10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek (2009)

With apologies to Jules Verne, who penned his Voyages extraordinaire long before we had technologies to peek through solid rock and glean an understanding of the Earth’s guts, the Narada’s drilling platform makes no sense. Why the need to lower it down into the breathable atmosphere? Does anyone realize how far that is from even low orbit? Is the Narada's ginormous size simply so that it can hold the preposterous cable necessary to bridge such a distance?

That aside, you can’t drill a stable hole to the center because the Earth isn’t made of solid rock, as any active volcano demonstrates. Hell even familiar materials behave differently under the intense pressures found deep inside a planet like Earth. Molten iron-nickel, anyone? That hole is going to constantly cave in and fill any gap made by fricking lasers or phasers or whatever this silly drill beam is. This pressure problem would exist on Vulcan as well, even if it’s older and cold to its core.

The only way this works is if — in addition to its flaming drill beam — the Narada is constantly projecting an immensely powerful cylindrical forcefield down the thousands of kilometers deep hole to hold it open and allow the Red Matter to hit bottom. But since the hole remains gaping even after Kirk and Sulu decommission the drill, this clearly ain’t the case.