posted
...I think I peed a little when I saw this. I'm at my work desk. Excuse me for a second.
This does not mean that Columbia was missing right after we last saw her. Two centuries before the start of the Dominion War still leaves us a couple decades for her to get lost. She's got the proper deflector and everything - I'm impressed!
That IS an Argo up front, probably taken from the CG version done for its leap into the shuttle at the end of the scene. That's a Type-9 and a Danube in the background, too. The only out-of-place thing here is that the Starfleet crewers are wearing VOY/DS9 colorfuls. Not irreconcilable, but they really shouda been wearing grey by then.
posted
"She's got the proper deflector and everything - I'm impressed!"
The Columbia is probably stored as a seperate file from the Enterprise, since it has different colouring, deflector and textures. I did look for that right away myself though.
Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
After a few seconds looking at that picture, I had to stop and remember to breathe. That looks quite enticing!
quote:Originally posted by Shik: Also, that's...remarkably intact for "abrupt planetfall."
Well, the Enterprise-D was "remarkably intact" after its "abrupt planetfall" as well. I expect that most of the bottom decks are left in pieces trailing a few kilometers to the left of the picture. Also, sand is probably (relatively) cushioning, compared to rock and compressed clay/dirt.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
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posted
Yeah, but...nacelles still standing? No major breaches? No burnination or anything like that?
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
Registered: Jun 2000
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Is the craft closest to the camera one of the workbees from Nemesis, or an extended version of the Argo buggy?
Argo buggy. The background ships seem to be the nose of a Runabout and (facing) a "speedboat shuttle" from Voyager.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
One can technobabble ones way out of questions like why the nacelles are still standing. Star Trek has always given out the message that Starfleet understands physical laws differently. The notion that the Constitution class is considered a robust engineering solution exemplifies that.
What bothers me about that picture is the antimatter. Where is it? There was no suggestion, to my knowledge, that the NX class were capable of ejecting the core. I think this limitation even formed the basis of several plot devices! Presumably all this antimatter is still contained in it's magnetic bottle or the whole back end of the saucer and the catamaran nacelle struts should be either missing or spread very thinly over the desert. And that's a conservative guess. The entire ship should have been disassembled! And there should probably be evidence of some sort of relatively new cratering - probably appearing to the visual observer as a very large shallow bowel full of sand, but which to a physical archaelogist would show up as a bloody big hole full of sand on his subsurface topography charts. Unless of course the antimatter containment failed whilst airbourne, in which case the ship should be tiny pieces scattered over most of one hemisphere!
But that is not the case, according to the picture. According to the picture, containment must still be active, although were the power for this is coming from, who knows. So how come all those little people are so calmly wandering around all over it? If you took one of the old decommissioned Soviet nuclear subs from Murmansk, raised it into orbit, dropped it in the Sahara and then came back two hundred years later, would you want to go anywhere near that thing? Even if it looked like the reactor hadn't breached and scattered it's radioactive guts all over the crash site, it will still be quite banged up. Would you want to go near it? Not if you want to breed one day, or even die of old age.
Sorry if I've burst any bubbles
Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
Well, it's entirely plausible that the antimatter containment bottles are removable/ejectable, while the reactor is not. Remember that episode where Archer was going to remove all the ship's antimatter and leave it on an Insectoid ship?
Therefore, one could justify a scenario where, whatever happened to the ship, there was enough time to shut down the reactor and remove/eject the antimatter before they lost containment. Restricted to impulse power, they wouldn't have been able to go very far, and probably some other circumstances related to the emergency forced them to make an emergency but (semi-)controlled landing.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
Good point, but I thought that Trip complained both at losing so much antimatter and also about how long it would take. Hours were mentioned. Doesn't sound like something you'd attempt in an emergency, like imminent realisation that if you don't get rid of it before you crash, you'll blow up.
If it's as easy to drain the stuff as that, why do later generations eject the entire core instead?
Registered: Jul 2006
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posted
Because even if you dump the fuel tank, there's still a little bit of fuel left over in the engine itself. Plus, the nature of the warp core is that it's a regulated reaction. If there's a failure in the core, that results in an unregulated reaction �i.e. an explosion. And in those kinds of emergency situations, there's no time to do a careful shutdown of the system to purge out the antimatter and prevent a chain reaction.
Also, remember "Disaster"? That time, the problem wasn't with the core itself, it was with the antimatter containment system. So we've seen both kinds of emergencies on the ship.
Finally, in the 22nd century, it's entirely possible that Columbia had been sent on a long-range exploration mission to a point where no one had any idea exactly where it was, there was no hope of immediate communications, and no hope of rescue. Think of the Archon and the Essex, for example. I think this pictured situation could be quite similar. If the NX-02 were out of comm range, they lost their warp drive, and had limited fuel or life support, then landing in the desperate hope of saving the crew might have been their only option.
(And then once the crew got away from the ship, something else disastrous happened to them, thus preventing anyone from surviving to tell the story several hundred years later. Talk about bad luck!)
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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posted
Just because the NX-01 was missing a particular feature does not mean the NX-02 was missing it. Also, just because the NX-01 was missing a feature at one point in time certainly does not mean the NX-02 was missing it at a much later point in time.
posted
Besides, barring some accompanying text, anything could have happened to get the ship there. Random demigod encounter, a magic subspace whosit. . .
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Just because the NX-01 was missing a particular feature does not mean the NX-02 was missing it.
Exactly. Once again, using the standard Starfleet/Earth naval fleets comparison, the first example of a class is usually somewhat prototypical. Lessons learned during its operation are incorporated into later ships of the class. As soon as it became an issue, Enterprise probably includeded in its logs "needs method for quickly eliminating antimatter". For all we know, the Enterprise itself could have been retrofitted with such a feature.
And that explanation doesn't even require technobabble.
-------------------- "Having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true."
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