Spoilers for Star Trek: Generations ahead: We all know that In Generations, the saucer section of the Enterprise-D crashes on the surface of a planet. I often wondered what happened afterwards. Did Starfleet salvage the saucer section, removing it from the planet? Or was it just stripped of any classified info and high tech and simply left there as a monument to Troi's bad driving? What do you think? Sean
I Imagine anything of value was stripped out of it and then it was vaporised to avoid contaminating the nearby culture. Would've been so cool to have seen it split in half like they wanted.
Have you ever seen Lord of War? It turns out that Viridian III wasn't quite so uninhabited, much to the chagrin of Starfleet.
I'm sure Starfleet went back to the planet to retrieve the saucer, along with Kirk's body. I mean, did you really think they would just leave them there? It's the frikkin' Enterprise-D and the most famous captain in the Federation. They're not going to leave them on some planet that nobody gives a shit about.
yeah, i'd say they either recovered the saucer separately... or 'customised it', and expanded on it, to create a new Federation colony on the planet M
Whilst retriving Kirk's body for proper burial would make sense, it would also make the already daft mental image of Picard spending hours very slowly dragging his caucus all the way back up the mountain in order to dump some stones on top of it even sillier if Starfleet then beamed it away once they arrived with rescue ships.
That's assuming Picard even mentioned Kirk in his official report, there's probably some directive about crossing dimensions :P officers are often buried on planets where they died so they'd probably leave him there, not like he's going to get any deader.
The Veridians eventually discovered the saucer and turned it into a resort & casino to compete with Risa.
I think the saucer wreckage was recovered and all traces of anyone being on Veridian III removed (including Kirk's body, IMO). Later, the wreck was towed to a shipyard and scrapped.
I think much of the technology/personal items were taken when the crew was rescued. At least, the stuff that was salvageable. With Veridian IV being populated, albeit by a pre-industrial society, I'd imagine the Prime Directive would stat that Veridian III had to be scrubbed by Federation crews. Being that the inhabitants of Veridian IV could possibly visit Veridian III before developing warp technology, I'm sure Star Fleet would want to avoid the possibility that someone could come and reverse engineer the technology in the saucer (granted, unless they could somehow activate a computer, they wouldn't discover warp drive from the saucer, they could, conceivable figure out replicator, holodeck, etc. technology with a look around), or at the very least they'd know that other races existed. It's been years since I've read them, but I want to say some non-canon answers might be found in the Trek books The Return (part of the series of books, beginning with Ashes of Eden that William Shatner co-wrote with Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens), Imazdi: Triangle (which, if memory serves, started focusing on the TNG crew on Veridian III ready to be taken away by the ships sent to rescue them), and, I can't remember if Rogue Saucer had a scene addressing it (I'm thinking not, but since the plot, which took place prior to Generations, centers around a saucer section that could conceivably land on a planet and take off again, it's a possibility it had a scene on Veridian III).
Didn't the planet have a pre-industrial society on it? I doubt the Federation would allow a colony on a planet with a pre-warp society. They probably retrieved/destroyed it all.
As I said and Memory Alpha backs up, it was Veridian IV with the pre-warp society. Veridian III, where the saucer crashed was uninhabited (at least by humanoid life). The other planets in the Veridian system were not Class-M.
thanks for that shivkala... i was sure the planet the saucer crashed on was uninhabited, but Mage made my doubt myself... was going to rewatch the movie tonight just to make sure lol M
No problem. To be honest, the movie doesn't spend a lot of time on it, I think it's only mentioned in the stellar cartography scene, which is quickly overshadowed by Data's problems with the emotion chip.
In 'The Return' The Saucer got shot to pieces by Romulan/Borg if memory serves me right and the Romulans/Borg beamed Kirks body away. Before that happened Starfleet were retrieving as much as they could of it. (i think) I believe in the Generations Novel Picard only mentions to Guinan about Kirk and when Worf and Geordi come in the shuttle to rescue him he doesn't mention it to them either.