How did the Phoenix Warp with No Dilithium¿

[Timo]

Dramatically, Robau had to descend when going to Hell. Practically, the factory floor location would not have facilitated a lift coming up from beneath. And in in-universe terms, it might well be that the cylinder hull holds bulky machinery that results in more torturous routes than any A-to-B within the saucer.

But as for the issue of entering a nacelle when warp happens... We have seen nacelle access rooms on the 1701-nil and 1701-D so far, and there was no special dialogue to indicate these should be off limits when warp is taking place. Actually sitting inside the warp coils themselves when power was on would obviously have been bad on the NX-01, but even on that ship, we didn't hear of proximity to warp engines being bad for your health. And the engine pylons of many ships, including the first two above, feature what looks very much like portholes. So access to nacelles might be fairly routine after all.

Whether to have Main Engineering inside a nacelle is a separate issue. Robau could have had his in the upper pod: it would still be closer to the nacelle there, relatively speaking, than Picard's corresponding facility. Apparently, long plasma conduits from the main reactor to the faraway nacelles are a desirable design feature, or else we'd see far fewer long pylons, and far more frequent application of dedicated engineering pods right next to the nacelles.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

The elevator Robau exits is shown coming down from above, but he still couldn't have been going to the lower warp nacelle because he was heading for the shuttlebay in the upper engineering hull. It must've just had to go up and over some obstruction in the route to get to the shuttlebay.

Practically, the factory floor location would not have facilitated a lift coming up from beneath.

To clarify, I was talking about the apparent design of the Kelvin, and not this particular scene in the movie. Some years ago, Roberto Orci explained that Robau is definitely going to the shutllebay in that scene. In the final design of the Kelvin, the elevator should have been coming up; the elevator went down because that was the layout of the factory, and the Kelvin's exterior had not even been designed yet.

I have seen plans for the Kelvin that show the actual Engine Room in the body of the nacelle, but I do not remember if they were official or not. As mentioned, the nacelle control room in TNG seems to suggest that this is possible, though given the physical condition of the engine room workers on the mirror NX-01, might might only be safe in the we-don't-yet-know-it-could-be-really-bad-for-you-long-term way.

 

[publiusr]

Kelvin nacelles were huge. Like those of airships….the only man-rated nacelles you could work in aloft IIRC. Zeps even had cloud cars.

 

[Timo]

Many aircraft have had engines the engineer could walk or crawl next to in-flight (at sufficiently low altitude, at any rate) - the B-36, say, or certain Tupolev or Junkers designs from between the wars. None where the engineer could walk into the engine, tho!

The floodlights on the pennants of the Kelvin and a few of her kitbash sisters in the 2009 movie make it look as if those ships had portholes in their nacelles. No such thing quite yet for a Starfleet ship. But having habitable spaces right next to warp engines doesn't appear to be a problem in any fundamental sense, and most alien ships are actually exactly like that. Many Starfleet ones, too, like the Defiant.

Nevertheless, I don't see a real need to put Robau's Main Engineering inside his nacelle. Plenty of room for it elsewhere.

(Surprisingly lot of it, too. On the outside, the ship appears only about half the official size: the bridge is small on the outside, the airlock door roundels aft of the bridge seem to establish a smaller size for the ship as well, and then we have the very TOS-like shuttlebay exterior. But then they squeeze in the much, much larger shuttlebay interior... I wonder when exactly the design size was changed, and why some details were not done according to the new scale. But the hero ship suffered from some of that, too.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

Many aircraft have had engines the engineer could walk or crawl next to in-flight (at sufficiently low altitude, at any rate) - the B-36, say, or certain Tupolev or Junkers designs from between the wars. None where the engineer could walk into the engine, tho!

The floodlights on the pennants of the Kelvin and a few of her kitbash sisters in the 2009 movie make it look as if those ships had portholes in their nacelles. No such thing quite yet for a Starfleet ship. But having habitable spaces right next to warp engines doesn't appear to be a problem in any fundamental sense, and most alien ships are actually exactly like that. Many Starfleet ones, too, like the Defiant.

Nevertheless, I don't see a real need to put Robau's Main Engineering inside his nacelle. Plenty of room for it elsewhere.

(Surprisingly lot of it, too. On the outside, the ship appears only about half the official size: the bridge is small on the outside, the airlock door roundels aft of the bridge seem to establish a smaller size for the ship as well, and then we have the very TOS-like shuttlebay exterior. But then they squeeze in the much, much larger shuttlebay interior... I wonder when exactly the design size was changed, and why some details were not done according to the new scale. But the hero ship suffered from some of that, too.)

Timo Saloniemi

The size problem is probably from the line "...saved 800 lives including yours..." and it could not be changed midstream due to the writers strike as I understand it.

Proportionally, the bridge size looks the same as a "typical" ship from the TOS, but the bridge interior set has twice the floorspace, or at least twice the stations. So, because the bridge is proportioned the same compared to the saucer but is twice as big, it is twice as big a saucer as we might think.

If the ship is basically just a giant saucer and the rest of it is not inhabited except for a possible engine room in the nacelle and a shuttle bay that is only inhabited when shuttles are coming and going, then it is not really "larger" in a way from other ships of the era, it is just configure to carry more people, sort of like the base that can move comparison I've used for the Galaxy-class. Alternatively, it could carry many shuttles, like I said about the similar Freedom-class in a thread about DS9. The freedom would have found a way to put the shuttlebay in the saucer.

 

[Timo]

The size problem is probably from the line "...saved 800 lives including yours..." and it could not be changed midstream due to the writers strike as I understand it.

Ah, but Pike, like Kirk, was drunk as a skunk, actually blurting "ah hundred"... In addition to accidentally stating that the Federation, rather than Starfleet, was the peacekeeping armada, etc.

(We saw that there were exactly 20 shuttlefuls of survivors, and also got a good look at the interior. No room for 40 people there, even when we forget about the lightly loaded medevac shuttle. So no, George Kirk didn't save 800 people that day.)

Proportionally, the bridge size looks the same as a "typical" ship from the TOS, but the bridge interior set has twice the floorspace, or at least twice the stations. So, because the bridge is proportioned the same compared to the saucer but is twice as big, it is twice as big a saucer as we might think.

Even at the larger size, the bridge set doesn't really fit the bridge dome, TOS/FJ style - it forms its own little off-center circle in the front part of the dome circle. Were the ship merely Saladin-sized, the bridge set would be a nice if snug fit, especially with all the extra room provided for that aft corridor by the spine of the ship.

If the ship is basically just a giant saucer and the rest of it is not inhabited except for a possible engine room in the nacelle and a shuttle bay that is only inhabited when shuttles are coming and going, then it is not really "larger" in a way from other ships of the era, it is just configure to carry more people, sort of like the base that can move comparison I've used for the Galaxy-class. Alternatively, it could carry many shuttles, like I said about the similar Freedom-class in a thread about DS9. The freedom would have found a way to put the shuttlebay in the saucer.

So the letter O in front of the registry number stands for "Overload"? Or "Outpost deployment"?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[LazyReader]

You don't need dilithium for warp. For one we have no idea how fast Cochranes warp drive was, we just know he broke the lightspeed threshold (Warp 1.01) As such fusion power (Which had been adopted by the 2020's) was insufficient, since the tech works by sending high energy plasma to a nacelle. However in Star trek 8 "First Contact" the Phoenix uses anti-matter (Lily is sicked by Theta radiation from a leaking propulsion unit)
By the 31st century; Dilithium shortages may have curtailed exploratory efforts, forced Starfleet to shrink it's fleet (Hence why they have such large 1 kilometer long vessels in the future, more long term supplies, habitable biosphere environments (Angelou class).
Warp coils in starships are undoubtedly designed to run around dilithium. In essence grind interstellar civilization to a halt.

 

[HappyMcWonderful]

Having watched All The Trek, and having read All The Novels, I arrived at the following head canon:

1) Early warp-drive worked nothing like TNG warp drive. The Phoenix was powered by a combination of fusion and the controlled detonation of the components of a scavenged nuclear warhead/missile assembly. As the technology improved, antimatter was substituted for nuclear components and controlled detonations... VERY hazardous.

2) First Contact made humanity aware that there was a better way but they continued experimenting with fission/fusion warp drive until they isolated a substance that would work: A specific form of quartz with a peculiar arrangement of lithium atoms in it's structure.

3) The Constitution class engines were vastly different than those of other Starfleet vessels of the day. Power was generated in the nacelles, for example. Specific timing, regulation and synchronization equipment was kept in the secondary hull along with backup reactors and power generation technology. The ship may have also had it's own antimatter factory, a crude one, for generating antimatter on the fly, with the ship only storing a few operational hours/days in the nacelles. Other ships were not built around these massive but workable engines, and the Connies were gradually refit using standard technology.

4) The end of the TOS series of movies shows a TNG-esque warp-core in a Connie hull. Perhaps this was the final refit -- standard engines and standard nacelles. The only other ship from the Movie-ish era we get a look inside of, the Stargazer/Hathaway, has a warp core that looks similar to a TNG one.... just "older."

5) Starfleet has never had any luck with advanced propulsion technology from Transwarp to Coaxial Warp to Spore Drive, and countless others. The underlying technology is sound, the principles are well documented, Starfleet and it's human-centric core has a cultural bias against other drives. This is why hundreds of years in the future a gradual depletion of a specific type of quartz with a peculiar arrangement of lithium atoms is so problematic. Will the newly recovered Starfleet learn from this disaster and diversify it's drive technology?


...just my take on the overall picture. A lot of people will disagree with it but it works for me.