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

One too many.

 

Yep. Even if you assume that some of the launchers get damaged during the battle, and you assume Riker was position the ship to minimize damage to critical areas like the bridge and engineering, Riker could and should have fired all available weapons pretty early on. Even with the BoP shields up, I'm guessing that the E-D could have done a decent amount of damage just from a few phaser and photon hits.

 

I still think this would be spoon-feeding. We don't see the VFX of constant firing, but we hear the (much more affordable) sound effects all right; it would be odd to assume the heroes would not be firing, and we have no good reason to do so.

That the heroes can't make a dent in enemy shields is quite a surprise to everybody concerned ("Our shields are holding!"). It need not be that for the audience, which knows Soran is there to hand out technological miracles to the sisters (starkiller weapons, backdoors to Starfleet codes).

The same with "shield rotation". Soran's bugging of LaForge solves that simply enough.

...Armchair quarterbacking really should be categorically preempted by the competent heroes saying "We can do no more". Surely it's not within our powers to decide that LaForge is lying?

Timo Saloniemi

 

As I noted before, Soran's bugging of LaForge depended on him looking at the shield frequency display. It's reasonable to assume that LaForge is rather too busy keeping the warp core from exploding to be looking at that monitor frequently enough for it to be useful to the BoP (assuming they changed frequencies), and even then, surely the computer could rotate frequencies quickly enough that by the time the BoP could adjust to a new frequency it would no longer be the current frequency.

Given that the sisters bemoan their inability to stand up to the E-D, we have no reason to assume that Soran did anything to improve the BoP's shielding, and that easily could have been solved with a throwaway line.

I think it's within our powers to take what we've seen in previous episodes and say "Why aren't they even bringing this up as an option?"

 

I'd actually argue LaForge would have time for little else besides looking at the frequency display. After all, the Durases start out by defeating the shields. It's LaForge's duty to do something about that, so he double-checks his displays, and perhaps adjusts the frequency. From which it follows that it doesn't help. So he checks the displays again, and again defeats himself and betrays his ship to the Klingons.

In any case, the frequency we see is likely to be the frequency of the frequency rotation if anything...

The sisters thought they could not win. Soran basically told them "I'll fix that". And in subsequent scenes, the sisters had no reservations about pressing the attack, and were justified in feeling that way, Riker's phasers and torps not hurting them any. So, El-Aurian dirty tricks.

As for offering clever ideas, it just doesn't pay. Surely the heroes did either bring up or dismiss every option, being experts on this stuff. If they say they can do nothing, then that's it - they already covered all the bases (and more, since they are good at thinking outside the box). Shouldn't we be cheering that they don't waste time with idle technobabble?

Timo Saloniemi

 

You do realize that you yourself are essentially bringing up clever ideas, even if your clever ideas amount to "trust what we see on the screen"?

The problem is that I don't trust what we see on the screen because it appears to be inconsistent with what we've previously seen on the screen.

 

The main issue with the shield frequency was that it was such a point of emphasis in the past that specifically helped to prevent the E-D from being seriously damaged or destroyed against the Borg. I can trust or at least go along with most things, but the exact reason the E-D was destroyed in this film was due to not doing something (i.e., rotating shield frequency or modulating or whatever) that helped prevent it from being destroyed in the past. It was seriously one of the first things I thought of after first viewing Generations.

 

This is more my frustration. They don't do any of the solutions that have worked in the past against far superior foes.

 

The Enterprise-E bridge, ready room, observation lounge, and main engineering set were built new for First Contact.

No. The design was remarkably similar to the "hub" we'd seen previously, and kudos to the production team for that; but the zoom from Romulus orbit into the Senate chamber itself was entirely new for Nemesis.

 

And then it took the BoP with it.

 

correct, I think they reconciled the observation lounge table from TNG, though.

Then again, many other sets were recycled from the series...But that’s really been extremely common in te history of Star Trek, nothing that unusual and certainly nothing as conspicuous as the Ent-D engineering standing in for the A’s in ST6.

 

Casualties does not equal fatalities. Casualty just means someone was injured enough to take them off duty, this includes both deaths and recoverable injuries.

 

this is why I wrote “not NECESSARILY zero:” we just don’t know. Could be three crewmen dead or just Worf with a broken nail.

 

No, but I was completely misremembering that line so the correction was helpful.

 

It seems really unlikely to me that nobody died in the crash, and I'm not even sure whether they could distinguish between those who died in the crash and those who died in the events immediately preceding it, but it is what it is.

 

According to the novelisation of Star Trek: Generations, seventeen people were "lost" during the destruction of the Enterprise-D, though it's not clear if they were killed during the Duras's attack, whether they were killed in the crash, or whether they were just unfortunate enough to not evacuate to the saucer in time. The novelisation differs from the movie in several ways as it's based on an earlier draft on the script than the one that was ultimately filmed (in the original hardback version Spock and McCoy are on the Enterprise-B rather than Scotty and Chekov, and Kirk gets shot in the back by Soran – though this was later corrected in the paperback release), but it's probably the closest we'll get to a canonical figure.

 

Hey, I have that hardcover, and I love that I have the novelization of events pre-reshoot.

I can buy 17 a lot more easily than 0.

 

Hrmm, well, maybe that is what the "Excelsior" upgrades are all about, and it was standard by the time of TUC?

 

well, it’s really the ent-d set, even the LCARS are 24th century. Luckily it’s only a very brief shot.

About the Generations novelization, I have the Italian version in paperback, Scotty and Chekov there but the original ending, with Kirk shot in the back, also I remember a scene with Chekov contacting sulu to tell him that Kirk is missing.

It also goes in much more detail on what happens to Kirk in the nexus: turns out that Antonia was only one of countless fantasies he went trough during the decades, he’s not really “just arrived” when picard shows up in this version.

 

I have a vague recollection of Carol and David being included, but that may be a false memory.