How would detached Nacelles work?

[yotsuya]

I hope since they were revealed quite some time ago that this is no longer a spoiler, but how would detached nacelles work?

The NX through early 25th century warp system involves an intermix chamber and warp plasma traveling to the nacelles. There is an alternate theory from TOS that the reaction is entirely in the the nacelles, but there are other TOS episodes that gave rise to the more familiar system found in all the other Treks.

Have they addressed any of that in Discovery? If no, does anyone have any theories? I do and it would be fun to hash out how this would work.

 

[matthunter]

Don't the DSC nacelles attach for warp and detach for impulse? If so, there's no mystery as to how they work as far as warp goes.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Independent Mini Fusion & Warp Reactors in each Nacelle along with a small fuel supply.

Basically each Warp Nacelles are Self Contained StarShips without any of the crew comforts or amenities.

The StarDrive & Saucer Sections get their own Large Fusion Reactors & Warp Reactors.

Ergo they have higher power output since they could potentially have 4x M/A-M warp cores, each one powering each section.

Therefore, you don't divide the power up as much to each individual section.

If a Warp Nacelle gets destroyed, somebody can literally bring a spare from storage and have it follow the ship that's going to bring it to it's new vessel and have it substitute right in for the lost Warp Nacelle.

There are ALOT of PRO(s) & CON(s) to doing this Warp Nacelle System.

PRO(s):
- Less Mass needed for the StarDrive & Saucer Section to deal with when manuevering in regular space.
- Eliminates the need for the Warp Nacelle pylon (less mass, less surface area to target, less structure to defend, power, maintain, etc)
- Battle Field quick replacement from allie if spare Warp Nacelle is needed to replace any lost parts. What usually would require ALOT of time in Dry-Dock can be swapped in < 1 minute and get a vessel back to FTL ready status.
- Each Warp Nacelle would have it's own power source, ergo allowing it to consume more energy for higher levels of Warp Speed for combat purposes.
- Each Warp Nacelle would have more independent energy resources to run it's own independent shields, weapons, etc.
- The rest of the Saucer & StarDrive can be run on their own independent Reactors, ergo each section would have higher fire power & shields then more traditional designs.
- Having your StarDrive / Saucer / Warp Nacelles be independent units opens up ALOT of new Close Formation Manuevering and Tactical options that didn't exist when Ships were one whole solid ship.

CON(s):
The Down-side is you have to make sure that your:
- Wireless Communication link to your Warp Nacelle/StarDrive/Saucer is solid an can't be "Hacked" / Jammed
- It can't be easily boarded and taken over via physical brute force boarding parties.
- It has enough basic AI to react with the mother ship that it does what it needs to do even when there are jamming signals at play on the battle field.
- You need multiple redundant form of Wireless communications like SubSpace Radio, Real Space Radio, Light Based Communication (LiFi), etc.
- Part of your vessel can be hijacked from you at any given time and turn against you, you need ALOT of security measures in place to prevent that.

Don't the DSC nacelles attach for warp and detach for impulse? If so, there's no mystery as to how they work as far as warp goes.

But I think that's more because the USS Discovery is a legacy StarShip design.

More "Modern" 31st - 32nd century designs seems to divide the vessel into various modular parts that fly in close formation with each piece.

 

[Unicron]

For my part, I've always felt mixed about the detached components. I'm not convinced they work aesthetically, for the most part, or from an engineering perspective (unless we learn more details from future eps). The kasathans in Starfinder have a cruiser design, the Saga, whose wings use highly advanced magnetic locks that allow them to modify their shape and even separate from the main hull, operating as floating elements. The construction of the Saga design uses "energy to matter" elements, although it's a bit unclear whether that's meant to be solely a form of technology or whether it means some magical forces are involved, because Starfinder is basically D & D in space.

 

[yotsuya]

Well, I was thinking some sort of tractor beam tech to keep the nacelle in place (or move it to adjust the warp field) and some sort of dimensional tunnel that links the warp plasma conduit. The down side to detaching is that you loose the large fuel reserves possible in the body of the ship. So my thought is that nothing much has changed, but there is no conduit through the ship to the nacelles, just a dimensional portal that allows it to go straight through.

Now the other would work if you have a small reserve fuel tank in the nacelles and the main tank in the main hull and you use a transporter to move the fuel as needed. It could be automatic.

Lots of possibilities.

 

[yotsuya]

For my part, I've always felt mixed about the detached components. I'm not convinced they work aesthetically, for the most part, or from an engineering perspective (unless we learn more details from future eps). The kasathans in Starfinder have a cruiser design, the Saga, whose wings use highly advanced magnetic locks that allow them to modify their shape and even separate from the main hull, operating as floating elements. The construction of the Saga design uses "energy to matter" elements, although it's a bit unclear whether that's meant to be solely a form of technology or whether it means some magical forces are involved, because Starfinder is basically D & D in space.

I have no idea what this is from, but I love this ship.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Well, I was thinking some sort of tractor beam tech to keep the nacelle in place (or move it to adjust the warp field) and some sort of dimensional tunnel that links the warp plasma conduit. The down side to detaching is that you loose the large fuel reserves possible in the body of the ship. So my thought is that nothing much has changed, but there is no conduit through the ship to the nacelles, just a dimensional portal that allows it to go straight through.

Now the other would work if you have a small reserve fuel tank in the nacelles and the main tank in the main hull and you use a transporter to move the fuel as needed. It could be automatic.

Lots of possibilities.

That's the thing, the amount of Matter / Anti-Matter you need in the storage tanks within the Warp Nacelle isn't that much compared to how much you would need to function for typical jaunts when you use Warp Drive.

So you only keep a reasonable amount in each Warp Nacelle and beam over whatever you need, as you need it.

 

[Unicron]

I have no idea what this is from, but I love this ship.

It's from the Starfinder RPG, specifically the Starship Operations Manual which expands the range of ships. The Saga is a newer build the kasathans developed because their colony ships, which they used to reach the Pact Worlds and which serve as their home, weren't really capable of matching many alien ships. The wings on the Saga also house its small craft bays.

One of the other races, the Eoxians, are mostly undead (although not all of them) due to a cataclysm that affected their world. They had to use necromantic magic to survive, and their ships have some interesting modifications since they don't need to support a living crew. Being undead doesn't mean that the Eoxians are inherently evil, although part of their military (the Corpse Fleet) went rogue when Eox helped found the Pact Worlds alliance.

 

[Go-Captain]

In the show they say power is transferred by something new, I cannot remember what but it seemed to be explicitly not plasma anymore. I think it is Jett Reno who states it offhandedly when she pops up one episode and talks about upgrading the power systems the entire time, as a way to explain why we didn't see her until then.

The floating parts are explicitly magnetically suspended, and, before we are told that, they are stated to increase maneuverability somehow.

My guess is who ever came up with that concept doesn't realize momentum is transferred through magnetism, and might have thought the ship would be two nacelles lighter if they are not physically attached, and didn't realize remote power beaming has existed since TNG. The only cool thing about the nacelles reattaching for warp is how the hull material creates a spider web like physical effect to keep a nacelle attached instead of it being knocked clean off. Though I'm left wondering if a fixed nacelle would have been stronger.

If not for what we saw, I would say detached nacelles during warp make perfect sense if we go with the idea that anything in the warp field isn't actually accelerating.

Attaching the nacelles for spore jump makes some sense only in that we don't really know enough about it to say they have to be attached, as in, does the effect conduct through the hull, or is it a field? I believe there is some behind the scenes stuff which says it gets emitted by throwing spores everywhere, which is why the spinning hull is needed. Or that's for cooling, I don't really remember.

Frankly, all of the fan theories are better than the explanations we got. I wasn't even a fan of independently powered free floating nacelles and ended up using that idea in my own ship concept, but I combined it with remote power beaming so all the parts share power. My favorite concept leaned to the extreme, with the nacelles being attached physically through a dimension we cannot see. That one plays nicely with the spacial compression tech we see in Enterprise, and that's another technology which is non-time machine based and should have shown up.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Some magical futuristic way we can't possibly comprehend. Which is exactly the point.

 

[Dumbbell]

At this point it would just be better to use TARDIS technology, where the inside can be much bigger than the outside.

 

[GeorgeKirk]

Some magical futuristic way we can't possibly comprehend. Which is exactly the point.

Exactly. It's supposed to be 1000 years in the future. It's like explaining a Cray supercomputer to someone in the year 1021.

 

[dupersuper]

At this point it would just be better to use TARDIS technology, where the inside can be much bigger than the outside.

They do. We saw it in Enterprise and many have conjectured (some seriously some jokingly) that it explains the turboshafts.

 

[Dumbbell]

They do. We saw it in Enterprise and many have conjectured (some seriously some jokingly) that it explains the turboshafts.

True. Historically, Star Trek has done even better by canonizing variable geometries for the same object either written or visually!

 

[publiusr]

At this point it would just be better to use TARDIS technology, where the inside can be much bigger than the outside.

That's the next step.

Magnetars can actually make the vacuum itself become polarized, becoming strongly birefringent, like a calcite crystal.

A magnetar's 1010 tesla field has an energy density of 4.0 × 1025 J/m3, with an E/c2 mass density more than 10,000 times that of lead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar

That is the hold those "floating" nacelles have....at least in my head canon.

 

[shapeshifter]

Wait, you mean any answer is pure speculation and we'll never get an in universe explanation of how it works? Goodbye cruel world!

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

That's the next step.

Magnetars can actually make the vacuum itself become polarized, becoming strongly birefringent, like a calcite crystal.

A magnetar's 1010 tesla field has an energy density of 4.0 × 1025 J/m3, with an E/c2 mass density more than 10,000 times that of lead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar

That is the hold those "floating" nacelles have....at least in my head canon.

Actually, I use the smallest chunks of Magnetars as a new Experimental Reactor that I call the MN (Magnetar Nucleus) Reactor Drive where a 0.1 mm Diameter Sphere of Magnetar that is suspended in a large Spherical Electro-Magnetic Coil Chamber and used to generate Electricity via the spin of the suspended Magnetar Nucleus Piece.

That 0.1 mm Diameter Sphere weighs ~ 28.340 tons, similar to the mass of a large Wind Turbine Blade Hub & Rotar assembly.

It still emits a smaller fraction of the full sized Magnetars Magnetic field but it becomes far more manageable at those smaller mass / volumes / Magnetic Field Intensities.

 

[LazyReader]

The Warp bubble is a field contained torus, self repeating wave.

In design, the Nacelles convert energy into a desired energy distortion subspace field.
Look at all the wireless technology in the Trek universe.

• Remote power transfer (TNG: the next phase)
• tractor beam
• Particle beams via navigational deflector
• subspace field emitters

The warp bubble is a vacuole of held space, what's in it, remains in it. In regards to subspace, relativity physics don't matter, as such ships do not "Accelerate" thru space, they pull space around them. Much like a treadmill and a rubber band. As for the whole detached concept works on a idea of "Thrust vectoring" Ships navigating at Warp often shutdown or slow to adjust course. In the Voyager episode "Drive" we hear it from a pilot
"Warp's fine if you like going fast in a straight line"
The detached nacelle works by slight motions that change the variable geometry of the warp field. Instead of changing the subspace displacement output by each nacelle to turn or exiting warp and readjusting course, you'd just vector the nacelles differently. This may have minute warp field augmentations by angles, similar to thrust vectoring. Navigating space is no simple task, general direction is one thing but the vast distances involved angular errors must be adjusted for. If you're traveling in a straight line; At a distance of 60 feet, a 1° error in aim causes a 1 foot error in impact point, a target destination say 100 meters long, that error is acceptable... At 60 miles, 1° error causes missing by a mile. At a lightyears distance a 1 degree error means you're off by 895 million miles. Minute adjustments can cut billions of miles off the journey, incremental adjustments even 1/1000th of a degree shave millions of miles, in a dilithium scarcity, gas mileage matters

 

[Go-Captain]

As for the whole detached concept works on a idea of "Thrust vectoring" Ships navigating at Warp often shutdown or slow to adjust course. In the Voyager episode "Drive" we hear it from a pilot
"Warp's fine if you like going fast in a straight line"

Voyager had to stop to turn because even if the ship could turn 180 degrees in 1 second while at warp, it would have a turning radius of millions to hundreds of millions, of kilometers. The gaps between spacial phenomena were too narrow for such wide maneuvers, and unless I'm mistaken it is the only instance of momentarily dropping from warp for sharp turns, maybe except for the weird chase scene in Star Trek: Picard.

The detached nacelle works by slight motions that change the variable geometry of the warp field.

The warp nacelles attach to Discovery at warp. The only time it moves at warp is when it is shot off and hanging by webs. It's really no different than Voyager's moving nacelles which never moved during warp travel, only during power up. Same for Bird of Prey.

 

[publiusr]

I think warp drives allow a ship to bite into space time to where you have a place to stand during the use of a tractor beam…in the same way Glomar had thrusters for station keeping. So you could pull without necessarily being pulled…as in Counter Clock or with tow lines. Same with nacelles