Question about the two Nacelles of the Enterprise D

[JayTheTrekkie]

You know the episode in season 7 where Worf, Geordi & Troi were up in that room in one of the Nacelles of the Enterrpise D...and below the 2 nacelles there is 2 windows there.

How do they get up there into that room and to the part where the 2 windows are?

I have wondered that since that episode aired but never asked about that here before.

 

[bintak]

You know the episode in season 7 where Worf, Geordi & Troi were up in that room in one of the Nacelles of the Enterrpise D...and below the 2 nacelles there is 2 windows there.

How do they get up there into that room and to the part where the 2 windows are?

I have wondered that since that episode aired but never asked about that here before.

Plothole. They climb into one side of it and exit out the other side.

 

[Christopher]

You know the episode in season 7 where Worf, Geordi & Troi were up in that room in one of the Nacelles of the Enterrpise D...and below the 2 nacelles there is 2 windows there.

How do they get up there into that room and to the part where the 2 windows are?

Presumably the same way they get anywhere else -- by turbolift. The nacelle struts are more than wide enough to accommodate a lift shaft. That was true even of the original Enterprise, at least according to the Franz Joseph blueprints, which included turboshafts up to the nacelles.

Admittedly, I'm not able to find the turboshafts to the nacelles on the TNG Blueprints. But those blueprints have many omissions, including the Jefferies tubes canonically known to be behind the bridge and above Ten Forward and the arboretum that the exterior plans say is beneath that array of blue-lit windows on the back of the saucer. (There are just cargo bays there on the interior plans.)

 

[Trekker4747]

the episode would indicate you get there through Jefferies Tubes.

 

[FalTorPan]

You know the episode in season 7 where Worf, Geordi & Troi were up in that room in one of the Nacelles of the Enterrpise D...and below the 2 nacelles there is 2 windows there.

How do they get up there into that room and to the part where the 2 windows are?

Presumably the same way they get anywhere else -- by turbolift. The nacelle struts are more than wide enough to accommodate a lift shaft. That was true even of the original Enterprise, at least according to the Franz Joseph blueprints, which included turboshafts up to the nacelles.

Admittedly, I'm not able to find the turboshafts to the nacelles on the TNG Blueprints. But those blueprints have many omissions, including the Jefferies tubes canonically known to be behind the bridge and above Ten Forward and the arboretum that the exterior plans say is beneath that array of blue-lit windows on the back of the saucer. (There are just cargo bays there on the interior plans.)

FJ's blueprints did not have turbolift shafts leading up the engine pylons. The nacelles were accessible via Jeffries (sic) tubes.

 

[Christopher]

Oh yes, of course you're right. I got them mixed up.

Wow, I don't envy the engineers who had to climb up those Jefferies tubes. That would've been, what, a climb of 15, 16 stories? Well, I guess they would've probably been infrequently used, just for maintenance checks when the engines were shut down, perhaps.

Then again, in TAS: "One of Our Planets is Missing," they showed Kirk and Scott going into a nacelle to replenish its antimatter supply, and I believe they accessed it via turbolift.

 

[BoxWhatBox]

The tubes in that environment may not have gravity, allowing engineers to pull themselves up at a brisk pace instead of having to climb it.

 

[Timo]

Or they might have two slides there, one going down from the hull to the nacelle, one going down from the nacelle to the hull. Wheeeeee!

In TAS "One of Our Planets is Missing", Kirk and Scotty access one of the nacelles, with an aquarium-sized antimatter containment pod in tow. No doubt they had to use some sort of mechanical assistance on their way up there; even if we don't explicitly see a turbolift, we might infer its existence.

Perhaps the turboshafts to nacelles are omitted from all official blueprints to discourage their reckless use while the drive is active?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Forbin]

Or they might have two slides there, one going down from the hull to the nacelle, one going down from the nacelle to the hull. Wheeeeee!

Don't laugh, that's how B-29 and B-36 crew got thru the bomb bays from the front pressurized compartments to the aft. There was a 24" diameter tube with a trolley. The crewman lay prone and pulled himself along. My father said if a guy was in there when a window blew out, he'd get sucked in the decompressing direction and slam into a chair at either end.

As for the 1701-D... If you look carefully at the nacelles on the model, there's a round docking hatch at the aft end of the mounting fairing, with a couple of windows, obviously a small airlock and service room:
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/scans/gus/1701d-gus-engineering-side.jpg
It was my assumption that a maintenence crew would take a travel pod-style craft up there when they had to work. Of course the episode in question blew that idea by putting in a turbolift and nice little lobby in the nacelle.

 

[Timo]

Oh, I was dead serious about there being two downward slides there. And about it being fun for the engineers, too.

As for the docking port, I'm sure it would be of great use in hauling repair materials and tools to and from this location while in spacedock. Not by travel pod, but by a direct jetway. Apart from Main Engineering, this is probably one of the locations the repair teams most have to access, and getting there through the innards of the ship is complicated - probably the most complicated path one can take through the ship.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[superstring01]

I'm certain that they were serviced by a turboshaft.

~String

 

[Timo]

The set certainly features what looks like a turbolift door. However, we never see anybody entering the set from those doors, and certainly we don't see the moveable turbolift set behind the doors. And at the beginning of the episode, Worf and Riker are shown climbing into the room via ladder, rather than using a lift.

Then again, the reason the (unreal) heroes are getting up there is already because of sabotage: the (unreal) disgruntled local employee Kwan had locked up many systems in order to commit his suicide. It would only be natural for him to have locked up the turbolift access as well.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[votd]

Was there a reason they couldn't have transported there (haven't seen the ep in a while)? Obviously they need manual access if necessary but wouldn't the transporter be quicker?

 

[Timo]

In emergencies, one probably would want to bypass lifts and ladders and use the transporter. OTOH, in emergencies, the transporter might be down more often than not...

In this case, there was no indication that the transporter would be down, nor that there would be security forcefields or special jammers in place preventing its use. Of course, Kwan might have used a jammer (and indeed should have used one) if transporting were an option. But it sounds likely that transporting to the immediate vicinity of a powerful warp engine, no matter how idled, is not a good idea at all!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SoM]

In emergencies, one probably would want to bypass lifts and ladders and use the transporter. OTOH, in emergencies, the transporter might be down more often than not...

Of course, in such an emergency, you have several shuttlecraft, all of which are equipped with transporters of their own, ja?

 

[Turbo]

In emergencies, one probably would want to bypass lifts and ladders and use the transporter. OTOH, in emergencies, the transporter might be down more often than not...

Of course, in such an emergency, you have several shuttlecraft, all of which are equipped with transporters of their own, ja?

That was one thing that always bugged me when something failed on the ship, especially communications and transporters. The shuttles have fairly long-range subspace transceivers and decently-ranged transporters. They should still be able to work even when the ship's own equipment does not.

 

[Timo]

What is the range of a shuttlecraft's transporter? We have never quite seen one do a surface-to-orbit transport, now have we... It's just short hops, such as to and from the Borg cube in "BoBW", or just outside the blast radius in "Day of Honor". Probably something like ten klicks.

Runabouts can do surface-to-orbit. Whether they can do the tens of thousands of klicks that starship transporters have done ever since TOS, we can't really tell.

The comm gear should be available even if there's a shipwide failure, of course. But how do shipwide failures usually come about? There tends to be some outside force causing them, something beyond mere equipment breakdown, and that force could be expected to affect shuttlecraft systems, too.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SoM]

What is the range of a shuttlecraft's transporter? We have never quite seen one do a surface-to-orbit transport, now have we... It's just short hops, such as to and from the Borg cube in "BoBW", or just outside the blast radius in "Day of Honor". Probably something like ten klicks.

Well, in the context I pointed out (needing to get into the nacelles) that would be more than enough, even if the doors didn't open and shuttles were stuck in the main shuttlebay, yes?

Runabouts can do surface-to-orbit. Whether they can do the tens of thousands of klicks that starship transporters have done ever since TOS, we can't really tell.

I very much doubt shuttles can transport across 10000+km distances - but given that orbital distances are in the range of 50km or so, tops (unless we're talking about a planet you probably wouldn't want to stand on); you would think that orbit-to-surface would be the bare minimum for a transporter design to be useful. You wouldn't want to be taking two ships much closer than that anyway unless you absolutely had to physically dock (remembering that TNG FX tended to foreshorten the relative distances between ships for effect an awful lot).

 

[Timo]

Agreed about the logic of using shuttle transporters for certain emergency jobs, provided that there is time, and the other alternatives aren't equally practical.

FWIW, VOY "Future's End II" mentions "emergency transporters" with ten-kilometer range, which may just as well be taken as a reference to using shuttlecraft transporters (even though they end up taking the whole ship down). Or then these are transporters they normally use for intraship work, similar to the dozens of platforms sprinkled throughout the E-D blueprints: even when the main pattern buffer crashes, these auxiliary platforms might have small buffers and transceivers of their own.

Whether shuttlecraft transporters would need to be surface-to-orbit is a bit doubtful, considering that shuttles are an alternative to transporters in surface-to-orbit work. And usually one would want to orbit at least a couple of hundred klicks up, really, so as not to suffer from the decaying orbit syndrome, as well as in order to get a better view...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Turbo]

We know that runabout transporters are at least surface-to-orbit, as the DS9 crew tended to leave them in orbit and transport down/up on more than one occasion. I'm trying to think of a time that a shuttle did the same, but I'm drawing a blank.