Spoilers below from the comic, Countdown (which was co-written by the writers for the movie story)
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The story takes place in the future, AFTER Nemesis (the TNG era film). Data is the captain of the enterprise, picard is an admiral, worf is a leader or something of the klingon command, and riker is on the USS titan.
The whole spock/nero story is from that era as we know due to the time travel in JJ Abram’s film.
However, all this other stuff wasn’t mentioned.
After the destruction of Romulus, , as Nero and his crew think of what to do. They end up (note, I’ve only read sections of the comic and notes online from forums/wikis so I don’t have all the info) killing the survivors of romulus who did nothing. Nero’s staff thing, is some artifact on romulus that the senate leader holds. He took it. They then take the ship, the Narada (which apparently looks very different) to the Forge (a secret romulan weapon base). There, they kill some people, and get others to help. After some time, they end up modifying the Narada with BORG technology (from a wreck, due to a romunlan/borg battle). The Narada now has the powers to: cloak, regener-ate damage (like a borg cube) and has some advanced systems. The nanoprobes within the hull also cause it to change it’s shape apparently.
After all this, Nero ends up destroying a fleet of klingon ships led by worf, almost de-stroys data and the enterprise, etc…and that leads up the film…
You can see aspects of Borg technology in the Narada’s design (and the fact that the in-side, has nothing really similar to what you’d expect in a mining/work vessel).
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And yes, that is captain archer they are speaking off as Admiral, since Kirk’s era is af-ter the Enterprise tv show era. Regading Warp, I thought the warp scale changes as technology improved..Then again, star trek has never made sense speed/time/warp wise. It seems to change all the time in terms of the actual speed they are travelling.
They wanted to tie all the timelines together, to keep hardcore fans happy. And with the time travel spin, they can explain any changes with ‘alternate reality’ so people who want to hate the film, can just think of the star trek universe they like, and forget the rest…
Sanjay