So did troi ever face court martial for crashing the enterprise

[Iamnotspock]

If I remember correctly, when Geordi was kidnapped from the observatory, Soran was seen fiddling with Geordi's VISOR at the moment they were beamed away.

Seriously, Geordi is slumped unconscious against a bulkhead while Soran is doing something to his VISOR, Riker and Worf arrive and a fight ensues and Riker clearly sees Soran and Geordi get beamed away and Soran has the VISOR in his hand. Why the hell didn't they inspect the VISOR when Geordi arrived back on the ship? If no one else, surely Data would've thought to do such a thing, especially bearing in mind the events of The Mind's Eye.

Also, why didn't Riker simply order Geordi to eject the Warp Core? Why didn't Picard emerge from the Nexus at an earlier point than just before Soran is about to destroy the star? Surely he could be Court Martialled for that when he makes his report to Starfleet, considering that returning to reality when Soran first comes aboard and taking him into custody could've prevented the destruction of the ship.

Actually, while I think of it, Data probably contributed to the ship's demise with his "Tiny Little Lifeforms" number. While his playing the Ops console like a piano got a good laugh, clearly some wrong button was pressed to ensure that the ship's engine efficiency wasn't what it should've been.

 

[Plecostomus]

Warp-core ejection is not the end-all-be-be-all safety feature you'd think it would be.

You have a damaged overheating container of matter and antimatter that's slowly losing it's ability to contain said reaction. LETS DISCONNECT EVERYTHING AND ACCELERATE IT TO HIGH SPEED.

It could be the damage was of a type that precluded ejection.

We have two cooling systems here, one being the system that pulls the heat away from the reaction zone and disposes of it, and one that cools the "containment field generators". Given the pattern of sparks and secondary explosions I'm guessing the "field generator" system failed and the generators began to overheat and loose strength. There wasn't enough "reserve capacity" left in the system to handle a disconnection from the main grid and not enough time to reroute around the damage.

It would have taken over five min to prepare for ejection and dump the core and there just wasn't enough time.


Now a CORE SHUT DOWN would make more sense and I never understood why they don't just hit the SCRAM button and go on from there. A modern nuclear plant has 150,000 ways to cause a shutdown and only one way to turn it back on.

My guess: Apparently the fuel system is integrated into the cooling system. They circulate cryogenic deuterium liquid down that pipe behind the core, and circulate it around the reaction chamber and back up to the injector. It preheats the fuel and carries away some heat... Maybe this is part of the containment field system, not so much the reaction waste-heat system.

Simply killing the fuel system also kills the coolant system and after running at balls-out (steam engine term, look up "fly-ball governor" ) you don't want a hot reactor sitting there without coolant. It'd be like depriving turbocharged engine of oil by shutting it down after a high-speed run at full boost: Burned turbo.

In this situation simply shutting down the reactor wasn't an option either as there was no time to cool things down.

We can justify Laforge shutting down the core twice in other episodes by saying the reactor was in an idle-mode and could be shut down from those points, not so much after the battle. Best of Both Worlds, the cooling system failure was of a different nature something prehaps an internal process failure and not a loss of coolant, the computer knew something was broken and activated a failsafe.