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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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
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I think that it ultimately just wasn't very useful. From a production standpoint, it was an expensive and slow sequence that could be easily avoided without any issues.
From an in-universe standpoint, it was probably a dead-end technology. There are engines, shuttle bays, weapons, and computers that are concentrated in the saucer, which could all be useful in a battle, or in the aftermath of one. The saucer itself doesn't have any warp engines (they are shown to be able to run on fusion power, so a warp core isn't a necessity, although it's a bit slower than antimatter), deflectors, or other FTL mechanism, so if the stardrive is destroyed, it would be effectively stranded, and could be left a sitting duck for anyone who felt like retracing the ship's steps to hunt down the people trapped on there.
It also doesn't help that for the most part, it's rare that a ship will knowingly head into danger, and have the opportunity to drop off its stardrive section. Danger usually happens to the ship on the spot, at which point, it would be too late to go and drop off the saucer section.
The Prometheus project might have been an attempt at salvaging the concept, replacing the saucer with a whole starship, but given that it wasn't used in later ships, it was likely deemed a failure, possibly because at that point, you're just building multiple starships, and might as well make them fully fledged craft on their own.