Starships and other objects CAN "coast" at warp speeds as long as their warp field remains stable. There's precedent for that in TNG, more than once I believe. As far as this situation -- no explanation is necessary, because I'm sure Abrams and the writers didn't care. They just did whatever they wanted, went halfway toward making sense and then gave up. But I'd say -- NO, a warp field wouldn't be stable if you were so close to a black hole that even being AT WARP meant you weren't getting away. And if the core breach explosion was powerful enough to get them far enough away for Impulse/thrusters to do it, it would pretty much destroy the ship, as you say.stardust wrote:Coming back to the scene of the Enterprise jettisoning it's warp cores. Leaving aside the minor fact the shockwave ought to have turned the ship inside out, (especially as we've seen the structural integrity severely compromised i.e the cracks in the bulkheads and view screen)
In the time between the jettisoning and the detonation, WHAT is powering the Warp drive, as this was all that was keeping the Enterprise from being sucked in?
"We need to blow something else up at the end, let's have the warp drive not be enough to get away from the black hole, so they have to blow it up to get away. I don't care how it's done, just make it look cool. ... So they've done warp core breaches too many times? How could we make it different? How about multiple warp cores or something? What? I don't CARE if the Enterprise never had that!! It's an alternate timeline, get with the program. Listen, just throw a bunch of stuff out there and make it explode. Then they get away. Yeah, on impulse, thrusters, whatever. I don't care. Just print it."
Prior to the movie, a series of Star Trek comics were released, called "Countdown." These comics have been accepted by Abrams as canon. Here are some of the first issue's highlights (lowlights) :stardust wrote:And I'm sorry, but that supernova idea was bull.
- Nero was mining "Decalithium" in the Hobus system... Deca-? Trilithium wasn't good enough eh? Nor Quad-, Pent-, Hex-, Sept-, Oct- or Nona-? Had to go all the way up to Deca-?
- The Hobus system star made a large solar flare, making them flee the mining planet, and this solar flare not only destroyed the entire planet, but converted the planet's mass into energy! And that's supposed to explain why the subsequent supernova was powerful enough to destroy neighboring star systems' planets!
..... So again we see half-understood science being wielded as a blunt instrument to advance whatever plot they want. They don't CARE if it makes sense. There's also crap like a Reman ambush and Data as captain of the Enterprise (uhh where'd Data come back from? B-4 got a massive bios update? And so soon after the events of Nemesis?)
It started to bother me, then I realized -- this is just a comic. Comics do things like this all the time. They use pseudoscience, totally implausible scenarios and two-dimensional characters to tell their "fantastic stories." It's just a cartoon.
And THEN I realized -- the new "Star Trek" movie is a cartoon as well!! That's EXACTLY what it is -- it's a cartoon with live actors. NOW I finally have a basic understanding of what I watched yesterday. The characters were two-dimensional because they were cartoons. The plot and science were paper thin because they were just a comic book page. So, this movie was "comical" in more ways than one!
Well, I don't really care for comics. I do care for the depth that Star Trek once had, and the vision of the future and heights of storytelling it could occasionally achieve. None of those were present in this, Abrams work of "pulp fiction."