IIRC, the exterior shot was of the regular neck launcher (also implied by the length of the torpedo tube), but the background behind Scotty before he ducks into the torpedo room implies it's one of the broadside tubes (37:35 in the video).
Spoilers NCC-1701-A (alternate timeline) Capabilities Wish List
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IIRC, the exterior shot was of the regular neck launcher (also implied by the length of the torpedo tube), but the background behind Scotty before he ducks into the torpedo room implies it's one of the broadside tubes (37:35 in the video).
I thought I was remembering an exterior shot of the torpedo flying away from Enterprise a bit after the fact, but not that specifically showed it leaving the neck launcher.
It did, but not because the Enterprise had better weapons. The best case would still be to combine the superior combat capabilities, automation, and speed of the Vengeance with the exploration capabilities, scientific equipment, and crew of the Enterprise (along with some other advanced technologies from other sources like Krall's alien mining equipment). That would create the ideal ship.
Science Officer 0718 was a cybernetically enhanced person, which means he would still be a huge loss if he was killed while on an away team, and he can't be mass-produced. Krall described the drones as mining equipment, and they are at least capable of flying aircraft, and probably capable of many other menial tasks. Being non-sentient and robotic, they could be stored in locker-like areas around the ship when not in use, instead of requiring their own quarters, and they wouldn't be a big loss if destroyed (the Enterprise might even be capable of manufacturing replacements by itself).
Of course not. I just hoped that they could combine the superior weaponry and speed with the science and exploration capabilities of the original Enterprise on a new ship that still represents the ideals of the Federation. Just because the Enterprise-D had much superior combat capabilities compared to its predecessors doesn't mean that it was meant to use them all the time, and I hope the new Enterprise has the same philosophy- incorporate superior technology and capabilities, but use them wisely (which often means don't use them at all, but it's still better to have it and not need it).
Something to consider, the Federation can throw something like the Vengeance together, the Klingons and Romulans aught to be making fairly similar ships. If not in size, then at least in firepower density we could see Klingon ships smaller than the Enterprise but its equal.
Great video, and you are right, that had to have been a side tube, even though Scotty launches out a neck tube.
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Toe to toe, the Enterprise NEVER stands a chance, but they still manage to outthink their enemies and come out on top.
Do I really need to go down the list of all the times the Enterprise was COMPLETELY outmatched and still prevailed just by being a little bit smarter than the people they were fighting? Just off the top of my head:
- The Corbomite Maneuver
- The Doomsday Machine
- Who Mourns for Adonais?
- The Lights of Zetar
- Taste of Armageddon
- That Which Survives
- TMP
- Wrath of Khan
- STXI
- STID
Even Star Trek Beyond tallies with Search for Spock in that the crew still managed to turn the tables even AFTER the ship was destroyed.
If it happens ONCE, you can call it a fluke. But when it happens thirty consecutive times with only one failure, you call that SKILL.
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Exactly. The Enterprise NEVER wins by having better weapons. In fact, most of the times that Enterprise comes closest to (or actually IS) destroyed, it's when they DON'T have better weapons. Hell, two different Enterprises have been shot by Klingon birds of prey and the E-A got itself shot full of holes before they finally managed to come up with a countermeasure for its cloaking device.
And in the battle against General Chang, it wasn't rapid fire phasers, combat drones, superfast warp engines or wave motion guns that won the battle. Even adding Excelsior -- far more advanced and better armed than Enterprise -- didn't turn the tide. It took two very smart people with a bag of electronics and SINGLE photon torpedo to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
The Enterprise is the ideal ship. That's why it has the crew it has, and why it's the first to go on a five year mission.
No, he was a construct slapped together by Spock to contain the emergent personality of the Enterprise's computer core. He's technically non-sentient (Spock is no Noonien Singh) but his backstory specifies that he was built using off-the-shelf parts.
The superior weaponry isn't all that useful in the long run. Most of the things the Enterprise encounters in space aren't affected by those weapon systems anyway, so the most important things the ship can have are scientific equipment that gives them room to think on their feet and adapt. You're thinking "they need to carry combat knives" when what they really need are Swisss Army knives.
Actually, I call that dramatic writing. I'm not sure if you're aware, but this is fiction/entertainment, not a documentary. The heroes tend to win in the end, against all insurmountable odds. Otherwise, it's no fun.
Again: how was luckily having Scotty on board Vengeance to disable it at just the right time a skill? Kirk's defeated look and "I'm sorry..." line sure isn't a trait of a master tactician.
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You can call it Divine Intervention for all the difference it makes; the point is, it happens reliably enough that someone in universe would have to conclude it to be a pretty reliable pattern.
Would someone WITHOUT Scotty's engineering skills have been able to disable the Vengeance that thoroughly? Better question: how many people other than Scotty would have been able to sneak aboard the ship in the first place?
Luck is the combination of opportunity and skill. Whenever Enterprise' crew EVER has an opportunity, they're able to take it, but they've got the skills. "Dramatic writing" or not, it's the reason they always win.
Neither is sitting angrily in your chair while your ship gets boarded and TAKEN OVER by three guys with hand phasers, but that's essentially who you have them up against in this thread.
You don't get an exterior shot of the launch (the camera follows Scotty's torpedo out the tube), but it's definitely a broadside launcher, we it's next door to engineering.
Ultimately any ship's most powerful weapon is going to be it's people, and the tactics that they employ.
This is why the Vengeance was defeated in battle.
If Scott goes with the Enterprise, it would've been lights out. The Vengeance was defeated due to blind luck.
No. But it's the Federation the JJVerse deserves...
The actor playing Science Officer 0718 would disagree with you.
I'm not arguing that they get rid of their scientific and exploration equipment, just add the rest of the Vengeance's capabilities to the ship alongside them. It's like adding the combat knife to their tool chest alongside their Swiss Army knives, and having both so that they can use whichever they need to use. I would also prefer to have a backup plan of some sort in case most situations involving the Klingons and/or Romulans don't get resolved the usual way. Note that most of the plans and strategies used by the Enterprise's crew (in any universe) are very complex and subtle, and thus extremely risky (in STID it even cost Captain Kirk his life). What if the Klingons faced a sudden internal crisis during the events of TNG's The Defector, and couldn't spare any extra cloaked warships to guard the Enterprise in the case of an ambush? If the Enterprise could fight (or in this case, intimidate) her way out of situations like that without relying on allies, then she could be more independent in her exploration.
Better armament is most definitely not the only feature of the Enterprise, and it should never be the primary way of dealing with problems, if anything it should be the last resort. But there are rare cases where the last resort is all that's left, or it's the option that causes the fewest casualties for the crew. If the ship can be better prepared for those rare cases without sacrificing any of her other capabilities (which I am assuming the Federation can do), why shouldn't she be?
The writers who actually developed his character and expanded on his backround in the IDW comic series wouldn't.
Orci and Cruzman slipped that into the comic series to explain that particular background character's.... er... background. That they didn't bother to explain this to the ACTOR is inconsequential, considering he had all of 4 lines in the entire film.
They're not needed. Again, the most dangerous and most useful thing on the Enterprise is and has always been the science officer. If you want to make Enterprise more effective in a fight, you don't give it better weapons, you give it a better laboratory.
Exactly. That's what the science officer is for!
Then the Enterprise would do what Kirk wound up doing in that exact situation a hundred years earlier: outsmart and outmaneuver them.
Starfleet has never relied on having better weapons than its opponents and it would be silly to expect them to start now.
It's not even A feature of the Enterprise. The ship is deliberately under-armed for a vessel that size; most of its bulk and energy are required for the inclusion of scientific equipment and sensors. Exclude all of that, and you'd have a ship roughly the size -- if not smaller -- than a Klingon D-7. Or you'd have (basically) the Defiant.
But the weapon systems just aren't that important for the completion of its mission, and even for its tactical missions they are far from decisive. Simply put: Enterprise just isn't a warship and never really was. It's a research vessel with a slightly-better-than-token armament. That's the main reason they lose so many fights: it's not the kind of ship that's SUPPOSED to be getting into fights in the first place, it's supposed to be stopping fights from happening altogether.
Let's assess a few performances in an imminent battle against a superior firepower:
ST'09: Enterprise saved from destruction by Narada only because Nero recognizes ship and wants to reach Spock.
STiD: Scotty saves Enterprise. Spock decides to beam bombs on board (where's the scientific ingenuity?). Otherwise, Enterprise is space dust, and Federation at war with Klingons.
STB: Swarm decisively destroys Enterprise, Spock is critically injured, saved by McCoy.
In this case, the Enterprise was indeed saved by the science officer in ST09, but not because he outsmarted the opposing weaponry.
This assumes that fight would have ended in sure defeat for the Enterprise, which is far from a foregone conclusion; Enterprise is more advanced than the Kelvin or any of the other ships that got sucker punched coming out of warp. Apart from this, Narada also has its drill deployed, which limits its maneuvering options in a fight. If Enterprise was at least as effective as the Kelvin in combat, the battle would have ended with a dead Enterprise and an equally dead or crippled Narada.
But it wasn't Nero's gloating that lead to his downfall in the end. It was the combination of Scotty's skill at the transporter console (despite his relatively poor aim) and Kirk and Spock managing to fight their way through Nero's crew to hijack the jellyfish that won the day. Enterprise's weapons turned out to be way less useful than Kirk and Spock's creativity.
In realizing that Spock Prime might be able to confirm his suspicions about Khan, and in realizing that Khan's single-mindnedness is an exploitable weakness; also, in figuring out that the torpedoes are set to detonate if tampered with and that particular feature can ALSO be used to his advantage.
Who then regroups with Spock and Scotty and the rest of the crew, who proceed to salvage a 100 year old derelict starship and subsequently use their experience with the swarm's movement and tactics to DESTROY THE ENTIRE FORMATION.
STB is actually the ultimate proof of this concept: even with the Enterprise completely blown to smithereens, even armed with token weapons a century obsolete, they STILL managed to outsmart and defeat their enemy.
Nope. He outsmarted the opposing COMMANDERS.
Which is Starfleet's entire MO. Where the Klingons and the Romulans have to depend on overwhelming force to give themselves an advantage, Starfleet manages to topple militarily superior opponents left and right by applying just the right amount of force at their weakest point. It's the MAIN reason why they're as successful as they are: they don't have to WIN a fight, they just have to make it impossible for their enemy to fight at all. Picard probably couldn't take Duras in a bat'leth match, but he can dodge his attacks long enough to create an opening, take a quick jab and dislocate Duras' elbow, turning what should be a sword duel into a farce.
Inspiration: Fuel scoops
We kind of already have this with the bussard collectors, but it suddenly occurs to me that this is a type of device that doesn't get used anywhere near as often as it could mainly because it's kind of silly and hard to see being used. But a very useful secondary effect might be the capacity to flood local space around the ship with a thick diffusion of matter -- ice crystals or some such -- like an artificial comet's tail to confuse and scatter hostile sensors or shields. Nice navy analog to when ships used to lay down smokescreens to avoid pursuit or modern warships that deploy chaff to avoid guided missiles. Maybe making better and more frequent use of a "coolant flush" would create a nice billowy (and totally scientifically bullshit) cloud that keeps enemies, probes and omnipotent demigods from locking on to them as quickly?
We kind of already have this with the bussard collectors, but it suddenly occurs to me that this is a type of device that doesn't get used anywhere near as often as it could mainly because it's kind of silly and hard to see being used. But a very useful secondary effect might be the capacity to flood local space around the ship with a thick diffusion of matter -- ice crystals or some such -- like an artificial comet's tail to confuse and scatter hostile sensors or shields. Nice navy analog to when ships used to lay down smokescreens to avoid pursuit or modern warships that deploy chaff to avoid guided missiles. Maybe making better and more frequent use of a "coolant flush" would create a nice billowy (and totally scientifically bullshit) cloud that keeps enemies, probes and omnipotent demigods from locking on to them as quickly?
No, the Enterprise wasn't destroyed because Spock was on board, and Nero wanted to torture him by having him watch the destruction of Vulcan. He could have been Chief Custodian, and it wouldn't have mattered. Nero would have spared the ship. Nothing about outsmarting here.
You can type as long-winded a response as you like, but the basic fact remains: you're wrong.
Again, you're assuming Enterprise WOULD have been destroyed if the fight had dragged on. You don't know that, and neither does Nero. PIKE thought so, but he probably would have been wrong.
OTOH, the Battle of Vulcan is a case of Nero outsmarting Starfleet; 8 starships against the Narada wouldn't have been so one-sided if they'd known what they were warping into, nor would Pike have deliberately taken the "come aboard for negotiations" bait if he'd known that Nero was basically stalling for time.
Nero didn't have much a choice. In retrospect, a prolonged fight with a starfleet vessel was about the only thing that could have screwed up his plans at that point. The failure is on Starfleet for not realizing this soon enough.
Good idea, in fact combined with a mining system reverse-engineered from Krall's alien equipment and the Narada, it might even be possible to resupply all of the ship's fuel and consumables en route, giving it truly unlimited exploration range.
I would also like to add the possibility of a Skycrane-like shuttle, which could carry a number of pods. These pods could include passenger bays (eliminating the need for other types of shuttles), science labs, vehicles, space mines, reconnaissance equipment, etc.
Finally, if the Enterprise is going to rely on its science to get out of situations, then it will need better facilities to produce useful equipment from that science. It should ideally have a full Industrial Replicator on board, and if replicators haven't been invented yet, then it would need the most advanced machine shop that has ever been placed on a ship. It might also be useful to have repair/multifunction drones (kind of like the Sentinels from Halo), which could fly around the outside of the ship, repairing or upgrading the outer hull as needed. If enough drones are present the ship could have a "healing" ability not too different from that of Borg ships.
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