So the PTCs are first running up into the saucer, then down again, then back through the pylons, and then up again. Am I missing something and the engine room could be elsewhere, or is this very bad engineering?
My best guess is that the Engine room is in the pod.
Dunno. Looks odd to me. Then again, the interior of the ship may still be in flux, and the exact location of Engineering somewhere else altogether.
Timo Saloniemi
Their version of ejecting the warp core is probably ejecting the whole pod.
And have we ever seen a canon Miranda MSD cutaway that shows where its warp core is?
However, it proves nothing about what that particualr hull detail was for.
If you targeted the warp core of the Enterprise-D you may hit the following things: deflector dish, main impulse drive, rear torpedo line, lower cargo doors, tractor emitters, fore torpedo emitters. Doesnt prove that any of those things are the warp core
[ September 25, 2001: Message edited by: CaptainMike ]
quote:
Originally posted by Bernd:
Am I missing something and the engine room could be elsewhere, or is this very bad engineering?
Assuming your location is correct, it's no worse than the engineering on the Galaxy. Enterprise has three kinks in the PTCs. The Enterprise-D did as well, if I remember correctly: she had PTCs that come out from the core, take a turn aft, turn outboard to the pylons, then turn up to reach the nacelles, right? So, as with most complaints regarding the Enterprise design, this boils down to being completely consistent with designs of the past. The only ship that we can say for sure had a fairly logical path to the nacelles was the refit Constitution. Even that isn't perfect.
My question is (slightly changing the topic): why do ships have these ridiculously long warp cores anyway? Why do you have to shoot the reactants through twenty meters of constriction segments to get to the reaction chamber? Isn't that just more room for error? Instead of having half a meter of containment to worry about, you've got twenty. One segment out of a hundred goes out, and you lose half the ship. At the very least, having the reaction chamber as close as possible to the antimatter makes sense, even if you have to pipe in the deuterium from ten decks up.
This is one area in which the original Constitution and the new Enterprise seem to make far more sense than their descendents, since both (apparently) have smallish reactors without all of the wasted space.
[ September 25, 2001: Message edited by: Ryan McReynolds ]
quote:
Am I missing something and the engine room could be elsewhere, or is this very bad engineering?
Bad engineering.
Kinks are probably unavoidable (bearing in mind other neccessary factors of starship designing). But according to basic engineering principles, the fewer kinks, the simpler the design, and the better the design.
But hell, it looks cool, right? So what difference does it make?
[ September 25, 2001: Message edited by: Stingray ]
quote:
I still wonder how they solve it with the rotating nacelles on the Intrepid class...
Its Fiction...
[ September 25, 2001: Message edited by: Obese Penguin ]
or the conduits are flexible at points.
quote:
For a prototype ship, the first to achieve Warp 5, I would expect something preferably without kinks, or with only one.
See, Bernd, I think this kind of encapsulates why I think many of your anti-NX-01 are immediate nonstarters... There is about as much evidence to suggest a kinked PTC somehow requires fancy tech as there is that turbolifts have airbags in them in case the computer messes up and two collide. With all due respect, I take incredible issue with your presupposing that you know conclusively how a fictional system must function, and your resulting logic, which seems to say that if the show that depicts said fictional system doesn't portray it how you, for lack of a better term, guess it might function, it is thereby a steaming pile of shit.
Personally, I think the blue dome is intimately related with the fact that warp cores AND warp nacelles tend to glow blue. Perhaps the blue glow is an unavoidable byproduct of meddling with subspace fields, and some ships (especially the TNG ones, with big nacelle radiators) channel all of it through the nacelles. Others use an auxiliary "radiator" or "spill valve" close to the main powerplant, perhaps specifically in cases where the powerplant is oversized or experimental.
In Miranda, Constitution-refit, Constellation, Sydney, and Enterprise, there's this simple dome, plus some grillwork in the nacelles. In most Galaxy-era designs, there's just the nacelle grillwork. In the Defiant, there are those eight circular thingamabobs on the top surface. The TOS Constitution is the only thing lacking blue-glowing components, really.
The "subspace spill valve" could be a simple security precaution. Or it could be the way the ships generate their mass-reducing subspace fields (I think even the Enterprise class needs one), in those cases the function isn't handled as yet another operating mode of the nacelles. It certainly won't blow up the entire ship when damaged, as we saw when the Reliant got hit. That ship could still move at impulse (but of course, there was also an undamaged ventral dome available).
Timo Saloniemi
quote:
With all due respect, I take incredible issue with your presupposing that you know conclusively how a fictional system must function, and your resulting logic, which seems to say that if the show that depicts said fictional system doesn't portray it how you, for lack of a better term, guess it might function, it is thereby a steaming pile of shit.
Its not that any of us think we understand how starships work or insist that our explanations are correct because they're *our* explanations. It's the most basic engineering principle out there; Keep It Simple. The less complicated any system can be and still perform its function is an inherently better design. That has been a fundamental tenent of engineering since the dawn of invention and will remain so for the rest of history.
Occam's Razor, all other things being equal, the simplest explanation is the correct one. The same holds true for engineering. All other things being equal, the simplest system to perform its function is the best.
Fewer kinks = simpler. Simpler = better.
The same rationale i tried to explain when we got new cash registers that operate on Windows95.. and getting a blue screen of death now happens about once or twice a week.. and the old cash registers worked just fine. *sigh*
If straight PTCs detract from the efficiency of some other design feature more than curved ones detract from the efficiency of the plasma flow, why wouldn't they be curved?
[ September 26, 2001: Message edited by: TSN ]
I get bitch slapped because I talk about general engineering principles and avoid *explaining* how I think starships work.
I get bitch slapped for not fully explaining why the systems of starships work in such a way that kinks are bad.
[ September 26, 2001: Message edited by: Stingray ]