Andy Probert's design was intended to fly short-axis forward.
In an atmosphere, yes. In space, one would imagine it flying top first, using the supposedly bottom-located engines for sublight propulsion.
Whether the craft would have warp propulsion or not would depend... Probert's artwork seems to show areas with the classic blue warp glow, possibly suggesting warp capability. Certainly it shouldn't be much of a technological challenge to install a warp drive in the craft, although one might speculate that all such "conformal", nacelle-less mounts are less powerful than their nacelled counterparts. Or then there might be a system like the Delta Flyer's, with some pop-out elements to boost the drive even though it usually is stowed flat with the ovoid hull.
Then again, the Yacht might have been optimized as a flying mansion that needed no warp propulsion and little in the way of impulse propulsion, being intended almost solely for landing on a planet and then staying there as a Federation Consulate for months at a time.
A separate question is whether the E-D ever embarked one of those babies. Certainly Picard never took such a Yacht for a spin, not even when there would have been good cause to utilize a luxury means of sublight, ship-to-orbit or perhaps interstellar transports. Nor was the Yacht offered as an option when there was a need to move large amounts of hardware or large numbers of people by shuttlecraft. Instead, standard "light" and "medium" shuttles (the designations solely from TNG TM) or runabouts were used for such tasks.
Perhaps the
Yamato had a Yacht in the ventral saucer socket, but the
Enterprise had an Energy Emitter (as seen in "Encounter at Farpoint"), the
Challenger mounted a Cochrane Cannon, and the
Odyssey had an Observation Outpost?
Timo Saloniemi
