A Warp Core Breach?

[JarodRussell]

I fail to see how the failure of the containment field inside the reaction chamber would cause a shipwide explosion. The antimatter within the reaction chamber is, after all, 100% annihilated anyways, and the reaction chamber is built to withstand that energy.

The only thing that would destroy the entire ship would be a failure in the containment field in the antimatter storage containers. Makes sense with the dialogue in Contagion. The containment field in the storage chambers failed. So all of the antimatter at once got in touch with the matter (a bulkhead, or the metal wall of the chamber) surrounding it.

 

[T'Girl]

^ ^ ^ Respectfully disagree, I don't believe the physical housing of the warp core can contain the violence inside of it. The containment field/force field is what does all the work.

And I don't believe the Enterprise's antimatter bottles exploded in Timescape, the shot of the Enterprise D exploding was (strange to say) too small for that, the Enterprise D carrys many tons of antimatter, the fireball would have been hundreds of kilometres across, the fireball we saw was of a simular size as the one in Generations, a few kilometres. Even if time hadn't reversed, it wouldn't of been big enough even to consume the Romulan ship.

Also the explosion traveled up the warp core, blowing out the top of the deuterium fuel tank first, if the containment field in the section of the ship where the antimatter is keep was still operating, up would have been the path of least resistance for the initial explosion. As the ship was blown apart the area with the antimatter bottles was the last to go, the bottles survived the destruction of the ship.