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Remember after Picard rams the Scimitar, he tries to have the ship self-destruct, only to hear that its not functional? WTF?!? Which kind of incompetent idiot designs a ship that has a self-destruct system inoperable after battle?

Auto-destruct was inoperable, not the manual destruct like we've seen in TOS.

Why didn't they use the manual?

How do we know that there's anything manual left aboard the ship? This is B&B-era Trek we're talking about here.

Good point. Like you've said before, when the computer is messed up, the ship is dead weight.

To quote Dark Helmet from Spaceballs:

"Shit! Even in the future nothing works!"

Mel Brooks should sue.

Graeme Dice wrote:Auto-destruct was inoperable, not the manual destruct like we've seen in TOS.

Self destruct was run thorugh the master computer in TOS, but it appeared to be a seperate system which the computer tied into. In "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", Bele burned out the self-destruct circuit, but Scotty and his engineers had the control rerouted within six minutes.

We can surmise that at the least it was a hardened system, since despite all the battle damage taken by the E-nil in TWOK and TSFS, Kirk was still able to activate it to destroy his ship over Genesis. This suggests that self-destruct was insulated from the main ship's circuitry, as you would expect in any properly designed control architecture.

Why didn't Geordi just go up to the warp core computer, and ask it "what is stronger, the irrestible force, or the immovable object?" That would have caused a self-destruct.

Why not just have Data install an old version of Windows ME onto the central computer? That would have caused a self-destruct.

Why not have Worf just look at the warp core funny? That would have caused a self-destruct.

There are so many options they could have used, but they never tried anything.

I was under the impression that the self-destruct used a self-contained computer system. That would be the sensible thing to do.

There are no segregated computer systems anywhere on the TNG-era Enterprise. "Contagion" demonstrated that quite clearly, with the computer virus spreading from a single point to every system on the ship.

Exonerate wrote:Remember after Picard rams the Scimitar, he tries to have the ship self-destruct, only to hear that its not functional? WTF?!? Which kind of incompetent idiot designs a ship that has a self-destruct system inoperable after battle?

Why didn't he order Geordi to switch of the A-M containment field, after ll that's all the self-destruct does anyway. If push comes to shove Detonate a Phaser next the containers.

Mind you, in Search for Spock, you see that the Self-destruct only destroys parts of the Saucer in the TOS days and the rest of the still intact Enterprise goes sailing past the camera. Does the TNG and beyond version do more damage?

There was a manual system on the E-D in TNG- down in Engineering. Riker and Picard needed to palm authorize or something, IIRC.

Frick can't remember the episode.

The one with the Binars if that helps any...can't remember title though.

Ghost Rider wrote:The one with the Binars if that helps any...can't remember title though.

1100110 or something like that (it was in binary anyway), if it's the one I'm thinking of.

I still think just blowing up the containment generator would have done it though. Much more my idea of Manual self-destruct.

Sure why not given that a love tap could probably do it

It is quite an irony that they can't make the ship blow up on purpose, but it blows up by accident at the drop of a hat.

Darth Wong wrote:It is quite an irony that they can't make the ship blow up on purpose, but it blows up by accident at the drop of a hat.

Lowest bidder?

Patrick Degan wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:It is quite an irony that they can't make the ship blow up on purpose, but it blows up by accident at the drop of a hat.

Lowest bidder?

Now we know what happened to the descendants of the people who designed the Chernobyl power plant; they became Starfleet engineers.

closet sci-fi fan wrote:with such a volatile fuel source like anti-matter, it defies logic why they couldn't just shoot the damn warp core and/or anti-matter storage containers to get their self-destruct.

Good idea! If the Geordi had half a brain, he would have try to have someone destroy the antimatter containment pods to destroy the ship. Instead of "oh' well, self destruct is off-line. So, guess we can't blow the ship up."

Just sneeze near the warp core, who needs a damn self destruct system?

Darth Wong wrote:

Patrick Degan wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:It is quite an irony that they can't make the ship blow up on purpose, but it blows up by accident at the drop of a hat.

Lowest bidder?

Now we know what happened to the descendants of the people who designed the Chernobyl power plant; they became Starfleet engineers.

It took hours to disable the safety system to get Chernobyl to blow, don't insult the Russians. Even there morons are far above the idiots that design Federation starships.

There's also the question of why no one tried to launch shuttle craft for additional ramming attacks or to fire at the damaged areas of the ship, or to damage the hopelessly over engineered technobabble emitters.

Darth Wong wrote:It is quite an irony that they can't make the ship blow up on purpose, but it blows up by accident at the drop of a hat.

Hasn't that become a brain bug among ST vs. SW debates?