Can you walk around inside the engine nacelles?

[Gingerbread Demon]

A very large pizza oven?

Yum yum




That could feed a whole planet

 

[David cgc]

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

The part with the blue dome? Doug Drexler called it a "symmetric warp field governor," his ideas being that Henry Archer's engine design was basically a pile of hacks patching over the problems that prevented Cochrane's engines from reaching warp 5 (or, perhaps, even warp 3), so there were a lot of extra parts that made the NX-01's over-powered engines actually work that weren't necessary for later designs, like the governor that kept both warp engines operating in sync. There are also "superchargers" near the front of the catamarans (the greeble that looks like a disc or flat dome connected to a box behind it) that was based on the supercharger from a P-38 aircraft, and had more-or-less the same purpose.

You can see more details like that in Drexler's EAS interview.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

The part with the blue dome? Doug Drexler called it a "symmetric warp field governor," his ideas being that Henry Archer's engine design was basically a pile of hacks patching over the problems that prevented Cochrane's engines from reaching warp 5 (or, perhaps, even warp 3), so there were a lot of extra parts that made the NX-01's over-powered engines actually work that weren't necessary for later designs, like the governor that kept both warp engines operating in sync. There are also "superchargers" near the front of the catamarans (the greeble that looks like a disc or flat dome connected to a box behind it) that was based on the supercharger from a P-38 aircraft, and had more-or-less the same purpose.

You can see more details like that in Drexler's EAS interview.

Ah.......


So no giant space pizzas then

 

[David cgc]

So no giant space pizzas then

That's between you and Chef. I hear he can work miracles.

 

[Timo]

Of course ships from the TOS movie era again have blue domes like this - one in Constitution refit, one or two in Excelsior, two in Constellation, etc. And then the Defiant again has a set of eight.

Might be it's indeed a patch you apply when you have learned to generate more power than before, but not yet how to channel that into propulsion through just the usual warp coils. The Defiant explicitly suffered for problems of this ilk; the whole generation of ships in the 2270s-80s might have, too.

My favorite take is to mix the backstage explanations of ENT and the TOS movies together, add a bit of TNG era technobabble, and stir vigorously. For the movies, the dome was dubbed the "impulse crystal". In TNG, where the domes have more or less disappeared, the Tech Manual speaks of the modern impulse engines having mass-reducing subspace fields of their own, implying that previous generations of ships borrowed those fields from elsewhere - that is, from the warp drive itself.

So, using the governor doodad on the warp field would manipulate it to impulse purposes, explaining e.g. why Kirk's ship can easily warp without impulse but Khan's ship can't do decent impulse if the doodad goes kaboom. Might be the original NX-01 doodad wasn't built to do that, but was found useful for the purpose later on. Might be the ability of Archer's ship to defeat the rocket equation at sublight always hinged on his ship using a governed warp field to manipulate inertial mass.

Ships without the dome would in essence have mini-nacelles or at least sets of coils hidden indoors, as part of the impulse system. Might be good for stealth: the main thing the domes do is glow, and I doubt this is limited to the optical wavelengths!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[hayesc0]

Didn't a character commit suicide by jumping into one?

 

[Timo]

Sorta into a little nook at the end of one:

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/s7/7x18/eyeofthebeholder026.jpg

This place is about two decks tall, while the interior of the nacelle is more like seven.

Timo Saloniemi