How could the crew abandon the Enterprise-D?

Question

In the Star Trek: TNG episode, "Cause and Effect", Picard gives the order for all hands to abandon ship. It's the only instance I can remember but there may have been others.

Now if we accept that he couldn't have known that Enterprise would explode so soon and so it would be reasonable to hope that an orderly evacuation was still possible, it still leaves the question of, how?

Unlike Enterprise-E I can't remember any time where Enterprise-D was shown to have life-boats, and although there are a few shuttle-crafts on board, Enterprise-D appears not to have learned from Titanic in that regard: They don't look like enough to accommodate all 1,000 or so crew and passengers.

So how could they abandon ship?

Answer 1

The TNG Technical Manual offers a range of scenarios for ship evacuation of the Galaxy Class Enterprise-D

Resources available for abandon-ship scenarios include:

Ability to transport up to 1,850 persons per hour from the ship via personnel transporters, including the use of emergency beam-out-only transporters.

Availability of five personnel shuttlecraft on immediate standby and up to six additional shuttles available on twelve-hour notice. Additional shuttle vehicles may be available depending on other mission requirements and maintenance status. Total transport capacity of these vehicles varies with range and other factors, but averages 250 persons per hour from standard orbit to a Class M planetary surface.

Abandon-ship protocols include use of ASRV (autonomous survival and recovery vehicle) lifeboats, which provide free space survival accommodations for up to 1,400 individuals for up to fourteen days. A total of four hundred ASRVs are available

In a lesser emergency in either the Saucer Module or the Stardrive Section, the saucer separation maneuver is an option, with evacuation of the ship's company to whichever section is not affected by the crisis. Evacuation protocols include options to leave behind a team of engineering personnel or other specialists who will attempt to deal with the emergency situation.

Environmental suits are available for evacuation into the space environment. In such scenarios, personnel may exit through any of the exterior airlocks, through the shuttle- bays, or through the exterior turbolift couplings (assuming that the turbolift system has been disabled). Environmental suits are available in storage lockers at all exit ports and shuttle- bays, as well as in emergency equipment lockers located in corridor storage modules located throughout the habitable volume of the spacecraft.

It is very likely that Picard intended for immediate evacuation via the ship's non-warp-capable lifepods and warp-capable shuttles.

The nature of its missions in the galaxy requires that the Enterprise carry a set of small spacecraft for dedicated escape and rescue operations. Located throughout both the Primary and Secondary Hulls, these ejectable lifeboats are designed to meet the short-term survival needs of the starship crew in the event of a catastrophic emergency.

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You may also wish to note that in TNG: Cause and Effect, Riker explicitly mentions that the Enterprise has emergency escape pods.

RIKER: This is the Bridge. All hands to emergency escape pods.

Answer 2

The Enterprise-D had plenty of escape pods for the crew to use - room for up to twice as many as the ship's regular complement. We just never see them used for all seven seasons and a movie.

Those big yellow squares are the lifeboats. They're more obvious as decals on the model kits than on the TV, but they are there and can be seen in the show (screenshot from the Season 6 episode Relics). I have no idea why they made the escape pods yellow for the model kits (my kit didn't have decals - but I did have instructions to paint all of the escape pods yellow, which I didn't).

A new model with extra detail was put together for the big screen because of the higher fidelity and larger viewing area for cinema screens, and so the escape pods are even more obvious. I don't know why we don't see any pods launching as the saucer crashes down into the planet.