Enterprise seperation

[Timo]

I can't think of a reasonable reason for such a short range craft to have or need bussard collectors

Which does support the idea that the scoops are vital for some unknown reason X that has little to do with range extension or fuel economy. Perhaps it's essential to scoop up interstellar gas from the flightpath of the ship so that it doesn't interfere with the warp engines?

If we assume that the nacelles need to be vaguely proportional to the amount of ship they are enabling to travel at warp

They could be proportional to the top speed of the ship, too. The saucer could have "trolling engines" for low warp. Analogies exist outside the naval realm, too: a towed field gun may have a small automobile engine for limited movement while a proper tracked or wheeled artillery piece will have a massive diesel or even a gas turbine for high speed road and offroad maneuvers. The mobility afforded by the small engine is still absolutely vital in some cases, just like having warp 1.8 might mean life where sublight would mean death - especially in a galaxy where natural disasters rarely travel FTL (on occasion they do, and our heroes always express curiosity and concern then).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Eckauskas]

I think the rarity of saucer seperation shows the seriousness of the situations.

The saucer seperates durin' the initial mission to save the families aboard.

The saucer seperates when La Forge is in command to save the crew on the planet surface without endangerin' others.

The saucer seperates as part of the plan to rescue Picard from the Borg.

And in the movie, the saucer seperates durin' a warp core breach.

If they did it more often, I think the question would be, why have a saucer in the first place?

That's pretty much it for me.

There really wasn't much of a need to keep seperating the ship, it would have taken the shine off it if they had done it more often.

I never got why the saucer separation was such a big deal. You've got a cool-looking ship. Why break it into two pieces?

I never thought during TOS, "I really wish they would take the saucer off."

This also sums it up for me..

The Enterprise D looked a bit rubbish when split in two.

 

[DonIago]

When you consider the number of times the Enterprise was almost lost with all hands, including families, there might be a legitimate argument that perhaps the saucer should have been separated more frequently.

Granted, I don't know off the top of my head the number of times when the danger was forseeable versus times when, for instance, Q popped the Enterprise into the Delta Quadrant without warning.

"We're going to go into the extremely dangerous anomaly, Number One."
"Suggest separating the saucer captain, so the civilians will be safe if we run into problems.
"...No. A little danger is good for them, Will."

 

[BillJ]

What reason can there possible be to exclude one from the design?

Probably the same reason the saucer doesn't have photon torpedo launchers... keep the anti-matter separate from the family sections of the ship?

 

[T'Girl]

While not exactly canon, trek fiction puts forward that you don't need antimatter for warp flight, just for high speed warp flight. The BoT Romulan ship seemed to be able to achieve FTL with the warp engines running off the power of the impulse engines. And there's a certain amount of doubt the Cochrane's Phoenix was using antimatter for it's brief flight. A warp engine enclosed within the saucer also could be powered by the saucers impulse engines or by separate fusion reactors.

I'm not the biggest expert on ENT, but did they ever come right out and state that the NX-01 used antimatter in it's reactor?

And there is antimatter in the saucer near the families, according to the TNG tech manual, the saucer's impulse engines can have antimatter injected into the fusion reactors at times that maximum performance is needed, the antimatter in stored in bottles near those engines.

 

[Timo]

I'm not the biggest expert on ENT, but did they ever come right out and state that the NX-01 used antimatter in it's reactor?

IIRC, they waited until "Cold Front" before going explicit; but by the fourth season, it was carefully spelled out in dialogue that the engine operated by annihilating matter and antimatter in a dilithium focus. If ENT engines and TNG engines both work that way, odds are that the TOS engines in between weren't completely dissimilar...

And there is antimatter in the saucer near the families, according to the TNG tech manual, the saucer's impulse engines can have antimatter injected into the fusion reactors at times that maximum performance is needed, the antimatter in stored in bottles near those engines.

According to "Best of Both Worlds II", the saucer can spit out a cloud of antimatter for Borg-fooling purposes. In all likelihood, that was something of a jury-rig, but it does go to show that there are some facilities for storing and dispensing antimatter in the saucer section.

The saucer also explicitly contains warp engines - namely those of the shuttlecraft stored there. In TNG, we never saw a shuttle go to warp, but we certainly heard this happen. Finally, VOY showed us directly a shuttle of TNG type 6 going to warp...

There's some risky stuff aboard the saucer, then, even with strict adherence to onscreen canon. Hell, the main guns of the ship, her biggest phaser strips, are mounted there! If anything, Starfleet might calculate that loading the saucer section with the scariest hardware available would keep the enemies at bay and protect the withdrawal of the majority of the crew while the battle section fought a delaying action...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[USS Excelsior]

And the Battle bridge is in the Star Drive section though.

 

[scotpens]

[note: if this shows up strange, sorry. For some reason quotation marks, spacing between paragraphs, ampersands are not showing up properly. Not sure why]

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[FormerLurker]

The saucer also explicitly contains warp engines - namely those of the shuttlecraft stored there. In TNG, we never saw a shuttle go to warp, but we certainly heard this happen. Finally, VOY showed us directly a shuttle of TNG type 6 going to warp...

At the beginning of "The Mind's Eye" Geordi's abortive shuttle trip to Risa for his seminar/vacation had to have been a warp trip, they didn't go to the system to drop him off, and he then flew back to Enterprise while they were at the Klingon outpost.

 

[Timo]

Actually, there's no evidence they didn't drom Geordi off at the destination system, or the outskirts thereof.

Indeed, it might be common practice to deploy shuttles at the outskirts of a system, and retrieve them there, instead of flying the entire starship to the heart of the system. Shuttles may be slow - but starships for some mysterious reason tend to slow from warp to impulse when entering certain star systems. Perhaps when facing such "speed limit" systems, a starship skipper will not tie down his ship for hours upon hours of impulse travel, but will instead drop off the passenger in a shuttlecraft at the "speed limit limit" where he can still immediately go back to warp.

Remember Picard shuttling to and from that starbase in "The Neutral Zone", or to his heart surgery in "Samaritan Snare"? There's no indication the ship couldn't have taken him to these supposedly highly important events directly, but every indication that it wouldn't, not under normal protocol. The idea that (some) star systems are "shallows" where the big ships would be handicapped but shuttles would not is also a nice explanation for TOS "Metamorphosis", or "The Galileo Seven" for that matter.

Regarding "The Mind's Eye", we should remember that LaForge explicitly wasn't at warp: we could see the stars through the windshield, and they weren't warp-streaking. Ditto for all of the shuttle trips in TNG, really, even in those cases where dialogue specified that the heroes would be going to warp, or had been at warp previously. Clearly, impulse travel in a shuttle is sometimes preferable to impulse travel in a starship.

OTOH, Geordi's return trip involved hitch-hiking on a warpship. The tiny shuttlepod could very easily do that; it's possible Geordi hitched a ride to Risa, too, even if the dialogue doesn't specify that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[varek]

My question is why the saucer seemed to be used to evacuate civilians, instead of using it to assist the Battle Section. I think the people could have used escape pods, so the saucer could help the BS in cross-fire types of maneuvers.

 

[Timo]

Why leave the ship? In the middle of a battle, the ship is probably the very safest place to be!

Really, starship shields are capable of stopping weapons that can melt down continents. I'd certainly want my kids aboard a safe starship rather than back home on a vulnerable continent if I were the security-conscious type... And if a high-risk mission presented itself, I'd either move the kids to another starship performing a different type of mission well before the mission started, or take my bets with the most badass section of my own starship, not with some haphazardly provided and provisioned escape section.

Timo Saloniemi