It's irritates me when people say the Enterprise D was taken out buy a 70 yr old Bird Of Prey

That's an interesting theory about the shields. I don't think I've ever really thought about it or heard anything like this before. You would think that there would have been some sort of dialogue explaining this better, although I suppose it could always have ended up on the cutting room floor.

While Generations is not a really great movie by any means, it always holds a special place in my heart just because of how I was finally able to see TNG and the E-D on the big screen. I've always wished that the battle would have been don differently. Even though it may have been an oversight of the crew to not thoroughly check Geordi's VISOR since he would have surely told them that Soren was examining it for quite a while, I still think it was an interesting idea to have them hijack the VISOR. I just wish that the Bird of Prey's attack wasn't the final reason the E-D was destroyed, even if it was done in an underhanded way.

 

Or they simply looked in the wrong place. In the novelisation Soren tortures La Forge with nanites around the heart and iirc the scenes were film but ultimately cut.

All that's left of the scene is Soren's line that "his heart wasn't in it".

Crusher makes a comment about removing the nanites but I can't remember if that was in the film or just the book.

 

in fact this was the very first scene filmed, with Burton wearing the new uniform that was then scrapped and eventually made its way back into canon with Lower Decks.
Part of that scene can be seen here.


Crusher does mention the nanites even in the final cut.

 

So take it further, if Geordi say he was interrogated about trilithium and what Guinan might have said about Soran, why would they think to check his visor for tampering?

 

Because Geordi knows Soran took an interest in it and it's been tampered with before.

 

I get the dramatic reasons behind the writing, but it’s still lazy. The first thing the crew should have thought of was rotating shield modulation/frequency. I also think that even with no shields the D should have been able to at least disable the BoP’s weapons. Full phasers + multiple full torpedo spreads and I’m pretty sure the BoP is toast anyways.

 

The "David vs Goliath trope"(tm) used by the villains MOOHAHAHAHA!! was as interesting as it was novel as it's always the good guys who end up magically winning, but with "modulating shield frequency" being an obvious solution for all involved... and yet the highest ranking super-dee-duper senior officer couldn't figure it out to even try activating the modulation subroutine that he also developed firsthand? Oops! (The routine appears to need to be manually activated*, but nobody's going to tell the Sr what to go engage, especially when the Sr developed the very thing to begin with... )

* let's just pawn it off as the need to change frequencies causes more energy to be used... then again they're looking at a heavily outdated BoP rather than being the weaker ship when placed next to a cube, sphere, pyramid, dodecahedron, tesseract, or any other Borg ship flitting on by.

Nitpickiness aside, the "matching shield frequency" to breach it is a cool idea. But ceased being a good one thanks to TBOBW.

 

The thing is, there's no reason the modulation ought to work.

What it does is two things, after all: change the shield frequency, and display the new shield frequency on LaForge's console. Which makes the new frequency just as useless as the old one!

Now, making the shield frequency rotate all the time sounds about as useful as changing your flak jacket during combat all the time. It may be the only way to stop the Borg beams in Trek but, intuitively speaking, against any other type of opponent it just weakens your defenses. In two ways, too: there are outright gaps between the flak jackets, allowing even a guy with a Derringer to kill you if he times his shot right, but turning a specific frequency on and off involves ramping up and down and thus makes each distinct flak jacket thinner on the average.

The writing really has all the bases covered there. It just doesn't go into technobabble detail, which is a big plus.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I don't know that we have any canonical reason to believe that the computer couldn't be modulating the shield frequency once per second if not more often without any detrimental effects. Yes, it's apparently not SOP, but that doesn't mean there's a good reason not to do it.

There's no reason the modulation ought not to work. Geordi has better things to do than look at the shield frequency constantly, especially if the computer's randomly modulating it.

In fact, do we have any good reason to believe that after BOBW modulating shield frequencies regularly wasn't the default, up until GEN?

 

Except it sort of does. If there's no penalty, there's no reason not to do it, either. So we very much should infer a penalty.

The readout on the frequency is quite prominent on LaForge's display, for obvious dramatical reasons. LaForge's main duty would be to worry about the frequency, and about why the trick doesn't seem to be working. I can't really see him looking away from that display for any great length of time.

The very fact that it isn't done in GEN? After all, there's no particular reason why this engagement should different from all the others in that respect.

Shields not taking rotation kindly is pretty much the default position, by virtue of, well, being the default position as far as evidence goes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Because.....plot
Plot trumps logic and reason in all cases. If we dissected this kind of gaff in every Star Trek episode/movie we'd never get the episode/movie.
Why was Troi conveniently not on the bridge when her empathic ability would have been most useful? Because it would have caused the episode to come to a screeching halt.
Why was Wesley conveniently not on the bridge when Nagilum shows up? Because they weren't going to kill off a main cast member when a red shirt would do.
Hell, if Tuvok had actually been a competent security chief half of the threats to Voyager never would have happened.
Lots of examples of this throughout star trek and television in general.

When logic and what makes sense interferes with the plot or story, plot/story wins every time.

 

it'a possible the visor was examined, but Soran's modification was undetectable by Starfleet technology.

Maybe Sorans additions were never found.

 

Under the circumstances, why would shifting the shield frequency not be the first thing LaForge tried? And if shifting it once didn't work, why not shift it multiple times? When the ship's having pieces blown off it, an energy reduction seems like a small price to pay. And besides, when the idea was first brought up in BOBW nobody expressed any concerns about energy loss, so we have no reason to infer that there is a penalty, just that for some reason they decided not to make it standard practice. Or they did make it standard practice and what's shown in GEN is exceptional (more on that below).

I would also think LaForge's main duty would be to worry about the aforementioned pieces being blown off the ship. Let the computer worry about the shield frequencies while he's rerouting power and keeping the warp core from blowing up.

Anyway, as I consider the shield frequency issue to be a weakness in the film itself, the fact that the E-D apparently isn't rotating frequencies isn't something I would assume to be typical practice so much as writer fiat.

 

I’m sure this question has been asked a lot.

 

Absolutely. The D could have and should have taken out that Bird Of Prey within the first few minutes of that battle. I would loved to have seen the D get a retrofit.

 

I blame Doctor Crusher. No matter what they did to the VISOR, Geordi was just tortured and in such bad shape that he collapses on the transporter room floor when beamed over and yet he's cleared for duty and back in engineering in a matter of a few hours? Really?? In that time, he should have been in sick bay, Counselor Troi's office, or his quarters instead of back at the job to give away the shield frequency.

I get that they're in a battle/crisis situation, but this is all part of Star Trek's hero syndrome. Generally speaking, nobody except the hero character can accomplish anything in their field of expertise. There's got to be somebody competent who could be acting engineering chief while he's recuperating.

 

Barclay!
Doesn’t he ends up in charge in the litverse? (He surely is in Elite Force II)

 

I'm pretty sure Geordi is still chief engineer in the novelverse.

Heck, they weren't even in a battle/crisis situation until the VISOR gave away the shield frequency. If Crusher had kept Geordi in sickbay then the Duras sisters never would have attacked to begin with.

 

imagine the frustration: “we’ve been watching the punt human take baths and enjoy himself in the holodeck between a therapy session and a physical for five days, he never goes to engineering”...Klingons discover paid sick leave!

 

In all likelihood Picard would have found Kirk, defeated Soran,and before or after burying Kirk called for beam-up. The E-D would have warped away and that would have been the end of it.