Saladin and Hermes

[Timo]

...Regarding that, an offhand remark from the TNG Tech Manual has made me speculate that the blue-glowing thingamabob at the aft saucer hull of some starships is related to this. It's a feature in many designs, but not all - and in the backstage technobabble of ST:Enterprise, it's said to manipulate the warp field generated by the nacelles of NX-01.

In the TNG TM, the Ambassador class is said to do impulse by generating the required subspace fields within the impulse engine itself, and this is supposed to be a novelty. And interestingly, Ambassador omits the blue dome thing, while her predecessors Excelsior and Constitution-refit and their sister designs all had the dome!

Perhaps Kirk's old ship, also domeless, had an "internal" impulse engine that did not need assistance from the warp nacelles? There would be tradeoffs, but in that scenario the Saladin, too, would only drag the nacelles as inert weight in impulse maneuvers. TOS does feature dialogue to the effect of "impulse is down but we still have warp" and "warp is down but we still move on impulse". Then again, there's also that bit from "Elaan of Troyius" where lack of warp drive is said to have a direct and highly adverse impact on maneuverability, supposedly of the impulse sort...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[DeepSouthTrekFan]

Nacelles could be viewed in the naval context, too: functionally, they are like the propellers of the ship, but as far as manufacturing is considered, they are the gun barrels. It is not just a matter of industrial capacity: it takes time to cast a barrel. So ships in the World Wars era are being designed around the available number of barrels, or even around specific individual barrels, and sometimes the precious barrels are being shuffled from one battleship to another.

The TNG Tech Manual even uses this casting excuse directly as a partial excuse for why starships in the 24th century aren't created with a push of a button, or at least quickly slapped together from pre-replicated parts: warp coils are best created by time-consuming casting, there apparently being penalties to trying it with replicators. Even greater time required, perhaps. Or then the material is so poorly understood that the engineers don't know what to ask from the replicator, which would churn out identical pieces of potentially useless coils when the casting process creates a range of subtly different coils that can be combined to functional sets by trial and error...

But not just any old crate can take a 16 inch gun barrel. The mere installation of one of those could well sink most lesser ships, let alone an attempt at its use. Scotty's darling, too, was always in danger of failing structurally when the engines overperformed. So "slapping on the bunny" might be a solution that is rarely applicable.

In any case, omitting one nacelle from Saladin and Hermes is no doubt but one way around the "nacelle shortage". Starfleet probably has many alternate, smaller, inferior nacelle designs in use as well (even if the only assuredly Starfleet one we see is for the Antares in TOS-R). A destroyer with four of those might be cheaper than a destroyer with one PB-31 or whatever - and the FJ designs would really represent the cream of the cream of the "second rate" combat and exploration fleet.

Timo Saloniemi

I was glad they made up a reason for not just replicating whole starships.

 

[Vance]

Does anyone know what the difference between the classes actually is? I mean, they appear to be identical. Am I missing something?

Saladin Class Destroyer:
- Phasers: F/V, F/S, F/P
- Torpedoes: 2x F
- Internal arrangement geared for combat patrols, few labs, etc.

Hermes Class Scout:
- Phasers: F/V
- Torpedoes: None
- Internal arrangement heavy on labs, heavy sensors, and so on.

Cygnus Class Courier:
- Phasers: F/V
- Torpedoes: None
- Internal arrangements primarily for VIP quarters, extended light cargo

For a model, you're not going to see a lot of difference between the three types. To really highlight them, you need to get the 'phaser turret' add-ons sold via 3rd parties. Otherwise, externally, they're very close to identical.