Why all the focus on B4 for Picard series? What about using Lore?

2m30 onwards.

 

Yes, the explosion powerful enough to vaporize a mighty warship clearly left the Android standing 2 feet from the source of the explosion intact

 

Basically, then, he's the fifty-fourth glowing dot to the right in the shrapnel cloud.

Whether intact, or in six pieces, or in sixty thousand... Depends. It's a bit like Mace Windu getting Force-Fried after having his Hands Lightsabered Off and then Thrown From Incredible Heights - each and every one of those things survivable by a Jedi, as painstakingly demonstrated onscreen previously!

Timo Saloniemi

 

If the story requires Data to be intact even though it defies all logic, Data will be intact. Call it the "Delta Flyer" effect.

 

There's nothing to say this Data couldn't be a reconstruction that they just can't get to work without the Magic Soong Touch. Thus being kept in the drawer.

 

Maybe he copied Lore's pull-my-finger site-to-site transporter trick.

 

It's Data. Or B4 with Data's consciousness. Brent Spiner has insinuated Data is in it...but NOT in it...i.e. there's a reason he can't be in it. This lends credos to the holodeck theory.

 

Soong Build Quality

 

Data’s quarters and lab were both extremely likely to be in the non boomed saucer section.

 

One would imagine that starship skippers hand over these types of discoveries and acquisitions to their superiors ASAP. On the other hand, the plot of ST Beyond hinges on Kirk stowing the abornath artifact in a locker aboard his ship instead of depositing it on Yorktown, so the opposite may indeed be standard Starfleet policy. Perhaps the elusive definition of a five-year mission actually is "time between two consecutive emptyings of the artifact lockers"?

Timo Saloniemi

 

In the case of Soong Androids, Data is pretty much the de facto next of kin and ruler of his race/species though.

 

Ironically, there’s plenty of big debris. Even a body shaped cone, if you squint with retcon ready glasses. If we had got another, we could have had B4 doing his best katra possessed McCoy scenes as he picks up Data’s signal. XD

 

What they did in the novels is much more fantastically absurd than this.

Spoiler

Soong did not perish in "Brothers" but dragged his ass down to his basement after Data and co. left him in his house to die, where he transferred his mind into a new Dr. Soong body. It was a super-Data android that could do all the fancy stuff Data's mom's body could do with a pretty nifty chameleon circuit system.

Dr. Soong went on to...run a gambling empire in the Orion Syndicate for the purpose of financing his science. He steals all his former creations to get Data's memories out of B-4 and eventually gives up his new body so that Data can be reborn as a super android who has Data's personality but Dr. Soong's emotions.

Super-Data goes on to take over the casino, rebuilds Lal, and rescues Dr. Moriarty, the Countess, and their children later on. B-4 continues to live his life out at the Daystrom Institute, I believe. Probably looking at spoons and whatnot.

Gotta love Treklit, lol.

 

B4 dies. Lots of people die.

 

Well, you know what they say. Why just go crazy when you can go totally nuts?

 

I thought he survived through The Light Fanstastic? I might be misremembering.

 

No doubt there was a positronic cocoon protecting him, like Jean Grey at Alkali Lake in X-Men.

 

I actually really enjoyed that novel (Cold Equations #2, if I'm not mistaken). That they gave Data 2.0 goals and priorities other than returning to the Enterprise and taking up his old post was kind of awesome. And they got to properly explore the concepts of AI that TNG barely comprehended.

 

Oh don't get me wrong, I loved the whole trilogy. But it's fun to badly summarize the novels because they usually sound really absurd when you do it in bullet points.