Warp Speed Scale Change

[Timo]

...Regarding the "Balance of Terror" bit, it could be argued that what actually happens is Kirk yelling "astern", Sulu pinwheeling the ship at impulse to face the direction that used to be astern just a few seconds ago, and the ship then darting forward at emergency warp speed as soon as she can actually engage the warp drive.

After all, there are no exterior visuals of reversing; there is little reason to think that the viewer image would be showing the forward view (because it instead is perfectly centered on the one item of interest, the fireball of death, this despite Sulu no doubt engaging in as violent evasive maneuvers as he possibly can); the difference between warp and impulse visuals does not yet exist for TOS; and not even the final impact scene allows us to divine which part of the ship actually got impacted.

Actual visuals of ships or items moving at reverse, sideways or up or down warp don't exist AFAIK, save for the cases where Q sends Picard's ship spinning across the universe...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Idran]

And then we've got "Fury", where it was established that changing direction at warp can fracture the hull (admittedly with some degree of contradiction to past episodes, though there is the "could" there that lets us take it as just "avoid when possible"). That would certainly suggest that it's difficult for a warp drive to change trajectory while at warp.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The more massive ship is not at a disadvantage because "it will require larger and heavy maneuvering thrusters than a smaller vessel and will use proportionately more propellant just turning around than the smaller vessel would". Maneuvering thrusters are relatively small on starships. So increasing the size of maneuvering thrusters on larger ships so they can turn as fast as smaller ships is a relatively minor design process.

That again assumes that making the same thruster larger would increase its power by a proportional amount. That is unlikely to be the case, especially since the larger propellant requirement would result in a much more massive ship than it otherwise might be and change the thrust to weight ratio of those maneuvering jets. That would ultimately defeat the entire purpose of building a larger ship in the first place, given that you don't actually NEED to build a large ship to install a very large engine. So the advantage of building a large vessel is implicitly something for which its lack of maneuverability wouldn't actually BE a liability (or if it is, the ship has other means of coping with that, such as, say, saucer separation).

It isn't so simple a task to "scale up" engines like you're implying. Thrust is a function of combustion temperature, chamber pressure, expansion ratios, mixture ratios and cooling rates for the combustion chamber. Making the same engine larger won't usually accomplish an increase in performance.

Suppose that a ship with twice the dimensions of a smaller one has eight times the volume of the smaller one but only needs a crew twice as large. That ship will have crew quarters and life support space twice as large as the smaller ship, and thus will have unused space equal to six times the crew quarters and life support space on the smaller ship that can be used for other things such as maneuvering thrusters, etc.

Which is a waste of space and material. If you need a ship that is fast and maneuverable, you just build a smaller ship. If you need a ship with a huge amount of cargo space, lots of heavy weapons and a shuttlebay the size of a small space station, you build that instead. If you need a ship that has BOTH, you build it in a modular configuration so that both HALVES of the ship can maneuver quickly in a pinch. This is the entire selling point of the Galaxy Class starship, and Worf explicitly tells the renegades: "When relieved of its bulk, the Enterprise becomes an exceptional weapon."

And why would a starship need maneuvering thrusters to change its course?

It doesn't. It needs maneuvering thrusters to change its orientation. Thrust vectoring can be used to control the ship's trajectory during a thrust maneuver, but actually turning the ship in a particular direction will require thrusters.

 

[Timo]

Why? If you can swivel your jetpipe, then your vehicle will most definitely reorient itself, as the thrust line now goes past your center of mass and has a momentum arm.

Or do you mean orientation when thrust is turned off? If a "course change" is to be achieved, then main thrust is likely to be engaged, for ultimately following said course - why not use that for the orientation change, too?

Whether any of this is applicable to Trek starships is debatable. Warp need not be anything like Newtonian. Impulse need not be that, either, and indeed we see little evidence of "thrust" or its vectoring. And maneuvering thrusters are infamously invisible in their putative action...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Why? If you can swivel your jetpipe, then your vehicle will most definitely reorient itself, as the thrust line now goes past your center of mass and has a momentum arm.

Sure, but that still limits your maneuvering options such that you can't actually reorient the ship at all without firing up the engines and putting on a couple hundred m/s of transverse motion. Large naval vessels have this problem which makes maneuvering in tight spaces like harbors and narrow rivers virtually impossible and they have to rely on tugs to get around. Starships seem to have no use for tugs, they use their maneuvering thrusters for pinpoint maneuvering or for small adjustments to orientation that shouldn't actually require a huge course correction.

A really good example of this is the battle from ST09, here Enterprise has to dodge through the debris field over Vulcan. With your helmsman trying to thread the needle between two tumbling hulks in a 700 meter starship, you don't want to have to gun the impulse engines just to dip the bow a few more degrees.

Whether any of this is applicable to Trek starships is debatable. Warp need not be anything like Newtonian. Impulse need not be that, either, and indeed we see little evidence of "thrust" or its vectoring.

For warp drive, this is irrelevant. We don't really know how maneuvering works at FTL speeds and it doesn't make a lot of logical sense either since most depictions of warp drive assume some kind of universal reference frame with respect to which all starships are stationary until they go to warp.

As for impulse engines, we've been over that before. Multiple times in TNG they are explicitly referred to as thrust-generating engines with an obviously newtonian component, and the ion trail in "Relics" is apparently distinct for being generated by "an impulse engine at full reverse."

And maneuvering thrusters are infamously invisible in their putative action

Not in the reboot films, no. More importantly, all of the movies and most of the TV series have dialog explicitly referring to the action of those thrusters at various times. One of the most explicit is in TUC, when Excelsior is hit by the shockwave from Praxis. Sulu's helmsman says "She's not answering her helm, Sir!" to which Sulu replies "Starboard thrusters! Turn her into the wave!"

 

[Ithekro]

Warp maneuvering is probably done by adjustment to the warp field, as it is adjustable. It might be dangerous to attempt such changes at some speeds because the field requirements for those speeds is very tenuous to begin with and making an adjustment is iffy.

However the Galaxy-class Enterprise did do a saucer separation at Warp 9 plus than did some sort of high speed 180 to head back towards Q while the saucer section continued on at warp speeds via a sustainer field of one sort of another.

 

[Timo]

Sure, but that still limits your maneuvering options such that you can't actually reorient the ship at all without firing up the engines and putting on a couple hundred m/s of transverse motion. Large naval vessels have this problem which makes maneuvering in tight spaces like harbors and narrow rivers virtually impossible and they have to rely on tugs to get around. Starships seem to have no use for tugs, they use their maneuvering thrusters for pinpoint maneuvering or for small adjustments to orientation that shouldn't actually require a huge course correction.

True enough for ships using separate rudders and propellers. Starships using thrust vectoring would probably be more analogous to ships using Azipods: just vector the main thrust by 90 degrees or more and you ship turns on a dime.

A really good example of this is the battle from ST09, here Enterprise has to dodge through the debris field over Vulcan. With your helmsman trying to thread the needle between two tumbling hulks in a 700 meter starship, you don't want to have to gun the impulse engines just to dip the bow a few more degrees.

Unless you gun them to move the ship down rather than forward. Their thrust is free of "thrust axis" concerns anyway - the axis from the supposed nozzles won't go through the center of mass unless each starship design is specifically massively ballasted to achieve such a Newtonian effect.

(In any case, Sulu wouldn't necessarily want to reorient the ship there - dipping the bow would raise the tail and risk further bruising. In precision maneuvering, there's quite a bit of demand for transitioning rather than turning movement.)

As for impulse engines, we've been over that before. Multiple times in TNG they are explicitly referred to as thrust-generating engines with an obviously newtonian component, and the ion trail in "Relics" is apparently distinct for being generated by "an impulse engine at full reverse."

...Thus in that model establishing that there is no need for the "gunning" action: if you want to go backwards, you just go backwards, vectoring the thrust by 180 degrees, and there's no need for big looping maneuvers like with rudder-and-propeller ships.

Not in the reboot films, no. More importantly, all of the movies and most of the TV series have dialog explicitly referring to the action of those thrusters at various times. One of the most explicit is in TUC, when Excelsior is hit by the shockwave from Praxis. Sulu's helmsman says "She's not answering her helm, Sir!" to which Sulu replies "Starboard thrusters! Turn her into the wave!"

Thrusters appear to be something the skipper has to specifically request for exceptional action, yes. We see (that is, hear) them applied for rapid turns, for fighting planetary gravity, and for precision maneuvering near docks and the like. We don't hear them used at warp. And we don't hear them used for choosing a heading (the E-D chooses a heading without manifesting the flames that in "Booby Trap" and the like are associated with thrusters; the runabout manifests flames in "Playing God" only and doesn't apply thrusters in dialogue elsewhere; etc.).

It very much appears that thrusters are what you use when you can't steer. When you can, something else is in use. Possibly different things at impulse and warp. Possibly.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timo]

However the Galaxy-class Enterprise did do a saucer separation at Warp 9 plus than did some sort of high speed 180 to head back towards Q while the saucer section continued on at warp speeds via a sustainer field of one sort of another.

Heh, there's room for interpretation there. After all, the actual separation of the two flightpaths takes place at impulse (no starstreaks on the background), and there's no turning action evident when the ship is at high warp (when the stars are streaking, that is).

Quite possibly Picard listened to Data and decided that warp separation was indeed inadvisable, hence instead chose to hit the brakes for the maneuver.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

True enough for ships using separate rudders and propellers. Starships using thrust vectoring would probably be more analogous to ships using Azipods: just vector the main thrust by 90 degrees or more and you ship turns on a dime.

No. A standard RCS thruster can turn the ship around its center of gravity because its counterpart on the other side of the ship is thrusting in the opposite direction. Fire only one thruster, and the ship no longer rotates around its center of gravity and gains a certain amount of lateral momentum in the direction the thruster was fired. The ship will not pivot "in place" but will move laterally as it turns, as if the thruster was simply a point of collision from another object.

A vectored engine is no different, in fact it's somewhat worse since the angle of the thrust vector is much smaller with respect to the axis through the ship's center of gravity. An RCS thruster can be placed to fire at 90 degrees to the axis of thrust, while a vectored engine can swivel around to maybe 45 or 60. You could, of course, install an impulse engine that swivels the entire housing like a gun turret, but unless you install an identical unit on the other side of its center of mass, you still have no fine control of the ship's movements.

And this before we consider that with ONLY a vectoring engine, your degrees of freedom are limited severely. You have no control for translational movement since lateral thrust cannot be directed through the ship's center of mass; you have no control of rotational movement, since the only way to roll the ship is to accelerate forward and vector the engines. So the vectored exhaust only gives you SOME control of pitch and yaw but requires a certain amount of delta-v for those changes to take place. This is not something you'd want to use to reorient your ship, but it would be useful for control of minor course corrections during acceleration and deceleration phases.

Unless you gun them to move the ship down rather than forward.

Which you can't do with a vectored exhaust nozzle, not without physically moving the ship's center of gravity along WITH the nozzle (or with two engines on opposite sides of it).

Their thrust is free of "thrust axis" concerns anyway - the axis from the supposed nozzles won't go through the center of mass unless each starship design is specifically massively ballasted to achieve such a Newtonian effect.

Which, let's face it, they pretty much HAVE to be, or else there'd be no reason for impulse engines to be placed in a rear-facing configuration in the first place (which they INVARIABLY are, without exception).

In any case, Sulu wouldn't necessarily want to reorient the ship there

What he wants to do is actually irrelevant; we see what he DID, which was fire the ventral maneuvering thrusters on the sauce section and lower the nose as well as the ship's direction relative to the hulk. Enterprise didn't gain a lot of forward motion in doing so, which suggests the entire maneuver was done with thrusters.

A similar ting happens when they drop out of warp over Titan, and Enterprise uses a combination of thrusters and impulse engines to leave the atmosphere. He calls for a "five second burst" from the engines, which gives the ship some forward motion; it's attitude and orientation are controlled entirely by thrusters.

...Thus in that model establishing that there is no need for the "gunning" action: if you want to go backwards, you just go backwards, vectoring the thrust by 180 degrees, and there's no need for big looping maneuvers like with rudder-and-propeller ships.

But again, that only works forwards and backwards along the ship's thrust axis. You have little or no control of the ship's orientation the farther you get off centerline.

i hate to say it, but you're literally arguing against 50 years of aerospace engineering here. Thrust vectoring is not and has never been the primary means of controlling a spacecraft's orientation, and for exactly the reasons I've described to you. This is so, even as 99% of all launch vehicles use thrust vectoring in their first and sometimes second stages; it's something you use when you're trying to build a lot of acceleration and make sure you're heading in in the right direction the entire time. It makes sense for a starship burning hard at impulse trying to cross from one planet to another, but when you're trying to maneuver through a giant door on a heavily armored space station that your ship barely fits through, you don't fire up the rockets and scream through it like a bat out of hell.

I mean, not unless you're an asshole.

Thrusters appear to be something the skipper has to specifically request for exceptional action

Or when the helmsman decides they're appropriate for the situation. That's the whole point of having a trained helmsman, after all: he knows how to use the many maneuvering instruments at his disposal, when to use them, and how they work.

 

[Timo]

No. A standard RCS thruster can turn the ship around its center of gravity because its counterpart on the other side of the ship is thrusting in the opposite direction. Fire only one thruster, and the ship no longer rotates around its center of gravity and gains a certain amount of lateral momentum in the direction the thruster was fired. The ship will not pivot "in place" but will move laterally as it turns, as if the thruster was simply a point of collision from another object.

This hardly matters, as any single force vector acting upon the free-floating object past the CoG will cancel itself out if applied long enough. Nothing suggests a starship still couldn't turn on a dime, literally - it's just a matter of applied thrust and momentum arm, the rotational inertia involved, etc.

A vectored engine is no different, in fact it's somewhat worse since the angle of the thrust vector is much smaller with respect to the axis through the ship's center of gravity.

Except in this case it isn't - you yourself argued that 180 degrees is being applied in "Relics". Azipods also do the full 360 degrees easily enough.

An RCS thruster can be placed to fire at 90 degrees to the axis of thrust

Which is less than 180. The damning fault is that an RCS thruster involves a flame shooting out. Nothing of the sort is associated with the impulse or warp engines that would be doing the supposed vectoring (a noncanon practice to be sure, but one at least consistent and allowable in the context).

And this before we consider that with ONLY a vectoring engine, your degrees of freedom are limited severely. You have no control for translational movement since lateral thrust cannot be directed through the ship's center of mass; you have no control of rotational movement, since the only way to roll the ship is to accelerate forward and vector the engines.

In a real-world situation, this would probably be an issue of immense disinterest: starship "maneuvering" would not involve such nuances, just point-and-shoot scenarios. A bit like modern AAMs that have no use for roll or lateral movement.

In the Trek scenario, we know starships aren't supposed to use their impulse let alone warp engines for delicate docking maneuvers, so that part is already out of the way. However,

So the vectored exhaust only gives you SOME control of pitch and yaw but requires a certain amount of delta-v for those changes to take place. This is not something you'd want to use to reorient your ship, but it would be useful for control of minor course corrections during acceleration and deceleration phases.

Quite to the opposite, whenever you want to reorient your Trek starship for any practical deep space purpose (setting a heading for Alpha Beta, dodging the Klingon torpedo, getting through the maw of the Space Worm in time), you want maximum delta-vee to go with it. Just rolling about in freefall is a maneuver mostly uncalled for.

Which, let's face it, they pretty much HAVE to be, or else there'd be no reason for impulse engines to be placed in a rear-facing configuration in the first place (which they INVARIABLY are, without exception).

Meh. They just happen to lie on the aft face (or the top face, or something in between) of the ship, but far, far away from any thrust axis.

Rocket flames (no matter how invisible) shooting out from nozzles is something we can categorically rule out as a principle of impulse engine operations. There are plenty of ships with the flame path obstructed, after all, and virtually none with the flame path going along a plausible thrust axis. And you yourself argue that reverse thrust is taking place in "Relics", and that can't involve any flames or nozzles since no forward-facing ones exist on the E-D and she never turned around.

Really, we have already heard a hero associate impulse engine features with tailpipes, and that's just perfect for our needs. These things spew that red exhaust regardless of the state of motion of the ship, but there's no known association between the exhaust and actual propulsion. Perhaps some engines make use of the exhaust to boost the primary propulsive effect (just like some aircraft piston engines get minor extra kick from their exhausts), but clearly that isn't decisive even in this putative vectoring concept because reversing or turning action is something associated with the primary propulsion mode - the heroes never lament that they should be using a secondary mode, nor do they reorient their ship to better benefit from rocketlike action (again "Relics").

What he wants to do is actually irrelevant; we see what he DID, which was fire the ventral maneuvering thrusters on the sauce section and lower the nose as well as the ship's direction relative to the hulk. Enterprise didn't gain a lot of forward motion in doing so, which suggests the entire maneuver was done with thrusters.

Or by an interaction of the usual maneuvering system (which, as we clearly can see in about 100% of Star Trek, involves zero RCS flame action) and an exceptional "pull the handbrake" type abuse of a normally unrelated system.

RCS flames are fine for special applications (which in the new movies, even if nowhere else, appears to involve planetary takeoffs, but do not involve departing a spacedock or lining up with the entry tunnel of Yorktown), and this in no way detracts from the concept of the "actual" steering happening some other way. Manipulation of a primary drive system? Perhaps. Application of a secondary system other than RCS jets? Quite possibly.

A similar ting happens when they drop out of warp over Titan, and Enterprise uses a combination of thrusters and impulse engines to leave the atmosphere. He calls for a "five second burst" from the engines, which gives the ship some forward motion; it's attitude and orientation are controlled entirely by thrusters.

Naah. A set of flames elevates the ship; everything else happens by invisible means. And there's plenty of "else" going on if you're to emerge from the clouds and then immediately thereafter to stop the emerging.

i hate to say it, but you're literally arguing against 50 years of aerospace engineering here.

Why are you mixing aerospace engineering into this? Starships have nothing in common with today's powered gliders. They don't fall out of space if they stop. They do move backwards a lot. They turn on a dime. That's standard humdrum naval engineering, only (occasionally) in three dimensions.

When you're trying to maneuver through a giant door on a heavily armored space station that your ship barely fits through, you don't fire up the rockets and scream through it like a bat out of hell.

Hmh? Of course you do, or else Devil will hit the "close" button before you get out.

Again, "Relics". Zero visible RCS action, lots of maneuvering. An invisible maneuvering system based on transparent RCS jets? Or on futuristic gyroscopes? Or on vectoring the main thrust (which can create all the required maneuvers, including the roll, within certain tolerances that are well available inside Dyson spheres let alon in deep space)? Everything is possible, but invisible RCS flames introduce complications I'd much rather steer clear of:

1) Why are they visible "on occasion"?
2) Why do they require special commands "on occasion" in order to be brought to play?
3) Why is there a separate control interface dedicated to their operation, untouched by the helmsbeing in normal maneuvering operations?

If we just drop the "on occasion" bit and assume that RCS rockets only operate when we actually see and hear them do so, we're much better off.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

This hardly matters, as any single force vector acting upon the free-floating object past the CoG will cancel itself out if applied long enough.

ROFL WHAT?!

Do you even physics bro?

Nothing suggests a starship still couldn't turn on a dime, literally

Other than, you know, Newton's Third Law, which tells us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Without a counteracting force to balance the reaction on the opposite side, the reaction is the entire ship translating as it turns. There's a rotational moment that depends on where the center of gravity is relative to the vector of thrust; the farther the vector is from the center, the more the ship rotates.

This is not the case for starfleet vessels, which appear to locate their impulse engines as close as possible to their center of mass. The Enterprise A, B, C and D all have engines that are either at or very close to their exact center of gravity with RCS thrusters very far from it. Even the Klingon bird of prey keeps a set of impulse engines in a recessed housing aft of the ship, deliberately brining the engines CLOSER to its center of gravity than it should be. This is not something you do if you're planning on using thrust vectoring for attitude control.

Except in this case it isn't - you yourself argued that 180 degrees is being applied in "Relics". Azipods also do the full 360 degrees easily enough.

The TF-39 jet engine is also capable of 180 degree reverse thrust. It's not an Azipod, though, and cannot achieve any angles OTHER than forward and reverse.

Which is less than 180. The damning fault is that an RCS thruster involves a flame shooting out.

No, an RCS thruster involves a high velocity jet of reactant mass leaving the ship. This jet may or may not be superheated as a way of increasing its velocity (as is the case for impulse engines). Cold gas thrusters, ion thrusters and particle beam thrusters do not use a "flame shooting out."

Neither do RCS thrusters on Star Trek, with the very notable exception of the enormous thrusters on the reboot Enterprise that are likely more powerful than most ships' impulse engines.

Quite to the opposite, whenever you want to reorient your Trek starship for any practical deep space purpose (setting a heading for Alpha Beta, dodging the Klingon torpedo, getting through the maw of the Space Worm in time), you want maximum delta-vee to go with it

Which is a different issue from pinpoint maneuvering, and why I keep drawing the distinction between thrust vectoring used in course corrections (as it is currently used for launch vehicles and long-burn upper stages that have to make many corrections for the duration of a maneuver) and pinpoint maneuvering, such as reorienting the ship in space along its orbital path, controlling pitch yaw and roll during low-speed maneuvers, aligning the front of the ship with a safe exit corridor (in the case of leaving a space station, maneuvering through a debris field or engaging warp engines for the first time) or maneuvering the ship through space in close proximity to other ships, shuttles or installations.

Pinpoint maneuvering, in other words, is something you do when you want to turn the ship but don't want to go anywhere (yet). Thrust vectoring is inappropriate for that type of maneuver, because the motion of your vessel is more difficult to control and requires a lot more open space than would usually be safe.

They just happen to lie on the aft face (or the top face, or something in between) of the ship, but far, far away from any thrust axis.

They lie on the aft face 100% of the time. Also, you don't actually know what the thrust axis is since you don't know how those ships are ballasted or why. I do not, however, think it is a coincidence that the impulse engines are almost never above the level of the bridge or main habitable structures. It probably has to do with the ship's artificial gravity field; it's likely that objects ABOVE grav plating have a lot more inertia (with respect to the engines) than objects below them.

Rocket flames (no matter how invisible) shooting out from nozzles is something we can categorically rule out as a principle of impulse engine operations.

Or we COULD have until Preemptive Strike gave us this:
"The Enterprise shields have a weak point. When the ship is at impulse, the thrust destabilizes the shield configuration right at this point. I'm going to try to punch through there."

Obviously not "flames" but it's some kind of ionized gas emitted from the engines to produce thrust.

And

you yourself argue that reverse thrust is taking place in "Relics", and that can't involve any flames or nozzles since no forward-facing ones exist on the E-D and she never turned around.

And yet the TF-39 jet engine is also capable of reverse thrust, despite never emitting "flames" and the C-5 galaxy never turning around.

I'm beginning to think you're not being serious...

Why are you mixing aerospace engineering into this?

Because aerospace engineering, unlike your conjectures, takes actual data into account. Data meaning "things that actually happen in reality." If data is meaningless to you, then you can just make up whatever random shit you like, in which case I don't care what you think.

[1) Why are they visible "on occasion"?

Because RCS thrusters do not produce "flames." Even in the REAL WORLD this has basically never been the case. Hydrazine thrusters produce a hot gas that is not actually incandescent and is only visible under certain lighting conditions. Cold gas thrusters don't even produce that much, and are visible even less often. Pulsed plasma thrusters will glow near their center but their emissions are never visible at all.

Background sources all describe RCS thrusters as some sort of "particle beam" which is, obviously, something entirely different from "flames". You should no more expect them to be "visible" than you should expect a radar sweep to leave a pale green glow on everything in touches.

2) Why do they require special commands "on occasion" in order to be brought to play?

Same reason they require ANY command on the bridge: for the sake of clarity and to avoid potentially deadly misunderstandings. For things that don't matter, no commands are required; Kirk can tell Sulu "Set course for Ganymede and then put us in orbit. We're gonna take the shuttle down." Sulu knows where Ganymede is and how to get there, he knows (probably) how fast Kirk wants to get there, he knows what a standard orbit is and what it looks like, and he knows what orientation the ship needs to be in to facilitate a safe shuttle launch. Kirk doesn't have to tell him "thrusters at station-keeping, maintain prograde inertial orientation with the ventral hull at 30 degrees to the horizon." Sulu knows all of this and can be trusted to do it.

OTOH, if you're trying to maneuver around in a tiny little space the size of a walk-in closet or, worse, in the belly of a giant pissed off alien robot starship, you want to be as specific as you possibly can about what you want your helmsman to do.

Naval example: Marco Reimius ordering his sonar officer "Re-verify range to target. One ping only, please."

3) Why is there a separate control interface dedicated to their operation, untouched by the helmsbeing in normal maneuvering operations?

Actually, the question is, why ISN'T there a control interface for vectoring of the impulse engines on any of the diagrams we've seen? Even in the set design for TMP, there is only a single panel on the helm console that can be used to alter the ship's orientation. We KNOW that they use thrusters for this at least some of the time; we don't know and have no reason to assume they would use impulse engines for this too. We do know that impulse engines can be fired in reverse, but there is nothing whatsoever that implies they can be fired sideways, laterally, oppositionally (for roll control) or fine-tuned for manually-adjusted course corrections. Indeed, the fact that vector exhaust is very difficult to use for that purpose is the probably the whole reason the helm console has a NAVIGATOR in the first place: Sulu can control thrusters and engine output and Ilia has to program the computer with a destination solution which allows it to make those very fine adjustments to the engine exhaust to keep them on course. This, more than anything, explains why Enterprise never has to make midcourse corrections while flying on impulse power, the computer does it in real time.

 

[Ithekro]

Newtonian physics seem to only apply for non-warp maneuvering. Potentially non-impulse maneuvering as well since that seem to break Newtonian laws from time to time as well (specifically times when the ship loses power and they come to a dead stop for no reason.)

 

[Mytran]

I think the key to all this non-newtonian movement is those fancy mass-reduction coils in the impulse engines (for TNG, anyway)

 

[publiusr]

The way I always explained turning in warp is that the field of each nacelle is a bit like tank treads. A little more power to one or the other. The galaxy is mostly a plane..so...

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The way I always explained turning in warp is that the field of each nacelle is a bit like tank treads. A little more power to one or the other. The galaxy is mostly a plane..so...

But the galaxy is almost a thousand light years thick in most places. You could stack HUNDREDS of stars just a few light years apart to make up that thickness. Space is three dimensional, even in the Star Trek universe.

 

[Tenacity]

Space is three dimensional, even in the Star Trek universe.

But not apparently in most Star Trek maps.

 

[Idran]

The way I always explained turning in warp is that the field of each nacelle is a bit like tank treads. A little more power to one or the other. The galaxy is mostly a plane..so...

It's mostly a plane on the galaxy-wide scale, but only because the galaxy is so large; it's still 1000 light-years wide. On the local scale it's close to equally distributed in all three dimensions.

 

[Ithekro]

It only has to work on subspace anyway.

 

[John Sinclair]

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the warp scale changed with TMP and in TNG episode "Relics" LaForge says to Scotty the warp drive hasn't changed in 100 years which would put it at the time of TMP. For all we know it could change on a regular bases.

However, sometime after TNG, it was discovered that this warp 10 barrier could be circumvented in a similar way as the original lightspeed barrier was, by going into an even deeper subspace domain (or set of subspace domains). Again, here new optimal points were found. This would then be the meaning of warp factors 11, 12, 13, and so on, and could be aptly named 'transwarp'.

I really like this idea. This might explain TNG episode "Schisms" with the subspace aliens abducting the crew.

 

[WARLOCK1965]

I was reading the Star Trek Encyclopedia the other day and I noted the description of the warp scale change from TOS to TNG. Apparently Gene Roddenberry stipulated that warp 10 was to be the absolute maximum for warp drive in TNG.

Has any timeframe ever been established for this change? It would seem reasonable that ships in the TOS movie era still travelled at TOS warp scale speeds. Therefore, I would assume that the change occurred after STVI but prior to TNGS1.

I can't recall this ever being properly mentioned in any canon or non-canon Star Trek material. Just curious if anyone else knows?

How about Mr. Scott guide to the Enterprise I am not possible but I do a that had the Enterprise refit wrap speed being around wrap 13 if so that could be one of the times the wrap scale changed