Spoilers SFA Ships & Tech

[Mark_Nguyen]

There are physical connections to the ring and wings, but I can't figure out the logic of when they decide to use them or not.

The saucer moves in sync with the wing when not physically connected, so there must be some sort of invisible energy field that keeps them together. Same with theea, other ships with detatched nacelles.

Yeah, the transformation of the various sections has been a head scratcher for me. The "baseline" is really just the Discovery-A, which pretty uniformly flew with nacelles detached at STL speeds, but attached them whenever they executed a spore drive jump or standard warp. All other ships of the era until the Athena flew with permanently detached nacelles, which stayed in place even when digging their saucer into a planet nose first (as seen with the USS Antares in "Red Directive").

Here, the Athena was seen retracting her saucer cross bridges when she went into warp in "Kids These Days", but in this episode the bridges were in place at warp when we see the shuttle leave its bay. Meanwhile, the nacelles (which have two distinct kinds of structure, the "feathers" and the nacelles themselves), are always detached, but unfurl into a larger configuration for warp and condense themselves back when moving to STL. Methinks that the cross bridges and the warp nacelle configuration are two separately-managed things, or perhaps the bridges are retracted for transition to warp but can be extended afterwards. Or maybe they were in place because of all the partying and the ship just needed the extra volume for student activities..?

Still, all of this is weird considering the Disco refit ditched her own cross bridges entirely, reducing her overall volume (along with the cutouts in the engineering hull) as well as a convenient way for crew to walk between the sections of the saucer.

Mark

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Also, WHY did they leave the atrium section behind? It didn’t have a tractor beam on it, and contains stuff like the main shuttlebay, torpedo launchers, and.. warp slugs, among things. Any of these could be useful if it’s just you against the whole Venari Ral (though I’m positive they’ll be getting some lies pretty quickly).

Mark

 

[tenmei]

Also, WHY did they leave the atrium section behind? It didn’t have a tractor beam on it, and contains stuff like the main shuttlebay, torpedo launchers, and.. warp slugs, among things. Any of these could be useful if it’s just you against the whole Venari Ral (though I’m positive they’ll be getting some lies pretty quickly).

Mark

Saucer can't go to solo warp with it attached? They left it behind in 1x04 too.

 

[Ronald Held]

Saucer can't go to solo warp with it attached? They left it behind in 1x04 too.

Why is that so?

 

[tenmei]

Why is that so?

Just a guess based on what we've seen, maybe the ventral fin of the neck destabilises the warp field created by the saucers secondary engines.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

It's a valid point - while we've seen some pretty crazy hull configurations in this era of Starfleet, the Athena saucer was probably optimized to fly or warp without the neck. We've only really seen three flight modes:

- Everything together
- Nacelles separated (for eventual landing in "campus" mode)
- Saucer only

Furthermore we know the nacelles have at least two configurations for warp and STL flight, and the cross bridges can retract for... Reasons.

I fully think that all the sections can fly independently at STL speeds, though whether they're designed to do so for tactical purposes or for aesthetics is up for debate.

Mark

 

[CaptChris42]

1x09 and an expected cliffhanger! Quick notes:

- The depiction of the Omega-47 "barrier" doesn't really make any sense. If they're mines, they're points on this scale and not a wall of any sense. What's creating the red barrier? And at a scale of hundreds or thousands of light years, any observable portion of it from the ship would be a solid flat surface without curvature.

- Not to mention that unless these mines can be set off by various transits through FTL methods not in regular space, then anyone using a transwarp conduit, spore drive, dimensional shift, time travel, etc. should be able to blink past the thing. Just saying, Starfleet should have options.

From the map I've seen so far, the mines seem to mainly be around the old Federation 'core', a diametre of maybe 80 light years? But more could have been activated later, within the context of the scene.

So it's unclear just how many were involved. Still, the depiction isn't exactly high on realism, so far (as is scaling of relative stars, as I recall)

 

[137th Gebirg]

I'm glad they at least showed a 3D "bubble" of sorts from a distance surrounding Fed space, even though it's kind of hokum. The maps they've been showing look way too "2D" to be taken seriously.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

In reality, there are some 10,000+ actual stars within 80-100 ly of Earth. Star Trek may or may not take that into account in most maps, and of course they'd ignore uninhabited systems (though logically, most if not all stars will have SOME natural satellites around them). I do wonder though, between terraforming (which was already in full swing by the 2300s) and general colonization, whether every star with a planet in its habitable zone WOULD have sentients on it by the 3190s. That could mean hundreds or thousands of inhabited worlds in that same space!

Mark

 

[137th Gebirg]

Don't forget about the Burn. There may have been thousands of colonies 100% dependent exclusively on warp-travel-delivered supplies from Federation core worlds that were cut off when all the dilithium went foom. Such colonies would have, sadly, all gone extinct through lack of supplies if they couldn't find alternative resources on their respective planets. If they were domed colonies on hostile planets incapable of naturally sustaining humanoid life, they would have been dead within months.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Well, if they had a dilithium-governed reactor like on Qo'nos, they'd be just fin-- ohhh. :P

I'd debate as to whether or not many planets would have gone extinct without interstellar trade. Granted, the Federation has always had a version of globalist economics at play, with systems / powers that HAVE stuff being able to export to places that don't and vice versa. But ecologically-speaking, most colonies we've seen in Trek (especially the early, wagon-train types being set up in TOS and TNG) seem to be wisely focused on self-sustainability, growing crops and such. As long as the environment was stable and the land arable, a local population could sustain itself indefinitely. Whether or not it would be able to prosper and grow without advanced technology imports is another matter.

Still, you have a fair point in that the Burn would have kaiboshed a LOT of trade by making it impossible to sustain at scale. And how long WOULD it take to re-establish a galactic trade network that had been evolving for thousands of years? Discovery really glossed over how bad things really should have been, dropping off camtonos full of dilithium as if that would fix everything instantly...

Mark