Warp Effects at end of Generations

[Captain59]

I was disappointed that the Miranda-class starship that warped out at the very end of the movie did not have the rainbow effect consistent with those warp engines in the latter Kirk-era movies. That would have been cool continuity.

 

[Ronald Held]

That ship has 24th century warp engines with 24th century VFX?

 

[Timo]

...The Oberth might also be of recent stock rather than a 23rd century original, regardless of her (never properly seen) registry.

But it would be fun to see dissimilar warp effects in a single shot at least once. It's not as if only identical warp engines can maintain formation at speed, so fleet/convoy scenes should work just fine.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captain59]

Here it is. Those are definitely 23rd century warp engines like on the Enterprise-A and Reliant.

 

[Timo]

But only on the outside.

Sometimes a given nacelle design is seen behaving explicitly and distinctly differently on a different century - say, the Excelsior nacelles start glowing in all-new places for DS9. Sometimes there might be an upgrade that doesn't show to the outside, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

But only on the outside.

Sometimes a given nacelle design is seen behaving explicitly and distinctly differently on a different century - say, the Excelsior nacelles start glowing in all-new places for DS9. Sometimes there might be an upgrade that doesn't show to the outside, though.

Timo Saloniemi

In universe, if it was an old Miranda class with newer engines, wouldn't they be 24th century looking nacelles? Could you put the newer tech inside older nacelles?

If it was a later built Miranda class (5 digit registries in DS9 battle scenes), would it even look like the 23rd century ones? And if it did, it would still have the 24th century nacelles.

Obviously, they just wanted to use existing models/CGI and probably never figured on discussions like this one.

 

[Timo]

We more or less got our answers in the first season of TNG already: all the century-old nacelles happily mingling with the style of the hero ship without a hint of a change, yet apparently considered good enough for formation flying and the like.

But nobody ever said any of these ships had actually undergone an engine refit, or was now following the New Warp Scale, or anything like that. And the only time there really was an engine refit, from TOS to TMP, everything changed externally...

I guess it's just implicit in Trek that external shape is irrelevant (hence the wide variety of shapes), and explicit that one can fit transwarp, tetryon plasma engines or slipstream drive within an existing engine cowling without much trouble.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

I was disappointed that the Miranda-class starship that warped out at the very end of the movie did not have the rainbow effect consistent with those warp engines in the latter Kirk-era movies. That would have been cool continuity.

I never thought of any of the warp speed/warp jump effects being any different "in universe", just the special FX we viewers see that changes.

If that makes any sense.

 

[Tosk]

It makes perfect sense, and is certainly the way I approach it.

 

[Ithekro]

USS Defiant has something that resembles the TWOK and TMP warp effect when it comes out of warp near Bajor's sun in the episode "By Inferno's Light".

 

[somebuddyX]

To me it's like the transporter effect. Voyager used it's own style for the ship but also at Starfleet Command, whilst on DS9 they used their effect when they were at starfleet command, but to me there's not meant to be any difference. In my opinion.