It's irritates me when people say the Enterprise D was taken out buy a 70 yr old Bird Of Prey

without acknowledging it was only because Lursa and B'Etor knew the shield frequency of the enterprise from hacking geordi's visor, and they got a shot that damaged the warp cores containment. The hull was not breached by their attacks. It was all dumb luck.

In a real fair fire fight that BOP would have been toast.

 

It just shouldn't have happened. It was a unnecessary mean end for a beautiful ship. They could have just refitted it and ditched the civillians without destroying the ship.

 

Yeah, & David didn't actually fight Goliath in a fair fight either. He had a rock. It don't matter how you take them out. They still got taken out.

What kills me is when, even in jest, people try to blame Riker or Troi for the shipwreck. Sadly, we all know where the blame lies, & so did they apparently, given that the next story we see has... no visor. I guess they figured after being hijacked by both Romulans & Klingons, that it should get retired before they end up losing the ship to Ferengi

 

I guess what people have a problem with is, Riker just shooting back once instead of unleashing everything.
I agree the Klingons got lucky.
It shows not even ships named Enterprise are save from freak bad luck sometimes.

 

They’re just being petty or silly and should be judged accordingly. The ship is fine, for the reasons you stated. It doesn’t matter how super duper your hull is, without shields, at the level of the weapons we’re talking about, you’re toast. Frankly, the Defiant’s ablative armor was always very silly to me. Might as well been something out of Captain Proton.

The problem with the ship going out that was is the same as James T. Kirk falling off a bridge. Maybe truer to life than an operatic blaze of glory, but it’s a movie. Have some fun with it. I don’t blame the ship. I blame the burnt-out writers.

Plus, for me, TNG ended with “All Good Things...” I mean, it’s in the title right there. The movies were their own other thing, mostly lackluster. For the ship, the crew, and the previous crew.

 

Actually, Lursa & B'Etor's BoP was not 70 years old. All we know about it was that particular class of BoP (D-12) was retired in the 2350's, only twenty years before Generations. So at the least, the ship was at least 20 years old.

From what I understand (and don't quote me because I don't have proof), Lursa and B'Etor's ship was originally supposed to be a larger, newer, and more powerful ship, on equal footing with the Enterprise-D. However, the producers wanted to reuse the BoP exploding scene from the previous movie to save money, so they changed it to a BoP.

 

I wonder if they did any art for that.
The Renegade D-7 type Eaves came up with would have been great. A 1/350 model is being looked at over at modelermagic.com

 

What was wrong was the lack of "Cyber Security".

Nobody bothered to inspect Geordi's Visor, to make sure it wasn't infected with Malware.

If they did that, the Enterprise-D wouldn't have been destroyed.

It's a very expensive / hard lesson that the Federation has to learn when recovering equipment / people from the field.

 

And Lursa and B'Etor acknowledge as much in the script:

Of course, whatever the script calls for will happen, no matter how contrived. The supposedly finest crew of Starfleet was also once overcome by two old Ferengi rustbuckets and their marauding crews.

But if you need to rationalise it, of course the basic hull design being 70 years old doesn't mean that particular ship was, and it could well have been stocked with more contemporary technology. Add to that the 'spylink' advantage they had and that Enterprise didn't know about. All that was needed then were a few (un)lucky shots.

And of course the fact that there is no computer security in the Star Trek universe to speak of beyond a few simple passwords, as indicated by the poster above me. (Data: "Geordi, this has been encrypted by a hyperdimensional fractally recursvie neural algorithm. In the one hundred and thirty six years since its inception, no one has ever been able to .... oh, I see you're in.")

 

Just because its 70 years old doesn't mean its weapons are Fission warheads.. Its still photon torpedos and disruptors. As pointed out they were retired because of a faulty cloaking device.
AND.. the Bop was destroyed with 1 torpedo, the Ent D took multipule torpedos and disruptor fire.
But I agree, Riker should have launched everything at the Bop instead of seems like 1 phaser pulse, AND It could have gone to warp or full impulse.

 

Well,

1) One phaser beam is already "everything": adding a second one supposedly doesn't up the ante, but merely distributes the destructive output between two beams, making each of them individually weaker. Many an episode of TNG or DS9 equated firing one beam with firing at maximum destructive effectiveness, with the second engagement in "Best of Both Worlds" basically the only exception, and even there the heroes had initially tried a single beam.

2) While we only ever see that one beam, and then that one torpedo, the shots from the bridge feature the sound effects of further weapons fire. Trek has always gone the cheapskate route with visuals, and GEN was no exception there.

Timo Saloniemi

 

GEN should have been an exception there, though. It was a film, not an episode of TV. Have we ever seen Our Hero ship put in such a lackluster showing previously in a film?

Yes, being able to fire weapons through shields is a huge advantage, and intellectually I can...kind of...buy the idea that the Duras Sisters got a lucky shot, but the fight goes on way longer than it should have if the E-D was making any real effort to fight back (clear damage to the E-D's weapons systems might have helped there), and it's narratively unsatisfying that in the end it comes down to, "Ooops, looks like we took one hit too many!" We've seen the E-D fire multiple torpedoes before and we know they have guidance systems, so what the heck is going on that's enabling the BoP to survive as long as it does?

TL;DR the combat as-shown may make intellectual sense (lucky shots are a thing), but as an exercise in cinema it's unsatisfying. The re-use of the BoP destruction sequence from the immediately preceding movie then sucks all the air out of the E-D's "victory", and to have that followed-up with the usual "unable to eject the core!" shenanigans (albeit more dramatic than usual)...I can't blame anyone for having a bad taste in their mouths afterward.

There were ways this could have been done better, but TPTB opted not to engage the resources necessary to realize them.

 

If the enterprise shields could be bypassed, the D should have just been destroyed with one good shot but yea it wouldn't make sense as an enjoyable film. One could argue that the Klingon's wanted a more worthy fight and prolong the destruction. Overall I think it wasn't a good idea to end the D the way it did. I just believe since it was the first big film of TNG, probably one of the main points on the top of the writers list was how to destroy the enterprise for shock value within the context of the story. Could have been written better imho.

 

IIRC it wasn't something the writers wanted to do; it was something forced upon them.

Which doesn't mean they couldn't have found a better way to do it.

 

Even without shields the Enterprise should have destroyed the BOP easily.

 

The real problem is that half the Trekkies in the audience knew that there was a blindingly simple and easy solution to the problem, one that the actual characters would have/should have know. Just change the shield frequencies, they've done it in battle many times, it should basically be a standard (heck, it should be an AUTOMATIC) tactic.

 

The novelization, IIRC, at least has Data detect the signal being transmitted to the BoP moments before they open fire. That's still pretty bad, but not as bad as what's shown.

 

Galaxy class starships were made of toilet tissue, much as I love them.

 

And their computer security wasn't much better.

But, yeah, it was a dumb way for this ship to go out, especially after 7 years of enduring various monsters of the week.

 

When you consider that The Phoenix had its shields deactivated remotely, & still managed take down a Cardassian warship, using superior weapons range alone