Spare Warp Coils?
- Thread starter Sovereign_One
- Start date
Warp coil. Inside the nacelles.
No, that's just the reactor. The warp nacelles (and thus, coils) are more like the wheels on a car, whilst the core is the engine (I really wish the writers would have stayed with the TOS terminology of "reactor" to keep this clear).
Flashover
Lieutenant Commander
It could be early coils were in fact wound, a thin wire of exotictanium wrapped around a densified ceramic/ubertonium armature.
Later on as material science developed it was found that one could cast the exotic into the ceramic and get a warp field. Later on a coating process was developed... an increasingly thin layer of the exotic on massive ceramic armatures.
Think of the coils and the nacelles more like a magnatron than a solenoid coil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Resonant_Cavity_Magnetron_Diagram.svg
You inject plasma, the "magic" happens and you get a field effect at the boundary of the coil which makes the ship go.
Later on as material science developed it was found that one could cast the exotic into the ceramic and get a warp field. Later on a coating process was developed... an increasingly thin layer of the exotic on massive ceramic armatures.
Think of the coils and the nacelles more like a magnatron than a solenoid coil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Resonant_Cavity_Magnetron_Diagram.svg
You inject plasma, the "magic" happens and you get a field effect at the boundary of the coil which makes the ship go.
Sternbach, Sternbach, STERNBACH!!
Flashover
Lieutenant Commander
YARN
Fleet Captain
This sort of thing make a 3 nacelled ship all the more plausible (like them or not they are now "canon") IMO.
If one nacelle goes out you still have two which remain.
You lose your warp drive when doing deep space exploration and it might take hundreds or thousands of years to get home.
Why not build a little redundancy into the system by adding a 3rd warp engine?
If one nacelle goes out you still have two which remain.
You lose your warp drive when doing deep space exploration and it might take hundreds or thousands of years to get home.
Why not build a little redundancy into the system by adding a 3rd warp engine?
Flashover
Lieutenant Commander
This has always been my argument for the Federation class Dreadnought. Look at where the nacelle is attached. It provides the saucer with warp ability.
Now the line is blurry for the E-D Dreadnought from AGT.... look at where THAT one is attached. Secondary hull. So it has something to do with the "warp 13" stuff. Perhaps in addition to "regular" warp-field generation it houses some fancy technobabble for pushing the ship fast as fast can be?
Now the line is blurry for the E-D Dreadnought from AGT.... look at where THAT one is attached. Secondary hull. So it has something to do with the "warp 13" stuff. Perhaps in addition to "regular" warp-field generation it houses some fancy technobabble for pushing the ship fast as fast can be?
Because another stipulation was that the warp field needs to be symmetrical, and you're not going to get that with 3 nacelles if one of them gets knocked offline.
Saquist
Commodore
That's true...Remember Warp is generated by fields and fields work on poles (positive or negative) The thing is I've never heard of a positive or negative warp field or even poles in the field.
Warp field could mean simply a range of influence like a gravity field which to our knowledge has no poles and positive or negative attractions. If that's true then the magnetic like look the Enterprise D warp field maybe due to the projection of positive or expanding field of space in from or the ship and a contracting field of space trailing the ship which is how the Alcubierre Drive works.
If that's true then a Third Warp Nacelle would be useful in operation but costly in power. It would stablize the ship but only if the extra field was projected ahead of the ship.
Warp field could mean simply a range of influence like a gravity field which to our knowledge has no poles and positive or negative attractions. If that's true then the magnetic like look the Enterprise D warp field maybe due to the projection of positive or expanding field of space in from or the ship and a contracting field of space trailing the ship which is how the Alcubierre Drive works.
If that's true then a Third Warp Nacelle would be useful in operation but costly in power. It would stablize the ship but only if the extra field was projected ahead of the ship.
Just rewatched the ENT episode where they steal a warp coil from an alien ship to repair the Enterprise. The alien ship's warp coil was something the size of a steamertrunk (around a cubic meter for those that don't know what a steamertrunk is), and they only had one. Did the writers just forget that warp coils were these big things in the nacelles?
Saquist
Commodore
No...likely they copied Voyagers stupidity when they took a Transwarp coil a borg ship that was apparently hand held.
But ENT was still pretty stupid because clearly they damage the nacelle and some how this hand held object fixes everything.
Jerry Oltion had some fun with that concept in the novel Where Sea Meets Sky.
OTOH, we could argue that the "warp coil" is the thing that coils the warp, not something that's coiled in itself...
I've got nothing against handheld warp engines as long as they're made by the Borg. The Sargonians could make walnut-sized ones, remember?
The issue with "Damage" is annoying, though. Unless we argue that warp engines are based on a single "primer coil" and then a series of repeaters, and that the all-crucial primer coil is less massive than the expendable repeaters. Perhaps the bit Archer stole was supposed to go into the centrally mounted, blue-domed "off-axis field controller pod" or "asymmetric field governor" or whatever the Drexler technobabble on that one was?
FWIW, Riker in "A Matter of Time" argues that the great technological development for the 22nd-24th centures was "the warp coil", singular. Doesn't mean they'd be used singly - but does allow for it...
Timo Saloniemi
And yea the Sternbach did rise up from the dead city of R'yleh and spake to the masses...
Voyager would have found a way to replicate a set of warp coils and beam them into place fully made.
Flashover
Lieutenant Commander
*snort* Who disturbs me at this time?
Ahem. Uh, warp coils used to be wound, yeah, but now the best ones are pressure-cast to preserve all the flavor of the-- sorry; still sleepy. What was I saying? Right; it's kinda like talking about dialing the phone when there's no more dials.
"Coils" are now more like big solid U-magnets juiced by the hot plasma in particular sequences to achieve motion through the continuum.
Rick
Ahem. Uh, warp coils used to be wound, yeah, but now the best ones are pressure-cast to preserve all the flavor of the-- sorry; still sleepy. What was I saying? Right; it's kinda like talking about dialing the phone when there's no more dials.
"Coils" are now more like big solid U-magnets juiced by the hot plasma in particular sequences to achieve motion through the continuum.Rick
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