RCS Systems TOS

[skree]

I have a question:
Where are the RCS on the Connie and Shuttlecraft?

And if they are not using standard RCSs then what are they using ?
Gravity polarizors, Flywheel ..what then?

I have also noticed that the USS Kelvin and shuttlecraft seem not to have them also

 

[uniderth]

I like to think they use some sort of gravity control system.

 

[Trimm]

They almost certainly have the same RCS systems as the Movie and TNG era ships, they just aren't placed in the bright yellow clusters we see on those ships.

Remember, part of Matt Jefferies design aesthetic for the TOS Connie was that all that equipment we see mounted externally on the Connie refit was hidden behind panels and hatches and whatnot on the original.

 

[Timo]

It is a bit awkward to think that Starfleet for a couple of decades decided to stop using small jets for RCS, to stop using shiny 700mm casings for photon torpedoes, to stop firing phasers from turret mounts, to stop using impulse engines that glow in flight - and then went straight back to all that in the 2270s.

It helps us a bit that ENT already showed Starfleet using cover plates, even if those of the 2150s only covered the phaser turrets and not the RCS clusters or the torpedo tubes "yet"...

Why the sudden fetish for gunports and hatches? Perhaps the Constitution was supposed to be stealthy, and a smooth exterior was vital for that. Or perhaps the lack of holes helped with armoring... Although we never get any indication that the hull would be particularly capable of withstanding, well, anything once the shields are gone. And besides, Archer's ship did rely heavily on hull armoring, but saw no need to chastely cover her RCS clusters. Similarly, Archer had no trouble flying in atmospheres, so surface smoothing isn't vital for that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

I think the answer (surprisingly) is on the design for the Nu-Enterprise: It features dozens of tiny thrusters (which we see firing near the end of ST:ID) which, except when active, are usually indistinguishable from the hull itself (unless you got really close, I suppose) Such a numerous array of thrusters would allow for quite precise control and manoeuvring, not to mention the added safety factor of multiple redundancies, should one or two thrusters fail.

Of course, most of the time the ship would not need them, since all manoeuvring could be handled by the main Impulse Engines (which are themselves most likely a form of gravity manipulation drive). However, they do get a mention in The Cage; when all other drive systems are down, their simple RCS tech is called upon as a last ditch attempt:

SPOCK: Mister Spock here. Switch to rockets. We're blasting out.

Sadly that doesn't work either, but it does suggest that the RCS thruster would (if firing at full force) be enough to blast the ship out of a standard orbit.

 

[Timo]

So perhaps the TOS ship hides her RCS because it is very rarely needed in deep space? And the TOS movie ship exposes hers because in the new role, the ship is supposed to spend more time close to space stations or something.

Or then it turned out that "we rarely need these" was not good enough a reason for using cover plates, and those were dropped as unnecessary ballast.

Whatever the Starfleet rationale, the back-and-forth confuses and annoys. How come they hadn't figured this all out in the preceding decades, or centuries, even?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

Why the sudden fetish for gunports and hatches?

If fighting an enemy who is unfamiliar with a Connie, it would be hard for them to "target weapons" if they didn't know where they were.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I think the answer (surprisingly) is on the design for the Nu-Enterprise: It features dozens of tiny thrusters (which we see firing near the end of ST:ID) which, except when active, are usually indistinguishable from the hull itself (unless you got really close, I suppose) Such a numerous array of thrusters would allow for quite precise control and manoeuvring, not to mention the added safety factor of multiple redundancies, should one or two thrusters fail.

Of course, most of the time the ship would not need them, since all manoeuvring could be handled by the main Impulse Engines (which are themselves most likely a form of gravity manipulation drive). However, they do get a mention in The Cage; when all other drive systems are down, their simple RCS tech is called upon as a last ditch attempt:

SPOCK: Mister Spock here. Switch to rockets. We're blasting out.

Sadly that doesn't work either, but it does suggest that the RCS thruster would (if firing at full force) be enough to blast the ship out of a standard orbit.

No, the impulse engines are the rockets. That's why they're called impulse, of course.

 

[Timo]

Ah, no - they're called that because they bootstrap themselves against Newton's loud protests. Inertially metered pulse and all that.

Really, there's no telling what the impulse engines are. But "rockets" is the one thing they most probably aren't, because rockets can't do what the impulse engines do - chiefly, defeat the rocket equation and attain interplanetary speeds with essentially zero propellant.

It would be more consistent for Spock to indeed be referring to the RCS system in "The Cage", as his money should go for the most primitive and foolproof propulsion system aboard. But it may come in varieties: the ST:TMP ship was supposed to have at least two tiers of rockets, small ones for turning and crawling, and bigger ones atop the secondary hull for rocketlike forward propulsion when the Big Engines aren't in use. The nuKirk Enterprise may also have small, humble and invisible control thrusters and then those massive flamethrowers that get the ship out of clouds in both the movies so far. And oldKirk's ship may have had big and small rockets in her RCS arsenal, too.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Um, no.

 

[Timo]

Um, yes. Or at least the very point of this thread is that we have no way of telling, because for some reason Starfleet went to great effort to hide the truth from our prying eyes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Ah, no - they're called that because they bootstrap themselves against Newton's loud protests. Inertially metered pulse and all that.

Really, there's no telling what the impulse engines are...

Yeah... no. We pretty much know what they are, a type of highly specialized thruster system that uses subspace driver coils or "unified space energy fields" or some other fuckery to achieve an absurdly-high specific impulse. That their in-universe depiction is inconsistent and not even slightly realistic is really just a scifi/TV trope (kind of like the "ion engines" of Star Wars fame).

There isn't really a lot of room for debate on this, the only question is exactly what brand of handwavium is applied to make the impulse engines as super-boosty as they are.

OTOH, calling them "rockets" is likewise overly simplistic, but that only in hindsight with 40 years of retconning behind it; that's clearly what Spock was referring to in "The Cage" so we can just as soon chalk that up to a translation error (he's probably still getting used to not having to speak Vulcan all the time).

 

[Timo]

Nope, them being "rockets" by any stretch of the word is the thing that is completely ruled out.

* A rocket moves by expelling propellant in a direction opposite to the direction of motion. Many impulse engines can't do that - there is no path for them to expel anything.

* A rocket creates a thrust vector along the path of expelled propellant. Most impulse engines can't do that - the thrust vector they would create would be so off-axis that it would only send the starships spinning.

* A rocket expels propellant. Nothing of the sort is seen coming out from impulse engines in general: there is no exhaust trail to track, just "energy readings". And, yeah, some sort of a localized emission in ST6, but not a trail.

If you really still want to argue "It's completely unlike a rocket and meets none of the criteria but that doesn't mean it isn't a rocket" because you like the word rocket a lot, feel free. It's like saying "the transporter is really an elevator, and you can't see the cables because it's a handwavium scifi TV trope". Functionally, that's true - a starship is just a big log floating in the stream, a phaser is a rapier, computers are genies in angular bottles - but we don't argue on that level at the TrekBBS Trek Tech forum.

Whether Spock was speaking of impulse engines when saying "rockets", that we can argue. He's among the heroes who say "magnetic" when they mean "creating pull through gravitics or other magitech unrelated to electromagnetism except through painfully stretching the TOE", after all. But since impulse engines aren't rockets yet certain RCS systems are claimed to be (backstage only) and seem to be (major visuals in TNG and the newer movies), the choice doesn't appear particularly difficult.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Richard Baker]

I wonder how the Impulse propulsion system works when the ship is backing up- no forward facing ports/vents. They specifically say 'reverse impulse' several times in TNG...

I think the RCS system on the Constitution class is just so small in scale compared to the rest of the ship you never got close enough to see it. The ones on the Refit would be hard to see if they were not surrounded by the yellow warning areas.

 

[Timo]

I don't see problems with reverse, as "ports" and "vents" don't seem to play any role in forward propulsion, either. There is no correlation between the motion state of the starship and the state of impulse engine glow from a supposed "port" or "vent": in TNG, the glow is on all the time, while in TOS-R, it only shows up during select few accelerations.

The easy assumption is that the engines glow because that's their red-hot (or sometimes blue-hot, such as with the badly hurt E-C) radiator, not because that's a rocket nozzle.

I think the RCS system on the Constitution class is just so small in scale compared to the rest of the ship you never got close enough to see it.

Or it might be bigger and clumsier than the TOS movie era counterpart, but since it's not marked in yellow but in black (those arching areas on the saucer rim), the black nozzles are practically invisible...

We can also assign some of the nondescript pinholes on the hull to the RCS system instead of treating them as portholes. We never saw a round porthole on the TOS ship from the inside, after all (even though the big three round things at the saucer bow were shown to be window'ish in ENT "In a Mirror, Darkly").

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JES]

I think the answer (surprisingly) is on the design for the Nu-Enterprise: It features dozens of tiny thrusters (which we see firing near the end of ST:ID) which, except when active, are usually indistinguishable from the hull itself (unless you got really close, I suppose) Such a numerous array of thrusters would allow for quite precise control and manoeuvring, not to mention the added safety factor of multiple redundancies, should one or two thrusters fail.

Of course, most of the time the ship would not need them, since all manoeuvring could be handled by the main Impulse Engines (which are themselves most likely a form of gravity manipulation drive). However, they do get a mention in The Cage; when all other drive systems are down, their simple RCS tech is called upon as a last ditch attempt:

SPOCK: Mister Spock here. Switch to rockets. We're blasting out.

Sadly that doesn't work either, but it does suggest that the RCS thruster would (if firing at full force) be enough to blast the ship out of a standard orbit.

I first noticed all those little RCS arrays when the fired to lift the Enterprise out of Titan's atmosphere.

 

[Timo]

Is that "reaction control", though? The rockets never flared in order to turn the ship around - they were exclusively used for lift, in both movies. Perhaps some other TLA for them, then? Vertical Lift System? Ascent Boost System?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Nope, them being "rockets" by any stretch of the word is the thing that is completely ruled out.

Except that that's exactly how Rodenberry envisioned them in the TOS writer's guide, and how Okuda and Sternbach envisioned them in the TNG tech manual. We even have a very good description of how impulse engines basically work in "Emissary" when Chief O'Brien uses DS9's shield generators to create a subspace field, effectively converting the stations attitude control thrusters into low-powered impulse engines (allowing it to travel a distance of several AUs in under 24 hours). This for a space station that is not even supposed to be capable of long-distance flight; this gives us a very good indication of what "thrust" can do if you deliberately screw with the laws of physics, as Starfleet does on a daily basis.

As said, impulse engines are used -- and depicted -- inconsistency, but then so is EVERYTHING on Star Trek, and in this particular case there's not a lot of wiggle room for how they work. It's a combination of "thrust" and "other stuff." It's the "other stuff" that varies from ship to ship, engine to engine.

If you really still want to argue "It's completely unlike a rocket and meets none of the criteria but that doesn't mean it isn't a rocket" because you like the word rocket a lot

I'm not arguing anything. I'm flat out SAYING that impulse engines are a rocket-like propulsion device because the producers of the show said they are. There are a lot of reasons why this doesn't make sense from a real-world point of view, but then if Star Trek were realistic it would totally unrecognizable to begin with.

Whether Spock was speaking of impulse engines when saying "rockets", that we can argue.

No, we really can't. This is a line from "The Cage" at which point Rodenberry hadn't worked out the more advanced terminology that went into later episodes of the series. Much like your own analogy: "Phasers" were called "Lasers" and "deflectors" were called "meteorite beams" and "warp drive" was called "time warp" and moved the ship by "time warp factors."

So we can either conclude that Pike's ship was carrying a set of bizzarely anachronistic technologies for some reason -- including conventional rockets in the impulse deck and handheld laser pistols -- OR we can just chalk it up to the language barrier. Say, for example, that most of Pike's crew actually speaks German and the universal translators are way overdue for a firmware upgrade (I even played with this in a fanfic recently; when the Keeper actually speaks instead of transmitting his thoughts, the translator gives the most literal rendition of his words and he repeatedly refers to Enterprise's organization as "The Federal Sunfleet.")

Out of universe, though, we consider that we know what the writers were actually referring to in those cases, and precisely what role in the story those plot devices actually serve. That can be reconciled without introducing any new speculative technologies from our end.

Is that "reaction control", though? The rockets never flared in order to turn the ship around - they were exclusively used for lift, in both movies.

No, their counterparts on the upper saucer fired briefly in orbit of Vulcan when the Enterprise was dodging through the debris field. This follows Pike's "drop us down underneath him, Sulu!" order.

Worth considering that the term "RCS thrusters" is not a canon reference to anything on a TOS or TMP era starship. They were only ever referred to as "maneuvering thrusters" and ST09 and STID are both very consistent with that.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I wonder how the Impulse propulsion system works when the ship is backing up- no forward facing ports/vents. They specifically say 'reverse impulse' several times in TNG...

It's not so mysterious. The Enterprise uses thrust vectoring for steering under impulse power, which makes it more agile at high speeds than it otherwise would be with thrusters alone.

Reverse thrust with an impulse engine probably works the same way it does with a turbofan:

Stick a properly-shaped forcefield over those engine exhausts and problem solved.

 

[T'Girl]

We pretty much know what they are, a type of highly specialized thruster system that uses subspace driver coils or "unified space energy fields" or some other fuckery to achieve an absurdly-high specific impulse

In other words, "not a rocket."