Deck Plans VI: The Undiscovered Bowling Alley

Sounds as reasonable explanation as any

I must admit I'm not too familiar with all the ins and outs of "Enterprise", but what things did the "temporal reset" actually reset? It seemed to me that most of the Temporal Cold War activities were fairly limited in their scope of influence.

 

I use that as the escape clause for anything prior to Season Four that doesn't fit. The reset snipped that bit out, whatever that bit might be.

 

Ah, gotcha. I shan't dig further

 

It only becomes a pain if anybody ever attempts to go through the series and figure out exactly which bit fits in with the overall chronology and which gets the boot.

It's kinda like the orientation of the bridge. Imagining it as facing forward only becomes troublesome when you start to do the math.

 

Fortunately, I'm not inclined to re-watch Enterprise and do this

As for the bridge orientation, I think maths is the least of your worries - what about the army of Off-Centre-ers? Actually on a 1080' ship there's enough room to do a little jiggling with whatever orientation you fancy, because the bridge dome is that bit bigger. It's trying to squeeze a forward facing bridge into a 947' that starts to run out room for the turbolift. The SciFi Pub cutaway poster is a good example of this.

 

I could spend a couple of days on the errors in that SciFi Pub cutaway.

Anyhoo, the cross-section put out by the studio appears to have warp coils in the nacelles, so it looks like it's the standard general model for Earth/Federation warp drives.

I've got a preliminary sketch I worked up on an Einstein's Bagels receipt which I'll be transcribing shortly for a reworking of the nacelle's innards. As a preview, I've decided to dispense with the Bussard collectors entirely.

 

Sounds fascinating - are you on about the TOS-E or the NX01?

 

Back to NCC-1701. NX-01 has been handled by far more talented than I.

 

Really, where? I think that's worth a look!

 

Regarding your bussard-less warp system, you're not by chance simply relocating it are you? The area around the dish has been posited as a suitable intake for both TOS and TMP (and by different people). Unfortunately this notion never seems to have made it onto blueprints.

Or are you ditching the “collect ya fuel” aspect altogether?

 

There's nothing canonical about the Constitution class having Bussards (truth be told, the first time we have anything on screen about any ship having 'em is the E-D), and we've seen the same swirly domes on ships that we can be pretty safe in assuming don't have that feature, so I'm really not all that worried about dumping the ramscoops altogether, never mind taking them out of the nacelles.

Besides, the Bussards have nothing to do with the warp drive. Tradition just puts them both in the nacelles, but in function, they really have nothing to do with each other.

 

The Phoenix didn't even go out as far as Mars, so Bussards would be next to useless. And, IIRC, as the warp nacelles are getting ready for the jump, there's a version of that fanblade effect starting up under those domes.

Also, there are a few times in TOS, particularly in "The Doomsday Machine", where conserving fuel is a major concern. If the ship was equipped with some version of a Bussard ramscoop, then why the concern about conserving fuel? One of the benefits of a Bussard system is the faster you go, the more fuel you gather.

 

Interstellar clouds of hydrogen have very low density, a starship may have to be moving at warp speed to gather enough gas to make it worth activating the bussard collector. Because of the solar wind, the necessary density might not exist inside of a star system. On the other hand the bussard collector might gather a star's solar wind as fuel.

Maybe one of these can help.

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/3594/starfleetvesselenterpri.jpg

http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/3594/starfleetvesselenterpri.jpg

http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/3594/starfleetvesselenterpri.jpg

 

I don't think so...

All three are coming back as 404 Not Found...

 

Worked fine for me. And, y'know, they just might be useful.

Thinking back on Cary's points, I think there might be a middle ground.

It's quite possible that the swirly bits aren't specifically a Bussard collector, but because of the nature of the warp drive, it acts as one, and the collection of interstellar hydrogen is done as much for filtering the collected hydrogen out of the process, so the warp drive can do its job, as it is for supplementing the onboard fuel supply.

In fact, I know have a better explanation for those three bits on the underside of the dome; those are the hydrogen collectors, siphoning off the stray hydrogen that wanders in, so that the nacelles don't become a duranium-hulled zeppelin waiting for a spark at the wrong time, and sending it off to be distilled into something useful.

 

Only PURE space-time in your nacelles, eh? It's an interesting direction, I shall certainly stick on this channel.

The pictures also worked fine for me.

Regarding your Doomsday Machine example, it wasn't until the warp drive was knocked out that Spock started bitching about how much fuel they had left. This may suggest that the ramscoop effect is not independant of but in fact a by-product of the warp drive; with it gone they can't scoop up hydrogen to refuel the impulse drive.

 

Yes, that was one of the issues I had considered.

Although... even if they were working, if the ship was moving purely at sublight (and this is assuming that "impulse" is sublight only, which is at best highly debatable at this point!) it would not be collecting as much fuel as it would be at warp... many orders of magnitude less... and it would be "burning" (really, reacting in a fusion reaction, but you take my meaning I hope!) fuel at a much faster rate to produce similar amounts of energy and propulsion. So this doesn't inherently REQUIRE the collectors to require active warp drive, though it does sort of infer it.

 

T'Girl,
Could I ask where those scans came from and if you have any more. You may reply via PM if you like.
Thanks.

 

There's a lot of indicators that (in TOS) the impulse drive is a FTL system, although of course vastly less inefficient than the warp drive.
On the occasions where the ship is in a hurry at impulse, fuel suddenly becomes an issue ("Doomsday Machine", "Mudd's Women").
There is one odd exception - "Paradise Syndrome", where the ship is moving at (presumably) top impulse speed for 59 days straight. Perhaps the ship had received an upgrade by then?