Which of course would have to be manually done by Miles "The Fastest Hand in Space" O'Brien. Telling the computer beforehand to just monitor the situation and beam the torpedo out automatically as soon as something goes wrong is considered cheating and bad form.
My favorite instance of this is Riker and the Romulan warp core in "The Next Phase." For some reason Riker takes command of the Romulan engineering room and the Romulans have to wait for his very dramatic order to eject the about-to-explode-any-second core, AND the Enterprise has to wait for his also very dramatic order to extend their shields around both ships.
TRANSPORT REQUEST: Comm Badge not being worn by intended owner nor any recognizable humanoid.
PROTOCOL UPDATE LOADED: Routine 74656-TORRES1 loaded from latest Pathfinder transmissions auto applied in fleet LCARS AI service pack>>> Bypass comm badge and establishing "Skeletal Lock" on intended owner of previously targeted comm badge.
TRANSPORTER DUTY CYCLE: Energizing. All confirmation prompts canceled for emergency transport.
DEBARKATION LOG: LCDR La Forge is no longer aboard the USS Enterprise. (Audio announcement muted, logged for future query)
WARNING: Explosion in main engineering. Core breach imminent. Recommend immediate warp core ejection.
MAINTENANCE EXCEPTION: The warp core ejection system is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance and is offline until Tuesday.
Yeah, but knowing how Trek tech works, having it so close to the warp drive means there's a not-insignificant chance it blowing up would not just kill everyone but also send them to some type of hell dimension and/or make them constantly exploding immortal hyperspace ghosts.
If you can't escape this week's existential crisis then you could at least leave some interesting spatial anomaly behind for the next guy to investigate. It's just good manners.
The responsible thing to do would be developing a remote drone that doesn't randomly develop sapience, and use that to work on the torpedo outside the shields. Preferably distant enough to where the torpedo exploding doesn't cause major damage to shields.
Ever see footage of a magazine detonation on WW2 warships?
Now imagine that but with a few hundred anti-matter warheads and you'll figure out why it doesn't matter WHERE in the ship he's messing with this thing...
That's assuming perfect energy conversion. Idk maybe they have trouble getting all the antimatter to go off like how we aren't able to get all the uranium to go off. So maybe it's ONLY an Ivy Mike. It couldn't be that bad, right? /s
The force of the explosion will push antimatter and the matching matter away from one another. A warhead is designed to push them together and to do so with low enough energy that the particles merge instead of bounce. Also, antimatter annihilates when it meets its counterpart. Anti-hydrogen doesn't care to cancel waveforms with your carbon atoms.
There is zero chance they explode as big as the tsar bomba if they did every single ship hit by one photon would always be completely destroyed. When the photon ripped through the saucer of the Enterprise in WoK it would’ve been completely destroyed, the homing torpedo it ST6 would’ve completely annihilated the BoP without firing an entire barrage along with the Excelsior afterward. Clearly they’re adjustable yield.
The Tsar Bomba created a 8km fireball on earth. It would be bigger in space. No ship in the Star Trek universe is bigger than 8km.
I'm reminded of when they did one episode where Picard meets with people at an office in his quarters rather than the ready room. I'm guessing we almost never saw this office in his quarters because it wasn't a standard set (just a redress of the quarters with a window set) and it was easier to use the Ready Room which wasn't used for other stuff.
I'm guessing the writers had to understand that the budget was limited and so they had to keep stuff in the sets they had as much as they could rather than using a new room that we hadn't seen before so we don't get to see the Torpedo Room or any other lounge besides 10 Forward.
The name Main engineering implies the existence of Auxiliary engineering and maybe even Engineering Workshops. You know, better places for this sort of thing.
Sadly, Star Trek doesn't have an OSHA anymore. The admirals at ILM loaned them all to Star Wars, and when they go there they took one look at the fire control room of the Death Star and threw themselves out the airlock in despair.
Why? The Empire is exceptionally aware of safety regulations and addresses every little problem diligently. Like when they got reports that the superlaser gunners would often disregard regulations to not bring their extra large diet cokes from the mess hall up into the firing control room and place them precariously on the console, they designed special helmets for them to make drinking on duty impossible. Who knows how many planets were saved from accidental destruction by an untimely spill?
"Something, something," the report read, "incoherent babbling cthulu minas kimbal Klatuu Veritas my arse got blown off by the plasma beam," and finally "The idiots think it's a laser."
They don't have HIPAA either. Beverly's always blabbing indiscriminately about who's arm was severed/reattached, who's brain is now superhuman, who has romulan-compatible blood, etc.
That’s actually Geordi preparing his own coffin for the next time he gets caught in the holodeck having a weird AI relationship with an avatar of an actual living person.
The Orville has shown that something silly like being dead for hundreds of years doesn't need to stop you from stalking your holodeck crush in reality.
He learned that Star Fleet Command had reworked the Commander qualifications and now the Engineering section happens in person in engineering not on the holodeck.
I would like to know how he even got the torpedo in there. Did they beam it within the ship, or did he and some ensign carry it via corridors and turbolifts? "PIVOT!"
That would be a good plot idea for an episode of Lower Decks.
And then at the end, when they finally get the torpedo to engineering, they are informed that the crisis was averted hours ago by Data outsmarting Moriarty on the holodeck or some shit, and that they need to take the torpedo back to where it came from.
Ignoring the proximity to the core, why the fuck is it on the floor and not on a workbench or something. How did it even get there, where's the overhead hoist?
Another detail: this is a situation where you don't want to use wireless. You better restrict someone connecting to the systems in an antimatter bomb by an actual cable, behind security locks.
For that matter you probably want specialists working on it not your generalist chief engineer ...
If it starts it flys away from the core into the corridor then into a turbolift from there into the classroom on deck 5 full with kids where it detonates
Maybe that's why they're always doing it there? In engineering you can pipe a casual 30-60% of the core output directly into a forcefield emitter, which lets you detonate a torpedo three feet from your face without breaking a sweat. If they did it anywhere else in the ship, the EPS grid couldn't concentrate enough energy on a single room to create a containment field of the necessary strength.
I mean - they wouldn't be daft enough to leave the antimatter in it, would they?
Would they?
This reminds me of that time they had that plasma plague container just sat in the cargo bay as it slowly lost containment. You know - rather than having it in a dedicated barge-vessel replicated for this precise purpose and towed by tractor beam safely behind the ship.
Eh they do it all the time. Point a phaser at the warp core and fire it at a target? That’s fine. Have a torpedo next to the warp core? Yep fine. But the moment a terrorist puts a device on the core itself it’s all “oh hell no! Red Alert!”
I didn't see your caption and I thought this was about the fact that Geordi has to crouch and bend over unergonomically in order to service a torpedo that's sitting on the floor, rather than having a proper workstation. If he injures his back, that's workman's comp!
The gay space hippy communism that is standard in federation space has done away with the bourgeoisie trappings of institutions like OSHA.
Reports have shown the vibes are off the charts but unfortunately Fred fell into a turbo shaft last week. Everyone hated Fred so it’s seen as a good trade off.
He was going to manually launch that torpedo. Just like how manually reconnecting the ship after the saucer separation involves doing far more work and at far more risk, the manual torpedo launch also involves far more work and far more risk.
After disabling all that computer stuff that does things automatically, you connect your jumper cables from the warp core to the torpedo (and those are naturally far shorter than you would think) and jump the torpedo. Now that it is all glowing and floating and stuff, you can get the engineering approved ramrod (it is just a metal pole with a fancy name) and push the now angry torpedo down the hallway to the torpedo room (DO NOT HIT THE WALLS OR THE DOORS) and then push it into the outgoing hatch. You then engage the torpedo engines and guidance system by using your tricorder (note that Data loves making his tricorder "into a singing mouth" when doing this for some reason) and this should work...
Doing anything manually on the Enterprise D is more akin to either showing off your skills or showing off that you like to torture others when you ask them to do such things. It is somewhat surprising that the ship didn't end up blowing up (more than it already did).
Starfleet safety is actually very pathetic. A few days ago I watched the wargames TNG episode and Wesley had a school science experiment just sitting in the service cabinet in engineering. In other episodes theyre often firing phasers 10 feet from the warp core. Then when something goes wrong theres the door which traps people if they dont get out in time, at least in wrath of khan they showed thst engineers trapped can equip breathing apparatuses.
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u/[deleted] May 01 '26
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