Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
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Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
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Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
view the rest of the comments
They highlighted the tactical disadvantages in The Best Of Both Worlds. In a battle situation, the saucer section’s phaser banks, impulse drive, and fusion generators are of high importance.
There are also alternatives. In DS9’s episode introducing the Jem’hadar, The Odyssey simply dropped off their families before heading to the Delta quadrant.
I’m the event a hostile force is encountered, it is likely the saucer section would just be pursued and destroyed, as it could only flee on impulse or sustain a low warp is released at warp.
So they really only used it the only times it was practical: facing Q, facing the arsenal of freedom (as the automated system only attacked ships in orbit), and as a life raft after the star drive was destroyed as in Generations.
It might also be noted that prior Enterprises had the ability to separate the saucer on an emergency. It was just never used on screen, and also would probably require a spacedock to reassemble.
I personally think it was just an experiment that didn’t work out. Perhaps they just reverted to emergency separations.