Can you walk around inside the engine nacelles?

If you need a jefferies tube to access that room why does it have the normal doors on the outside? Those two orange doors that look like regular deck doors.

 

We've seen normal doors opening to Jeffries Tube junctions in the past. From Main Engineering at least.

 

I suppose but in those drawings it looked like they opened into a corridor, which seems odd. Where the hell would a corridor be up there in the nacelle?

 

The description says they get their info from official sources.

 

On-screen, Worf and Riker did climb a ladder to get to the exterior of the control room entry door, so, it is what it is.

I'm baffled on how little hardware is involved to power the warp engine: one beam from the bow matter collectors (which way does the power flow?) joining into two more beams from the top and bottom (plasma injectors? only two?). IMHO, it seems to be a bare matter/antimatter plasma reaction (force field contained in its own little reaction cubical) with a matter beam coming from the front matter collector, hitting an antimatter beam from the top injector at a 90 degree angle, with the resultant "power" plasma beam going down to the bottom collector (not an injector but the reverse) to feed the power conduit laying on the bottom of the nacelle which in turn feeds power to all the warp coils. I count 14 warp coils in the matte painting. And that's it. YMMV.

TNG Warp Engine Hardware:

Forward Matter Collector/Matter Plasma Injector
Aft (Top) Antimatter Plasma Injector
Force Field contained, M/AM Reaction in Cubical
Aft (Bottom) Plasma Collector/Injector
Warp Coil Plasma Power Conduit
14 Warp Coils​

The TAS nacelle hardware could be similar in concept. In the TAS case, the entry doors are toward the forward-mid section of the nacelle, probably near the pylon connection. We see a matter/antimatter reaction chamber under the catwalk (instead of the single, force field contained, bare reaction). Matter plasma flows into the forward side of the reaction chamber from the matter collector/supply injector located in the forward portion of the nacelle. Antimatter plasma flows into the aft side of chamber from the antimatter supply injector (Scott calls in an integrator) in the aft portion of the nacelle (the TNG control may be located in the rear of the nacelle primarily to manage the flow of antimatter? Kirk and Scott may have entered a similar control room when they carried antimatter to this location in the aft nacelle). Both M/AM plasmas react in the long cylindrical reaction chamber feeding resultant "power" plasma (via the series of spoke-tubes) to the outside diameter on the nacelle which we can assume are where the warp coils are housed. I count 8 plasma spoke-tube sets, so, there could be 8 warp coils in the TAS Enterprise. I'm liking this concept.

TAS Warp Engine Hardware:

Forward Matter Collector/Matter Plasma Injector/Integrator
Aft Antimatter Plasma Injector/Integrator
Long, Cylindrical M/AM Reaction Chamber
Warp Coil Plasma Power Conduits (one spoke-tube set per coil)
8 Warp Coils​

 

Memory-Alpha also seems to think that it's at the rear of the nacelle based on the on set signage, and the design of the matte painting.

Might be where that book got the idea:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Nacelle_tube

They think this is the rear of the Bussard Collector. Maybe some dialogue implied the direction they were facing.

 

I'm guessing the red colour.

I'm reading the TNG Tech Manual right now, and so far there's no mention of that room at all. The cutaway of the nacelle doesn't show one either. This is all I could find regarding accessing the nacelles:

I don't have Fact Files, so I can't see if it's there.

 

On the Sternbach deck plans, there is a docking port into the nacelle:

There are also windows there, and "Deck 25" is consistent. It's one of these decks:

The room would have to be either in the rear of the nacelle, or close to the rear. Otherwise you would need to travel through the whole nacelle to get to it.

 

Memory Alpha is a wiki, members of MA write the articles. Unless a piece of information is directly from a episode/movie, what you are reading is someone's individual opinion.

 

This production note on Memory Alpha is unsourced, but it had to have come from somewhere:

The nacelle tube was originally conceived of by "Eye of the Beholder" writer Brannon Braga as a long catwalk that ran the length of the nacelle. While the set was ultimately constructed as a two-level room, augmented with a matte painting, the catwalk eventually appeared in Star Trek: Enterprise in the appropriately-titled episode "The Catwalk". While not explicitly stated in dialogue, the location of the nacelle tube can be identified by signage (clearly placing it on deck 25 starboard) and by the matte painting vista of the nacelle interior, facing forward to the Bussard collector. Parts of the nacelle tube set were later incorporated into the upper level of the engineering set used on Star Trek: Voyager.

 

I know how a wiki works. The observation however does point to evidence in the episode.

Yeah I already quoted the TNG related part of that above.

This is pretty good.

 

What, you don't know what the inside of a Bussard collector looks like?

I guess I will say that if we assume the BC feeds directly into the rest of the nacelle, which makes sense, then there wouldn't be any place to put a control room there, whereas the back of the nacelle isn't used for anything AFAIK.

I feel sorry for the people who have to crawl all the way from the rest of the ship to that control room though. Hopefully under normal conditions they can just beam in or such.

 

You can when they’re off.

 

Of course you can because if they were on you'd get a wicked tan, and then die.

 

...I'm pretty sure that what we saw in action in "Eye of the Beholder" was a pilot flame of sorts, for the idle mode, and that during warp the place is a fantastically swirling and pulsating and psychedelic mass of plasma packages moving whichever way to create carefully shaped field effects in the coils. Putting the pilot flame close to the control cabin would make sense: it could be essentially the same thing as the TAS doodad that could kickstart the whole warp engine when somebody semi-manually injected a bit of antimatter in there. Only this time there'd be forcefields instead of physical bulkheads, so it looks a bit different.

And since the Drexler cutaway for the TOS/TAS ship has the angled-tubes-around-catwalk-within-cylinder setup at the bow of the nacelle, as (barely) seen in "In a Mirror, Darkly", the 2260s ship has the pilot flame at the bow rather than the stern of the nacelle, FWIW.

Then again, the suicidee might well have locked up the turbolifts to get enough privacy for completing the act - so Worf and Riker might need to climb up a turboshaft, which (as we learn in "Disaster") is provided with a ladder for just the purpose.

Timo Saloniemi

 

There's these really well done deck plans for the NX at http://www.waxingmoondesign.com/NX01DeckE.html

In them you can see a corridor leading back to the pylon, and a long tube with a ladder leading up to a trap door that gets you into the nacelle catwalk. It reminds me of that angled ladder chute in TOS that Scotty was always crawling up.

Closeup:
http://www.waxingmoondesign.com/NX01ImpulseEngine.html
http://www.waxingmoondesign.com/NX01NacelleCatwalk.html

 

Hey on the NX01 what's that round part in the middle behind the saucer on its own between the two wings?

 

A very large pizza oven?