Could the OG Enterprise have been recovered and rebuilt at all after ST III?

[BillJ]

What happens to anti-matter containment when a starship explodes? Is there something added in to somehow make it inert, when destruction is assured? Or else you'd have gigantic explosions all over the universe every time a warp capable ship goes down.

 

[publiusr]

Shades of The Doomsday Machine—perhaps there really is a way to render anti-matter inert—unmatter:

A New Form of Matter -- Unmatter, Composed of Particles and Anti-Particles

Besides matter and antimatter there must exist unmatter (as a new form of matter) in accordance with the neutrosophy theory that between an entity <A> and its opposite <AntiA> there exist intermediate entities <NeutA>. Unmatter is neither matter nor antimatter, but something in between. An atom...

ui.adsabs.harvard.edu

De-activated?

Heaviest antimatter observation yet will fine-tune numbers for dark matter search

In experiments at the Brookhaven National Lab in the US, an international team of physicists has detected the heaviest "anti-nuclei" ever seen. The tiny, short-lived objects are composed of exotic antimatter particles.

phys.org

 

[Jamie C]

Yeah Imagine there were spine and bulkheads that were from the Robert April era while deck plating, etc and hull plates were essentially new.

Does make an interesting Ship of Theseus question if those parts could be re-assembled, but imagine most went into recycling.

On a pound-for-pound basis more of the original ship is sitting in space junkyards somewhere than went down on Genesis. I'd also say the Enterprise was already historically significant enough when it was refit that they would have at least saved the original bridge module. Setting plausibility aside, my head canon is Scotty spent his retirement putting the old girl back together.

 

[publiusr]

Having the wreck be found drifting with something nasty using it as a home would be good for storytelling.

 

[DonIago]

Having the wreck be found drifting with something nasty using it as a home would be good for storytelling.

It could be, though I also feel that's kind of a trope...I'm also not sure how there could be much of a wreck when we appeared to see what was left of the ship burning up over Genesis...when then proceeded to destroy itself. Like, what's left after that?

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

Yeah first the ship blew up, then the wreckage burned up in the atmosphere of a planet, then the smoking debris presumably crashed into the planet, and finally the planet blew up with the force of an exploding planet. There wasn't enough left of that ship to even carry on the tradition of putting a tiny little piece of it into its successor.

 

[Humanoid #77]

Yeah first the ship blew up, then the wreckage burned up in the atmosphere of a planet, then the smoking debris presumably crashed into the planet, and finally the planet blew up with the force of an exploding planet. There wasn't enough left of that ship to even carry on the tradition of putting a tiny little piece of it into its successor.

Palpatine had it worse and still came back

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

Palpatine had it worse and still came back

Yes, but he came back as a broken identical clone who needed the heroes to come and fix him. Completely different situation.

 

[publiusr]

This very real object skipped back into space—

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About the same angle—it too looks like it is about to crash.

My head canon would have Enterprise do the same—the torpedo casket somehow soft landed too…oh well.

The Teton event did a de facto 1,500 km aerobrake. Most meteor footage I’ve ever seen shows fragments…I wonder…

 

[Peach Wookiee]

Palpatine had it worse and still came back

“Somehow, he returned.”

 

[tharpdevenport]

Joke answer: the self destruct is the one system on the ship that doesn't get tested in action so maybe it was just faulty.

Sensible answer: Scotty revealed in the last movie that properly blowing up the Enterprise would destroy V'Ger too, so it would certainly take out a tiny Bird of Prey. Maybe they deliberately avoided detonating the warp core to ensure that their only hope of escaping the exploding planet remained intact.

Yeah, but I chalk that up to bad writing. We know how big V'ger is -- which is humongous. We've seen what happens when the warp core goes on the Enterprise D, so one: how in the world could the Enterprise A have a bigger explossion? And two: One so large that in order to take out V'ger, not shuttles or escape pods could clear the blast and kill all escaped survivors.

 

[cgervasi]

"Mister Scott's Guide to the Enterprise" (apologies if I've misremembered the name) theorized that the E had two different destruct modes. A more violent one that would annihilate the ship by the simple expedient of dropping the antimatter containment fields, and a more restrained one as evidenced that used explosive charges but would prevent a matter-antimatter explosion.

I remember reading that when the book was new. It made perfect sense to me. We know anti-matter explosions are huge. It makes sense that they would have have a less catastrophic self-destruct, one that destroys the ship without destroying everything nearby.

 

[arch101]

Nope- vaporized like the MIR space station...

 

[Admiral Jean-Luc Picard]

Even though they used the self-destruct, after the self-destruct went off it didn't completely vaporize the ship.

As you can see in the image above, the stardrive section was still completely intact and only half of the saucer section was gone.

In season 3 of Star Trek: Picard, Geordi was the head of a space Starfleet museum and he managed to take the saucer section of the Enterprise-D that crash landed on Veridian III after ST: Generations and then over the period of many years he revived the Enterprise-D by using a stardrive section from another Galaxy-class ship. He did such a thorough job of reviving her that she flew again to fight the Borg one last time and was victorious!

So do you think Geordi ever considered taking the wreckage of the OG Enterprise to rebuild it for the Starfleet museum? I know that he had the Enterprise-A in the Starfleet museum (which is cool and all but as we all know it isn't the OG Enterprise). I mean, a lot of it is still intact so I think it could be a project worth pursuing for him. I'm not saying he would have to go so far as to make her battle (or even flight) worthy, but rebuild her just enough to be presentable as part of his Starfleet museum. Hell, maybe he could just rebuild the exterior and just simply not bother with the inside.

EDIT: NM. I forgot the planet the Enterprise crashed on (the Genesis planet) also blew up lol. OK, so as @Morpheus 02 suggested, let's shift the conversation to ... what if the Enterprise did NOT fall into the atmosphere....could it have been recovered partially!

To answer the OP, no... I don't think so. The ship was being ushed to decommissioning already. If the ship fell into orbit or drifted away instead of the planet fall we saw in the film, I think it would have been classified as space garbage and handled accordingly. Probably dropped off in a starship junkyard. Come get your parts at your own risk, pay on your way out kind of thing.

 

[DonIago]

I maintain that a self-destruct that leaves any worthwhile components behind (okay, components bigger than a breadbox) isn't a very useful self-destruct.