Court Martial over the loss of Enterprise-D

[Agent Fisher]

But there's some small consolation-- one of his "kids" pulls out a rather interesting model of, apparently, a starfighter of some kind? Wouldn't mind a closer look at that.

You wanted a closer look? Here it is. Aliens EVAC Fighter.

[Prometheus Unbound]

-- Why does not the fucking Enterprise have SEAT BELTS. Goddamnit.

It's a good question but they wouldn't have helped. The entire chairs and consoles were ripped out. If you were strapped in, you'd probably die anyway when a 50kg chair lands on you.

[DaveJB]

The lack of seatbelts actually does make a bizarre kind of sense when you consider the other main danger on 24th century starships: exploding consoles. Without a seatbelt, there's a good chance that the explosion will knock you aside and minimize injuries from shrapnel, as apparently happened with the E-D helm officer in Generations, who got nailed by an exploding console but later showed up just fine on the E-E. On the other hand, if they had seatbelts it'd mean that they'd be held in place and subjected to the full force of the shrapnel.

Sure, Starfleet's engineers may not know how to design consoles that don't go off like a bomb if you so much as spill your coffee on them, but at least they take steps to minimize the danger!

[Baffalo]

I found this earlier completely at random and it is so on topic.

[Tribble]

There was a really good point I just read on the YouTube comments. In order for a ship to fire through its own shields, it has to have the frequency of its weapons calibrated to the frequency of its shields. Otherwise, the shots would hit the inside of the shield, right?

So...

The BOP's weapons are calibrated to the E-Ds shields
This means that the BOP's shields must also be calibrated to the E-D's shields in order for the BOP's weapons to fire through them.
The E-D's weapons are naturally calibrated to its shields.
This means that the E-D's shots should be going through both its shields and the BOP's shields, since they are all on the same frequency.

Yet another reason why this fight should have ended with a single salvo.

[Baffalo]

There was a really good point I just read on the YouTube comments. In order for a ship to fire through its own shields, it has to have the frequency of its weapons calibrated to the frequency of its shields. Otherwise, the shots would hit the inside of the shield, right?

So...

The BOP's weapons are calibrated to the E-Ds shields
This means that the BOP's shields must also be calibrated to the E-D's shields in order for the BOP's weapons to fire through them.
The E-D's weapons are naturally calibrated to its shields.
This means that the E-D's shots should be going through both its shields and the BOP's shields, since they are all on the same frequency.

Yet another reason why this fight should have ended with a single salvo.

In David Weber's Honorverse series, they used a shield system but it was considered 'solid' in that it would block both incoming and outgoing fire. To avoid damaging their own shields and wasting their energy, they fired through shield 'windows' that were opened and closed as needed. Given that the Enterprise can fire at almost any angle, I'd say either the shields rotate the windows as necessary, which would take a lot of work, but it would be possible. The problem is, there's a unique thing we see when the BoP fires through the Enterprise's shields: there is some shield interaction, while none has ever been seen when the ships fire. Also, we saw the Enterprise's phaser fire hit the BoP's shields and be absorbed. So, I'm going to say that they're using a type of window to fire.

Now, this works out pretty well for the Klingons because if they are using windows, the bulk of Klingon ships have very narrow weapon arcs. If this is the case, then it would limit the amount of processing they'd need to do to fire through their own shields. Plus, imagine how hard it would be to hit the narrow 'window' in the shields? But I mean, that's just a theory of mine and most of mine are hit or miss.

[DaveJB]

Even if the Klingons could only alter the frequency of their entire shield, presumably they'd only switch it to match the Enterprise's frequency long enough to fire their own weapons, and then immediately switch back to the default setting (or a random frequency), meaning that the Enterprise would only be able counter-penetrate the BoP's shields if it was engaged in a constant bombardment and hit it at just the right time.

Which brings us back to the question of why the Enterprise crew weren't doing a constant bombardment, instead of shooting at the BoP once, not doing any major damage, and then screaming "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" over and over until Data comes up with a technobabble plan.

[Elheru Aran]

-- Why does not the fucking Enterprise have SEAT BELTS. Goddamnit.

It's a good question but they wouldn't have helped. The entire chairs and consoles were ripped out. If you were strapped in, you'd probably die anyway when a 50kg chair lands on you.

Which is either poor design or absolutely shitty materials. The consoles are built *into* the ship's structure. They should *not* be getting ripped out, and if they do, it really doesn't matter if you're strapped in or not. Note that people are more likely to survive auto accidents while wearing seat belts; the whole "if you're flung away from the accident you're more likely to survive" notion is bullshit.

I'm OK with people getting thrown around when the saucer crashes-- that's one thing, far more traumatic than a battle would be (assuming the Ent didn't lose), but getting hit by a few torpedoes should *not* have people flying around the bridge. The exploding consoles thing is also fucking idiotic, but that's been covered elsewhere.

Fisher, thanks for the picture. Aliens toy, eh? Cool beans

[Agent Fisher]

Fisher, thanks for the picture. Aliens toy, eh? Cool beans

I had one growing up, and a few years later, when I saw Star Trek Generations, I thought it was the coolest thing! And I also wondered why they were using a toy from the 20th century in the future.

[Elheru Aran]

I will add another point to the materials thing: The saucer (and by extension rest of the ship) is pretty tough, to the extent where it survives pancaking into a planet with all the grace of a wet flapjack reasonably well and keeping most of the crew alive.

Given that, there is absolutely no reason why they would have had consoles and chairs flying all over the place except criminally negligent ignorance of even basic 20th century safety standards. You don't have bridge consoles flying about a battleship when it gets a direct hit in WWII!

Speaking of battles: The engagement is even more ludicrous when you remember that the Enterprise has demonstrated some very impressive offensive capabilities on the show. Firing multiple phaser strips, torpedo salvos, and even venting antimatter sparklers, all at once, plus rapidly changing shield frequencies.

And one dinky Klingon Bird of Prey tags them, they feebly wave a phaser strip in its direction, technobabble a bit, and fire a torpedo out their ass. Come the FUCK on. Did Soran slip stupid pills into the replicator supplies or something? After the first torpedo hit they should've done a 180 and let loose. Hell, even firing backwards, they could've done far better!

[Patroklos]

Exactly, the Enterprise should have been able to overwhelm and destroy a POS BoP in seconds even if it is at full shields and readiness. Probably multiple BoPs actually.

The only real plausible explanation is that the Duras brats targeted their shots well enough to basically cripple the ENT's power generation. This isn't unfathomable. They had all the time in the world to aim their shot, the ENT wasn't at full alert, they had no defense available and its not like the ship is an armored box. If you let me casually pick a place to put a Harpoon on a CVN without haven't to worry about counter fire, point defense, them immediately responding to the damage, etc. I can pretty much one shot her mission kill wise. They didn't bother saying anything like that though, and the ENT's shields were still up for the subsequent BoP shots so they obviously had plenty of power.

[Eternal_Freedom]

On that note, shouldn't the E-D have had more warning? How many times have we see Worf announce "the vessel has armed weapons" or "they are locking weapons on us." Hell, The E-Nil managed that in TWOK. A report of "they are targeting us" should be answered with "lock our own weapons on them, be ready to return fire." Riker shouldn't have needed to order Work to return fire.

[Tribble]

There was a really good point I just read on the YouTube comments. In order for a ship to fire through its own shields, it has to have the frequency of its weapons calibrated to the frequency of its shields. Otherwise, the shots would hit the inside of the shield, right?

So...

The BOP's weapons are calibrated to the E-Ds shields
This means that the BOP's shields must also be calibrated to the E-D's shields in order for the BOP's weapons to fire through them.
The E-D's weapons are naturally calibrated to its shields.
This means that the E-D's shots should be going through both its shields and the BOP's shields, since they are all on the same frequency.

Yet another reason why this fight should have ended with a single salvo.

In David Weber's Honorverse series, they used a shield system but it was considered 'solid' in that it would block both incoming and outgoing fire. To avoid damaging their own shields and wasting their energy, they fired through shield 'windows' that were opened and closed as needed. Given that the Enterprise can fire at almost any angle, I'd say either the shields rotate the windows as necessary, which would take a lot of work, but it would be possible. The problem is, there's a unique thing we see when the BoP fires through the Enterprise's shields: there is some shield interaction, while none has ever been seen when the ships fire. Also, we saw the Enterprise's phaser fire hit the BoP's shields and be absorbed. So, I'm going to say that they're using a type of window to fire.

Now, this works out pretty well for the Klingons because if they are using windows, the bulk of Klingon ships have very narrow weapon arcs. If this is the case, then it would limit the amount of processing they'd need to do to fire through their own shields. Plus, imagine how hard it would be to hit the narrow 'window' in the shields? But I mean, that's just a theory of mine and most of mine are hit or miss.

If the ships are using windows for weapons / scanning (the Pheonix does so in "The Wounded,") then the shields shouldn't need a frequency at all, and they should block the entire spectrum. And if that were the case, why would the weapons have a frequency setting as well? They wouldn't need to if they were fired through a window in the shields.

Also, if the E-D computer is powerful enough to do windows and for some reason a shield frequency is still necessary, why doesn't it simply rotate the shield frequencies with every shot? Why does that have to be done manually at all? One would imagine that would be the default procedure built into every starship, especially after encountering the Borg.

I find it odd that there was some kind of interplay between the BOP's weapons and the E-D's shields, despite being the same frequency. That would imply that some of the energy of the BOP's weapons was still absorbed/redirected by the shields.

What's sad is that this stupidity could have been avoided so easily. All they had to do was have the E-D get attacked by multiple ships and while they manage to destroy them all they suffer the irreparable damage to the warp core.

Or instead of it being a 20 year old BOP they could have used a Vor'cha, and the opening salvo knocked out the shield generators.

Sloppy, sloppy writing.

[Prometheus Unbound]

On that note, shouldn't the E-D have had more warning? How many times have we see Worf announce "the vessel has armed weapons" or "they are locking weapons on us." Hell, The E-Nil managed that in TWOK. A report of "they are targeting us" should be answered with "lock our own weapons on them, be ready to return fire." Riker shouldn't have needed to order Work to return fire.

You answered your own question; Lursa was targeting manually using the periscope thing. Just like how Khan didn't realise Sulu was manually locking weapons.

They can pick up the offensive ship using its computer to scan for targets, but not someone using their eyes.

[WATCH-MAN]

There was a really good point I just read on the YouTube comments. In order for a ship to fire through its own shields, it has to have the frequency of its weapons calibrated to the frequency of its shields. Otherwise, the shots would hit the inside of the shield, right?

So...

The BOP's weapons are calibrated to the E-Ds shields
This means that the BOP's shields must also be calibrated to the E-D's shields in order for the BOP's weapons to fire through them.
The E-D's weapons are naturally calibrated to its shields.
This means that the E-D's shots should be going through both its shields and the BOP's shields, since they are all on the same frequency.

Yet another reason why this fight should have ended with a single salvo.

The fact that the Enterprise did fire on the BoP and her phaser strike was blocked by the BoP's shields should show you that your logic is faulty.

[DaveJB]

What's sad is that this stupidity could have been avoided so easily. All they had to do was have the E-D get attacked by multiple ships and while they manage to destroy them all they suffer the irreparable damage to the warp core.

Or instead of it being a 20 year old BOP they could have used a Vor'cha, and the opening salvo knocked out the shield generators.

Sloppy, sloppy writing.

To be fair, the writers were backed into a corner by Rick Berman, who told them "The Enterprise has to have a space battle that causes enough damage that the stardrive blows up and sends the saucer crashing onto the planet below. Because of our budget however, you can only have one enemy starship. Oh, and that enemy starship has to be a Klingon Bird of Prey, because we're reusing the explosion shot from Star Trek VI."

That said, there were still ways the situation could have been handled better. They could have had the Enterprise facing off against one of those big-ass K'vort BoPs that were shown to be more than a match for a GCS in "Yesterday's Enterprise" (and, implicitly, a Romulan Warbird in "The Defector") or had the Durases beam a bomb into the Enterprise's engineering section at the start of the battle, crippling her from the get-go.

[Patroklos]

It was three of those ships in Yesterday's Enterprise, and even with that numerical advantage they still lost one of them. One on one with a GCS it would be toast. Of course both of those classes (the ENT and the Kvorts) were heavily modified for war so its not exactly analogous to in universe versions of the same.

[Eternal_Freedom]

On that note, shouldn't the E-D have had more warning? How many times have we see Worf announce "the vessel has armed weapons" or "they are locking weapons on us." Hell, The E-Nil managed that in TWOK. A report of "they are targeting us" should be answered with "lock our own weapons on them, be ready to return fire." Riker shouldn't have needed to order Work to return fire.

You answered your own question; Lursa was targeting manually using the periscope thing. Just like how Khan didn't realise Sulu was manually locking weapons.

They can pick up the offensive ship using its computer to scan for targets, but not someone using their eyes.

How about the "not detecting armed weapons" or "not detecting they're preparing to fire"?

[Prometheus Unbound]

How about the "not detecting armed weapons" or "not detecting they're preparing to fire"?

writing that makes me

[Crazedwraith]

How about the "not detecting armed weapons" or "not detecting they're preparing to fire"?

writing that makes me

If you'd said that to start with we could have saved ourselves another four pages of 'waaa! Generations wasn't very good'

Though how the board would have coped without that point being underlined for the umpteenth time I do not know.

[Prometheus Unbound]

How about the "not detecting armed weapons" or "not detecting they're preparing to fire"?

writing that makes me

If you'd said that to start with we could have saved ourselves another four pages of 'waaa! Generations wasn't very good'

Though how the board would have coped without that point being underlined for the umpteenth time I do not know.

Well. Ok, sure. But then we wouldn't have a discussion.

And since we're not allowed to "necro" old threads, some of which are actually interesting -- seriously, read posts from 6-7 years ago or when Voyager was live on air etc -- we have to sometimes make new threads (and I didn't make this thread).

Yes, sometimes writing being is the direct answer, but it's also fun to come up with ideas why something happened, and can we "internalise" it or bring it into accepted lore.

Otherwise... what's the point in this sub-forum?

Not that I want to keep bumping threads to the top, I know this place is so busy, this "traffic" must really annoy people. They might confuse it with one of the threads over a year old, still on the first page.

[Skylon]

To be fair, the writers were backed into a corner by Rick Berman, who told them "The Enterprise has to have a space battle that causes enough damage that the stardrive blows up and sends the saucer crashing onto the planet below. Because of our budget however, you can only have one enemy starship. Oh, and that enemy starship has to be a Klingon Bird of Prey, because we're reusing the explosion shot from Star Trek VI."

The writers were also keen to crash the Enterprise. Ron Moore proposed a saucer crash as a season-ending cliffhanger during TNG.

Generations just seemed like it was a mess in not only writing, but budgeting as well. Moore and Braga, two normally solid writers during the course of TNG, churrned out a script that an hyped up fanboy who hadn't thought the whole plot through (and seeing as they wrote it in parallel to "All Good Things", likely had not).

Berman, as you noted didn't seem as money savvy as the TOS film producers (plus he had more money to play with than the producers of "Undiscovered") and he lacked the imagination of how to use it. Your example of going back and using the K'vort type is a perfect example versus the "Twenty-year old POS" is a good script compromise to the budget. From a budgetary standpoint though, simply doing away with the damn holodeck scene which serves no purpose other than to scream "MOVIE BUDGET! - WE HAS IT!" would make sense. Or instead of tinkering with the damn Excelsior model (which already looks fine, just apply new labels to represent the Enterprise-B), try and upgrade the Vor'cha model to bring it up to specs for the big screen (something that would be easier to see taking down the Ent-D).

[Baffalo]

You bring up a good point about the budget because... god damn the uniform changes.

You look at the uniforms and they just swap around for no reason, but yet they blew a chunk of the budget on a scene that does NOTHING to further the plot and actually confused me the first time I saw it. I was like "Why did we go from space to water? What the hell is this?" It's a pointless scene that could have been replaced with a simple "75 years later..." or something.

[Lord Revan]

the Bird of Prey taking out the Enterprise-D could work as a mutual kill where the Big-E is able to take out the Bird of Prey via pure firepower but suffers enough damage in the process for the plot to go own as it did. the problem isn't that there's no way a Bird of Prey could take out a Galaxy class but rather a Galaxy class shouldn't have resort to technobabble to beat a BoP.

[Batman]

The holodeck scene in the beginning was the only TNG part of the movie actually worth watching.