He didn't try to get the crew off either. I'm assuming that the special selfdestruct he ordered was on instantenous, do not pass go, do not wait 5 minutes, blow up now self destruct, yet he didn't try to evacuate at least some of the crew first even though Romulan ships were there, albiet a bit smashed up.

I'm with Glom, yes, Data was more emotionally attached to them, and the audience, than some helmsman, but they didn't even blink. A toast to Data and all the crew that were lost in that battle and then Riker going into the story of his first meeting with Data would have been adequate for me.

In some "future" episodes, both Geordi and (Beverly) Crusher are shown to have become captains. IIRC, Geordi of the USS Challanger and Crusher of the Pasteur. Both of them have had command experience before and both of them did a good job. I guess they just got stuck in a rut being on the flagship doing all sorts of crazy things.

Is there a tradition of killing off the helmsman in TNG movies? One dies in Generations, Hawk gets assimilated in First Contact and the poor schmuck in Nemesis gets tossed into space. I blotted out IX from my memory, but dimly remember Riker piloting the ship via joystick[!] so did the Helmsman die in that? (I think they were all male, but if not read Helsman as Helmsperson).

I think the episode Lower Decks did a good job showing the grief for minor characters amongst other who knew them. Remember in Nemesis, the Enterprise has been pretty badly mauled. There are scores dead, perhaps over a hundred. If they focused on all of the memorials, the movie would have to be several hours longer with funerals. Besides, the memorial was really for we the viewers and we have no particular emotional attachment to the Helmsman (while we do for data).

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When I die I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror, like his passengers.

I've always had a problem with ST ships (even the shuttlecraft) being steered via multiple finger taps on multiple touch-screens. This always seemed extremely inefficient to me. When Riker called up the joystick for some particularly tricky manuvers, I actually thought that was a nice (logical) touch!

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. . . My moustache is touching my brain!!!!

I'll have to disagree there. A joystick is fine when you're in a craft that has limited movement possibilities, but in space those bets are off.

Here's just a quick off-the-cuff of stuff that can be done (ignore the fact that ST tends to portray ships as if they're aircraft in an atmosphere):

Say you're going forward. The options that pop to my mind are:
-turn left/right like a car
-bank left/right (useful if you want to use ventral shields, say side shields are down/weak)
-reverse bank left/right to get dorsal shields in line
-Turn up/down (again interposing ventral/dorsal shields)
-Slide up/down (basically a upward/downward thrust, the ship stays on the same plane but moves upward at an angle, like a sloping elevator for example)
-Slide right/left, AKA sidesteping (again, the ship still faces forwards but slides at an angle, like a checkers piece)

For the next few, assume three axis coordinate system, x+ is direction of travel, y+ is to the right and z+ is up
-Rotation along x axis (you want to keep going in the same direction but need to get different shields facing different locations, corkscrewing basically)
-Rotation along y axis (again you want to keep going in the same direction, remember you don't need constant thrust to maintain velocity so now you're travelling in a belly-flop position, if you rotated nose up, thus protecting that exposed bridge by interposing the entire saucer cross section to enemy ahead of you
-Rotation along z axis (180 degs and now you're travelling backwards with full forward armament facing any chasing enemies.

Now, tell me how you can do all that with an 8-position joystick? A keypad/console makes sense to me. Especially when you start combining them.

Well I used to play Elite exclusively with the 'keyboard' ... on a Sinclair Spectrum 48K 8)

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N6MAA10816
Faber '62 ΔTX
Are you a Bright?

Thoughts:

The only reason I watch Trek is to see ships blasting the hell out of each other. The movie succeeded as far as I'm concerned.

Does anyone know anything about Janeway's backstory before Voyager? Maybe she was already n the works to be promoted before the series and when she made it back, it went through.

Worf was on the ship because he was a guest at both weddings. However, this doesn't explain his going on an away mission or being in charge of weapons.

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Imagination is more important than knowledge - Albert Einstein

Michael Wong has his own synopsis. (WARNING: very bad language)

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

There needs to be a thread resurrection limit, 6 months and it autolocks. I read half the first page thinking it was new until I came to one of my posts. That was a shock. #-o

(Actually, if I paid attention to the dates, that sort of thing wouldn't happened.)

Ditto what the Kidd said.

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"Earth diameter is 7,900 miles, and Moon diameter is 2,160 miles. It takes on average 90 minutes to complete one Earth orbit, so one Moon orbit should take roughly 25 minutes." - Sam "NasaScam" Colby

Bearer of the highly coveted "I found Venus in nine Apollo photos" sweatsocks.

DataCable^2008 A+

On one hand, I have little to disagree with - It was a terrible movie. On the other hand, I wonder if he treats the Star Wars movies the same way. They certainly are full of contrived moments and massive plot holes as well.