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Praeothmin wrote:I've always been under the impression that what we saw happen on the ships happened at the same time as what we saw on the ground, but because they couldn't split the screen in two, it was shown one after the other.

After all, It's hard to believe that Picard was beamed down, and then did nothing while the sisters were blasting the E-D to bits and pieces.

He wasn't doing nothing - he was a) trying to persuade Soran not to launch his starburster and b) chucking pebbles about, trying to find a way through the shield. Showing all of b) would have been exceptionally boring.

Captain Seafort wrote: "Hours" was probably an exaggeration, but so's "seconds". Geordi knew the core was going to breach a full five minutes before it did, but there was still no way of preventing it. Why couldn't they have ejected the core? Why couldn't they simply cut off the supply of antimatter so as to use up the supply already in the core, leaving the thing harmless? Why was there so much unspent antimatter in the core in the first place? The whole thing reeks of bad design.

*Cough*-Plot-*Cough* {clears throat} But seriously, I think part of the process in a warp-core breach, what aids in making it go "boom" would be a loss of Antimatter Containment, so cutting of the AM and using the supply in the core wouldn't fix the problem of the pods losing containment. Perhaps the reason they couldn't eject the AM pods was because if they were already losing power, the instant they were disconnected the containment field would drop and they'd go boom. Perhaps Geordi thought, "Alright, I've got 5 minutes. I could stay here and keep trying to fight a loosing battle thereby cutting into evacuation time, or I could just tell them to evacuate and save as many as we can. Ships can be replaced, lives cannot."

me,myself and I wrote:*Cough*-Plot-*Cough* {clears throat}

It's as stupid from an OOU perspective as it is from an IU one - being unable to generate dramatic tension with making characters look stupid is poor writing.

But seriously, I think part of the process in a warp-core breach, what aids in making it go "boom" would be a loss of Antimatter Containment, so cutting of the AM and using the supply in the core wouldn't fix the problem of the pods losing containment.

They why do the describe the two as separate events, and actually showed a warp core breach as a big cloud coming out of the core in "Timescape"?

Perhaps the reason they couldn't eject the AM pods was because if they were already losing power, the instant they were disconnected the containment field would drop and they'd go boom.

Easy solution: give the pods their own power supply, that gets jettisoned with them.

Perhaps Geordi thought, "Alright, I've got 5 minutes. I could stay here and keep trying to fight a loosing battle thereby cutting into evacuation time, or I could just tell them to evacuate and save as many as we can. Ships can be replaced, lives cannot."

Or the ship could have been sensibly designed so that a) the core wasn't a bomb waiting to go off and b) the same chain of events that risks a loss of antimatter containment causes the pods to be ejected. The best solution would be not to use antimatter at all, but evidently their fusion reactors aren't powerful enough to replace antimatter reactors.

Didn't they have enough time to evacuate everyone on the ship into the saucer section? That alone would have taken more than five minutes, and that's assuming they ordered the evacuation the moment the core started overloading. Obviously, they didn't. They had to realise it was going to overload first, check out the few failsafes they had, realise they weren't working, conclude that they had to abandon ship, and then give the order.

Clocking all that up, I'd say it took a good ten minutes or so for the core to go up.

and IMO ten mins is an awfully generous minimum.

Indeed. Civilians, including children, are hardly going to act with effeciency or speed.

especiall if thier frightened like that.

I did an analysis of that battle once, counting the hits the E-D took. I don't recall the number, but it was a good few. Something like fifteen or twenty as I recall. Don't forget it's not just the external hits that we see; every time they show an inside scene the ship is going BOOM...... BOOM.... BOOM.... in the background, and each of those is a hit. And since many of them do take place whilst we're inside, we have no idea where they are landing.

I don't find it hard to believe that such an assault would cause enough damage to destroy the ship. The E nil took one hit unshielded in ST VI and it was a big deal; the E-D took 15 or 20 times that, from weapons 70 or so years more advanced.

As for ejection, Geordi stated that there was nothing he could do. So yes, the ejection systems were down due to battle damage. Sucks, but there you go.

But you'd think they would have SOME sort of backup ejection system.

For example, initiate an auto-disengage, and beam the core off the ship

Its not just the core you need to worry about. Its also the containment fields on the antimatter pods.

If all power on the ship suddenly goes dead, the ship doesn't blow up, which is a fairly good indicator that they have some sort of independant power supply for the containment fields, so they SHOULD hold long enough for transport.

Well, transporting the core would take a lot of power, and then its only a matter of time before the rest of the reserves run out, and boom.

The ship already has two fusion reactors powering the impulse drives, IIRC. They should be able to provide more than enough power to transport the core and any other associated bits far enough away from the ship that they aren't a threat.

Of course, a dead-man's-switch type ejection system would be a far better idea.

Well, that's three pretty simple backup systems we've come up with in just a couple of days. How long did Starfleet spend designing the GCS again?

If you're fuel tanks risk going boom then you should have a way to dump them. Planes and ships now a days have those systems, the E-nil had to shut down her warp core several times and that only took Scotty crawling behind some tube and playing with the power switches.

Scotty "Its going to blow if I don't do something captain!"

Kirk "Whats the plan then?"

Scotty "Oh, I unplugged the damned thing. Works every time."