A lot depends on the distinction between "engines" and "reactor" An engine is a machine that converts energy into mechanical force or motion. Such a machine is distinguished from an electric, spring-driven, or hydraulic motor by its use of a fuel.
Sorry, but that's not really true. You took the definition from "the Free Online Dictionary," of course... and that's one possible definition, but not the real technical definition. Some similar definitions also require it to "have moving parts," by the way, which is also not really necessary for something to be an "engine.")
In fact, there are analytical engines, there have been "computational engines" for ages (the abacus has always been considered a computational engine) and so forth.
Furthermore, let's look at a term often (not entirely correctly) used as a synonym... "motor." Motors, unlike "engines," MUST result in mechanical work being done. Motors are one subcategory of "engines."
The root definition of the term "engine" is the same as that of the term "engineer." Both derive from the same latin root as the word "ingenuity" does.
If anything, the term "engine" is far, far more general than is usually recognized. And engine is, at the root, simply a device which does work... not NECESSARILY "mechanical work." A device which transforms one less-beneficial form of resource (one such resource may be "fuel") into another more beneficial form (such as "movement").
Still... it's true that the warp engines of the enterprise DO meet the general definition you stated. Just wanted to make sure that people don't get a false impression of the meaning of a term.
Now, in a conventional gasoline driven internal combustion engine, such as what drives our automobiles, the transformation occurs within that "engine." And I can't think of any other place the term is used where the "engine" isn't where the "reaction" occurs.
By the time of TNG, it's clearly established that the reaction occurs in the secondary hull of the ship, and that the nacelles only contain the "motive element" of the propulsion system.
This works in automotive terms, of course... think of the nacelles as the tires, and the "warp core" as the engine. Thus, the things on the 1701-D are not "engine nacelles" at all. The "engine" is in the secondary hull. (And yes, dialog supports that, doesn't it?)
Can anyone remember any time during TNG that the nacelles were referred to as "the warp engines?"
If you were to think of this in aerospace terms, you'd have a single big engine in the main cabin of an aircraft, and long driveshafts going out to the wings to turn some form of propeller.
Of course, in aerospace terms, this isn't what's done, is it? The "engines" aren't in the main cabin, driving external propellers. The engines are external, and provide both power and propulsion to the rest of the aircraft.
Now, I think we all agree that the TOS nacelles house the engines for propulsion? So if the reactor is somewhere else and the warp coils merely generate an energy field analogous to how an electric motor generates an electromagnetic field (both are "warped fields" according to physicists) then the nacelles and their coils could not be called engines. Since they are, the nacelles must contain something more than mere field generation coils.
"Warped fields?" I think that's stretching to apply a "Treknology" term to a very well-understood real physics term, don't you?
But I do agree with your overall point. You're correct... without the "engine" part (transformation of one resource... fuel, etc... into another form... high-energy radiation, heat, mechanical work, whatever) happening in those nacelles, they can't be called "engines," but they CAN be called "warp nacelles." Which is, of course, EXACTLY what was done in TMP, TNG, etc, but not in TOS.
Furthermore, a true engine such as a steam engine or internal combustion engine works by bringing the fuel into the engine itself where the fuel is utilized to do the work (the expansion of gases and combustion in these cases).
Yep.
So the upshot of all this is that the M/A-M reactor can be a component of a warp drive engine, but not the engine itself. So if we assume that the reactor is in the secondary hull, then that would make the nacelles and the secondary hull all part of "the warp drive engines", but instead, in TOS only the nacelles are referred to as "the engines". Therefore the nacelles should contain M/A-M reactors; otherwise they cannot properly be called “engines”.
Agreed.
And in TNG, we often hear the "warp core" described as being "the warp engine," don't we?
