I thought the script made it abundantly clear they thought the Enterprise was the perfect ship for fighting the Borg, but Picard was too much of a liability to be anywhere near that cube.
Well, obviously not, since Starfleet stopped the
ship from attending. Had it been just Picard, Starlfeet would have stopped
Picard.
Riker could have thrown Picard in the brig in chains and stunned him to be sure. Or vaporized him to be doubly sure. Or if (and when!) Starfleet didn't trust Riker, either, the entire bunch of traitorous officers could have been kicked out of polluting the bridge of a prime Borg-fighting asset, and a team from some other starship could have taken over. But no, Starfleet was perfectly happy to let the E-E keep counting comets.
Note that the ship wasn't banished to the comet-counting assignment because of the Borg, because there were no Borg, not until the movie started. She had been doing stuff like that for a full year, because Starfleet strongly disagreed with LaForge on the "We are ready!" issue. The distrust relating to the Borg might be a relevant explanation for the final 2% of the team's humiliating banishment; the other 98% must be due to the ship being a dud. Or, you know, the team would simply have been given a garbage scow, and the non-dud ship would have gotten a trusted crew.
Have you read John Eaves article responding to the constant changes to the E-E? He compares this process with one of the major USN aircraft carrier.
It's pretty exceptional for Starfleet, no matter what the root cause.
It's not all that exceptional for an
Enterprise, though. NCC-1701 kept on changing, often radically so, basically once per decade. The E-C also looked rather different from ships supposed to be her sister designs, although we can't tell if she herself underwent any changes. But the E-E still takes the cake here, with changes between all three movies and well within a single decade.
My interpretation of the bitching at the start of Insurrection to be because "our heroes," and presumably Enterprise herself, *had* been involved in the war effort, just not a part of it we ever saw.
Strongly agreed with that. They had had their fill of fighting. Now the war was over and won, and there might be a chance to do some exploring again. But no, Starfleet sends them to draft new allies and put out bush fires.
Did they fight aboard the E-E? Or aboard ships that actually worked? We don't know. But Starfleet probably wanted to get its act together as regarded the
Sovereign class. It's just that they didn't manage to field a single working
Sovereign in any of the battles we actually saw. Were those serving in some elite Fleet off camera, perhaps?
So the E-D crashing in Generations was a direct result of someone seeing - or at least hearing of - that section of the Tech Manual?!
More or less. The original
Enterprise was also going to separate, in various versions of the first movie, simply because this was something "built into the ship" (read: mentioned in tech backstage musings) and the movie budget would finally allow this to be shown. These things are in the assorted tech manuals in the first place solely because they are cool, and the whole point of making Star Trek is to show cool things; the connection is pretty much hardwired.
Timo Saloniemi
