Best Trek Movie Moment 3: The Search For Spock

[Tiberius]

According to Mr Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, the reason that the self destruct only destroyed a bit of the saucer is because there are actually two self destructs. One is the big kablam designed to be used in deep space. But near a planet, that would contaminate any ecosystem with antimatter radiation or some such technobabble thing, so they avoid that with the second type of self destruct, but use the planet's atmosphere to help destroy the ship.

[Blackstar the Chakat]

2) The self destruct doesn't seem that effective - it only seems to destroy about half the ship, the rest burns up in the atmosphere. Its also hardly painless for the people left on board. Hopefully the Enterprise D has a quicker kaboomer, what with all those children on board.

The E-nil was to be decomishioned. It's possible most of her anti-matter was used up or removed before she was destroyed. That would leave only the secondary self-destruct systems operational. Due to the extensive damage, and loss of the automation systems, some of the secondary self-destruct packages may not have gone off as well, especially the ones in the secondary hull.

[Captain Seafort]

Fair point. I gather theres an error regarding the age of the Enterprise. Prior history suggests it is indeed 40 years old, and not 20 as stated in the film.

It's possible that Morrow was referring to the age of the refitted ship which, assuming the commonly accepted data of the trilogy of 2285-86 is correct, would be about 20-ish years. Albeit very "ish".

Possibly, but I'd have thought there was a less drastic way. Something similiar to the program Sisko ran just before evacuating DS9.

We've been over Sisko's programme in another thread - the only conceivable reason that such a limited method was used was because of the large number of civilians still on the station. The only way to guarantee destruction of data is to physically destroy the storage device as thoroughly as possible.