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Aft vs. Fore warp field dynamics
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Peregrinus: [QB] From my understanding of all the Treknologies involved, nacelle placement is a secondary engineering artifact. That is, they could happily be anywhere on the ship for their primary function, but other considerations tend to keep them in the positions we're accustomed to seeing. Grante dthis only applies to Federation ship construction tech -- and, given what we've seen of some Vulcan design aesthetics, maybe even more of a Terran engineering bias. First of all, warp travel is indeed non-Newtonian. THere is no inertia, no 'pushing' or 'pulling' the ship, but simply the direction in which the space/time continuum slips by, based on the warp coils' firing sequence and rate (or something very like that). Mass and inertia do, however, play a role in sublight propulsion and maneuvering. Granted, the warp and impulse engines do create an apparant-mass-reducing subspace field around the ship to facilitate acceleration and maneuvering, but the ship's volume and density remain the same, and this will effect the stresses placed on the structural elements. The structural integrity field would help, but designing and building a ship to work with these stresses, rather than against them, is still your best bet, especially as the ships (and specifically the engines) become larger and more massive. Remembver, the average mass ratio is for the warp coils to comprise some 40% of the ship's total mass. All this begs the question 'well, why build the ships with the nacelles out on those pylons, then?'... According to Matt Jeffries, and those who came after, a side effect of the engines operating (whether propulsively or just idling) is a tremendous electromagnetic field, which we've known for a long time is harmful to living beings. As propulsion technology improved to the degree that ships no longer needed to accelerate from the warp threshold (the speed of light) to their cruising velocity, but could instead 'jump' from a standstill to their target speed, the energy needed to initially tunnel the ship into subspace rose dramatically. Hence the really damn bright flash of the [i]Galaxy[/i] class jumping to warp. Granted, we have the field and shielding technology to protect the occupants of aship from this radiation, but it's still safer to keep the engines out away from the habitable volume to minimize risk of exposure in the event of shielding failure. This was one of the initial objections I had to the [i]Defiant[/i] and [i]Steamrunner[/i] classes, but I've since grumblingly accepted that they're more concerned with protecting the engines in combat than ensuring the safety and health of the crew. So... have I rambled on long enough? --Jonah [/QB][/QUOTE]
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