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Mark wrote: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.

We don't know that you CAN beam an antimatter pod around the place willy nilly. We've seen antimatter containers beamed from place to place on three occasions that I can think of. The TNG TM claims that special containers and precautions are needed for it, though I don't know if canon supports that really given that one of those three occasions was an apparently standard photon torpedo. (Dark Frontier. The others being TOS Obsession and TNG Peak Performance.)

In any case, "there's nothing I can do" is conclusive. It's actually the kind of dialogue I far prefer over "well the antimatter pods are caught in a cascading quantum inversion so they are too unstable to eject". Instead of meaningless gibberish, "there's nothing I can do" indicates that all options have been thought of and dismissed as unworkable. The reasons are irrelevant to the plot, so why waste dialogue on them? No matter what you or I may think of, the statement "there's nothing I can do" indicates that it was thought of and dismissed.

It's the kind of tech speak that I love.

Generally, I agree with you. Any day of the week I'd rather hear something like this

Kirk: "Hail the Potemkin"

Uhura: "There's just to much interference."

Kirk: "From what?"

Spock: "We are being jammed."

and opposed to

Janeway: "Hail the lead ship."

Kim: "I can't Captain. Subspace emitters are suffering an inverse feedback loop."

BUT, regarding the ditching of the core, it just would make sense to have several unrelated systems to back up ejection. I mean, the damned warp core is what makes most ships go boom in the first place. You'd figure Starfleet would have a half dozen or so DIFFERENT ways of ditching it if they needed too.

Hell, why not simply DE-ACTIVATE the anti-matter, as did Nomad?

It was the Doomsday device that did that. And they didn't know how it had managed it. Beyond their ken, I suspect.

You'd think that would have sparked some research.............that would be a super weapon for Starfleet. Just deactiviate main power on most ships.

maybe they did and the technology required to do so was beyond their ability to construct/power/use.

Then, I think that I have an idea for a 25th century weapons system.

unless, its still beyond them, potentially, it could take them a millinea to learn how to magicly reverse the charge of matter.

It only took humanity a hundred years to go from the industral age to cruising the stars. I seriously doubt it would take THAT long.

Unless it is nearly impossible and has billions of other technological requirements.

Captain Seafort wrote: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.

You are correct, I rewatched the entire sequence, and a 5-10 minutes interval is plausible.
But, as Graham said, Geordi stated there was "nothing he could do", which indicates that he had tried everything he knew.
Also, I saw no mention of the Core ejection system.

When was it mentioned in TNG?
Because the only ships that had it (as far as I know) always mentioned it in situations where ejecting the core would be a possibility (Voyager and the E-E).

Praeothmin wrote:But, as Graham said, Geordi stated there was "nothing he could do", which indicates that he had tried everything he knew.

There were only a few seconds, if that, between the coolant leak and Geordi stating there was nothing that could be done - he didn't try anything. This indicates that loss of coolant is a known single-point-of-failure in the GCS.

When was it mentioned in TNG?
Because the only ships that had it (as far as I know) always mentioned it in situations where ejecting the core would be a possibility (Voyager and the E-E).

Cause and Effect - one of the things mentioned after the Bozeman hit was ejecting the core.

Perhaps he had been working throughout the battle to contain the core, and the coolant leak was just the start of the breach, at which point he had already tried everything else to stop it.

Cool, thanks...

Mark wrote:It only took humanity a hundred years to go from the industrial age to cruising the stars. I seriously doubt it would take THAT long.

Space is really pretty easy in comparison.

to get into space all you have to do is find a way to lift an object(or vacume sealed chamber with air and food supply) with sufficient velocity to escape the gravitational pull of earth (I believe its 11.something m/s but I'd have to check).

what we're talking about here is projecting some kind of beam, allowing it to penetrate normal matter without having any effect, and getting to the anti-matter where it reverses it's charge somehow.

Starfleet can already reconfigure matter for it's own ends. I'm still not seeing a problem.