And here's a man casually standing less than ten feet from a 2-metre chamber pressurised to 715 atmospheres and heated to 2.5 million Kelvin, generating potentially terawatts of power. Trek technology seems to have very different standards for health and safety than we do today. Specifically in the case of Bussard collectors we know that the field generators (the red bits) and the intake vents (the... venty bits) are separate, and the field generated by the Bussards should be tightly focused ahead of the ship to only ionise gas directly in the ship's path, or else you're just wasting energy. It shouldn't be any more dangerous than having your quarters near a phaser emitter in that regard, though I agree the omnipresent baleful red glow might get a little tiresome. There's a separate issue with the Steamrunner's intake vents being mounted on the sides of the nacelle booms behind the saucer, but if the Excelsior class managed to use its Bussards effectively then the Steamrunner shouldn't have an issue.
I think we can assume that shielding technology has evolved parallel to warp core tech between the early-mid 23rd century (when it was dangerous to have warp engines so close to living areas) and late-23rd thru 24th centuries, where it wasn't quite a big deal. I mean, the very nature of warp power changed over time, with TOS claiming in-dialogue that the power was generated by the nacelles. By TMP, things were changing to M/AM intermix happening inside the engineering area, regulated by dilithium crystals that were located...somewhere...and finally by TNG, we settled onto the image seen above, following the currently accepted architecture. It was joked about within fan circles many decades back that the late 23rd century saw interesting experimentation with different kinds of warp configurations, leading to the Klingon crew in TSFS to go insane, with the warp core and internalized nacelles being all contained within the hull of the ship. The deleterious effect of the intermix process being in close proximity, poorly shielded, and for such a prolonged duration, scrambled Kruge's brain so far as to: Violate the neutral zone under cloak (whose extended use also may have contributed to long-term crew dementia) Fire upon a feebly-armed innocent science vessel Engage in the dishonorable act of taking prisoners Engage in the further dishonorable act of ordering the murder of said-prisoners Fighting in a burning house...er...planet By the time the Defiant and Steamrunner came around, the Federation clearly worked out the kinks in such a system.
As far as that goes, there really isn't any difference whether the window is right there beside it or just in front of it like on the Constitution Class. On most designs the Bussard collectors have to work around the saucer and are fairly close to the saucer. I really don't think there is a dangerous area around the Busard. I think the dangerous area is the warp field coils in the back.
You make a very good point. It is quite clear that from NX through Excelsior and Constellation that Starfleet is after speed, but the advances after that seem to include a lot of safely. Not so much making the ship's faster (Which they are, but not by much) but increasing the efficiency and safety of the systems leading to designs where these systems no longer have to be pushed out from the hull. Though I have to point out that TOS was pretty vague about the whole anti-matter power system. The dilithium crystals were in main engineering from the get go, but how they fit in to the main power system and where the main power system was and how it functioned was left deliberately vague until That Which Survives in the third season. That introduced that there was an anti-matter stream inside the ship that controlled the warp field power and ship speed at warp. Scotty had to manipulate the anti-matter stream to repair the system and stop the ship from destroying itself. So TOS was always a dicotomy of lets keep these things far from where people are and let's have the people be able to fix things from inside the ship. In TMP the warp plasma stream becomes the focus of the system with the visible warp core. But still that matter/anti-matter mix chamber is at the base of the vertical column near the anti-matter chambers. That glowing core is the post mix plasma headed to the three engines, warp and impulse. And for TNG, that mix chamber has moved up to main engineering and the dilithium cyrstals are now key to the mix, where in TOS and TWOK they were key to the ship's main power. And per the Hathaway, this change happened early in the Constellation Class, so that class was probably one of the first built that way. I know a lot of TOS tech fans tend to discount That Which Survives, but I see it as fitting with the rest of the franchise and finally providing some explanation for things that had been vague before that. My entire philosophy of how to interpret TOS tech lies with looking at where it was taken and extrapolating backwards. So for the TOS Enterprise I look to the TMP Enterprise, which was more thought out and logical and then look back to what in TOS can lead to that. TOS has a log of contradictory dialog so focusing on what in TOS best matches TMP is as good a way of filtering out those contradictions as any and it leads to a more consistent Trek universe. I did have one theory that the Ent A had pioneered the new style warp core because they used the revamped TNG engine room for the Ent A engine room, but that was based on Johnson's interpretation of the Ent A systems, which Michael Okuda says were incorrect (and since he did them he should know). So I haven't figured out if moving the intermix from lower decks where in was in TOS and TMP to main engineering really impacts the warp power and speed or if it is just more efficient to monitor and adjust. Is that move part of the slowly diminishing goal of going faster or part of the start of the goal of making things more efficient?
Sorry for the late reply. I was referring to the swapped registry number for the U.S.S. Zhukov (NCC-62136 to 26136.) Memory Alpha states that the 62136 number was a production error, but I don't believe that. Mainly because there was an Okudagram shiplist shown in a previous episode which also had the Zhukov's registry as 62136, and its class as Rigel. Upon the discovery that the Zhukov model was in fact a different model than the Ambassador class Enterprise-C (and with minor but significant changes throughout the new model), I think that Greg Jein envisioned the Zhukov to be a separate, newer and more upgraded class of ship than the Ambassador, but then it was later decided to keep it as a different version of the Ambassador. Since they thought the original Rigel class registry number was too high for an Ambassador, they swapped the first two numbers. However, in my opinion that made the registry too low, considering there were already Excelsiors on that list with higher registries.
I have no problem with an Excelsior with a higher registry than an Ambassador. Registry numbers have only a loose connection to when a ship was built or commissioned. And I think the registry can be changed once a ship has been put in storage. So reactivating it might give it a higher registry. Perhaps current, perhaps using up a skipped registry. If they were chronological, no Excelsior should have a registry higher than 10xxx. But they do. Many of them do. I agree, I don't have a problem with the Ambassador class having a registry of 62136. There needs to be an answer to the discrepancy, but there isn't a good reason to go either way, except which was used more consistently.
If you look at the earlier drafts, the intention was always that the action take place in one of the nacelles. The earliest draft below is more vague but the second nails it (extracts provided by Alchemist) Here's how the Revised Story Outline for "Survival" (August 8, 1968) describes the situation: The matter-antimatter control is inoperative; it has been inexplicably and totally destroyed. Scott can fix it, if he begins now... but he might not have enough time. The area where he must work is tight and cramped -- room for just one man. Scott scrambles in and gets to work. The uncontrolled matter-antimatter mixture that provides warp power is almost out of control and will explode in ten minutes -- more or less. At this point, it's impossible to tell -- and just one man can do the job: Scott. Kirk clears the entire "disposable" warp nacelle area, moving all personnel into the saucer section. If they must jettison the nacelles, it is understood by both Scott and Kirk that Scott might not have the time to get out before the thing blows. And here's how the relevant part appears in the First Draft of "That Which Survives" (September 9, 1968): INT. CRAWLWAY - CLOSE - SCOTT SCOTT All right, Mr. Spock, I'm now opening the access panel to the magnetic flow valve itself. Keep your eye on the dial. If there's a jump in magnetic flow you must jettison me and the entire matter-antimatter nacelle immediately. It will blow in two seconds after the rupture of the magnetic field. In the final episode they replaced the term "nacelle" with "pod" but those names were used interchangeably throughout TOS anyway. It's only later versions of Trek where "pod" came to be associated with antimatter storage.
I am not terribly concerned with what the script said, only what we see in the final episodes. There were so many changes from script to screen that scripts are not of much use. The final episode is where we get the final output of the creative process and in That Which survives we see for the very first time where the anti-matter/mater integrator is. It is a new set just for this episode and it wasn't used again. And according to Scotty, "I've sealed off the aft end of the service crawlway, and I've positioned explosive separator charges to blast me clear of the ship if I rupture the magnetic bottle." which indicates that he has basically created the first jettison system for a warp core in case of a breach. So he is not talking about a saucer separation to jettison the secondary hull and nacelles, which was brought up 2 other times, but specifically the anti-matter feed to the integrator (or intermix chamber as it is later called). Everything before this episode was very vague as to how the system works. We knew from The Naked Time that the formula was complex and that refiguring it for lower temperatures was difficult. But we are never told where the reaction takes place. I have several theories about that, but I think that the process has remained somewhat consistent from ENT to TOS to TNG in terms of how the Warp engines work. The question is if the reaction is 100% in the warp core or if there is a secondary reaction in the nacelles. Some thing the reaction is entirely in the nacelles and then power is fed back down to the ship, but between Obsession and That Which Survives, I think a single anti-matter source is more likely. It is fed into the integrator/mix chamber, then plasma travels to the energizer and the warp nacelles where it activates the warp field coils which generate the warp field. I think it is possible that the matter the bussards pull in is used to ensure a clean "burn" of the anti-matter by doing a final mix with additional matter in the nacelles. But you are quite right that pods often referred to the nacelles in TOS. They had not nailed down the terminology and it varied a lot. That is why I put more store in what we see over what the characters say. Jefferies actually had a lot of say over the sets where he didn't over the scripts. So what we see is much less varied than the dialog, though even there we have a lot of things that are one offs for individual episodes. That Which Survives is critical not because it agrees with the other episodes, but because what it shows becomes the foundation for what we see in TMP and TNG and Enterprise and it does not conflict with the other episodes which mainly focus on dilithium crystals and their various uses in the processing of main power.
I agree that the final version on screen must be taken on it's own merits, but the earlier drafts can give us an idea of how to interpret nonspecific or ambiguous scenes. For example; Scott is working on the malfunctioning matter/antimatter integrator and has set up an explosives to blast him clear of the ship in case of emergency, but Spock already has a "pod jettison system" button in place on the Bridge. This system of jettisoning the pods (nacelles) was mentioned once before by Kirk in The Apple and will be mentioned again in The Savage Curtain. All this leans towards Scott being stuck in a single nacelle and using the earlier drafts as further guidance it is pretty clear that this is what the intention was. However I agree that if we take TWS in isolation from the rest of TOS it is possible to interpret the Enterprise's engineering setup as being the same as in TMP or TNG I think it would be more accurate to say that the terminology established on TOS got revised into the current form later on. For example, "pods" was the term used in diagrams, FX control board and other backstage materials and was used 8 times throughout the show compared to 5 times for "nacelles". I can see why they changed it, as "nacelle" has far more specific connotations compared to "pod" which is incredibly generic. It's certainly possible to interpret the episode that way, but it does require us to discard all the other nacelle focused references in TOS which are incompatible with the TMP/TNG engineering setup.
My point was that they really aren't incompatible because those other references usually don't concern anti-matter storage or the matter/anti-matter mixing process. What we have in That Which Survives is unique in terms of what it shows and covers. The other references are to anti-matter pods or nacelles or some very vague reference to the engines or something. Nothing is consistent or exact, but when we get to Obession, we have the ability to siphon off some anti-matter into a portable containment vessel and in That Which Survives we see a service crawlway that runs parallel to the antimatter stream on what appears to be a normal deck and this is the point where Scotty can adjust the magnetic containment to restrict the anti-matter and slow the ship. There are elsewhere vauge references to reactors, but no specific reference to where the matter/anti-matter reaction actually takes place. So That Which Survives is very specific and very in line with where the technology went, so I feel quite comfortable dumping the references that don't fit as approximations or laymans references rather than anything specific.
Whee, golly, some stuff. I'm-a winnow a bit... A longer discussion could be had here about glowing-bubble version versus dark-grille version, line-of-sight, field strength and shape, distances from various structures... I feel most material depicts the glowing-bubble version (as with the Galaxy and Steamrunner, here) as projecting a higher-energy narrow-but-spreading field out ahead along the direction of flight to charge stray interstellar matter, and then lower-energy short-range and more lateral-flaring fields to draw the charged particles into the accumulators. So I can see hull-integrity fields being proof against that acquisition-field energy and the higher-powered fields never hit the hull... But it feels like an unnecessary risk to take, when there's no reason I can see to embed the engine structure that thoroughly in the habitable hull. The Saber was fine with the engines attached just a smidge more outboard, as discrete units. The first century is characterized by getting more distance-covered-in-elapsed-time out of the engines. Bigger coils, fusion giving way to antimatter, Duotronics and other boons to navigation... The second century is characterized by by endurance and safety. By making the power-generation and -delivery, and field-generation systems more robust and reliable, they were able to roll out a class (Intrepid) that had a sustainable cruising speed of warp 9.975 (new scale). Once they refined the warp scale and determined the true asymptotic nature of it, better nailed down the integral warp factors, and determined a theoretical maximum set by diminishing returns... They knew they could reach warp nine easily enough, so the focus shifted to being able to hang there longer, and also see how well they could stably mount the decimals past warp 9. I feel the Excelsior had a lot ot do with this, as did the Constellation, and the lessons learned were applied to the Ambassador and Galaxy. Now we get into terminology and perception, and I need to do a lot of word-pruning... Regarding antimatter, dilithium, and what's where: The earliest dichotomy was off-screen, before sets were built. Matt was all about a nice, refined future-tech, with the engine pods being wholly self-contained, apart from control leads, power taps, and other ancillary systems running through the pylons, and an engineering control room more like a computer center or nuclear power plant. Gene wanted a big boiler room "belowdecks", as you'd find on an old ocean liner. Matt felt that was amazingly primitive, but Gene was the showrunner, so that's what he made, complete with the forced-perspective reactor farm in its cavernous high-bay visible out the aft grille of the set. Maybe it's matter and antimatter fuel stores somewhere in the secondary hull, integrated somewhere near the main engineering set -- possibly in those reactors... or maybe those are the backup fusion reactors -- "tuned" through the dilithium crystals, and then the plasma carrying the energy out to the engines. Where Scotty was crawling in "TWS" was the TOS analogue of the horizontal shaft in TMP. Except. The biggest problem is the nacelle domes. All those neat lighting effects were meant to depict some otherworldly-powerful reaction going on that powered the engines trailing behind them. Whether Richard Datin had only heard Matt's notion of the reaction being entirely self-contained to the nacelles, I do not know. "That Which Survives" gives us the integrator in the secondary hull, near Main Engineering. Do we know what it's integrating is matter with antimatter? I can make a lot of reasonable conjecture about needing the reaction as close to the coils as possible for a long time until containment tech improved enough that they could maintain plasma energy density all the way from the integrator to the coils by the time things like the TMP setup came along. The "reaction" in the nacelle domes needs to be explained away somehow, though. Except that that "main power" was needed for warp drive. If it was just non-warp-engine-related shipboard power, why didn't they just warp far enough away to be clear of the blast and then continue repairs? Whatever that silly pedestal was, it was added after TMP, and was necessary for warp drive. I feel like dilithium was necessary from TOS on for higher warp factors and/or better engine performance... It would still go, without, but not as fast/not as well. And that, for some reason, when that pedestal was added, something like the phaser-cutoff in TMP tripped when the crystals were knocked out of alignment that cut off warp drive. I feel like the dilithium chamber being mounted inline with the intermix conduits, rather than separate, was an Excelsior-class thing that was incorporated into the -A. And that aspect of it works well. They fudged the angles so the one PTC we saw was implied to be the "horizontal intermix shaft" leading back to the nacelles a la TMP, and having the TNG style reactant injection setup leaves me wondering how the -A's impulse engines are powered. Or the Excelsior with its own impulse deflection crystal. Needed to have a vertical intermix shaft like Voyager's. So we're left to shrug helplessly and try to rationalize it. [clarification snipped] Ah, right, that. I set that aside mentally, years ago, to deal with later, and never got back to it. Did we ever get pics of the Rigel class model Greg built for the Zhukov? My preference would be to go with that. As yotsuya said, that's not a factor. Post-NCC-2500, there's only a few things to be gleaned from the registries: Roughly when Flight I and Flight II Ambassadors were launched, roughly when batches of Excelsiors were ordered to build up the fleet, and roughly when some classes stopped being built in quantity. 62136 is definitely outside the generally accepted range for an Ambassador, whereas the swapped registry fits nicely in the Flight II Ambassadors. Never mind what Excelsior numbers are doing. I highly doubt it. The only indications of revising the hull number of an extant vessel have been slapping a replica of an older registry on it (Enterprises and Defiant). ...Why? If it's just a matter of when they were built, and Starfleet decided they wanted some well into the 2330s, why wouldn't the hull numbers reflect that? I think you're missing something. In "The Apple", the way the line is written implies that when Kirk orders Scotty to "jettison the nacelles", he's including the secondary hull in that. In the draft you quoted, Kirk is moving all personnel into the saucer in case they have to jettison the nacelles. Why, if the secondary hull would still be there? And, later, the draft references the "entire matter-antimatter nacelle". Singular. He's not crawling around in one of the outrigger engines. He's crawling around in what we consider the secondary hull. At this point in the show, at least some people apparently are still thinking of it as a nacelle, dependent from the main hull of the saucer, and with the engine pods standing off from it. Or... Spock is ready to blow the engines clear if Scotty can't stop it, or if he ruptures the magnetic bottle and those unrelated explosive charges need to be detonated. The engines are referred to as pods and nacelles inconsistently. From the setpieces, they seem to be "pods" as far as official shipboard nomenclature. Also from the draft and from this and other episodes, the engineering hull is referred to never as that in TOS, but when it's referred to at all, it's as a "nacelle". We only ever see "pod" applied to the engines themselves (not counting the specifically-named "ion pod" from "Court Martial"), we only ever see the secondary hull called a "nacelle", and we sometimes hear all three referred to, separately or collectively, as "nacelles", but should not take dialogue as technically correct, as one or another character may be using verbal shorthand or be speaking in error or misinterpretation. Scotty was near Main Engineering in "TWS", ready for the reactant-injection subassembly he was in to be explosively ejected in case of catastrophic breach. And, meanwhile, Spock was ready on the bridge to blow the engines clear if the runaway warp reaction couldn't be stopped. Logically, the chance of the vessel being destroyed if he did that was better than the certainty if its uncontrolled flight were allowed to continue. That was the contingency in case Scott failed.
Well, that was the point I was making: the "Rigel class model" of the Zhukov Jein built was the second model made from the Enterprise-C mold, initially thought to be the same model as the Ent-C until recently when it was in fact found to be otherwise. It is only my speculation that Jein considered this model to be a Rigel class starship rather than an Ambassador class variant. https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/ambassador/zhukov-top-box.jpg
Interesting. I don't think the secondary hull was ever called a nacelle. A nacelle is the housing around an engine. Technically the M/AM reaction is not resulting in thrust so it isn't an engine, just like in a nuclear powered ship the reactor is not the engine. The engine is the steam turbine. In warp ships, the engine is the warp coils, activated by the warp plasma, which is what makes the nacelles so dangerous and one of the reasons for them being out on pylons away from the hull. And when they talk about separating the ship it is never truly clear if the ship splits at the neck or the pylons. The behind the scene tech has it at the top of the neck (Franz Joseph and then Andrew Probert). And in That Which Survives it is clear from the dialog that the explosive charge and separation that Scotty had implemented is what is going to be triggered from the bridge. It is not two separate functions. And Jefferies did have access to the nacelles in his plan. Just a small room at the top of the pylon, but still, access. They could have had Scotty climb up the Jefferies tube to that other horizontal crawlspace. Instead he walks over to it and had two engineers help him in. So the set is pretty clearly in the engineering hull somewhere and it leads to the anti-matter stream. You wouldn't want to store in in the hull and run it up to both nacelles (that is a lot of magnetic ducting that could go wrong), so you have the reaction in the hull and duct the plasma (which needs a similar magnetic ducting, but for heat reason not reaction reasons which makes it far safer to use over that long distance). And I think Jefferies cross section has some features that can be interpreted to be part of the engine core. So I put the pieces together and we get a simple engineering model that is in use from NX-01 to the Sovereign and Intrepid classes without much change. And Starfleet was definitely pushing speed from the NX project (also called the warp 5 project) through at least the Excelsior. Warp 5 to warp 15 in just over a century isn't bad. It was all about going faster.
I think you are confusing Jein's studio models with the duplicates he made later for sale. Every major model he made had unlit copies available for sale. Only one Ambassador Class model appeared in the Star Trek series and it was modified after removing the Ent C battle damage. Also, that link doesn't work.
No. The Enterprise-C and the Zhukov/Excalibur/Yamaguchi are two separate and distinct models. It was assumed for many years that the Ent-C was refurbished into the Zhukov, but a private collector (and member of this BBS) has the original Enterprise-C model in his collection (with the battle damage still retained) while the Yamaguchi was sold at Christie's auction. And link is fixed.
Well, that has not been backed up as yet. According to Memory Alpha "The relatively radical redesign has actually led to some fan speculation that a second Ambassador-class model was built by Jein, but that notion was conclusively dispelled by several production staffers, who affirmed that Jein had indeed extensively modified the existing Enterprise-C model." I'm not sure what staffers, but I suspect that Sternbach, Okuda, and Kerr would be ones to ask.
Oh! Oh, Greg, no. Didn't you do enough damage with "The Case for Jonathan Doe Starship?" Yeah, no, I, for some reason, thought he'd made something else prior to doing a re-pop of Enterprise-C bits and modding them. I don't think the cowlings on the Bussard ramscoops, different deflector, additional aft hangar, and the saucer mounted slightly further aft make a new class. I just treated that as the Heavy Cruiser configuration of the class, versus the Enterprise-C's Explorer (same with Excelsior vis-a-vis Enterprise-B and Enterprise-D vis-a-vis Venture). Yes, I know that. Some of Star Trek's writers seem to not have. The line in "The Apple" has always bugged me for that reason, and this, now, from "TWS". Reference to ejecting the nacelle, singular, makes no sense if the other engine would still be going full-tilt. And besides, why would Scotty be up in one engine, when, again, both are on runaway? So I take it to mean that Scotty's near Main Engineering to access the intermix and has created a system to eject the integrator when Spock blows the engine pods, and the writers just don't know their terminology. The behind-the-scenes tech since well after the show ended. FJ never watched the show, except bits and pieces when his daughter had it on. He got most of his information from The Making of Star Trek and made a lot of errors as a result. And his booklet of plans wasn't published until '74. The Jefferies section view shows a pretty integrated ship from saucer through neck to secondary. The fan-tech depiction of the TOS saucer separated and landed was from later still, and Andy, using FJ as primary guide, made his own errors when carrying FJ's stuff forward to the TMP refit. None of that was present during the development or production of TOS. Then he must have tied it into an already-existing engine pod jettison switch, because that looked like a standard piece of equipment Spock had. Perhaps. There's a passage up the pylon and that small box at the top. Could be personnel access and a monitor room, could be a plasma conduit and manifold. Without labels, there's not much way to know what any of the stuff in Jefferies' '67 section view is/might be. I agree with all of that. Yep... But NX was an alternate timeline. Cochrane managed warp 1 in 2063. Two hundred years later, the Constitution class was rated for warp 8, but the Enterprise managed faster than that on several occasions. If progress was anything resembling logarithmic, the halfway point would see the time period of Enterprise doing well to have made it to warp 3 and be pushing for warp 4. But not in a ship nearly the size of TOS' NCC-1701 of a century later (and not considering no one batted an eye at seeing an NX-01-A named Dauntless rather than Enterprise). There are a few hills I'll die on, and one is that I don't care how much The Powers That Be insist they are: Enterprise, Discovery, and Picard are not part of the timeline we saw from 1966 through mid-2001.
Well, we will have to disagree on some of that. I consider Enterprise and Picard to be part of the same universe as TOS, TMP, TNG, DS9 and Voyager. Discovery is some close but different universe moving in a similar and yet different timeline. The Kelvin timeline is the same (and I don't mean after they change the past... the USS Kelvin has no place in the TOS timeline). I love how they brought in the single nacelle designs, but otherwise that timeline has nothing to offer.
Memory Alpha is wrong. The member who owns the model sent me photos of it. There were two models built. Take my word for it.