posted
Yes, on the refit Enterprise (and presumably any ship with a deflection crystal), fusion reactors are only around for backup. Main impulse power is warp plasma redirected by the crystal. The big shaft in engineering is just a conduit, not a reaction chamber; at the engineering level, it splits the flow so some goes to impulse and most goes to the nacelles. The reaction chamber is down at the bottom of the ship.
This actually makes some sense. Why do you need any long magnetic constriction tubes leading from reactant storage to the reaction chamber? Why do warp cores span twenty decks just to bring the reactants together? It's a big waste of space on the Galaxy, Sovereign, Defiant, and any other ship with a "warp core." The only rationale I can see is that they need to have the reactants loaded from different ends (deuterium on top, antihydrogen ejectable on bottom), so the long tubes bridge the gap. But then, why have the injectors so far apart, forcing you to lose a lot of energy as the ionized reactants travel to the chamber? It would make more sense still (if you have to put the reactants at different ends of the hull) to just have pumps and conduits leading to engineering, and have the injectors and reaction chamber as close together as possible.
OnToMars
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Member # 621
posted
My theory is that with a longer warp core, the matter/antimatter can be aimed more precisely to achieve a more accurate collission and thus a more efficient reaction. That is, of course, a Treknical explanation and without any actual basis in fact.
-------------------- If God didn't want us to fly, he wouldn't have given us Bernoulli's Principle.
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