Appereantly, Commodore Paris WAS a nod to Tom Paris...

[KelisThePoet]

Stargazer I buy, that is a nod.
The saucer crash... well, how many ways to crash the saucer of a giant spaceship on an alien planet are there? XD

Visually, the crash reminded me of Voyager's crash in "Timeless." But I think your point is correct. Nearly any crash of a ship with a saucer section will look similar to any other.

Perhaps, the whole idea of detaching the saucer section is a kind of nod to the Enterprise D in The Next Generation.

 

[Christopher]

Perhaps, the whole idea of detaching the saucer section is a kind of nod to the Enterprise D in The Next Generation.

The idea that the saucer could be separated was around during TOS. It was alluded to indirectly in "The Apple" -- "Discard the warp drive nacelles if you have to and crack out of there with the main section, but get that ship out of there!" -- and mentioned in The Making of Star Trek. The TMP refit Enterprise was designed with a visible saucer separation line at the top of the dorsal connector, and late in production of the movie, when people were tossing out all sorts of ideas about how to fix the ending, Andrew Probert did a nifty series of full-color storyboards of a sequence where the three Klingon battlecruisers from the opening were restored and attacked the Enterprise, forcing it to separate its hulls. Maybe that's part of why the Probert-designed Enterprise-D was given the ability to separate and reattach its hulls routinely (when before it had been an emergency measure and was irreversible without a spacedock to put the hulls back together).