If those are warp engines on the E-D saucer, where are the bussard collectors (and yeah, I know this has been discussed before)? Memory Alpha indicates the saucer section wasn't capable of sustaining warp speed once separated. Most bluprints & drawings indicate they are impulse engines. I definitely never saw an example of those spots being open on a Nebula type when I was kitbashing the USS Nebula many years ago, but there could have been other renderings made since then. If they are impulse engines on the E-D, being in those spots shouldn't have been a problem for a Nebula, since they aren't too far from where they ended up putting the impulse engines anyway.
It seems most everything relating to warp drive is actually optional extra. All you really need is warp coils and a powerplant of some sort (with or without dilithium, with or without antimatter, it's your choice). Plenty of ships and shuttles go to warp without such extravaganza as Bussard scoops or navigational deflectors or separate nacelles for the coils. The E-D had pretty distinct impulse engines on the aft rim, heavily framed in fashionable ribbed back and glowing red. Depending on the model, the Nebula has tiny red-glowing grillework just below the aft rim and either no trace of the E-D engines or then smooth cowlings where those "used to be". However, the blue squares aren't labeled anything much in blueprints, and the Sternbach ones amusingly leave the area mysteriously blank in the interior view. Those squares aren't to be found on any Nebula variant. We know Starfleet impulse engines can glow red (or blue or white or yellow), and Starfleet warp engines can glow blue, so the squares could be either sort. But since the E-D already has the red impulse engines, the blue squares could be left to take care of the evident warp performance of the saucer. Now, no doubt actual nacelles bolted onto the saucer could provide extra warp performance. Or basic warp performance in the case of Nebula. It's just that we now know the "BoBW" ones aren't connected to the saucer... Timo Saloniemi
I thought I saw somewhere that those squares were supposed to be some massive arboretum/garden-like room, like the big windows at the bottom of the secondary hull of the TMP refit. Honestly never gave them much thought beyond that. Edit: I did see this - Kennedy Shipyards E-D schematics has them as an arboretum. Totally unofficial, of course, but at least my tired old brain remembered something correctly.
^ Yeah, the 2 blue squares at the back/center of the E-D saucer are frequently labeled as "arboretum windows", and they do look more like windows than anything else. A shame we didn't see them from the inside in arboretum scenes. What we saw used as an impulse engine is the large orange rectangle on the back of the neck, and even though the two ports on the saucer are impulse engines, the only time we saw those lit up was when the saucer was separated IIRC. Even on the Galaxy-X, with the 3rd warp nacelle, the main impulse seems to be divided into 2 engines on the back of the neck, maybe just vented away from the pylon. It wouldn't do to have a dirty pylon. 2 small pop-out warp nacelles (ala USS Prometheus) on the saucer would be "Galaxy-X kewl", even if they only managed Warp 1 or 2.
FWIW, the saucer impulse engines are lit on the CGI Galaxies of the Dominion War, as well as on the Challenger in VOY, boosting the neck engine even in attached flight mode. Why would blue rectangles "look like windows"? All "other" windows on starships are yellow. And we know the arboretum is yellow-lit from the inside, too. Again FWIW, twin pop-out nacelles in place of the saucer shuttlebay is what Peter David used in his New Frontier novels. But "Encounter at Farpoint" has the saucer doing much better than warp 1 or 2, as it reverses the extreme-warp-for-several-minutes-at-least course of the joined ship in a matter of mere hours. (And the Defiant can do warp 9.5 without nacelles! ) Timo Saloniemi
They sure don't look like engines. In some of the better pictures, you can see something behind them, hence "looking like windows", similar to the windows on the refit Enterprise's secondary hull (when the windows were lit in blue instead of red/orange). As far as the Defiant, it has bussard collectors, even if there are no nacelles.
Hmm. 1) Warp engines in Starfleet do have blue-glowing windows, of oddest shapes. 2) What shot could possibly have something behind them? A CGI one? But those had even less detail than the big physical models, on which the individual blue-lit "windows" were tiiiiiiiny. 3) What those "windows" on the refit E-nil were remains an open question, too. They appear to be located right where the lower end of the warp core (or the vertical thingamabob component thereof, anyway) ought to go... And the refit E-nil has nacelles but no collectors. The same as the Excelsior. So a Galaxy saucer should be fine without either component (unless you somehow suggest Bussards and nacelles are interchangeable?). Timo Saloniemi
BoBW has Riker consider needing the "power from the saucer's impulse engines" for some unspecified battle redundancy. I always thought it was the power from the fusion reactors he meant, but perhaps the Galaxy gets an advantage from firing up the extra impulse engines in battle? Be it speed or manoeuvrability. Like the Enterprise-B's extra big engines that don't seem to serve much purpose.
Rick Sternbach wrote that the Galaxy saucer had the ability to sustain a warp field that was generated by the main ship. In other words, the ship would launch the saucer off while at warp, and be able to caost its way out of immediate danger while the rest of the ship turned around to do battle (and better leverage the power from the warp core and actual warp engines). Regarding the Nebula as a science vessel, it may not have been designed as such, but it was certainly featured as such as the USS Prometheus, which was apparently placed at the disposal of one nutjob terraformer scientist and under the command of a mere Junior Grade Lieutenant! In my opinion, THAT Prometheus was probably meant to be some generic science vessel (probably even the Oberth), but someone decided to swap it out for a cooler ship model without really thinking of the repercussion to the Trek nerd community. How DARE they. As for a Miranda equivalent to the Sovereign, perhaps you're thinking of the USS Endeavor, which was more heavily featured in earlier drafts of the script for First Contact, to the point where John Eaves had made several sketches of it. Those sketches were seen in the TNG movie art book, but didn't make it further than the idea phase before later script revisions ditched the idea of the Endeavor as a hero ship, and the Defiant's role became the most featured ship in that battle. Here's a link to said sketch: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/USS_Endeavour_(NCC-71805) Mark
This image looks CGI free and has those arboretum windows lit, less brightly than the blue on the nacelles. I'm sorry, they just look more like windows than anything else to me. This image has them unlit, but it shows how much they face up. This image has them unlit, but looking more slotted than the others. Difference between 2' & 6' (& CGI)?
All due respect: Noooooooo! Unless it is a warp nacelle it does not provide warp power. Even the Defiant has Bussard ramscoops. I'll entertain the idea that a four nacelled Nebula may have a warp powered saucer, but Galaxies and Sovereigns have no such thing. In Encounter at Farpoint the concern was that the saucer would be leaving the warp field not starting the saucers warp drive.
Simple. The arboretum windows are specifically tinted to simulate a blue sky and daylight, that can be interactively adjusted to go clear to look at the stars above to simulate night at the switch of a button. The arboretum windows of the TMP refit had a bluish tint to them as well.
Perhaps it's vice versa, sort of: Riker, student of the school of maneuvering-does-no-good, likes to turn off the red glow of the saucer impulse engines so that all this power can be channeled to the weapons instead? Yup. And then they came and wrote "Arsenal of Freedom" where the saucer is explicitly sent to its merry interstellar way from impulse, not warp, debunking the idea that a warp launch by the stardrive section would be necessary or even useful. No doubt. On a possibly related note, the footage of Nebula class ships docking with DS9 is always shot grossly out of scale. That is, the E-D in the pilot episode was already shot at half the originally intended size, both because the docking looked cooler that way, and because there was a deliberate effort to double the size of the station from the original intent (making the Promenade portholes and the Ops exterior look sorta stupidly scaled). But the Nebulas are smaller still! Should we actually be better off believing in some ship class that looks like Nebula but is "in fact" sized more like a Springfield? Which is completely false, as neither the Defiant nor her Type 18 shuttlepods have nacelles, and do go to warp. And never mind that many alien ships perfectly capable of warp lack nacelles. And the Excelsior, a very prominent starship design, does not. Also, it's difficult to argue that such things should be vital hardware, as all they supposedly do is give some extra mileage. Do today's main battle tanks have a little display teaching the driver the joys of economic gas pedal use? But we know the color of daylight in the real arboretum, and that's not blue. Also, why would such illumination be provided by windows, which are completely useless for the application in deep space and will only serve to fry the poor plants when close to stars? The last thing an arboretum needs is windows! Now, the people going to the arboretum might wish to look at something else besides trees now and then. But they don't need tinted windows, or else the other, more explicit portholes of the ship would also be tinted in all the rainbow colors. The arboretum of the TOS ship had no blue tint anywhere - the same as the arboretum of the TNG ship. Those things with the bluish tint on the refit? Who knows. But as said, they are right where the one truly blue-glowing indoors item, the warp core (or equivalent doodad), ought to be. Timo Saloniemi
Yes, that makes more sense to look at it the other way around. Plus we never really knew what the purpose of the big red glowy vents was - it's obviously not thrust, as they can reverse at impulse power. Is it exhaust? I'm not sure there would be any benefit in having more of them. Is it indication of the presence of an impulse field, similar to the blue nacelles indicating the potential to generate a warp field? There are a whole generation of Starfleet ships without nacelle caps, as well as plenty of alien ones. Obviously the red cap doesn't in itself indicate a bussard collector, but it does perhaps suggest Starfleet toyed with an alternative for 30 or 40 years, then developed a new technology that visibly looked more like the earlier design.
We do know impulse engines have an exhaust, and categorically so: "The thing's gotta have a tailpipe". Is that propulsive exhaust, or just waste products idly bellowing or radiating out? The fact that the glow is on all the time in TNG and ENT suggests the latter; that the glow appears and intensifies in TOS-R when the ship accelerates is in no contradiction, as the engine could be "running on higher revs" when accelerating even if it did not shoot out a propulsive exhaust jet. We may speculate on certain ships having more of a buffer or margin in power output, with the TOS-R ship only ramping up power for accelerations, but with the other ships constantly pumping out excess power for the possible sudden need in weapons, shields or replication. Is there an advantage to having more of the glowing bits? NX-01 has four of them, despite not separating or anything. Perhaps it's good redundancy to have spare "heat radiators" to better manage the varying demands on your powerplant? If OTOH the glow is directly related to the putative impulse field, then big ships might appreciate more of the glowing bits for better coverage. Instead, it seems one is plenty even for a Galaxy, as long as it's a big one. Timo Saloniemi
An adventure where our skilled and professional heroes attempt to force Data out of warp, and succeed, is not much proof of the saucer's abilities one way or another. Initially, they tried to force the attached ship out of warp, and that certainly didn't mean the E-D would have been fundamentally incapable of sustaining warp! We can intepret "Brothers" any way we want. But we can't easily interpret "Encounter at Farpoint" so that the saucer would only be capable of two minutes of independent warp, since it so clearly spends hours at it, and is expected to do so by our stardrive set of heroes. And while we can interpret "Arsenal of Freedom" so that the saucer is incapable of even those two minutes of warp if deployed at impulse, what would be the point? Using a compatible interpretation for all the three episodes (saucer can do warp, since it does warp in two and is supposed to go interstellar in third; saucer can do it independently of initial boost, since there is no boost in one) carries no penalty whatsoever, as there is no storyline that would claim the saucer cannot fly around at warp, and no a priori reason to think a Starfleet vessel or component thereof would lack warp drive. Timo Saloniemi
They don't say anything about forcing it out of warp. They say "fall out of warp", indicating that it can't sustain warp speed on its own. As far as "Farpoint" goes, for all we know, they sent a distress call and the Hood (or some other ship) towed the Enterprise saucer the rest of the way to Deneb IV.
If tiny shuttlecraft can have warp drive, why wouldn't the saucer? Even if it's not got a full warp core, it could easily have a set of warp coils hidden in the trunk. Even if it's just capable of a maximum of warp 2 (like shuttles were said to be), it's still a lot more use as an escape vessel than if it only had impulse. It's irrefutable that the saucer makes interstellar journeys, ergo it must have rudimentary warp capability at least.
So they skipped a few steps in the description of their plan. Big deal - they told us what they were doing, which was getting Data out of warp. The saucer "should fall out of warp" after all is said and done, as the end result of their toilings. Skipping the step of another starship towing the saucer in is in a completely different league! Indeed, the real question here is, do we know of Starfleet spacecraft that are incapable of warp? If so, why did Starfleet leave the warp engines ashore? The TNG Type 15 shuttlepods apparently are incapable of warp - or at least one random craft of that type was stated to lack warp capability (apparently by design, or at least by configuration, rather than due to damage) in "Time Squared", which combined with the fact that the pods were never seen at warp could offset the fact that they have prominent nacelles and sometimes appeared to span interstellar distances. But from that size up (and even with craft of that same size, such as Type 18 from DS9), we know warp is possible. Perhaps Kirk's saucers always had warp, too, and the cases where the warp engines of the ship failed would not have benefited from the abilities of the saucer as the failure would extend to those engines (and onboard shuttle engines etc) as well? Timo Saloniemi