Canon principal
A citação do script de episódio era
PICARD: A "save our skins" maneuver. The Stargazer was on fire, finished. We had to abandon ship, and limp through space in shuttlecraft for weeks before being picked up. (beat) I haven't thought about it in years...
Mas sim, você está certo. Uma vez que os incêndios a bordo foram extintos, o navio parece estar em condições bastante funcionais. Quanto ao motivo pelo qual não foi salvo (pela Federação), os Ferengi presumivelmente conseguiram que um time fosse mais rápido para rebocá-lo. A suposição era que explodiu / caiu.
EU Canon
O romance Star Trek EU " A Era Enterrada " discute a Batalha de Maxia (e a subsequente corte marcial de Picard pela perda de sua embarcação) em grande detalhe.
O navio foi mortalmente ferido, em chamas e possivelmente com vazamento de radiação. Picard deixou-a em órbita em decadência em torno de uma gigante de gás local, na expectativa de que iria queimar na atmosfera.
Simenon made an unhappy noise in his throat. “As I feared, Captain. The purge is incomplete. Some of the hatches didn’t respond-we still have fires burning in much of the engineering section and physics labs.”
A thought struck Picard. “Can you shut down ship’s gravity? Without convection, the fires would smother in their own smoke.”
The Gnalish shook his gray-scaled head. “I no longer have control of those systems.” It was the paradox of Starfleet gravity generators: under power, their superconducting stators could be braked within moments, allowing near-instant gravity shutdown, but in the event of power loss the stators would continue spinning on sheer momentum for up to four hours. It was a safeguard against power loss, but right now it was working against the ship’s survival.
“Oh, no,” Simenon said. “I’ve read an explosion in nuclear physics. Atmosphere venting from those compartments…I’m detecting radiation spreading outward. Looks like…a canister of plutonium must have ruptured. No fission, but the plutonium dust is spreading through half the ship.” He shook his head. “We don’t have the equipment to decontaminate it.”
Picard stared at his dying ship. “Then we can never go back.”
After the crew had absorbed that for a time, Ben Zoma asked, “What if there are more enemy ships coming? Ships that do have decon equipment? Do we just leave her for them?”
“We never made a stable orbit,” Asmund answered. “She’ll spiral down into the Jovian’s atmosphere within a week, two at most.”
“Can we make sure she self-destructs?” Picard asked Simenon.
“The engine controls are unresponsive. And these shuttles don’t have the armaments to take her out. The only way would be to remove one of the shuttles’ micro-warp cores and make it into a bomb.”
e
Afterwards, Phillipa changed her tack, concentrating on the third charge, Picard’s alleged failure to ensure that the ship was scuttled. She called Simenon to the stand, and the engineer testified to everything Picard had attempted, first to save his ship, then to ensure its destruction once abandonment became inevitable. He explained why they could not have risked returning to the ship or sparing a shuttle warp core to destroy it, and stated that its descent into the Jovian’s atmosphere was certain in any case. “And long-range scans saw no sign of hostile ships in the time it would’ve taken the Stargazer’s orbit to decay.”