20 episodes into my rewatch of TNG and Riker has remembered they can pop the saucer off for dodgy situations like Romulans showing up. They didn’t do it of course. Not sure they ever do between the pilot episode and Generations.

@jon I always found this unbelievable. Can you imagine the amount of engineering needed to be able to split the saucer section off, and for what reason? Just in case? Because it's cool?

I've been in too many meetings to believe anyone would sign off on that level of feature creep.

@jonty @jon you've never worked in army procurement

@jonty @jon it affects the loudspeakers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb07MT5fcEE

@jonty the Enterprise is designed for crew to take their families along, so they said “oh, it’s fine, the saucer will run away whenever your kids may be in danger” and then they put in place a sign off process so onerous it only happened when all senior management were out and Geordie has been left in command. Perfectly believable.

@jonty @jon i present to you: the tilt rotor osprey

@tef @jon How dare you insult my vertically unchallenged son

@jonty @jon i love how it was built in order to have something better than a plane or helicopter for desert runs and ended up with something worse than either