>Nacelles do not necessarily equal warp drive - see Romulan Bird of Prey.
Cylindrical engines aren't necessarily warp pods...nacelles that match those of their motherships can't be anything but.
>Over the years I've landed on the thought that impulse and warp generate a magic field that requires thrusters to accelerate. They are different enough from one another in some principle but can have their effects combined/stacked.
I differ slightly. Both engines/propulsors provide FTL via a never-mentioned "black box" that generates the FTL field. Impulse acceleration using that field is slower, with a lesser top velocity than warp engines. Warp engines are in effect "FTL ramjets" in operation--canonically, per bridge intercom voiceovers that put Franz Joseph's "energy/matter sink" and such into TMP.
>I avoid citing printed materials mostly because they oddly do not match up to what was aired
I didn't "cite" TMOST. I recalled what it said to point out it was not canon (necessarily)--i.e., whether it's TMOST or the TNG Tech Manual or some officially sanctioned work as yet unpublished...check what the associated series says. Aired data is canon; all else is not.
>Klingon Bird of Prey's impulse dive and block of the harpoon. On impulse she doesn't disturb the atmosphere. When she goes to warp, again the atmosphere isn't impacted. In "The Wrath of Khan" both the Enterprise and Reliant at impulse collide with the Mutara Nebula boundary and have to push into it.
Again I ask: is an FTL ship IN our universe? Intra-atmospheric FTL would say not. Have we ever seen one collide with a material object?
>There is also the Enterprise in the ion storm in "Court Martial" where at Warp encountered "pressure".
This might represent an interaction of field effects, rather than an FTL "submarine" colliding with ions.
> By TNG, there is a shift where everything needs a navigational deflector dish
(except for the Reliant).
Hey, that proves FTL submarine theory! Thanks!
>[any shuttle] probably has an impulse drive, too
For sure. Semi-canonically--but utterly logically--a Class F's is the backside grille: its pod-less but FTL predecessor's sole means of propulsion (ignore the "t-i-e" suffix; this is actually the Kellogg shuttlecraft:
https://www.scifiairshow.com/copy-of-t-i-e-fighter-cockpit
I dunno what G7's "boosters" were (does anyone?). In my never-finished Class F revised blueprints, I put maneuvering thrusters inside various wing-like structures (yaw thrusters fired along the craft's topside, from within the inward-slanting upper walls, f'rinstance).
I smell antigravity in G7's leisurely liftoff, which seems to be shown in the flashing lights on the underside shuttle descent to the planet of the galactic core's "god" (was a Class F's belly ever seen in TOS?)
>I find it foreshadowing that Kirk discusses the shortcomings of the old impulse engines while the next log later, he has to rely on impulse engines to save the ship once they lose the main engines and as a result, the ship's space warp ability.
I really, really like that. Once again you confirm your godhood.
>The basic design of the current impulse engine existed 100 years before TOS, but not 200 years before TOS as with the SS Valiant implying the "old" impulse engines being different and less powerful versus the "current" impulse engines. Refreshing that TNG cared about canon (or was it just dumb luck not to conflict.)
Veeery interesting (said the Nazi from "Laugh In"). I'll have to mull on this.
publiusr, I'm not entirely sure spacelanes are canonically proven/provable (i.e., I'm on the fence). Citations, please?
On the other hand, I frackin' LOVE the idea of warp staging.
In re: Valiant...here's an idea. Like many (every?) ST fan, I wrestled with (wrote) generation after generation of speculative timelines, trying to rationalize the varied series' mutually-contradictory citations. A few years back, eureka!
Consider "the" Bonaventure. In TAS, she resembles a Connie, and Scott calls her "the first ship to have warp drive installed" (curious phrase, to which I'll return). In the Okudas' Chronology, she's a kludge...but Earth's first FTL ship:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bonaventure_(C1-21)
Then she gets canonized in DS9's "The Nagus" in the form of a schoolroom's wall poster:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bonaventure_(C1-21)
which shows her vastly embiggened above the words "Discovery of the space warp"
https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/bonaventure/bonaventure-display1.jpg
which phrase's origin is canon:
KIRK: Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centuri, the discoverer of the space warp?
COCHRANE: That's right, Captain.
MCCOY: But that's impossible. Zefram Cochrane died a hundred and fifty years ago.
My point(s)?
1)Cochrane's having been retconned into flying the Phoenix out of a missile silo can be reconciled by having him "the discoverer of the space warp (principle)"--i.e., that of an FTL "motivator"--first used by a deployable-pod ship launched by a Titan V ICBM (actually the MOST bizarre, ahistoric aspect of all...but I digress)
2)and/or: Phoenix was a "brute force" FTL ship of some sort, sans an actual space warp(er) (I cannot justify this--I'm just thinking out loud)
3)Bonaventure of "The Nagus"
really was that big in relation to generations of Enterprises, and presumably the first Earth ship to employ a "space warp"
proper. It was a big and primitive, built-before-its-time "supership," ala the SS Great Eastern:
an
iron sail-powered, paddle wheel and screw-propelled
steamship designed by
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and built by John Scott Russell & Co. at
Millwall Iron Works on the
River Thames, London. She was the largest ship ever built at the time of her 1858 launch, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers from England to Australia without refuelling. Her length of 692 feet (211 m) was surpassed only in 1899 by the 705-foot (215 m) 17,274-gross-ton
RMS Oceanic, her
gross tonnage of 18,915 was only surpassed in 1901 by the 701-foot (214 m) 21,035-gross-ton
RMS Celtic and her 4,000-passenger capacity was surpassed in 1913 by the 4,234-passenger
SS Imperator. ...she plied for several years as a passenger liner between Britain and North America before being converted to a cable-laying ship and laying the first lasting
transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866.
4)The TAS Bonnie's name was an homage. She became "the first ship to have warp drive
installed" when her existing, FTL-impulse-driven disc had an underslung engineering hull and warp drive nacelles "installed."
5)Head-canonically, she may have in turn been followed by the only Bonnie to appear so far in "model" form:
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Bonaventure_class
6)Per this entire line of crap reasoning, NX's nacelles were antimatter-powered FTL impulse engines (ducks).
7)Finally, in re: Valiant. As with balloons, dirigible and heavier-than-air machines, FTL was pursued by many an Earthling. More than one succeeded. In my aforementioned "fixes all issues prior to Discovery" (insert eyeroll) timeline, UESPA was a Russian inwention, Valiant an FTL prototype whose inventors thought an FTL field could only be generated in close vicinity of a sun. Executing that maneuver, SS Valiant found herself accelerated to mind-boggling velocities, abruptly inside a magnetic storm which swept her from just within the Barrier, through it and a half lightyear Outside. More happened after that...but all records of Valiant were lost in the Post Atomic Horror era.
BTW, the Soviet Union either took a LONG time to fall in TOS, or post-Soviet Russia decided at some point to commemorate it (despite its multi-tens-of-million death toll):
CHEKOV: This place is even better than Leningrad.
...which in reality reverted to its original name of St. Petersburg, and has yet to go back (maybe Putin will get around to that)
) "move" matter through a space warp (another "thing" for which many a possible theoretical justification exists).
).
