Star Trek Discussion

Depends, if they want to keep that object safe as well, a tight fit isn't enough. Also I would imagine that the field is huge with the star ship in a homogenized part of the field in the middle. You sure don't want to have different parts of your vessel travel with different speeds! That would also explain the problem with the gravity wells.

They extended the shields several times, but as far as I can recall only expanded the warp field once in 'Q-Who?'. That was to try and lower the practical mass of a moon so they could alter its orbit using the tractor beams. They did note in that episode that there would be shearing forces on the moon, since they couldn't create a field large enough to encompass the entire moon.

I'd assume that the warp field is subject to the inverse square law, so that the larger the warp bubble the more energy you have to put into creating and maintaining it*. So while you could probably expand the warp field around another ship your top speed would be a fraction of what it would normally be.

This assumption would explain why Voyager - a ship 1/4tr the size of the Enterprise D - has a higher top speed even with a far smaller engine. Presumably the warp field is smaller, so more efficient, that the larger ship** - which would also explain why you could have warp capable shuttles when their power core is small enough to fit in Picard's ready room without worrying his fish.

The distance the field is from the hull is most likely calculated to allow the shields to be used when at warp speeds, balancing out efficiency with protection.

(*This is certainly how the shields work, as it was noted on at least one of the occasions when they expanded them to cover another ship that this dramatically reduced the number of shots the shields would be able to withstand.)

(**The Defiant bucks this trend, but only because she was designed for raw power not high warp speed. This class has the warp coils right next to the hull to protect them - as do Klingon Birds of Prey - which is not as efficient a design as having the coils mounted on booms further away from the main hull.

It allowed the nacelles to be moved in flight to alter the shape of the warp field, making the field much more efficient and therefore increasing the ships top speed. Think of it as being rather like modern fighter aircraft who's high performance is due to the computer being able to make minor adjustments to the control surfaces several hundred times per second.

That we don't see this technology on any other ships is not that surprising. It is presumably complex, vulnerable to damage, doesn't really improve warp performance enough on smaller ships as they simply don't have that much power to spare to start with and on larger ships physically moving the nacelles would be a lot harder due to their greater mass*.

(*The nacelles on TNG era ships are typically about half the length of the ship - at least for Federation Starships. Voyagers nacelles are roughly 1/4tr the length of the ship. So Voyagers nacelles are considerably smaller and (presumably) lighter than would be usual on a ship of her size.
Note; Length of the ship in this context does not include the nacelles themselves.)

I can see where the "warp" position places them at approximately the midpoint of the height of the vessel. I was questioning why they move them OUT of position when they are out of warp.

If I recall correctly, in "The Making of Star Trek" book, several alternate designs were shown in the book. Originally, the saucer section was a sphere, but Matt Jeffries liked the saucer better. While creating a simple mockup to show the suits, he accidentally hung his design upside down and liked the look better than the original, saucer down format.

The Borg do use spheres - the first appearance was in First Contact.

As for what they need the room for, well the Borg assimilate other species and their technology - so the extra space may be there so they can bring larger examples of such technology into the ship for closer study. On their first appearance the Borg cut a large chunk out of the Enterprise, and while we never see what they did afterwards it would not be unreasonable to assume they brought it aboard for closer study. To do that they'd need a fairly large area to store the section - and we know that the Enterprise D, big though she is, is far from the largest (none-Borg) ship out there.



Actually the intention was that the saucer section could double as an emergency 'life pod' - in other words the ship could separate into two parts. We think of this as being a trick only the Enterprise D could do, but Kirks Enterprise had the same feature although this was a one-shot deal as they could not reattach the two sections - or at least not on their own.

Separating the saucer was mentioned on one episode of TOS, and the original script for what became The Motion Picture included a damaged Enterprise detaching the saucer section to follow a Klingon ship during its climax. This was never done with any TOS era ships, and only done with the Enterprise D and the USS Phoenix during TNG era - in the latter case because the ship was designed to split into three sections during combat.

It should be noted that this feature could only appear on ships that had a primary and secondary hull. The NX, Miranda, Nebula, Sabre and Akira classes (to name those I can think of off the top of my head) could not have this feature because they lack a secondary hull.



Correct for both.

As I said above, it is reasonable to assume that warp fields are subject to the inverse square law - so the larger the field the more energy needed to create and sustain it. When it comes to moving a ship it appears (and is reasonable to assume) that you only need to modify the warp field in the direction you intend to move while the rest of the field is simply there to protect the ship from being torn apart and is therefore static. Altering the field would most likely mean making it somewhat unstable, which would take more energy and computing power to do safely. If you can reduce the size of that part of the field you have to alter you lower both the power requirements and the computing power needed. This would allow for a more powerful and efficient field and faster adjustments - ie a higher speed for a given amount of engine power and greater agility/acceleration at warp.

This in fact makes sense given the emphasis on defence and exploration Starfleet ships have - a higher sustainable speed and greater fuel efficiency allows you to cover a greater area and remain in space for longer. It also explains why the bigger ships are not automatically faster than smaller vessels, even though they presumably have larger engines, and why ships like the Klingon Bird of Prey are slower than comparable Federation ships - they are less streamlined so less efficient.

As for the Borg with their cubes...well subtlety isn't exactly a Borg trait. They seem to prefer to deal with problems with raw power - something that they clearly have to spare....



The design with a spherical primary hull became the Daedalus class - the successor to the NX class and the precursor to the Constitution class. This design was seen in TOS, as well as 'All Good Things' as an upgraded/updated design. In the first case the class was being used as an explorer, in the latter a medical ship.

Starfleet clearly loves to reuse its old ship designs....



More likely being able to lower the nacelles makes the ship more stable when she is resting on the ground. Lowering the Nacelles would lower the centre of gravity, making her harder to 'push' over. It would also avoid problems in stability caused by wind hitting the otherwise near vertical warp pylons and pushing the ship over or causing unwanted stresses on the pylons when the ship is grounded.

Because they are too far from home with federation police.

Do you mean the red light that can be seen on the back of a ship?

A red light is used on ships to signify that is the ships port side, a green light is used to signify the starboard side. (Both in the real world and on Trek).

The red light seems to show up better on screen than the green, so the starboard lights are often hard to spot - I'm guessing that for the physical models the problem may have been down to the use of green screen technology which probably resulted in them having to tone down the green. It should also be noted that the green is harder to spot against the duck egg blue colour* of the hull even on the CGI models.

(*The model for the Enterprise D was painted duck-egg blue, but the ship appears to be a light grey due to the lighting used to film the model.)

Same color as the original TOS Enterprise, pretty much, and for the same reason. I noticed it when I saw it at the Smithsonian in the '70s-80s.

It looked downright dingy.

blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2009/05/smithsonian-events-week-of-511-15-portraits-presents-star-trek-and-sailing/