Human and Vulcan halves meshed, and bullied him as an experiment to see if they could find a stimulus to provoke an emotional response. Those are the exact terms the movie put it in, too. And look close and you will see that the bullies were actually quite surprised and shocked when Spock did react as he did in the end.
...okay now that, that I can totally believe in and accept. That makes much more sense to me than them picking on him just because they don't like him.
