Enterprise D's terrifyingly volatile warp core stability?

[MacLeod]

Aside from Contagion -- one of my favorite episodes -- when they were combating an unbeknownst-at-the-time computer virus -- when else did the crew wonder about design problems with the ship? I never got the impression anybody felt like they were flying around in a lemon; rather the reverse, actually... Much of the time I felt they were all too often awed at the the magnificence of the new ship (particularly the holodecks).

I seem to recall a ship from history that was considered magnficent a technologcal marvel of it's of age, had people in awe of it. Unfortunantly it sunk in 1912.

Nothing wrong with being awed by something just have to have some secptisim that not everything may be as great as it seems.

But perhps later builds of the Galaxy Class ship had features built into through lessons learned from the earlier ships of the class.

 

[Takeru]

How is that lever protected?

By being in engineering, a section that should be off limits to unauthorized personnel anyway.
It also shouldn't be a lever that you just pull, the lever could be behind a hatch and opening that hatch triggers and accoustic and visual alert and the user then has to attach the lever to the mechanism or something to delay them. Not something super complicated just enough to delay crewman crazypants from randomly ejecting the core without someone else being able to interfere.

Can just anybody yank it?

Sure, that's the point. In modern factories everyone can shut down the entire production line anytime by pressing a big red button that sits right there for everyone to reach.
I mean, if everyone in engineering is dead and the computer says "warp core breach in 2 minutes!" you want any random person to be able to yank it, they should probably point an arrow at it.

Next thing you'll tell me you want is a manual level to jettison the warp nacelles. Or to blow the saucer from the stardrive section.

That wouldn't be a bad idea actually.

 

[tharpdevenport]

By being in engineering, a section that should be off limits to unauthorized personnel anyway.

Not only has that never stopped people from entering Engineering before, but I not only recall multiple ways into Engineering (not counting Jeffries tubes) and none of them are sealed off.

And we also have bad guys that routinely ignore it and go to Engineering anyway, from the Borg to even terrorists.

Sure, that's the point. In modern factories everyone can shut down the entire production line anytime by pressing a big red button that sits right there for everyone to reach.

That's a factory setting. This is a starship that's frequently in some kind of major peril or battle where pulling that level could mean the differences between life and death of over two-thousand souls. Pull a level or press a red button at a factory and the belt stops, well, maybe we won't get peanut butter M&M's this week at Wal-Mart.

That wouldn't be a bad idea actually.

Bad fan! Go to your room!

 

[M.A.C.O.]

Thing is, there are several steps to a warp core breach.

1. Coolant Leak

2. Magnetic Interlocks that separate the matter and anti-matter interlocks fail. See magnetic confinement fusion reactors (that suspends super heated plasma) for a real world example.

3. Matter and Anti-Matter combine at an uncontrollable rate in the intermix chamber.

4. Explosion


There has to be a way to manually save the ship, in the event computers fail or their is a power outage. Geordi and B'Elanna were able to eject and or shutdown their respective cores of their ships when the need arose. However, for the sake of drama and TPTB (mostly Braga wanting a saucer section crash scene), this method was unavailable when the ENT-D suffered a breach.

Reset or recycle the magnetic interlocks.

Initiate a force field around the matter and anti-matter or the intermix chambers.

Eject or teleport the anti-matter chamber off the ship.

Manually eject the whole core. Set up priority passwords or authorizations, like the original ENT had (TSFS) and the ENT-D (Brothers) had). Safeguards to make sure no unauthorized saboteurs or crazies of the week can disable the ship.

 

[Ithekro]

It should be noted that the system failures that lead to the Enterprise-D's destruction in Yesterday's Enterprise and Generations was the exact same failure. It might be something to do with Klingon weaponry as the failure not only caused a coolant leak but also caused the system to not be ejected or be able to be shut down within the two minutes or so until the warp core breach. This might be a design flaw, or it could be a design feature of one of the Klingon disruptor or torpedo designs specifically to take out Federation starships.

 

[DonIago]

Or it could just be a defect in the E-D design. Unfortunately there wasn't a way for the crew of the Y/E E-D to communicate their findings back to the Primeline. :P

 

[publiusr]

With the registry number of the USS Nebula being lower than the USS Galaxy, I often wonder if the Galaxy had flaws even in the design stages.

Flaws like the neck area being structurally unsound, and I think the warp core is in that "neck" of the woods as well.

The Galaxy class is the SLS of its era. It does a lot--but costs alot--and got snakebit. Tornadoes at MAF--breaches with the Dash-D

 

[ellindsey]

Leah Brahms wants to have a word with you.

I think that Leah Brahms is a big part of the problem. She's a theoretical physicist, not an engineer. She is probably very good at figuring out the physics of how to react antimatter in a warp core and use the energy released to somehow propel a massive starship at many times the speed of light, but it doesn't appear that she has much experience with the proper design of safety-critical systems. From a physics point of view, the galaxy-class starship is amazing, but from the point of view of an industrial engineer, looking at it in terms of safety and reliability, it's a horribly-designed deathtrap. Yeah, I know, that's mostly due to bad writing and the need for dramatic tension, but just going from what's shown on the show here.

 

[tharpdevenport]

Still probably safer than flying. Your typical Galaxy-class starship that isn't named "Enterprise", probably goes a year where the biggest problem the red and green blinkers go out and need replacing.

Except, you know, when a war comes up. Speaking of writing.....

 

[Qonundrum]

Bingo.

In-universe, whoever Starfleet hires to design starships in the Kelvin Timeline are the guys to go to. The USS Vengeance crashed into San Francisco and her core didn't breach.

Yeah, but the ship didn't have sensors to fire thrusters to prevent crashlanding onto a planet's surface just like how no other ship ever made anywhere has... Or the isolated system's sensors failed.

 

[DonIago]

^Oh Khan disabled them, which is most likely assuming they weren't already disabled due to the damage the ship had already taken.

 

[Tenacity]

A Klingon Bird-of-Prey gets the shield frequency and fires through the shields, rendering them useless (why they couldn't modulate shield frequency, who knows), causing sever damage.

I've read other posting concerning this (modulating frequencies).

Given that the BOP would know the new frequency after LaForge simply turned his head in engineering (past the general direction of the display), changing the frequencies would have been of only momentary benefit.

Worf could have been changing the frequencies repeatedly as a matter of standard procedures, it simply wouldn't have done any good.

 

[DonIago]

Well, if they were changing frequencies with enough frequency...

 

[Ithekro]

Maybe the Son of Mogh is too predictable to other Klingons.

 

[tharpdevenport]

I've read other posting concerning this (modulating frequencies).

Given that the BOP would know the new frequency after LaForge simply turned his head in engineering (past the general direction of the display), changing the frequencies would have been of only momentary benefit.

Worf could have been changing the frequencies repeatedly as a matter of standard procedures, it simply wouldn't have done any good.

I have to disagree with that, though. I can't think of a single instance during a battle where LaForge is looking at that giant display. He's always somewhere around the warp core control panels of the billiard table station. Plus, I have to assume Klingon technology is inferior as Kli-boobs ordered the numbers and the numbers were put in manually, so with constant frequency changes, that would have to not only be a continuous video feed of where the shield frequency modulation number is but also some fast and furious typing.