Did the Auto-destruct partially malfunction in TSFS?

[SchwEnt]

Also, maybe the destruct method was corrupted by the damaged nature of the Enterprise.

Between the limited repairs left from TWOK and the hit from the Bird of Prey, the damage may have affected the destruct system. What we saw in TSFS may be a self-destruct mishap, where certain scuttling charges didn't go off as designed or detonated prematurely out of sequence or whatever else you can think of. A self-destruct that didn't go as designed.

Maybe what we saw in TSFS was an unplanned destruct scenario, something between "maximum annihilation" self-destruct and "scuttle the vessel safely" self-destruct.

I'm guessing.

 

[Takeru]

There is some merit to the famous backstage rationalization (printed e.g. in Shane Johnson's Mr Scott's Guide to the Enterprise) that scuttling near planets is normally done gently ...

Ugh, I really don't like explanations like that, there's way to much overthinking going on. They wanted to blow up the Enterprise in a visually intersting way, it was one of the biggest fx scenes of the movie, they didn't just want a big boom and the Enterprise disappearing in a ball of fire right away.

 

[Xaios]

It crashed the way it did by design, except that they missed their target. Nimoy was hoping to make it crash directly into Kirk. It was his pioneering attempt to "drop a Bridge on him."

 

[Timo]

Just killing (or capturing) the boarding party would not suffice for Kirk. He had a helpless starship while the Klingon commander had a threateningly armed one. Kirk needed to negate that threat somehow: either the Klingon ship had to be destroyed, or then captured, or then deprived of targets.

Destroying the Klingon ship by conventional means was obviously not possible. Boarding would have presented quite a risk, too: Kirk had no real idea of what sort of opposition he would face, but he did know he'd have to drag the less than combat-capable McCoy (and Scotty) along for the fight. Trying to blow up both ships would have been a pretty clever move, and would imply that the scuttling did not go quite as planned since Kruge managed to escape. Just blowing up the boarding party helped already, though - but escaping from the doomed Enterprise was a necessary move no matter what, so stun gas or containment fields would not have been viable options, as they would not have diminished the Klingon fighting strength and ability to hunt down Kirk's party in any way.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[USS KG5]

Ships blow up a lot with antimatter still onboard and it never creates all that big a bang.

Well I'd have thought it depends what you try to do.

If the antimatter is simply released into space when the pods are destroyed, or magnetic containment loses power, it would need to come into contact with matching particles of matter to release energy.

Whenever antimatter has been created in a lab it has lasted only a tiny fraction of a second, in our universe it isn't very stable - so when containment goes maybe it simply disappears, unless, like Scotty, you are going to release the whole lot in one go into the reaction chamber, creating a whacking great reaction that would wipe out everything within a few thousand miles.

 

[Kemaiku]

Except the vast majority of ships explode instantly, no time to vent, drop or otherwise neutralise the antimatter, like the ships in First Contact shot point blank in the engineering section detonating the antimatter pods directly.

 

[Timo]

explode instantly, no time to vent

Why would there be no time to vent? That is, why should venting take more than two milliseconds? Supposedly, the antimatter comes prepacked in ejectable pods, and Trek technology demonstrates high accelerations for projectiles.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Also, maybe the destruct method was corrupted by the damaged nature of the Enterprise.

Between the limited repairs left from TWOK and the hit from the Bird of Prey, the damage may have affected the destruct system. What we saw in TSFS may be a self-destruct mishap, where certain scuttling charges didn't go off as designed or detonated prematurely out of sequence or whatever else you can think of. A self-destruct that didn't go as designed.
I'm guessing.

Plus Voyager and Nemesis showed that its possible for battles damage to completely disable the self destruct, so it being partially disabled isn't that much of a stretch.