OMFG MASSIVE SPOLIERS: NeoTrek Engine Musings

Ok, this is not a thread for liking or hating the new engine room, let keep the discussion to figuring out it all works. WE can do it.


Based on what we saw, it appears they ejected either multiple cores or multiple reaction assemblies or chambers or something. I didn't see exactly where they ejected from nor did I get a good look at what was in motion when Scotty flipped his switch. (cannot wait for screen-grabs!)

Then we had a line about diverting power from the nacelles to the shields.

Plus the nacelle roots themselves attach directly to the shuttle-bay.



My preliminary theories: Multiple redundant small reactors in the secondary hull provide power to the ship. Part of that power is diverted either as electrical current or plasma to the nacelles where the further power generation/amplification takes place.

Prehaps that's why that the nacelles are so large. Not only are you housing the warp coils themselves but additional power generation hardware.


Lastly, the "surge" of power when the ship jumps to warp... prehaps this generation of warp drive was open-loop... the plasma was discharged into space after reacting with the coils. Makes sense based on what we saw yes? Later designs collect and recirculate/recycle the plasma, a closed loop design. That design could come a few years down the road, maybe a decade or two later.


As for the differences between the engines of the NX-01 and the NCC-1701... NX was very early technology... it was advanced in some regards but it just couldn't scale up to Big Ship designs so they went for a more brute force method.

Thoughts? Comments? Please remember this is a technobabble thread not an OMG I HATE THE NEW DESIGN DEATH TO JJ thread.

 

i thought the ejection came from the bottom of the neck of the ship? The engine room does look more functional than a room of bleeping lights. and more like the bowels of the titanic, i love this about it. I hope the designers of the ship will publish blueprints and get an overall length for the ship. i need these things to update my scaled ship charts!

 

Bottom of the neck of the ship... ok. So did we actually see any motion during the ejection sequence inside the ship or was it all blur/flash/smoke?

No problem with part of the engine being in the actual neck, just trying to get a sense of what goes where.

 

Here's a musing: I don't think the nacelle caps are bussard collectors. They seem to spin fairly slowly at sublight, but they were whirling a hecka lot while the Enterprise was caught in the clutches of the giant squid - err, black hole. Imma gonna say part of the warp engine itself.

 

I hope they arne't bussard collectors! I always thought it was a stupid place for them.

 

From what I saw the ''cores'' were ejectid from where the ''middle'' of the neck. inbetween the saucer & shuttle bay.

 

I cant agree with you more, people dont seem to like this design, but as someone who has worked on a REAL engine room, I cant help but smile wide at a engineering room that actually looked PRACTICAL.

No Trek has ever given us a realistic engineering section, ever. If the ship is meant to be repaired on the fly, its going to be exposed at all times, and not hidden away behind walls and bulkheads.

 

...Of course, even a "naked" engine room is likely to have a neat, shirtsleeves/whitecollar control center somewhere. And most of the time, Scotty would be working in that section of the engine room, not in the grease pits or axle shafts or coolant waterslides. Essentially, something would have to go very badly wrong if Scotty had to leave his comfortable control center.

Granted that something often did even in TOS. But it's more realistic for a single person to repair things in a single room than in a vast maze of machinery; if something was really broken in the deep bowels of the engines, it wouldn't be logical that Scotty, working almost or completely alone, could repair this within the time allocated by the drama. It's more logical to think that it was some central control doodads that broke in those episodes, and that Scotty was able to reroute rather than repair - which is something achieved better at the small, neat control panel room than in said deep bowels.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I have worked in the engine rooms of 1000 foot long cruise ships and none of them give you the impression of vast acres of room that these scenes did. There should have been more bulkheads to breakup the space. In fact it almost reminds me of the old Buck Rogers TV show where they would occasionally just have the background fade into darkness for lack of set construction money.
Even so, I will go with the "bowels of the engine" rationalization here and hope next time we get to see an engine control room.

 

its stupid!

 

What an eloquent response.

Anyway, I don't really think it's completely off the wall to have a futuristic engine room look like it did in TOS, TNG, and on. I also don't think the engine room would be quite so... BIG, as it was depicted in the movie. It seemed way over the top, like Chekov's accent.

That being said, I think the engine room gave it a real feeling. From my pov, the engine room is a power generation facility, just like the nuclear reactors we have today. And from what i've seen of those, there are pipes EVERYWHERE. I don't think the M/AM reactors they use on trek would be to different then reactors we use today. Yes, nuclear reactors heat up water, and run them through turbines to generate electricity. But I can see M/AM reactors doing that with the plasma, so pipes going every which way didn't seem to far off.

 

Well, engineering certainly did look different. I didn't see anything that looked remotely like a warp core, did any of you?

Those canisters they ejected to escape the black hole... did Scotty say he was going to eject the "cores" (plural)? They looked like matter and antimatter containers to me.

Well, in any case, it looks like the basic design of starships in this new Trek universe is substantially different than what we've seen before.

 

But is it? All these bowels might have been found inside the TOS ship - and, if we trust the computer graphics from ENT "In a Mirror, Darkly", the central parts of the engineering hull did indeed consist of massive scaffolding and piping like this.

Multiple cores/reactors is a possibility with the TOS setup, too. And the basic elements seem to be the same: internal power generation facility, external engines in nacelles, separate impulse engines, antimatter involved in the workings, a nondescript role for dilithium...

Timo Saloniemi

 

In one of the scenes (I think it's when they're in the clutches of the black hole), a bunch of glowy cylinders can be seen in the background.

He said he was ejecting the warp "core", singular ().
I'm used to warp cores being glowy and containers not being glowy, so I didn't get the same impression from it as you did.

With regards to the neck situation- looked like the ejection ports were at the very base of the neck - where it blends with the engine hull. The cores are probably housed down in the engine hull.

 

I thought I heard a plural.

Of course, these could be segments of a larger core structure, ejected separately even though normally utilized as a single unit. In that case, singular would also be consistent.

Timo Saloniemi

 

No, he just says 'core', no plural.
But perhaps the core now simply consists of various reactor-units - redundancy and all that.

 

OK, if I remember correctly from old blueprints, the base of the neck along the spine of the secondary hull used to be where the deuterium tanks were. This are is where I saw the core(s) eject from the area where the neck blends into the secondary hull.

To me, I think because of the timeline change, the way Federation ships get to warp is much different. Someone up thread mentioned it, I think the nacelles are now much more self contained units then we have seen previously and the engineering deck now acts as a monitoring room making sure the nacelles get what they need to run and keep them balanced - hence the piping and various controls.

To me the nacelle front caps (the former bussard collectors) reminded me a lot of the swirling lights in the warp core in ST:TMP, indicating to me anyway that more is going on in there then we have previously seen. I think also the additional size/girth also supports this.

 

I'm not sure if any old blueprints even acknowledged the concept of deuterium tanks. The TOS ship was originally supposed to run on something futuristic, be it superdense pellets of weird matter or interstellar forcefields of plain holy spirit (no doubt from Scotty's distillation plant).

However, the base of the neck (or much of the neck itself, for that matter) would be where a deuterium tank would go if the blueprints were made following the TNG era guidelines. The Encyclopedia gives a deck count for the TOS ship where this sort of tank placement is suggested, FWIW.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I would attribute the "multiple core ejections" to the effects department not giving a damn. If they moved a little faster they could have just as easily been photon torpedoes.

 

Bullshit.
Is it so hard to imagine that this core consists of multiple core-units?