What Happened to the Star Drive and what happened to what was left of the saucer?

[Rayleo02]

When Krall Split the Enterprise in 2, we saw what happened to the Saucer Section, but what happened to the Stardrive? Did the core breach? Did Starfleet recover it? Did it crash to the Planet? Did it simply drift in the unknown?

What happened to what was left of the saucer? Did Starfleet Destroy it? or was it a lost cause and simply left abandoned?

 

[PixelMagic]

Either drifted off into space or burned up in Altamid's atmosphere I would think.

 

[Kemaiku]

After the saucer flipped, most of it's structure is just scrap metal now, that was catastophic damage.

The nacelles and stardrive were still primed, and largely ripped open. The saucer sped up and entered the atmosphere the way it was designed to and the open sections still ended up worse. The rest just falling would have meant them exploding or breaking up substantially.

Even if they could be bothered going back through the nebula, there's nothing really to salvage.

 

[ominous_thunk]

I'd imagine that the stardrive, at least, was still there after the events of the movie. It probably drifted off into space after that impulse burn and subsequent decapitation. The nacelles might hang in there too, but it's tough to say.

I think that Starfleet would definitely send a team to retrieve the Enterprise's remains. Even if she's beyond repair, I don't see them leaving one of their most advanced starships out there for scavengers to find and reverse-engineer.

Such a mission could also be used to rescue any other survivors from Krall's mayhem. Altamid is also probably an archaeologist's dream, so it could even warrant extended study.

 

[Fandango831]

From Altamids size and the fact that the stardive and nacelles have no power they probably got pulled in by the gravity well and burned up sometime after the fact considering orbital decay and a lack of a being able to maintain station keeping from the planet. From the Big-Es vicinity to the planet that would be my guess. It's also possible that the Krall could have scrapped the remains of the ship for resources during the time the crew was captured and the parties were split up. Either way there would be no reason for Starfleet to recover/destroy anything of the ship since nothing would be worth repairing/covering up/salvaging, and I'm sure Starfleet is not hurting for construction materials considering they built Yorktown and are already in the process of building a brand new ship plus god only knows what else out there in the universe.

 

[David cgc]

I imagine they would still want to remove the remaining debris for environmental/security/Prime Directive reasons. Starfleet doesn't seem like the kind of organization that would just leave their trash floating around strange planets until it causes trouble. And the Enterprise-A was slated to explore the area beyond the nebula, anyway.

 

[pst]

it was deliberately left vague by the filmmakers because the star drive is integral to the plot of star trek 4.

 

[Timo]

A couple of odd points:

- With a whole planet to choose from, the saucer ends up basically on top of Krall's base. Why? Did Krall's boarding crew fly her there? Did Krall have a device for remotely controlling suitably battered spacecraft into his lair? Did the saucer automation have some sort of a "home in on already launched escape pods" setting that it slavishly followed after Krall's minions had dragged those pods to his base? Had the fake castaway suggested that her wreck was at those coordinates, and the saucer nav console had that punched in as some sort of a default?

- The "nebula" seems to be an extremely thin layer of extremely dense rubble between Yorktown and Altamid, and surrounding the latter world from every side. Otherwise nothing would make much sense... We see the rubble right next to both Yorktown and the planet; Kirk's ship traverses the distance at basically walking pace and still reaches Altamid in less than a hundred thousand years. Going around the "nebula" ought to be trivial and take about fifteen seconds at warp, unless there's more than distance at play, and it should suffice that the rubble surrounds the planet. But how much rubble are we talking about? Do Altamid and Yorktown orbit the same star?

- We do see traces of the rubble during the action on Altamid orbit. It could have shredded the damaged stardrive easily enough - after all, it should be extremely close in order to be visible, and the stardrive was in the process of trying to reach the rubble. I wonder why it didn't shred the Franklin or even show up much when she escaped the planet.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kemaiku]

I think Yorktown and Altamid are in the same system and around the same star.

The nebula seems to exist in a bubble like arrangment around the planet, held together by a large amount of sustained and heavy electromagnetic effect. I think the race that created the drone army simply left the system and maybe even the galaxy, using the last of their abilities to create the nebula deliberately so that (hopefully) no one could physically survive to reach the planet inside.

Only the Franklin bypassed that protection by her wormhole error in her warpdrive, ending up despaceing inside the perimeter. Krall stranding several shiploads of people there is terrible, but risking the safety of the Enterprise-A to re-enter the region? probably not.

That savanger society is unlikely to band together, or have enough left of the races technology to do anything with either that or the Enterprise remains. And should then even cobble together a ship, it might not survive the nebula, and they'd arrive at Yorktown that is maybe a century or more advanced than it is now and able to fend them off.

The saucer is the only thing that made planetfall, and that got smashed thoroughly, the computer core will have been incinerated wiping nearly all it's contents. The warpdrive is just gone, as are the torpedo magazines and the phasers.

 

[Timo]

Only the Franklin bypassed that protection by her wormhole error in her warpdrive, ending up despaceing inside the perimeter.

But Jaylah's ship got there somehow, too. And countless others, supposedly. Starfleet had not dared try until they got the tech, but possibly others were more advanced or more daring? I doubt wormholes took all of them there unless the place is a wormhole magnet.

(And we can pretend it's not if we decide that only Franklin ever ended up there via wormhole, and that the universe provided millions of years in which a wormhole incident could deliver a ship there, and trillions of ships to which this could happen. It would not be that big a coincidence in the Trek version of reality, then. But it happening to more than one ship would flip the scales and dictate the "magnet" scenario.)

I guess the big question here is, did the Franklin wormhole herself directly to that mountaintop, or did she initially just pop into existence inside the rubble sphere and for whatever reason then land on the mountain?

The former scenario certainly calls for far more precision from the wormhole than the latter. While we can postulate e.g. that the wormhole automatically collapses at the vicinity of solid bedrock, this doesn't explain why the ship is undamaged and perfectly level. OTOH, controlled landing doesn't explain why Edison didn't take off again, or why there's a heap of not-so-loose dirt covering the ship.

Krall stranding several shiploads of people there is terrible, but risking the safety of the Enterprise-A to re-enter the region? probably not.

I dunno. The Franklin, decisively lacking in modern navigation gear, got through the rubble just fine. So did millions of spacecraft under Krall's command. And the original interpretation that the place was a traffic hazard may have hinged on the loss of the Magellan probes - but we can now deduce they were not lost to traffic hazards but to Krall.

The Feds do place quite a bit of faith on their probes, even though crewed starships seem to survive challenges robots do not. Failure to have probes return was quoted as the reason why the Great Barrier was supposed to be an obstacle, wasn't it?

That savanger society is unlikely to band together, or have enough left of the races technology to do anything with either that or the Enterprise remains. And should then even cobble together a ship, it might not survive the nebula, and they'd arrive at Yorktown that is maybe a century or more advanced than it is now and able to fend them off.

OTOH, how many of Krall's victims are "savagers"? Nice folks like Jaylah's might form the majority of the population, and they'd have put significant distance between themselves and the immediate vicinity of Krall's base that is the location of all the surface action in the movie.

Plus, savagery might be the result of the planet being inescapable. But inescapability was primarily the result of Krall's evil siege, and with news of Krall's departure spreading, soon the planet would be a cornucopia rather than an oubliette - anybody could command the remaining drones to build escape ships or latinum palaces instead of war machines. Or, at the very least, to lend a ride to the other side of the rubble field in one of the droneships.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kemaiku]

But Jaylah's ship got there somehow, too. And countless others, supposedly. Starfleet had not dared try until they got the tech, but possibly others were more advanced or more daring? I doubt wormholes took all of them there unless the place is a wormhole magnet.

I guess the big question here is, did the Franklin wormhole herself directly to that mountaintop, or did she initially just pop into existence inside the rubble sphere and for whatever reason then land on the mountain?

The weird effect the race left behind to create the nebula barrier could have had the unforeseen problem of being a subspace or wormhole attractor, it's not like they would have seen that coming. I get the idea the Franklin appeared there first but other smaller ships could have crashed and just not had the anger issues within the crew that drove Edison.

The Franklin probably skidded to a stop at that mountain top and crashed farther back. The stuff covering her nacelles is loose gravel that's been sliding down the mountain sides, since when she starts up, it all sifts off gradually like a powdered material. Loose debris, maybe attracted to her nacelles latent charge/field as the coils before they depolarised entirely?

I dunno. The Franklin, decisively lacking in modern navigation gear, got through the rubble just fine. So did millions of spacecraft under Krall's command. And the original interpretation that the place was a traffic hazard may have hinged on the loss of the Magellan probes - but we can now deduce they were not lost to traffic hazards but to Krall.

That's an oversight of the movie I think they want us to ignore. They had to have the drama of the Enterprise being the only ship to make it through to ambush her. But it means them not having her to get back out again, and they skip the Franklin doing it. Maybe she's just small enough and with Sulu already having flown them through within 48 hours (shorter than anyone else making two trips through?) he managed it due to that.

OTOH, how many of Krall's victims are "savagers"? Nice folks like Jaylah's might form the majority of the population, and they'd have put significant distance between themselves and the immediate vicinity of Krall's base that is the location of all the surface action in the movie.

Krall would have made sure to have enough grunts to pilot all quarter of a million drones so he had at least that many loyal troops. The rest scattered and would have formed the small groupings we saw on Spock's scanner as they arrived. Those were at random points all over the surface, I don't think they had enough coordination to do anything more substantial.

 

[Ithekro]

I would think that most of the ships lost in there would have come from the other side...away from Federation space.

 

[Timo]

But that's not a valid interpretation of the geometry of the situation. The rubble field must be extremely thin, or else it would take geological ages for the heroes to traverse it at the demonstrated speeds. And a thin plate, perhaps a few lightseconds thick at the very most, but extending at least hundreds of lightyears in every other direction...? Doesn't work.

Having Altamid surrounded by a very closely situated sphere of rubble is in keeping with what we see.

What happened to the Franklin is a mixture of known facts and speculation. The one thing clearly different from what happened to the Enterprise is that the mining drones did not attack the former, smaller ship - she's undamaged, after all. This may mean the drones would only attack while under Krall's later command. Or then it means something else.

We know the ship gets to the planet (but we don't know whether it's orbit or surface yet), fails to leave (but we don't know why), and her crew discovers the secret of the drones but then gradually dies so that ultimately there are only three left. At some point, those three and the ship end up down on the planet and in charge of things. And at some point, they discover that futuro-cannibalism is the way to survive. But the timeline is unclear on the exact order of those things.

Krall would have made sure to have enough grunts to pilot all quarter of a million drones so he had at least that many loyal troops.

But we have zero evidence that these troops would come from the crashed ships. They're more likely to be 100% those mining drones left behind by the Ancients.

Whatever the crash victims were, "scattered" is debatable. The Enterprise saucer landed within walking distance of Krall's base, for reasons unknown. So did the Franklin. We can't rule out these "reasons unknown" applying to each and every crash, then.

Timo Saloniemi