posted
I think the best course of action upon finding out that a core breech was going to happen was to separate the saucer immediately and get it to safety. Everyone left in the stardrive would abandon via escape pods and shuttles. You save the crew and the saucer. And they actually had the time to do this as they waited for everyone from the lower depths of the stardrive to climb through the Jeffries Tubes all the way up the the saucer before separating it. Wasn't it only around five minutes before the warning and the actual explosion?
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Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
I suppose that they could have done that, but the saucer was designed with separation with the purpose of getting the entire crew to safety whether the danger is a battle or core breach.
There was evidently time for the crew in the stardrive section to make their way either down to the lifeboats (which are on the ventral side of that hull) or up to the saucer. I don't think shuttlecraft were a viable alternative.
One of the stardrive shuttle bays (I think it was 3) had it's door blasted. You can see this when the saucer seperates. Then, you only have Shuttle Bay 2. Add to that the time needed to prep all the shuttles for launch, raise them from the hangar to the bay, and to load the shuttles, then I think you exceed the five minute limit.
We saw how massive the explosion was how it damaged the saucer's reaction control system. What would that have done to the crew members who had to climb from deck 25 in the neck down to deck 40 to reach the lifeboat? The lifeboat would have been caught in the same explosion and (quite probably) may not have withstood the explosion.
Taking all of this into account as well as Geordi's five minute warning, he believed it was a prudent move to go ahead and move the crew to the saucer because it can withstand more than the lifeboats. Had there not been the time to do it, he probably would have ordered the saucer to immediately detach and have the stardrive crew try and save themselves. A lot of people (probably including the school children) would not have made it.
-------------------- The philosopher's stone. Those who possess it are no longer bound by the laws of equivalent exchange in alchemy. They gain without sacrifice and create without equal exchange. We searched for it, and we found it.
posted
Ok, why would the children be on the stardrive section of the ship. I imagined them being on Decks 11 or 12 of the saucer so they had to evacuate like the rest of the crew.
-------------------- "It speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow, it's not all going to be over with a big splash and a bomb, that the human race is improving, that we have things to be proud of as humans." -Gene Roddenberry about Star Trek
Registered: May 1999
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posted
The children looked like they were being ushered out of a school room. When they first show the kids, there's one adult with the group, and she strikes me as a teacher-type person. Then she disappears when Geordi and his assistant come upon them.
Of course, the other possibility is that the teacher-type person was a crewmember of some sort or a civilian who was going from quarters to quarters in the neck of the ship pulling out the children. It could have been her evacuation duty as practiced in the drills.
-------------------- The philosopher's stone. Those who possess it are no longer bound by the laws of equivalent exchange in alchemy. They gain without sacrifice and create without equal exchange. We searched for it, and we found it.
Saltah'na
Chinese Canadian, or 75% Commie Bastard.
Member # 33
posted
You know, something really bugs me regarding the destruction of the Ent-D. Why didn't they simply eject the core? Unless the ejector controls were destroyed, but they didn't say that.
-------------------- "And slowly, you come to realize, it's all as it should be, you can only do so much. If you're game enough, you could place your trust in me. For the love of life, there's a tradeoff, we could lose it all but we'll go down fighting...." - David Sylvian FreeSpace 2, the greatest space sim of all time, now remastered!
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
I think the destruction of the ejector systems is a given. Geordi said, "We have a new problem. We're about five minutes from a warp core breach. There's nothing I can do."
By saying that, I gather that the ejector system was damaged or destroyed. I also gather that this means the regulator controls for the injectors were also damaged or destroyed since it seems a simple matter of shutting off the flow of fuel. It's possible. The Enterprise got hit pretty hard on the stardrive section with no shielding.
-------------------- The philosopher's stone. Those who possess it are no longer bound by the laws of equivalent exchange in alchemy. They gain without sacrifice and create without equal exchange. We searched for it, and we found it.
posted
The failure of the system that ejects the core is too common. I would have prefered that they said something like "The exterior hull plate is fused. We can't eject the core." Just my opinion. But if wishes were horses, as they say, I'd be knee deep in...well...whatever.
But, yes, I've always assumed that the controls were off-line too.
posted
"Core ejection system is offline" is only second to "remodulate shield frequency/harmonics" as a plot device. You'd think they would have built a little more redundency into a key system like that.
Personally I blame the destruction of Ent-D on Riker, he would have gone all out against that BoP, phasers and torpedoes blazing.
-------------------- "God's in his heaven. All's right with the world."
posted
Why the Hell was the saucer section using the thrusters instead of the impulse engines, anyway?
-------------------- Fry- How will we get out of this? George Takei's head- Maybe we can use some kind of auto-destruct code like one-A, two-B, three-C... (Bender's head blows up) Bender- Now everybody knows! -Futurama's obligatory Star Trek episode
Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
After the (I believe) second shockwave hits the saucer section, the computer makes the announcement that helm control is offline. This means that all ability to control the flight path and propulsion means of the saucer were temporarily fried. We see in the FX sequence that the shockwave causes the saucer to bounce and it looks like that it points the saucer into the atmosphere. If the engines were still running, that could have forced to continue full-tilt into the atmosphere.
On the other hand, the shockwave also could have conceivably damaged the saucer's impulse engines as well. In this case, with impulse engines and thrusters offline (thrusters because Data had to reroute control and/or power to get the lateral ones working again) the gravity of the planet would simply pull the saucer in after the shockwave changed the saucer's trajectory and damaged the propulsion systems.
-------------------- The philosopher's stone. Those who possess it are no longer bound by the laws of equivalent exchange in alchemy. They gain without sacrifice and create without equal exchange. We searched for it, and we found it.
posted
My question on the explosion is, how much physical damage would it do to the saucer at that distance? After all, a good portion of the damage in a nuclear blast is caused by the shockwaves travelling through the atmosphere. Up in orbit, the only physical contact between the blast and the saucer should be the impact of whatever parts of the stardrive section that weren't destroyed outright.
I've always thought a better reason for the crash whould have been to have the ship's control circuitry fried by the electromagnetic pulse of the blast. You could argue that that's what really happened, except the visuals make it pretty explicit that the physical damage of the shockwave blew the saucer out of orbit.
-------------------- The difference between genius and idiocy? Genius has its limits.
posted
Woodside, you idiot. The Enterprise does not use nuclear reactions to provide warp power. Matter and Antimatter annihilating parallel into a dilithium crystal, producing an energetic plasma. Nothing nuclear here, baby. Antimatter, when one atom of it comes into contact with regular matter, annihilates immediately, destroying itsself and the matter atom.. Think what trillions of billions of atoms of antimatter could do if it all came loose from the magnetic fields containing all of it.
-------------------- Fry- How will we get out of this? George Takei's head- Maybe we can use some kind of auto-destruct code like one-A, two-B, three-C... (Bender's head blows up) Bender- Now everybody knows! -Futurama's obligatory Star Trek episode
Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
Crusher's calling Woodside an idiot was really uncalled for, especially considering that his question was reasonable. Woodside wasn't saying the Enterprise was nuclear powered per se, but just making an analogy about blasts in an atmosphere as opposed to in (the near vacuum of) low orbit.
And, he's right. Shock waves per se don't propogate in a vacuum, no matter how powerful the blast. And while matter-antimatter reactions do release a lot of energy, they do so mostly in the form of energetic radiation. Within the confines of the ship, this would be hellish, and very much like a nuclear explosion to the nth-power. But across a vacuum where there's no atmosphere to heat up or otherwise react with, the result would be a rapidly dissipating sphere of debris and energized particles, the impact of which would fall off to almost nothing right away.
Even if the whole stardrive were unifomrly vaporized, it didn't have enough mass to result in the kind of saucer-whacking shockwave shown. The only stuff that should have "hit" the saucer were a) radiation b) unvaporized hunks of the stardrive section and c) any stray antimatter particles that didn't contact matter in the explosion.
A star blowing up would be another matter. The same physics apply, 'natch, but the blast front would be pretty nasty at great distance just fron the massive volume matter that would be scattered by the blast.
-------------------- "Well, I mean, it's generally understood that, of all of the people in the world, Mike Nelson is the best." -- ULTRA MAGNUS, steadfast in curmudgeon
posted
Well...space may be a vacuum, but an exploding ship does have an atmosphere of sorts to work with. Namely, the one created by its air being released and the materials of the hull being vaporized by the explosion. Not enough to give you a typical shockwave, but I suspect the results would be interesting, if fleeting.
Registered: Mar 1999
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