The idea of a David vs Goliath battle with the old ass underdog ship pummeling the big superior one to death is actually a pretty cool idea. The problem with the sequence as filmed is we get no real idea of the damage being inflicted on Enterprise by this fast little thing doing strafing runs on the slow lumbering Federation flagship because all the damage we see happening is from the inside of the ship -- the bridge sets shaking, consoles blowing up, the desperation of the crew to find a quick solution, etc -- but there are unforgivably few shots of the two ships in orbit. Maybe only two or three. If we pay very close attention we see the bridge shake maybe twenty times and the aft consoles explode at one point, it's clear that the Klingon ship is running rings around them and the Enterprise caught unawares can't keep up (maybe the BOP took out the other weapons systems?), but we don't get to SEE it, so the whole thing feels lame.
Another hint of things we don't get to see: Geordi declares the coolant leak that brings down the ship to have been caused by "that last torpedo", but we never got to see the BOP launching torpedoes at Enterprise. It clearly happened, but it all happens off screen. We never saw any of it.
The whole thing needed more optical shots of the ships battling it out, to help sell the idea of the pasting the Enterprise is taking.
As a rule, among vehicles built for speed, the large vehicles are faster, not slow and lumbering. And in space, there is no liquid or gaseous medium to put more drag on larger vehicles as opposed to smaller ships. The whole idea of tiny vehicles being faster than larger vehicles goes back to the apples and oranges situation in World War II when tiny planes from aircraft carriers were much faster than aircraft carriers or battleships, because they operated in a much thinner medium which offered much less resistance and drag. That is not the case in outer space.
Furthermore, way back in TOS it was established that the effective ranges of starship phasers was tens and even hundreds of thousands of kilometers. But of course the more advanced phasers in the Next Generation should have much longer effective ranges. And a much larger ship like a Galaxy class should have much more powerful phasers than a small Klingon bird of prey, and thus have much longer range phasers. The bird of prey should have been unable to fire on the
Enterprise because it would have had to spend some time travelling through the "kill zone" of the
Enterprise in order to get within range to use it's own phasers.
On November 20 of 1944, the submarine Sealion (1,500 tons) sank the battleship Kongo (37,000 tons).
The battleship
Kongo was restricted to traveling at the interface between two mediums, air and water, and had no vertical freedom of movement. The vertical freedom of movement of
Sealion was also quite restricted, but much greater than that of
Kongo. More importantly, the
Sealion traveled in a medium, water, that is quite opaque at large distances, and so was hidden from
Kongo until it fired its torpedoes. Space is transparent. Very, very, very transparent. There is nowhere for a smaller and weaker ship to hide and surprise their more powerful enemy in space.
In space, everyone can see you trying to sneak up.
...
Imagine an alternative version where the lumbering 'Goliath' starship is being circle strafed by the BOP, still putting up a dramatic fight and with the incredible image of Veridian III in space as a backdrop
Imagine it, as a battle scene taking place in close proximity of a planet, perhaps even actually in orbit.I
As said above, the huge "Goliath" starships are the fast ones and the small "David" starships are slow and lumbering. Thus it was the
Enterprise that could have circle strafed the bird of prey.
And once the shields dropped Riker could have simply ordered the
Enterprise to leave and they could have zoomed away in a split second. Thus the battle would not be happening near Veridian III for very long. Which would be good for the health of the natives. Once they figured out how to defeat the bird of prey they could have returned to confront it.
), the uniforms were fine. I like to think they just didn't like the new ones they'd designed for the movie and panicked, hence someone press ganging the DS9 unis into service. Or else the plan to use them on Voyager was well underway and they wanted to show starship crew transitioning to the new unis in order to explain why Janeway and crew are not wearing the TNG ones (which IMHO was kind of an error too
)
