I was wondering what the actual total was. I just remember the D going up several times with all the various realities and timelines the show dealt with. I've come of think of Galaxy class ships of being a bit breakable.
Poll Which Engineer Would You NOT Want Fixing Your Replicator/Warp Drive/Etc?
- Thread starter Bry_Sinclair
- Start date
I don't know. Only three Galaxy class ships are confirmed destroyed, the Yamato, the Odyssey and the Enterprise. And to be fair, there are extenuating circumstances, the Yamato's computer was infected by an alien virus, the Odyssey was rammed by another ship, and the Enterprise was destroyed because the Duras sisters had a live feed through Geordi's VISOR. And at least the Enterprise's entire crew survived. Well, except for Livingston the Fish.
I also consider the exploding D's that didn't stick. Like the various deaths in Cause and Effect, and the alternate dimensional one Riker was encharge of from the reality where the Borg had taken over the whole galaxy. I'd even add the one from Yestetday's Enterprise. It's a personal thing. When I think of the D, I think of it going up like the Fourth of July. I gets rammed in one of its nacelles by another ship, spins out of control, and poof. The Reliant gets its nacelle blown clean off, and nothing. Plus I will never get past it getting killed off by a single, very old Bird of Prey after only shooting back with one 2 second phaser burst and one torpedo. I know that's just bad writing, but in the end, I feel the D was squishy. But in the, it was utilized more than any other Enterprise, so naturally it experienced more, too.
Oh, and how dare you bring up, Livingston. Don't you know the dangers of reopening old wounds?
Actually, I did review all the Enterprise D's destructions in alternate timelines and what not.
Time Squared seemed more related to that vortex thing than it did any of Geordi's engineering skill.
Yesterday's Enterprise Geordi was responsible for. That's 1.
Cause and Effect it blew up almost instantly after the Bozeman collided with the nacelle. Between that happening and Picard ordering abandon ship, there's not much Geordi could have done, he's off the hook here.
Timescape Geordi wasn't on board the Enterprise when it blew. Off the hook again.
Parallels we don't actually know if Geordi is still on board that Enterprise, the only ones we see are Riker and Worf. For all we know he could have been killed or assimilated, so I won't blame that on him.
AGT has the Enterprise being destroyed three times, but only one of them Geordi is responsible for, the 2370 one. He had not yet arrived on board the 2364 one, and though he was on board the 2395 one he wasn't an engineer, so I won't blame him for that. Still, the 2370 does count, so he's now at 2.
Generations of course not only fell under his responsibility, the Duras sisters were seeing through his eyes. Which brings our count to 3.
Compared to the other engineers:
Scotty lost his ship once, but that was through self-destruct.
O'Brien is tricky. Technically you could say twice, but one was the station, and the other the Defiant, so technically you could say once and it is still true from a certain point of view.
Of Voyager's many destructions, B'Elanna was only really responsible for one of them, and she quite literally was given it was the result of the quantum slipstream drive she had installed.
Trip is an interesting situation. When the NX-01 was destroyed in Twilight, he was no longer the engineer but was in fact captain, so yeah, he's still responsible. Then again, he was already dead, and the actual destruction was because of Archer, T'Pol and Phlox messing with the warp core.
This is who I had in mind when I clicked on the thread, but I do have to admit that others here are making a pretty strong case for La Forge. When you really think about it, when did La Forge *ever* perform what might be considered an act of *extraordinary* engineering where he wasn't accompanied by someone else who did some of "the heavy lifting", so to speak, on figuring out the solution? All of the rest did, even Barclay. I like Geordi as a character, and he maintained excellent engine efficiencies, but he was, at best, a very good *standard* Chief Engineer - not a miracle worker like the rest.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that perhaps "boat" can refer to small spacecraft by their time, too. Admittedly, I don't believe we ever saw that directly - but the Captain's private shuttle is referred to as a "yacht", and motorboats are sometimes referred to as "runabouts", too, so...
Or maybe Trip was actually working on a warp engine attached to a motorboat. People put jet engines on pickup trucks, so why not? "Hey, y'all - hold my beer and watch this!"
Bingo.
I hope you're not counting the destruction of the "no bloody A, B, C, or D" against Scotty - that was a willful destruction of the ship on their part, not an engineering problem or mistake.
"Booby Trap" comes to mind, as the whole episode focused on Geordi trying to solve a problem. The Leah Brahms hologram was just a tool of his own devising being used in that effort.
I count the Leah hologram *as* Dr. Brahms, because that was really just a conceit to get her there - I don't recall anything that really indicated that she was anything less than the real Dr. Brahms aside from not being able to leave the holodeck. And even if she wasn't the real Dr. Brahms, she was still a manifestation of a ship's computer that was apparently advanced enough to create Moriarty and weird multi-colored space train babies. So I'm not giving him full credit for that one, either.
From a story standpoint, yeah, that was all about him interacting with a virtual recreation of somebody he'd never met. From a practical, in-story standpoint, I'd count that as Geordi getting information from the computer in a particularly creative way.
Actually, it was the computer which devised the hologram. All Geordi did was load it up with Leah's personality profile so it would be easier to work with her. But creating the hologram in the first place was the computer's idea.
Hmmm...I'd say that the computer threw in an ingredient that he got creative with, resulting in the more realistic, interactive Leah.
"Got creative with" - that reminds me: he also did something ethically questionable with a simulation of a colleague. So, okay, maybe +5 points for thinking to make her a more realistic and helpful simulation. But minus at least that many for creepiness.
College degrees or formal education don't make one intelligent, necessarily. I know some self taught network administrators and software developers who only have high school diplomas. They are some of the smartest people I know, and I am saying that as someone with 4 college degrees.
No, it's because in the series itself, it was stated that he was entirely self-taught in engineering, developing his skills by working on boat engines (which have nothing to do with warp theory or space travel), and never finished college. That means he was seriously lacking in formal education about starship engineering.
Kor
That said, I like Trip the least of all the engineers in Star Trek, so I have to agree with you that I wouldn't choose him.
Trip managed to McGyver his way out of prison in Terra Prime but couldn't think of a better way to defend the ship from generic villains other than blowing himself up in the next episode? But I suppose that that it's still truth because that's what "historical files" say. I'm no fan of the novels but the holo-story nature of the episode makes me inclined not to believe that Trip never finished college. And Laser Beam mentioned nothing about novels.
Also I'm an accountant. Professors always drill into our heads to pass the CPA exams because they would never let you sign off on anything without a license. Think about this: we bust our asses to pass a test in order to get leadership positions in jobs where we're NOT saving anyone's life. They won't let anyone without a license move past a glass ceiling without a license, let alone a college degree. Engineering is a far more regulated field.
Now I agree degrees and exams don't measure intelligence. There are some dumb people who have CPA (and other professional licenses). But NOTHING will ever make me believe they will promote anyone to freaking CHIEF ENGINEER without a license or college degree.
Until Galaxy's Child where we meet the real Dr. Brahms and discover she's nothing like that hologram.
So much "not like her" that they ended up married in the alternate future of "All Good Things"?
Ah, but all he said was he was married to "Leah." Was this the real Dr. Brahms or a hologram based on her equipped with a prototype mobile emitter?
Maybe he fell in love the real one. And they have a good laugh about Holo-Leah at family gatherings.
Similar threads
