It's odd that the OP has only made 4 posts in this forum over the past year, and all on the same topic. Maybe if Burley feels he's not getting the answer he wants, he could be a little more descriptive of what he's referring too.
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Which is a bit silly if the thrusters always spit out gaseous pollution. That would make life complicated in the enclosed Spacedock. The gas could not be "ventilated" out because ventilation at such extremely low pressures is hellishly difficult; it could only be adsorbed onto solid surfaces, and in practice, it would eventually cling on to surfaces, coating the transparent bits into opaqueness. It might need to be controlled by futuristic and complicated means such as transporting it out or sweeping it with tractor beams - in which case one could just as well use drive systems based on subspace fields inside Spacedock, because there would be these strange energies flowing in any case!
The division to "main" and "vernier" engines probably reflects real-world rocket terminology where verniers are secondary, lower-power rockets for more subtle work. They generally share resources with the main engines in order to save weight - so mains and verniers are probably found in one and the same place on the E-D, too. Although since Star Trek RCS rockets have thrust vectoring, it doesn't really make sense to have a large number of rockets in one location where one steerable one could do the job...
Anyway, Sternbach and Okuda describe the RCS clusters as being "quads", with two main rockets to each. "Quad" thus presumably comes from each of them serving a quadrant of the saucer hull, rather than from having four of anything. The description of a quad also features the description of the auxiliary or vernier engines as a paragraph, leaving the reader wondering if the vernier is a separate assembly or physically part of the quad (despite the quad graphic not showing any auxiliary engines).
We might speculate that in "Booby Trap", all the main RC engines were inoperable, because their fancy magnetohydrodynamic traps were neutralized by the aceton assimilators. Hence Picard used the simpler, fixed verniers, which in this theory were in locations not immediately evident from looking at the model - one of these being the side of the neck. Possibly only these primitive verniers emit the rarely seen and polluting jets of flame?
Also, the mention in the first paragraph about the ship using six main and six auxiliary RC engines is probably intended to indicate that only six of the twelve locations are in use at attached flight mode (the paragraph specifically says "In its normal docked configuration", after all). The remaining eight supposedly only come to play when the two halves separate.
Timo Saloniemi
doubleohfive
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Huh. Maybe he has some sort of disorder where he wakes up everyday forgetting the events of the previous days and occasionally on one of these mornings/days he watches Next Gen and gets to wondering. Of course by the next day he's forgotten all of this and he may make different choices so we don't get this every day, but like a blue moon....
They are probably used more for docking manuevers where small adjustments are needed. Warp Drive is a field, and has it ever been said if the impulse engines are a field drive or are they like thrusters where the emissions out of impulse engines pushes the ship?
-Chris
I think you're spot-on. I'd suggest he tattoos the answer to his forehead before he forgets again.
One of these days the poor fellow is going to wake up on a boat in the Arctic married to Adam Sandler.
Cheese slices.
doubleohfive
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