Yes, that looked colossally stupid as well.
Spoilers Starship Design in Star Trek: Picard
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Gonzo
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True but I do like how they are willing to update platforms to keep them relevant.
There is a limit to that though in regards to structural integrity and available power and I do think the platform had pushed as far as it could, indeed very much like Riker himself.
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Gonzo
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I dont even know where to start with that so I wont bother.
Doubly so with the title of the thread its in.
There’s actually a fan-made design that predates the Galaxy-X which solves this problem. The Olympus (1988). It’s a little wonky looking, but there it is.
What is wrong with people? Why would anyone do this? It is an abomination!
Tell all the 80's fans they need to take a class on design theory ASAP.
I'll agree that one is pretty ugly. Trying too hard to be FJ's Dreadnought.
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Gonzo
Guest
Not the best way to attach the third nacelle but its fair enough as long as it doesnt fall off.
Over the years we have seen ships with nacelles from 1 up to 4.
Should increase top cruising speed and amount of time it can be maintained.
Obviously it is not that simple. The fastest and most powerful ships tends to have two nacelles, so there is some reason for that configuration.
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Gonzo
Guest
There must also have been reasons to have more than two at times as well.
Perhaps for the reasons I stated above or just to have a backup in times of war when you know the enemy is going to target them.
You want it to be complicated because you don't like how it looks, I won't discard an option just because it is not pretty enough.
Function first, once that has been satisfied then I may take a look at how I can make it look better, if that is possible.
That is one ugly ship
The function is fictional! And because in this fiction the third engine is rarely used, it obviously isn't very beneficial. I trust Leah Brahms in the matters of efficient warpfield design over you!
I'm fairly certain It's factual that in the fabulous fictional Trek Universe it is forever functional, so why the friction over it?
There are two examples (both interestingly enough from Enterprise) where having real windows would help (this also applies to needed real windows throughout the body of the ship.
In Broken Bow when the writers hadn't yet screwed up cloaking tech, we hear Reed say he thought he saw something (on sensors before they lost power). With space, and ship without light sources is going to be almost impossible to see unless exceptionally close to the ship. Those Cell ships were tiny and lacked much in the way of any real light source. Without sensors being able to detect, you have in truth the next best thing to invisibility.
This is how Enterprise should have handled any type of cloaking ability in that period. Something that screwed up sensors, but was actually still visible to the naked eye (like how Discovery did it, in it's first episode (1 point for Discovery actually learning from the mistakes of previous treks). And in the Minefield where the ship is surrounded by a lot of small mines, having people (not to mention massive amounts of flood lights from the ship to illuminate the area) would have given functional cloaking but allowed the crew to safely escape without the Romulans having true cloaking technology. For both Minefield, and Shockwave Part One it would have given the show a bit of drama by having to have the crew doing manually what sensors would normally. DS9 added a nice touch of more manual commands to the episode where they captured Eddington, after he damaged the computer and it gave the episode a nice little punch to it.
Of course the powers that be, further screwed up the Suliban by making it true invisibility when they are physically shown together on a planet....
On ships like the Stargazer for example I always took it that perhaps the ship wasn't any faster then a standard miranda, but the it could operate at peak power for twice the duration (or supplement shield and weapons strength without needing to divert from full engine speed). Something that would be highly desirable in a long range exploratory/ military vessel.
The Suliban got all their tech from the Future, so in my mind it's easy to explain away.
(including their DNA changes)
My theory is that more than 2 warp nacells may not be the fasted but they instead allows you to maintain maximum warp speed longer as you can cycle through the engines, letting 2 rest while 2 work.
So a 2 nacelle ship might only be able to do warp 9.7 for 12 hours but a 4 nacelle ship can do warp 9.2 for 2 days.
And using that can explain why the Stargazer had them, because Picard at the time was way out exploring on the frontier of the Federation boarders.
Something that four nacelles would be most appropriate for.
We have to understand how the function actually works before we determine if it is functional. Unfortunately, we have a limited understanding of how the nacelles do their voodoo.
So, word of Gene is they must be in pairs, so 2 or 4. Given the common configuration of 2 there is a benefit to it in some capacity that 3 doesn't offer, or offers but at a cost.
IIRC, TNG-era warp engines were supposed to possess two warp coils, hence the two bussard collectors lit up in the front. So the Galaxy-X actually had 6 coils in three housings and ships like the Freedom class had two coils in a single housing.
