Obviously there was a spaceport there. Why in Iowa? Why not.
Because it's dumb that's why.
(Not to mention, why would cadets gather in Iowa to go to San Francisco?)
Look, we're shown frame after frame of how desolate this place is, and then, there is a bar with a bunch of cadets in it and a captain, and what's more, there is a ship-building facility (that apparently you can just about walk right up to without being stopped).
Is it beyond the realm of possibility?
No, it's not.
Is it something small and stupid that could have been fixed, simply by having it happen AFTER Kirk left Iowa, say after a recruiter talked him into leaving?
Yes, it is.
It's sloppy, opportunistic writing.
Maybe the same reason there was a space port there? Low population density. Though I admit that it is strange not to have built in orbit.
See the above.
I don't know, But apparently he was able to work it out in 25 yrs.
That's a neat way of saying you don't know.
A mining ship with technology from over a 100 yrs in the future, And being Romulan, I don't think that it is unlikely for it to have defenses and weapons
It's a mining ship.
There would be no point to having it armed.
And setting aside for a moment that it had a ridiculous design, size and immensity of the crew (what did they all do?), you need to remember that it took on and bested at least two FLEETS of armed ships, designed for combat with crews trained for combat. That doesn't seem likely to me, regardless of the time difference.
I have to assume that Nero would have just destroyed the Enterprise if it tried to charge weapons, and would have detected another shuttle being launched and destroyed it.
But he missed the guys jumping out of the shuttle right?
Look, you're missing the point.
What I'm saying is that there was no reason for 90 percent of the movie's action if all that was really necessary was to shoot off the drill, as Spock did toward the end, rather easily, I might add. Why attack Nero at all? Just shoot the drill bit off and watch him simmer.
It seems that they used a small amount of "red matter" to initiate the black hole. May be it was the conditions at the core that were needed to initiate the process. But really is it any more far-fetched than other devices used in other Star Trek stories (protomatter for instance)
Nope, it worked just fine when Spock rammed the ship at the end. Thus, the movie isn't even following its own logic. Again, sloppy writing from another of Hollywood's so-called talents.
Were there some scientific errors and convenient plot devices? Yes. But you are going to get that with most movies. (I mean really, In "Independence day" they used an Apple computer to upload a virus to an alien ship)
The crappy science I can deal with, it's plot holes the size of trucks that get to me. I hate them. And what's funny, is that most of them are unnecessary, if you really think about it. The only reason they had a "platform"
I for one, am willing to excuse the way they contrived to get all the main characters to their customary positions. After all, this is a two hr movie that had to have a plot outside of this, not a documentary biographical mini-series.
The problem is it was contrived. The movie could have followed the characters through the academy, seperately, and then really began with the entire crew being assigned to the Enterprise randomly. There was no need to fatalistically keep throwing everyone into their "destiny," a world used about dozen times in the movie.