The idea was to ram the ship and destroy the Enterprise, they were going to die one way or the other. When Kirk destroyed the original Enterprise I doubt if he planned on using the Bird Of Prey to get off of the planet.
Emergency Force Fileds in "Nemesis"
- Thread starter IrritatingGameOfChess
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The idea was to ram the ship and destroy the Enterprise, they were going to die one way or the other. When Kirk destroyed the original Enterprise I doubt if he planned on using the Bird Of Prey to get off of the planet.
My i9mpression of the scene in Nemesis -- why Picard didn't have everyone go to Engineering - is that he really thought it didn't matter, he thought that the ship would be destroyed upon ramming the scemetar, but at least he'd stop it. It's reflected in the conference earlier when he said that everything else was secondary, as well as his dour tone of voice in the said scene of the film
I don't really believe Picard intended to die in the ramming. For one, there simply wasn't that much at stake - Starfleet already knew of Shinzon's plans and had organized a defense, one that would surely make short work of the silly superweapon that required several minutes to arm.
More importantly, when the ramming was completed, Picard appeared satisfied that everything had gone according to plan and that nothing further needed to be done. It was only when the Scimitar began struggling loose that Picard realized the job wasn't finished - at which point he ordered self-destruct.
Significantly, when he was told that automated self-destruct wasn't working, he didn't choose to perform manual self-destruct which is alwasy an option. Why? Becuase he didn't intend to die. Automated self-destruct allows for all the personnel to safely evacuate before the kaboom happens. A manual self-destruct kills at least the personnel required to implement it. And apparently Picard still didn't consider the Shinzon brat serious enough a threat to sacrifice even a few junior engineers for.
Why Picard didn't order the saucer evacuated is thus IMHO due only to his belief that no evacuation was necessary, that the saucer wouldn't suffer massive damage in the process, except to the extreme bow of the already evacuated central decks. Which turned out to have been a fully justified belief in the end.
Timo Saloniemi
More importantly, when the ramming was completed, Picard appeared satisfied that everything had gone according to plan and that nothing further needed to be done. It was only when the Scimitar began struggling loose that Picard realized the job wasn't finished - at which point he ordered self-destruct.
Significantly, when he was told that automated self-destruct wasn't working, he didn't choose to perform manual self-destruct which is alwasy an option. Why? Becuase he didn't intend to die. Automated self-destruct allows for all the personnel to safely evacuate before the kaboom happens. A manual self-destruct kills at least the personnel required to implement it. And apparently Picard still didn't consider the Shinzon brat serious enough a threat to sacrifice even a few junior engineers for.
Why Picard didn't order the saucer evacuated is thus IMHO due only to his belief that no evacuation was necessary, that the saucer wouldn't suffer massive damage in the process, except to the extreme bow of the already evacuated central decks. Which turned out to have been a fully justified belief in the end.
Timo Saloniemi
^ All of your logic makes impeccable sense, as usual, but I think that trying to apply logic to the events of the film is a hopeless endeavor. The actions of both Picard and Shinzon, and for that matter of just about everyone in the film, are hopelessly nonsensical and can only ultimately be attributed to bad writing.
Except that he already did. Several scenes before the ramming. Back when Shinzon blew holes on Decks 10-12, and life support there was compromised.
One might argue that this was clever writing - that the audience was supposed to go "All right, I so didn't see that coming when I heard the evacuation order!". Had it been a bit more blatant, it might even have worked...
Timo Saloniemi
One might argue that this was clever writing - that the audience was supposed to go "All right, I so didn't see that coming when I heard the evacuation order!". Had it been a bit more blatant, it might even have worked...
Timo Saloniemi
It did work since people forgot that Picard gave that order. In the end it wouldn't have mattered since once he rammed Shinzon's ship he intended to destroy the Enterprise.
^ Did he? How do we know? If he wanted to do that, he could have just used the auto-destruct without doing the ramming. If Scotty thought that the 23rd century Enterprise exploding would be enough to take out V'Ger, surely the Enterprise-E exploding at that close range would take out the Scimitar. Also, when Picard finally did try the auto-destruct, and it was offline, he could have just simply had someone aim a phaser at the warp core, but he didn't.
I don't think he wanted to destroy the Enterprise, just cripple the Scimitar.
I don't think he wanted to destroy the Enterprise, just cripple the Scimitar.
Indeed. Contrary to what The Life of Brian might have us believe, suicide is seldom a viable military tactic... Killing the enemy is a much more useful approach!
Essentially, if Picard merely wanted to defeat Shinzon at the cost of his own life, and the lives of his crew, he need not have done anything after ramming. He had already won hands down - the Scimitar no longer presented any sort of threat to Earth, not with her cloak gone, half her spaceframe gone, no doubt also her warp drive gone...
However, the Scimitar still presented a threat to Picard's life, and to the lives of his crew. So when Picard kept on fighting, it was for survival, meaning that he was not intent on dying for the cause.
Timo Saloniemi
Essentially, if Picard merely wanted to defeat Shinzon at the cost of his own life, and the lives of his crew, he need not have done anything after ramming. He had already won hands down - the Scimitar no longer presented any sort of threat to Earth, not with her cloak gone, half her spaceframe gone, no doubt also her warp drive gone...
However, the Scimitar still presented a threat to Picard's life, and to the lives of his crew. So when Picard kept on fighting, it was for survival, meaning that he was not intent on dying for the cause.
Timo Saloniemi
Shinzon took out the warp engine with his first shot, so no I don't think firing a phaser at the warp core would've destroyed the ship. And Picard did say that thye had to stop Shinzon at all costs all other concerns were secondary.
But then Shinzon would have been able to detect that and got out of range.
But since the ramming happened at walking pace, people could have evacuated at running pace and still left Shinzon helpless to do anything in time. 
"Warp engine", "warp drive" and "warp core" are different things. When ships do battle, it's quite typical for them to knock the opponent out of warp, probably by destabilizing the opponent's warp field; that means loss of warp drive, at least temporarily. Sometimes the hit may do damage to the engine nacelles, preventing them from creating warp again until repairs are effected; that means loss of warp engine. Only incredibly seldom does anything happen to the antimatter reactor itself, and if something does, the ship usually goes kaboom immediately; that's damage to the warp core, and it didn't happen in ST:NEM.
It's perfectly possible to destroy a warp core with a hand phaser. We have seen such a thing attempted in TNG "Heart of Glory" and VOY "Projections", with supposedly ship-terminating consequences. If Picard really wanted his ship to go kaboom, he could have ordered one of his minions to do that phaser trick, or any of the zillion other things that can be done to blow up an antimatter-laden ship from the inside. But that would have meant condemning those minions to death - and Shinzon, already defeated, simply wasn't worth those deaths.
Timo Saloniemi
"Warp engine", "warp drive" and "warp core" are different things. When ships do battle, it's quite typical for them to knock the opponent out of warp, probably by destabilizing the opponent's warp field; that means loss of warp drive, at least temporarily. Sometimes the hit may do damage to the engine nacelles, preventing them from creating warp again until repairs are effected; that means loss of warp engine. Only incredibly seldom does anything happen to the antimatter reactor itself, and if something does, the ship usually goes kaboom immediately; that's damage to the warp core, and it didn't happen in ST:NEM.
It's perfectly possible to destroy a warp core with a hand phaser. We have seen such a thing attempted in TNG "Heart of Glory" and VOY "Projections", with supposedly ship-terminating consequences. If Picard really wanted his ship to go kaboom, he could have ordered one of his minions to do that phaser trick, or any of the zillion other things that can be done to blow up an antimatter-laden ship from the inside. But that would have meant condemning those minions to death - and Shinzon, already defeated, simply wasn't worth those deaths.
Timo Saloniemi
But since the ramming happened at walking pace, people could have evacuated at running pace and still left Shinzon helpless to do anything in time.
"Warp engine", "warp drive" and "warp core" are different things. When ships do battle, it's quite typical for them to knock the opponent out of warp, probably by destabilizing the opponent's warp field; that means loss of warp drive, at least temporarily. Sometimes the hit may do damage to the engine nacelles, preventing them from creating warp again until repairs are effected; that means loss of warp engine. Only incredibly seldom does anything happen to the antimatter reactor itself, and if something does, the ship usually goes kaboom immediately; that's damage to the warp core, and it didn't happen in ST:NEM.
It's perfectly possible to destroy a warp core with a hand phaser. We have seen such a thing attempted in TNG "Heart of Glory" and VOY "Projections", with supposedly ship-terminating consequences. If Picard really wanted his ship to go kaboom, he could have ordered one of his minions to do that phaser trick, or any of the zillion other things that can be done to blow up an antimatter-laden ship from the inside. But that would have meant condemning those minions to death - and Shinzon, already defeated, simply wasn't worth those deaths.
Timo Saloniemi
In both of those cases the warp drive was online and fuctioning, here the warp drive was offline, there were no more torpedoes and phasers were down to 4%. Picard pointed the Enterprise towards Shinzon's locaction and tried ramming the Scimitar it was only after that failed that Picard tried the self destruct, he then risked his own life knowing there was no way of beaming back to the Enterprrise to try and stop Shinzon. Since the Enterprise's warp drive was offline there's no way of knowing that hitting it with phaser would've destroyed the ship and Picard only had seven minutes, he took the fastest option available to him.
As long as we're on the subject of energy fields in Nemesis, let's talk about the deflector shields. An early scene in First Contact clearly establishes that the Enterprise-E has the same "bubble" shields as its predecessor (along with the Defiant, Voyager, and many other on-screen post-TOS starships). Offhand I don't think the Enterprise's shields were seen under direct assault in Insurrection, but the various shuttlecraft and Son'a ships all had the spheroid shields too as I recall.
Then all of a sudden, we come to Nemesis. In the battle scene in the Bazen Rift, the shields seemed to be basically "skin tight." This was something we'd never seen before in "modern day" Trek (although readouts in the latter five TOS films showed theirs worked the same way). Has any explanation, canon or otherwise, been given for this?
Then all of a sudden, we come to Nemesis. In the battle scene in the Bazen Rift, the shields seemed to be basically "skin tight." This was something we'd never seen before in "modern day" Trek (although readouts in the latter five TOS films showed theirs worked the same way). Has any explanation, canon or otherwise, been given for this?
The Enterprise-E underwent a bunch of physical upgrades between INS and NEM, including the addition of more torpedo launchers and phaser strips. Who's to say they didn't get a new shield system installed at the same time?
Something occurred to me after someone once bitched about how the warp core was always about to breech, when early in TNG, they established that there were safeguards in place to make sure it never got that far. What if, in the course of the battle, the ship had been damaged enough that it had jettisoned the antimatter pods already? The reason the self destruct was off-line was that there wasn't enough combustibles left to physically do the job.
Not too mention the addition of 5 extra decks and a giant chasm at the bottom. What will Starfleet engineers think of next?!
Oh, yay! I get to drag out my pictures again!
The door sign over the Reman's shoulder indicates they were actually fighting on Deck 9. Now, according to the MSD, there's a vertical turboshaft that starts on Deck 8 and runs almost to the bottom of the ship. There's your "bottomless pit."
The door sign over the Reman's shoulder indicates they were actually fighting on Deck 9. Now, according to the MSD, there's a vertical turboshaft that starts on Deck 8 and runs almost to the bottom of the ship. There's your "bottomless pit."
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