posted
He Who Shall Not Be named is asking me to post this topic: OK, so here's somethign that should generate a few theories.
I was sitting on my bed after moving furniture staring at my E-E cutaway poster...& I noticed 2 things:
1) The warp core is stupendously huge. Why? WHY do big ships have monstrously enormous & long warp cores? It's not necessary for power; look at Defiant's dinky little 4-deck core. Not EVEN 4 decks..it's THREE. Is it aliek a penis thing or something?
2) OK, so the plasma in the nacelle is sprayed from the top & bottom (dumb as shit, it should just be the bottom or better yet, shot straight in on the centerline. How does it get to the top?)through the coils to energize them, right? And wee've SEEN this. The plasma's just fired down the middle of them. But WHERE DOES IT GO?? Does it just evaporate? Get collected & reused & recycled like poop?
Enquiring minds want to know.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
I would guess that, by the time the plasma reaches the back end of the nacelle, it will have cooled to a gas, and it's probably collected, cooled to a liquid, and reused.
Registered: Mar 1999
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Also, to be sure, we haven't seen how the plasma behaves while a ship is at warp drive. The scenes in "Eye of the Beholder" were at varying degrees of "idle"...
Personally, I *like* humungously large machinery. As long as it serves a humungously large starship, that is. If the machinery to move the ship around is tiny, and the weapons are tiny, and two trainees and a Monkee can pilot the ship, WHY do they bolt living quarters for a thousand people to the thing, and give it external dimensions that barely fit the TV screen?
Roddenberry's "technology unchained" nonsense is dramatically unappealing. Tech (at least tech as important as warp drive) should be bulky and finicky and always imposing dramatic limitations on the characters' actions.
posted
The E-E cutaway poster is good for killing an hour of time. I've done it several times. I keep looking for a guy (a better yet a woman) in the shower like in my Ent A cutaway from ERTL.
I also keep trying to figure out what room Picard and Lilly were in when they were having the discussion about money in the future and what not. It was kind of a round room with a railing in the center, but nothing like that shows up on the poster. Not that the poster is canonical...
Registered: Oct 1999
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MPicard and Lily are walking along, Picard's got the phaser rifle. It looks VERY much like a corridor, except there's a rather thick rail in the center of the corridor, for no apparent reason.
The scene you're thinking of is, IIRC, in a room adjacent to a jeffries tube, right after Lily has disarmed Picard, and Picard is trying to convince her that he isn't the big-bad guy.
quote:Originally posted by Aban Rune: Right you are Snay. The scene I'm talking about occurs after the scene where Picard points out the window.
I suppose it could be a corridor, or perhaps some kind of juntion of corridors.
Mabye the "window" is some sort of emergency venting system for that particular Jeffries tube? Mabye something to alievate those pesky plasma conduit ruptures we always hear about. There was no glass after all- just a forcefield behind a sliding hatch: not your standard fare for a viewport.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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There's also a control console seemingly dedicated to the operation of that hull orifice... Far too complex a setup for this to be a mere window.
I'd suspect this is an umbilical connector of some sort. The hole isn't conveniently sized or shaped for the ingress or egress of personnel or goods. And clearly it wouldn't be a good idea to pump deuterium or fresh water or plasma or somesuch through it, as it opens directly to the Jeffries network. But it makes wonderful sense that this would be a purge valve for the Jeffries system.
Rather than an "emergency relief valve", though, I'd suggest this is where the starbase plugs in when it starts to recycle the air aboard the Enterprise. That is, this is one of the dozens or hundreds of such plug-ins necessary for the job. Such a hole would not need any adjacent machinery, and indeed nothing useful is visible in the room, save for the control console.
Oh, and the railing in the middle of the corridor... When does one need such "traffic dividers"? When there's a great rush to a limited number of destinations. Either this corridor serves a cafeteria, or then helps divide the flow of evacuees to lifepods (some which we saw are accessed via corridor walls in this ship).
(OTOH, what the hell is the *real-world* reason for that set? Did they accidentally build too wide a set for two people to interact, and narrowed it down this way? Did they have a spare rail lying around? Were they planning on replacing the outer wall with a greenscreen and cool graphics of vast spaces beyond?)
posted
Too small an opening for that: torps would likely be loaded directly adjacent to the launcher anyway....and probably beamed on board at that.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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I'm not sure why the torpedoes would be more likely to be beamed aboard than any other item or consumable, and since we've got plenty of evidence that most of that is physically piped in or transfered over . . .
(Also, I wonder if the low-resolution transporter protocol that makes cargo transporters worthwhile might not wreak havoc with advanced and delicate circuitry such as the kind one ought to find in the guidance system of a 24th century weapon. For a barely acceptable comparison, could Data be transported via cargo transporter any more safely than something biological? I'd lean towards no. ((It presents another limitation to what transporters can do, for one thing, which appeals to me from a certain story-telling aesthetic p.o.v.)))
Registered: Mar 1999
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