Does warp drive work (or work efficiently) on ships when one nacelle is damaged/destroyed?

I believe Voyager was able to travel in warp during Year of Hell with only one working nacelle, albeit not very efficiently. This may have happened again during Voyager, but I don't remember it happening in any other series. I used to think early on that a ship needed both nacelles to be working in some capacity for warp drive to work, but this seems to be incorrect.

 

pretty sure the NX01 limped along on one nacelle at one point

 

With one nacelle out of action in "Twilight", NX-01 could reach warp 1.7. With both functioning, they could just exceed warp 5.

 

That's a good point. I forgot about that episode.

 

From past episodes, Warp does work with 1 nacelle, though the speed is greatly reduced. I'm guessing ships with only 1 nacelle are balanced for it, or have 2 sets of coils in the 1 nacelle..
So the ones with 2 nacelles are balanced to have 2, and if 1 is out, the 1 isnt enough to cover the entire ship efficently..
Of course.. all a bunch of mubojumbo.. Just past on screen stuffs.

 

Depends on the plot

 

I'm sure I've seen notes from the writers posted online or in a BTS book, with the idea of Voyager losing a nacelle and having it replaced with an alien one. I think they abandoned it because they wouldn't be able to reuse any stock footage flybys of the ship anymore.

 

The concept of the ship mutating every fifteenth episode, perhaps starting with "Scorpion" and keeping some visible Borg parts first and then adding other alien stuff, might have been worth the expense. Technically, there were no showstoppers, as we did get the Borgified or the "Living Witness" falsified exterior etc. Perhaps a new set of stock footage for each season would have been the way to go... Also, there could have been delightful individual flash-forward eps where the "future" ship ended up looking truly weird, differently so in each future.

For the most part, the writers seem to be treating the nacelles as propellers, through which the power of the warp core can be translated to motion. Losing one means losing speed and probably agility, too; even having two calls for careful balancing akin to minding the vibration harmonics of multiple propellers in a boat or a plane. And the number of nacelles is not directly related to speed in any obvious way. But even this may be reading too much into it all, the tech really being a blank slate that does not limit the stories in any particular way. We never get a plotlet where hurting of one nacelle would be a specifically effective way of making a two-naceller go in circles, say: any such lopsided damage is painted in dialogue/technobabble as resulting in deeper and more generic trouble with the whole power train. Except in the above two VOY and ENT episodes, that is.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I don't believe Voyager ever went to Warp on one nacelle, but I'm sure it's happened in dialogue that they lost power to one of them. Maybe memory alpha would have the answer.

There's also two episodes where they repair them. In "Blood Fever," they find a rare element that is used for Warp coils, and use it to "refit" them. And in "Nightingale," they have to land to repair one of the nacelles, and it shows how they remove the Warp coils to work on them.

 

Also don’t forget the Ent D saucer section. 0 nacelles, but no apparent issues being at warp.

 

At least with fan art, unless something canon exists, those ships with one nacelle - what happens if it gets damaged and they can't warp anywhere to get replacements... this is outer space, even with the Federatrion equivalent to AAA it's going to take a lot of time for another starship to stop by for repairing or towing.

 

That always bugged me too, in "Encounter at Farpoint" - now maybe it's due to velocity not being affected in outer space, as the saucer did still travel along a straight line. And it was the engineering hull that turned around afterward but it still overlooks the big issue of "let's lump everyone together in this barrel and hope someone stops by and aren't out on a fishing spree"...

 

The saucer section was still inside the warp bubble of the star drive and both parts of the ship were slowed down to impulse before the star drive turned around to head back into battle.

The intention was that the saucer section would always be a lifeboat type section of the ship that the star drive would return to once the threat had been neutralised.

 

The thing about the saucer in "Farpoint": no matter whether it stopped or just made a warp speed U-turn when we weren't looking, it did fly at high warp for at least an hour after the incident.

That is, the combined ship was still short of Deneb IV when Q made them turn tail and head to the exact opposite direction (as easily seen by comparing with Q's wall of chainmail) for at least several minutes at the highest warp they could muster and then some. The saucer would have to undo that voyage all on her own. Would it be slower than the stardrive section? Faster? Likely to take the long way around in case Q was still lurking? Hard to tell. But the idea of the saucer being slower than light doesn't really work there. (Unless we assume the combined ship at her highest possible warp was still going sublight, that is. Perhaps the lack of warp stars in the separation scene is indicative of that?)

Warping entirely without nacelles isn't particularly difficult. Most ships in Trek do so! It's just that many Starfleet ships have nacelles. Or then other blue-glowing bits, of which the E-D saucer also has plenty.

Timo Saloniemi

 

In the Star Fleet Battles universe, a ship only needs one working Impulse Engine to make FTL speed. It'll be much slower and/or done in short hops, but it'll get you home in a pinch.

 

As usual, it's whatever the plot requires. In the TNG episode "The Chase," the Cardassian ships each targeted a single nacelle of the Enterprise and the Klingon ship to leave them stranded (only achieving this against the Klingons).

 

If the Cardassians ship can travel at Warp 9, and disabling a nacelle on the Enterprise makes it so they can only travel at Warp 1, then they are effectively stranded in this case, since the Cardassians were trying to get there first.

It would be the equivalent of the Cardassians traveling Mach 4 while the Enterprise has to get out and walk.

 

That's not supported by what the Klingons say, or their situation of being totally stuck. Again, according to the plotline.

 

Vulcans used ring drives instead of nacelles, and earth tried using them as well. What is a saucer but a ring with some bits filled in?

 

The only way I can figure it, without the saucer having some kind of warp engine, is the separate happened basically in the Deneb system.