How important is the shuttle?

[Captain Rob]

^^ You know; I like that idea. That would have looked better than using a slow-as-hell spacewalk. I know that we had never seen a spacewalk on the hull before. So the writers/producers thought that would look cool. But using a shuttle to land on the hull next to the deflector array and get out and battle Borg would have looked even more cool. I don't think that the main shuttlebay was controlled by the Borg. I think that our heros were shown walking away from an airlock near the bay. Must watch it again. They could have used an existing shuttle set for it. As for the Captain's Yacht; they would have to build another set and a CGI/practical model.

And again; for aircraft carriers with electrically powered propellers:

New for Christmas at Home Depot:

"Starfleet warp plasma to US Navy warship AC-DC power system power converter. Just $999.99 while fictitious supplies last."

 

[Vanyel]

New for Christmas at Home Depot:

"Starfleet warp plasma to US Navy warship AC-DC power system power converter. Just $999.99 while fictitious supplies last."

Amazon has them for $900.00, with free shipping.

 

[Captain Rob]

New for Christmas at Home Depot:

"Starfleet warp plasma to US Navy warship AC-DC power system power converter. Just $999.99 while fictitious supplies last."

Amazon has them for $900.00, with free shipping.

Cool. I've got a gift certificate for them. Now to find some warp plasma and "borrow" an aircraft carrier.
Quietly books tickets online to San Diego and Honolulu.

 

[T'Girl]

No demise of Lt Hawk

There's the flaw in your plan right there, he was too pretty to live.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

New for Christmas at Home Depot:

"Starfleet warp plasma to US Navy warship AC-DC power system power converter. Just $999.99 while fictitious supplies last."

Amazon has them for $900.00, with free shipping.

Cool. I've got a gift certificate for them. Now to find some warp plasma and "borrow" an aircraft carrier.
Quietly books tickets online to San Diego and Honolulu.

Excuse me, can you direct me to the naval base in Alameda? It's vere they keep the nuclear wessels...



NOO-KLEE-AR... WESSELS!

 

[KJbushway]

They couldn't have fired at the deflector dish. If you remember is was highly explosive and if damaged could blow up more than half of the ship. But they could have used to shuttle TP to transport them on the deflector instead of walking all that way.

 

[Captain Rob]

Amazon has them for $900.00, with free shipping.

Cool. I've got a gift certificate for them. Now to find some warp plasma and "borrow" an aircraft carrier.
Quietly books tickets online to San Diego and Honolulu.

Excuse me, can you direct me to the naval base in Alameda? It's vere they keep the nuclear wessels...



NOO-KLEE-AR... WESSELS!

Alameda's closed. And so is the San Francisco Navy Yards at Hunters Point where the TOS Enterprise was supposedly built. Mare Island naval shipyard is also closed. I think that almost all US Navy facilities in the San Francisco area are gone. Except for some reserve fleet storage.

Now with a slight edit:
"Excuse me, can you direct me to the naval base in Pearl Harbor? It's vere they keep the nuclear wessels..

NOO-KLEE-AR... WESSELS!"

 

[Colonel Midnight]

^ Si, the only Navy stuff in Alameda is a reserve office (think they do some training there, or did a while back), and the USNS ships out at the old Naval Base. USNS isn't USN, so really... they don't count.

The only really significant Armed Forces contingent/mass in Alameda is the Coast Guard base.

Cheers,
-CM-

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ All that really means is if you wander around San Francisco asking about "nuclear wessels" in a Russian accent, you'll still draw the same blank stares.

 

[Captain Rob]

Well the aircraft carrier USS Hornet is on display at Alemeda. It's an Essex class WWII era carrier that later was used to recover Apollo command capsules after splashdown. So it's not a "noo-klee-ar wessel"

"All that really means is if you wander around San Francisco asking about "nuclear wessels" in a Russian accent, you'll still draw the same blank stares.'
Maybe instead they point you to the airport or bus station.

 

[Timo]

They couldn't have fired at the deflector dish. If you remember is was highly explosive and if damaged could blow up more than half of the ship.

One would assume the deflector wouldn't be explosion-prone in normal circumstances - but only when converted to a multiplexing beacon by the Borg. Otherwise, Trek starship battles would look rather different...

Picard apparently knew about the Borg activities thanks to being an insider, so he'd have known from the very start of the exborgmination mission that it would be a poor idea to fire at the deflector. So yes, the shuttle would have been a means of transport only, not a weapon as such. Unless they used it for bumping Borg drones off the hull...

Perhaps using a shuttle would have upped the "offensive index" of the team, making the Borg respond too soon and too aggressively?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mr Silver]

Perhaps using a shuttle would have upped the offensive of the team, making the Borg respond too soon and too aggressively?

Maybe, but when faced with a shuttle, what could the Borg exactly do? Apart from in "Descent" (where the Borg were renagade drones, using equipment supplied by Lore) the Borg haven't been shown using Ranged Weapons during Ground Combat, in fact they haven't used weapons of any kind, except the Assimilation Tubules, which aren't a weapon per say, more of a device


I suppose the Borg could up the speed of their work on the Deflector, but whats saying they weren't moving as fast as they could already? surely moving fsat would lessen the "efficiency" of the job, lack of efficiency, being something the Borg loathe and go to great costs to avoid As I suggested earlier, it would be effective for them to use the Shuttlecraft as a weapon against the Borg, with a higher yield and Computer Targetting, they could take out multiple Borg, without denting the Deflector, before they adapt and whats saying they couldn't take out the entirity of the Borg at the Deflector before they adapt?

 

[Timo]

Apart from in "Descent" the Borg haven't been shown using Ranged Weapons during Ground Combat

But this wouldn't be ground combat. The Borg use a variety of weapons against spacecraft; who knows what a bunch of Drones would be equipped with, or capable of creating for the purpose?

whats saying they couldn't take out the entirity of the Borg at the Deflector before they adapt?

Indeed, one'd think that if the first two shots from a phaser rifle are efficient against a random drone, then twenty simultaneous shots from ten rifles should fell all the Borg present at once.

However, since Picard has never suggested such an approach after gaining his Locutus experience and insight, there's probably some sort of a Borg defensive mechanism that helps against such "overkill" attacks. Say, the adaptation to a phaser setting might only take nanoseconds, and the Borg let the same setting take down an additional Drone several second laters because they want this to happen, perhaps to gain further data on the nature of the phaser beam.

It might be that a "medium" threat like a shuttlecraft's phasers would be met with rapidly raised defenses that would necessitate upping the threat strength and thus endangering the deflector. The cute angle here is that Picard is established as having access to hidden information, hidden both from the audience and from his colleagues...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Colonel Midnight]

Well the aircraft carrier USS Hornet is on display at Alemeda. It's an Essex class WWII era carrier that later was used to recover Apollo command capsules after splashdown. So it's not a "noo-klee-ar wessel"

"All that really means is if you wander around San Francisco asking about "nuclear wessels" in a Russian accent, you'll still draw the same blank stares.'
Maybe instead they point you to the airport or bus station.

Well, supposedly the USS Hornet is haunted, so I guess we could go there and collect some ectoplasm...

Not to mention, there's also a ready source of 'fuel' (*polite cough*) nearby, at the Hangar One vodka/spirits distillery.

Cheers,
-CM-

 

[Vanyel]

I guess a shuttle could have been used to "bump" the Borg off the deflector if worst comes to worst. However, that wouldn't have really helped. Once Picard and Worf stopped the interplexing beacon, the Borg increased their attacks inside the ship. Stopping them would have left the Borg with one option, over run the ship. Which they were doing when Lily gave Picard the Moby Dick speech.

Shuttles are important, but underused. They wouldn't have helped much in FC. They might have helped in Nem, assuming they were strapped down in the shuttle bay, so the force of impact wouldn't have thrown them all into the wall.

 

[Timo]

I guess if the bridge crew survived the impact, then so did any loose heavy gear...

Having Picard go hunt for Shinzon in a shuttle would really have been a win-win-win situation. It would have eliminated Treknological implausibilities such as the annoying button transporter gimmick or the indeterminate status of shielding on the two ships or the mysterious all-encompassing transporter failure. It would have given us cool VFX on shuttles, good examples of which served the story on two earlier occasions. And it would still have given us some spacewalk, spacejump or transporter intrigue, because Shinzon would obviously have refused conventional shuttlecraft entry.

The movie could have used so much conceptual change, though... Details of execution aren't really so important when some basic premises, such as Shinzon being created to take Picard's place, were almost completely ignored.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

Picard apparently knew about the Borg activities thanks to being an insider

[snip]

The cute angle here is that Picard is established as having access to hidden information

I don't think you can depend too heavily on Picard's "insider information" just because he was briefly a Borg drone. The existence of the Queen(s) came as a complete surprise to him (and to Data), it likely his actual knowledge of the Borg's inner workings is spotty.

 

[Timo]

True enough. But "Locutus insight" really is the only way Picard could know that the deflector dish is currently charged with anti-protons and explosion-prone (and would have to inform his ignorant crew of this fact).

Whether that's direct feed from the Collective (which he did seem to get during the initial space battle), or merely something he dug from the processor captured from the Tommy-gunned Drone by using his Locutus skills, we don't know. But once again, Locutus did save the day...

Timo Saloniemi