Did the Auto-destruct partially malfunction in TSFS?

[Kronos]

It has always seemed to me that the charges blew up the bridge, auxiliary control, enviromental controls and the computer system, basically creating a load of scrap but not making a bang that might damage the only other ship to escape on.

[Timo]

It's just that it very much looks like all the really important parts of the ship, mainly the warp engines and the location where the warp core and the torpedo launchers reside, were left completely intact by the explosions we could see, for an extended period of time at least - which does make one think that something went wrong with the scuttling charges. Perhaps they did not completely fail to detonate, but some of them were apparently badly delayed, possibly badly enough to allow a swiftly acting enemy to stop further detonations. There are many stories of warship scuttlings here on Earth being stopped by a brave and determined boarding party...

If a malfunction is ruled out, then it looks like the scuttling charges were optimized to go gently on the warp drive, for whatever reason.

Or perhaps the charges malfunctioned the other way? Perhaps Kirk only wanted to blow up the areas with Klingon boarders, so that he could later return to the wreck and fly it back to Earth, but something went wrong, the entire saucer blew and the fell from orbit. Kirk's "What have I done?" takes a new meaning here...

Timo Saloniemi

[Mytran]

That would certainly provide a clearer answer to the old question of "why didn't Kirk just beam over to the nearly empty BOP?"

On the other hand, if Kirk only meant to kill (or incapacitate) the Klingon borders, wouldn't making use of the intruder alert systems be a sensible route to pursue? Knockout gas, phasers on wide beam, even just some locked doors all seem less drastic than resorting to dynamite!!!

[jayrath]

Or even just drop the bulkheads and turn off the turbolifts? It'd take a week for the boarding party to zap their way to the bridge. (Accommodating of them to beam into a transporter room, and not right onto the bridge, incidentally.)

None of it makes too much sense, but perhaps auto-destruct and intruder containment were some of the systems damaged in the BoP attack. Lots of other things already went gaflooey, and Kirk & Co. no longer had any hope of running the ship themselves.

So the only hope was destroying the bridge and (more far more importantly) computer core, and letting the atmosphere do the rest of the work.

[C.E. Evans]

Shane Johnson's idea of there being a "destruct one" and a "destruct zero" could still work if the latter is used to ensure enough clearance for last-second lifeboats and transporters, IMO. The former could be used when any evacuation of the ship isn't possible or feasible.

[SchwEnt]

Also, maybe the destruct method was corrupted by the damaged nature of the Enterprise.

Between the limited repairs left from TWOK and the hit from the Bird of Prey, the damage may have affected the destruct system. What we saw in TSFS may be a self-destruct mishap, where certain scuttling charges didn't go off as designed or detonated prematurely out of sequence or whatever else you can think of. A self-destruct that didn't go as designed.

Maybe what we saw in TSFS was an unplanned destruct scenario, something between "maximum annihilation" self-destruct and "scuttle the vessel safely" self-destruct.

I'm guessing.

[Takeru]

Timo wrote:

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There is some merit to the famous backstage rationalization (printed e.g. in Shane Johnson's Mr Scott's Guide to the Enterprise) that scuttling near planets is normally done gently ...

Ugh, I really don't like explanations like that, there's way to much overthinking going on. They wanted to blow up the Enterprise in a visually intersting way, it was one of the biggest fx scenes of the movie, they didn't just want a big boom and the Enterprise disappearing in a ball of fire right away.

[Xaios]

It crashed the way it did by design, except that they missed their target. Nimoy was hoping to make it crash directly into Kirk. It was his pioneering attempt to "drop a Bridge on him."

[Timo]

Just killing (or capturing) the boarding party would not suffice for Kirk. He had a helpless starship while the Klingon commander had a threateningly armed one. Kirk needed to negate that threat somehow: either the Klingon ship had to be destroyed, or then captured, or then deprived of targets.

Destroying the Klingon ship by conventional means was obviously not possible. Boarding would have presented quite a risk, too: Kirk had no real idea of what sort of opposition he would face, but he did know he'd have to drag the less than combat-capable McCoy (and Scotty) along for the fight. Trying to blow up both ships would have been a pretty clever move, and would imply that the scuttling did not go quite as planned since Kruge managed to escape. Just blowing up the boarding party helped already, though - but escaping from the doomed Enterprise was a necessary move no matter what, so stun gas or containment fields would not have been viable options, as they would not have diminished the Klingon fighting strength and ability to hunt down Kirk's party in any way.

Timo Saloniemi

[USS KG5]

Chemahkuu wrote:

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Ships blow up a lot with antimatter still onboard and it never creates all that big a bang.

Well I'd have thought it depends what you try to do.

If the antimatter is simply released into space when the pods are destroyed, or magnetic containment loses power, it would need to come into contact with matching particles of matter to release energy.

Whenever antimatter has been created in a lab it has lasted only a tiny fraction of a second, in our universe it isn't very stable - so when containment goes maybe it simply disappears, unless, like Scotty, you are going to release the whole lot in one go into the reaction chamber, creating a whacking great reaction that would wipe out everything within a few thousand miles.

[Chemahkuu]

Except the vast majority of ships explode instantly, no time to vent, drop or otherwise neutralise the antimatter, like the ships in First Contact shot point blank in the engineering section detonating the antimatter pods directly.

[Timo]

explode instantly, no time to vent

Why would there be no time to vent? That is, why should venting take more than two milliseconds? Supposedly, the antimatter comes prepacked in ejectable pods, and Trek technology demonstrates high accelerations for projectiles.

Timo Saloniemi

[Hartzilla2007]

SchwEnt wrote:

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Also, maybe the destruct method was corrupted by the damaged nature of the Enterprise.

Between the limited repairs left from TWOK and the hit from the Bird of Prey, the damage may have affected the destruct system. What we saw in TSFS may be a self-destruct mishap, where certain scuttling charges didn't go off as designed or detonated prematurely out of sequence or whatever else you can think of. A self-destruct that didn't go as designed.
I'm guessing.

Plus Voyager and Nemesis showed that its possible for battles damage to completely disable the self destruct, so it being partially disabled isn't that much of a stretch.