Certainly it would still be disruptive, it was horrible to lose their homeworlds but how did most of the population and industry get wiped out given that a supernovas do not move at FTL speeds, so they should have had years to prepare?
Certainly it would still be disruptive, it was horrible to lose their homeworlds but how did most of the population and industry get wiped out given that a supernovas do not move at FTL speeds, so they should have had years to prepare?
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The supernova was pretty abnormal – it breached subspace and traveled faster than light as it spread, and converted everything it touched into more energy to expand further and faster.
Depending on where it came from it’s possible that area wasn’t being monitored and so they didn’t know it went Supernova until the grb (or whatever) hit the planet
But that’s just a take from a passerby I have no clue about the actual lore of this event
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Subspace techno mumbo jumbo. Same as how the praxis explosion created a wave that hit the Excelsior.
In general it was not considered a natural supernova.
I don’t recall it ever being explained canonically, but like how Starkiller Base in Star Wars is able to destroy star systems across the galaxy due to hyperspace effects, most people accept that the supernova had a subspace effect that made it faster and more far-reaching. It’s also been theorized to have been artifical, but again, if I’m not mistaken that isn’t canon.
It was coming faster than they expected. Even with all the Federation assembled to help, it still would have taken 6 weeks to evaluate Romulus. But, due to Subspace being a thing in that universe (notably that makes their FTL communication work), the blast of the supernova broke through space, traveled through the subspace conduits, and that way moved faster than light. The total destruction took about a day.
Someone on r/DaystromInstitute broke it down a while back https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/s/eDX1NQKpvb
[Note: Pairing the STO canon with the story as revealed in Picard may lead to oddness]
They were trying to evacuate people and industry. The Romulan leadership knew the supernova was coming years in advance. (Because they caused it by attempting to use their primary star to fuel a cloak of their entire star system)
They kept it secret for a time, but searched for a new capital.
And then the Romulan Mining Guild had noticed instability in another Romulan star – Hobus. It became public knowledge that Romulus was, effectively, doomed.
Spock promised to save Romulus, buuut said they should evacuate anyway.
But Romulus is the capital of a star empire – there are a lot of things to evacuate.
The Federation and Starfleet dedicated resources to assisting, getting the Romulan population to so-called ‘refuge-worlds’, and were even building a brand new evacuation fleet…
The fleet was destroyed when the Daystrom A500 androids went rogue, and not a single ship ever launched. And the Romulan senate itself didn’t give the order for evacuation until the Hobus supernova had already started expanding, so only those who went with Starfleet voluntarily were saved.
Spock was racing to stop the supernova – it’s expansion (deliberately enhanced by very powerful enemies of Romulus due to their leader time travelling and committing genocide) was spreading far faster and wider than should have been possible. But he was too late. Romulus’ own star went supernova, and Romulus was destroyed before he could create the black hole to contain the energy of the Hobus supernova, sacrificing (as far as anyone can tell) his own life in the effort.
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Just how fast do you think they can move the population of a whole planet? The logistics alone are mind boggling.
To expand on what others have said, you have to remember that subspace is a thing in the ST universe. Throw enough energy at something and it’s effects can propagate through subspace and realspace.
This is probably how subspace was first discovered. Effects from high energy reactions were being recorded as travelling FTL.
It’s worth noting that, had starfleet mobilized, they could have saved the majority of romulans. But after the androids destroyed the new fleet, they refused to help anymore, even though they had hundreds of old ships lying around
Or so Picard makes it seem
But it did travel through sub space, so faster than light
[In the STO timeline] The Iconian survivors caused the Hobus supernova specifically to devastate the Romulan Star Empire in revenge for some time travel stuff. Because of the way the Iconians caused the Hobus nova it propagated across subspace moving at FTL speeds and destroying multiple inhabited Romulan worlds before the Red Matter reaction stopped it.
The Romulans were hard pressed to save what they could from even one world with billions of people, but the logistics of evacuating multiple densely populated planets was just too much for them. In this timeline the Romulan government was severely fractured after the assassination of the Senate by Shinzon, bordering on a civil war.