Yep, very true. It was widely presumed, yes, but nothing "canonical."
and we've seen the same swirly domes on ships that we can be pretty safe in assuming don't have that feature,
There, I have to part company with you... I see no indication that any ship which has "swirly domes" didn't have bussard-type collection capabilities.
Remember, the shuttlecraft had domes for the "nosecones" of their nacelles, but those domes certainly never had any "swirly-ness."
The "pheonix" had "glowy domes" but not "swirly domes" and lets be fair, we have no idea if the "pheonix" might have been collecting fuel... there is no "canonical" reason to assume otherwise.
What other ships are you referring to?
so I'm really not all that worried about dumping the ramscoops altogether, never mind taking them out of the nacelles.
A short-range vessel, within easy and frequent "fill-er-up" range of a variety of bases, might be able to get by without the ability to harvest fuel along the way, but I don't buy that long-range space travel is remotely practical without some form of "refueling along the way" involved. We're talking about truly tremendous amounts of energy... and even with 100% conversion by E=mc^2, you'd run out of gas pretty quickly.
Now, what the system is by which this ship "refuels en-route" may be subject to debate, but I just can't accept that it has to carry its own fuel supply at all times. Not with the sort of ships we see in Trek, anyway.
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.
Well, as I spend more time thinking about this, I'm leaning toward them being a "Reese Peanut-butter Cup" solution... two great tastes that taste great together.
That is... the nacelles are doing something to the fabric of space/time, in very much the same way that gravity affects the fabric of space/time (or rather, that MASS affects the fabric of space/time, with gravity being the result of that mass acting on space/time).
If the front end of he nacelle is looking like a very sharp "singularity" well, you can easily imagine any mass in a conical region in front of the ship being drawn towards the nacelle front... no need to project a "forcefield cone" or jump through any similar hoops. The "warp drive field" is, in fact, the collection method, in other words.
If that's the case, it makes practical sense to locate the hydrogen collector (aka "bussard device") where the majority of hydrogen will be drawn towards, doesn't it?
Alternatively, you might argue that the deflector is the best place to collect hydrogen from... but that presupposes that the deflector is a continuous beam, not a "pulse-based" device. Everything we've seen relating to the deflector (from TMP onwards) is either entirely ambiguous about how it operates or infers a pulse-based system. It does seem silly to be perpetually projecting a massive high-energy field in front of the ship if it has nothing which it needs to be doing at that moment, doesn't it?
I'm still working out a few of the details, but I think that the most practical place for the hydrogen collection is always at the front of the warp drive. Other races may not do this... but they seem less efficient overall (see the Klingons, who have three front-facing intakes... and probably much larger ratios of fuel-to-overall-mass than a multipurpose ship like the Enterprise). And they'd still be relying on the gas being attracted to the region in front of the ship by the warp drive field... they'd just be less efficient at scooping it up!
