Why has warp core safety regressed so much in 80 years?

[Captain Clark Terrell]

^Plus, I think Esteban may have wanted to see what the BOP was actually going to do before he reacted (i.e., firing disruptors as opposed to torpedoes), as it may have affected any potential exit-strategy he was quickly formulating.

--Sran

 

[Noname Given]

So you think it would have been better if they invented an all-new way for the ship to blow up every week?

Timo Saloniemi

What's really bad is when they just REUSE a script scene almost verbatim --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN001iUenmU

 

[trynda1701]

Tying in with how upgrades in warp core technology seemed to make systems poorer, the one thing that annoyed me when I first saw that scene with Grissoms destruction, is why didn't the deflectors come on automatically, as they did numerous times in TOS!

 

[Maurice]

I think it's easiest to imagine that the "new engines" in TMP also involved this whole new reactor core which was unlike that was in earlier ships, later retcons notwithstanding.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

^Plus, I think Esteban may have wanted to see what the BOP was actually going to do before he reacted (i.e., firing disruptors as opposed to torpedoes), as it may have affected any potential exit-strategy he was quickly formulating.

--Sran

Well if that what his plan he failed miserably, because the Grissom was still sailing on a straight course when it was hit and destroyed.

I know they destroyed it to add tension and drama to the film but it really seems Esteban was just a poor captain I'd estimate there are about 10 seconds or so from the first time they see the BoP to when it is destroyed. In all that time the ship didn't raise shields, fired any rear phasers if she had any, take any evasive action, jump to warp....nothing. Not that any of it would have necessarly saved the Grissom since she was only a science ship against a warship, but for God sakes man......do something.

Plus I thought it was kind of disrespectful to Gus Grissom, highly respected member of the Mercury 7, second American in space but mission is overshadowed because hatch explodes and capsule sinks and he takes heat for possibly causing it (Which I think is BS). Totally overshadowed bu Alan Shepard and John Glenn. Was scheduled to fly the first Apollo mission and is speculated that he would have been the first man on the moon on Apollo 11, achieving immortal fame and certainly would have walked on the moon at some point regardless of when. Instead becomes one of the space program's 1st 3 casualties because of a spark.

So Star Trek names a ship in his honor and it gets the distinction of being possibly the Federation ship that is destroyed the easiest in the whole series.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

Can you seriously expect a starship that has PINK chairs on the bridge to be able to take any kind of serious battle damage?

I realize you meant this in jest, but it's a silly comment nonetheless. The Sao Paulo/Defiant bridge was equipped with purple chairs and carpet, and clearly held its own in combat. The Grissom's seeming inability to defend itself stemmed from its being an Oberth-class vessel rather a Constitution- or Miranda-class cruiser.

--Sran

Lighten up Francis. The pink chairs looked tacky and stupid, I was just merely making light of the designers strange choice to go with them when they stood out like a sore thumb.

 

[F. King Daniel]

So you think it would have been better if they invented an all-new way for the ship to blow up every week?

Timo Saloniemi

What's really bad is when they just REUSE a script scene almost verbatim --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN001iUenmU

I personally loved that. Like Kirk or Spock dying in engineering in Wrath of Khan and Into Darkness or Kes or Seven in a Jefferies tube scanning a Krenim torpedo in "Before and After" and "Year of Hell", the Enterprise-D was going down via warp core breach in a battle with a Klingon Bird of Prey (or three), no matter which timeline they're in.

 

[USS KG5]

So Star Trek names a ship in his honor and it gets the distinction of being possibly the Federation ship that is destroyed the easiest in the whole series.

A ship going out into space barely armed if at all because it is on a peaceful mission doesn't seem disrespectful.

The USS Grissom should never have been attacked, let alone destroyed, even psycho Kruge only wanted to cripple her.

 

[Maxillius]

Back to topic, I think newer engine designs sacrifice durability for power output. TOS engine cores never breached, not even when blasted with the Planet Killer. Heck, even NX Enterprise's engine never threatened to breach and that ship was beat to heck multiple times by the Xindi before it was repaired. Half of one nacelle was shot off it and all that happened was a speed reduction.

 

[Leto_II]

Foreign labor and cheaper materials. It's what happens when you outsource jobs to the Pakled homeworld.

Non-union labor, too. Would you really trust your engine room to be built by electricians without their union cards?

Yep, that's pretty much what happens when you let the Bluth Company build your starships...

 

[Ronald Held]

So is there a tech reason in the TNG era or just plot devices?

 

[Doctorwhovian]

Doesn't the enterprise actually shatter the top of the Reliant warp core early in TWOK yet this only damages it?

 

[USS Triumphant]

I think it has to do with all the times crewpeople from TNG and beyond mess with the intermix ratio. They have some sort of stupid idea that they can improve engine performance by futzing with it, when it's dead obvious even to a late 20th century mind (such as mine when I first saw them talking about this) that the anti-matter/matter intermix ratio HAS to be 1:1. All they're doing is destabilizing things and causing warp core breaches left and right.

 

[Mytran]

They shoot and explode the greeble often known as the "Impulse Deflection Crystal" which is followed by a shot of Reliant being thrown around the Engine Room.

But you're right, the prospect of the Reliant destructing due to her own systems failing is never mentioned by either side. If Khan had not activated the Genesis device the implication is that the ship would have hung there in space indefinitely.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

So Star Trek names a ship in his honor and it gets the distinction of being possibly the Federation ship that is destroyed the easiest in the whole series.

A ship going out into space barely armed if at all because it is on a peaceful mission doesn't seem disrespectful.

The USS Grissom should never have been attacked, let alone destroyed, even psycho Kruge only wanted to cripple her.

Really? So you don't see even the slightest hint of bad taste in Star Trek naming a ship in honor of arguable the most important astronaut in the first decade of NASA's existence, one of the first three men to die in a NASA space program related incident, and a man who, had he lived, might have been the most famous astronaut of them all, and the ship's main role in the film is to be completely annihilated without so much as even firing a shot. Really, not even a hint of hmmmmmm, that maybe wasn't the best way for Star Trek to honor a real space pioneer?

If they sent out a force of ships named the Arizona, Indianapolis, Challenger and Columbia and that fleet was easily and utterly destroyed would that be pretty disrespectful or would that be cool in your book?

 

[Maurice]

Lighten up Francis.

Classy.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

Lighten up Francis.

Classy.

You know what? Guy makes a issue over a little quip I make about pink chairs on the Grissom, and didn't even make it in a way to imply I was targeting any group who use pink as their symbol, then I'm not going to say "Oh gosh, I'm so sorry that the most innocent little joke gets you riled up."

You don't like my response to someone who decides to make an issue over that, too bad, you are in no position to decide what is and isn't classy so why don't you just mind your own business.

 

[USS Triumphant]

Really? So you don't see even the slightest hint of bad taste in Star Trek naming a ship...

I take the point you're making, but, I think you have the benefit of hindsight and are failing to see this from the perspective of the people making TSFS back then. They have no knowledge that there will be another 9 movies, and they just want to honor Grissom somehow. There's FOUR Federation starships of the movie era - Enterprise, whose name was a given, Reliant, which was named in the last movie and can't be named for anyone else now, another ship (Excelsior), which is going to get disabled by one of the heroes, and a peaceful science ship destroyed before its time. Which one would YOU name after him?

You might say "none", but now let's figure out what to name the ship. Naming it something like the Callow or similar would have been the worst sort of writing - when the ship was commissioned, the builders LIKED her, and they certainly had no idea what a dunsel her captain would be or how she would meet her end. So she's GOING to be named after someone or some ship from the past worthy of naming a starship after. Since the class is Oberth, and that was a scientist, one can conclude that the ships in the class will also be named after people that advanced science, not past ships. So now you're down to whom to choose to HONOR. And they chose Grissom.

And given that they were going to name it after *someone* in their honor, it's pretty much a given that whether they had named her the Curie or the Copernicus or the Marconi, there was GOING to be a poster on the Internet like you fussing about how disrespectful that was, right about now.

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

^Agreed. I'll add that Star Trek has always gone out of its way to pay tribute to important figures, places and events from Earth's history; the use of Gus Grissom's name was in no way intended as a slight to him or to any other astronauts who have passed, nor was the vessel's destruction. Grissom's demise was a plot device, not a slap in the face to a hero.

At the outset of Star Trek IV, a brief tribute message was included to remember the crew of the Challenger, following the fatal accident that destroyed their space shuttle only months earlier. Later in the same film, the BOP commandeered by Kirk and his friends crashed in San Francisco Bay. Was this in any way meant to slight the Challenger's crew? Of course not; it was part of the story.

Anyone looking for the devil will eventually find him, whether he's really there or not.

--Sran

 

[Amaris]

So obviously warp core are like nuclear reactors in the fact that if they are damaged and fail the results are probably going to be bad.

Yet in TOS I don't remember any instances where the warp core was in danger of breaching because of battle damage. I remember times when an outside force or Kirk himself set the engines to explode (which was always avoided of course). But I can't remember a battle sequence where the Enterprise or any other Federation ship got hit and the core either exploded or came close to it (maybe it wasn't in the budget).

The Grissom was destroyed with one hit in Star Trek III, the gunner was told to target the engines only I can't imagine one hit taking a ship without hitting the engines.

Well, in the dialogue, the gunner even says it was a lucky shot, so I figure what happened was supposed to be a one-in-a-million hit.