Single-Nacelle Ships

[Herkimer Jitty]

Single-nacelle ships. They are canon: the Freedom, the Saladin showed up on some computer screens, the Kelvin is thought by some to be a prime-verse ship (please, no debates about JJ-verse tech and all that). Now, some assume they're impossible because of the idea that you need two "poles" to generate a warp field. Now, isn't it reasonably possible to have two sets of coils in a nacelle - not stacked side-by side or on top of each other, as is commonly shown, but merely one in front of the other? I mean, it's not that hard for me to imagine it like that. I mean, the standard TOS-era nacelle might actually by like that, with both nacelles being the "linear jet" type, and the TMP refit being the "dual pole" design, brought into being by the Transwarp Project.

It also opens up possibilities for other stuff as well - like how we've seen ships warping around with a busted nacelle without being torn apart by acceleration differences, and so on.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Technically possible? Okay, I'll go along with that.

Two nacelles are better, though, for balancing out the irregularities in each nacelle's warp field. One nacelle wouldn't be very efficient beyond a certain speed, which is why it's a lousy design for a scout or destroyer.

Even shuttlecraft have two nacelles. Hell, the frakking Phoenix had two nacelles...

 

[Wingsley]

I suppose you can imagine anything you want. It's a free country.

As for whether or not others will agree with you, that's another matter.

Personally, I used to like the Saladin/Hermes when my original plastic-bound FJ Tech Manual was less than 10 years old. I thought it had a cool, "light starship" look to it. Ever since, not so much. I guess I drank the Roddenberry design criteria kool-aid and so now I prefer the symmetry of twin pods. So if I had my way, single-nacelle starships would be gone. That's just me, of course.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

I usually prefer symmetrical designs as well. I find that a single nacelle ship has to have a significantly fatter nacelle than usual, in order to look good to my eye (Masao's Predator and the Trek09 Kelvin come to mind). However, I don't feel it necessary to rule out their existence on visual grounds alone. There are plenty of aircraft and ships in service that are by popular opinion, ugly as sin.

 

[Bill Morris]

Maybe you already know that the Freedom class does have the equivalent of two nacelles close together port and starboard within a single wide housing. I labeled that on my schematic. But one behind the other wouldn't satisfy the rule of line-of-sight codependence, I would think. And the Saladin and Ptolemy are generally assummed to have one nacelle per ship basically identical to the nacelles of the TOS E.

TrekMania page--Freedom class:
http://www.trekmania.net/art/freedom_class.htm

My schematiic of the Freedom class:
http://lcars24.com/schem74.html

Some say that rule of 50% line of sight only came into being because Gene Roddenberry wanted to bust Franz Jospeph's chops. And we know that some ships with two nacelles, like the Intrepid Aeroshuttle, the Raven, and even the Nebula class, not to mention the Defiant, seem to violate that. And you know some even have three nacelles, even though one rule was that nacelles have to be in pairs. Another rule is that the nacelles have to be visible from the front.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Why not? What better line of sight is there other than being in the same housing?

 

[Bill Morris]

Notice the words "across the hull" in Rule No. 2 below. Rule No. 3 would also seem to apply here, as well, if you want to hide the equivalent of one nacelle behind another.

Rule No. 1: Warp nacelles must be in pairs.
Rule No. 2: Warp nacelles must have at least 50% line-of-sight on each other across the hull.
Rule No. 3: Both warp nacelles must be fully visible from the front.
Rule No. 4: The bridge must be located at the top center of the primary hull.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I always imagined that the "rule of two" thing was a way of preventing fanboys from designing ships with five or more nacelles...

But otherwise, I never took much stock in it other as than a means to balance Star Trek ships. I tend to think that smaller vessels can operate with one nacelle, but it may also be just a case of what is more efficient for a particular design, regardless of size.

 

[Timo]

For me, it's pretty simple: nacelles are propellers. Big warships have always had more propellers than small ones, often simply because they can; channeling propulsive power through a single prop and making it larger and larger has its limits. Modern submarines use single large props mainly because those can be made quiet when slow-turning, but for high speed they'd probably revert to something very different, too. And multiple props give you redundancy for damage tolerance and for balancing and steering.

When Franz Joseph came up with his 1, 2 or 3 nacelle ships, he probably didn't think in terms of props, but (like so many fans and RPG players) in terms of boilers: more nacelles means more power. But onscreen technobabble has more or less contradicted that, indicated nacelles consume power instead of producing it. It's not solidly proven for the TOS era, but if it works that way in ENT and TNG...

Of course, more props usually is an indirect indication of more power, even if the props consume it instead of producing it.

I doubt, though, that nacelles would be the equivalent of smokestacks or rudders or anything else that is unrelated or weakly related to power levels. It is fairly natural for the various Trek artists to use fewer nacelles on smaller ships, and that makes plenty of sense in the prop analogy (and some sense in the boiler analogy as well).

Never cared for Gene's rules, as those obviously don't hold true even for TOS. Most warp-capable ships there didn't even have nacelles, and of those that did, two out of five (Aurora, shuttlecraft) lacked line-of-sight.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[B.J.]

I've got nothing against single-nacelled ships myself, with or without the so-called "rules". If it looks good, it's okay in my book, and this is coming from an engineer.

For the analogy, I'd actually use aircraft engines instead of propellers. Aircraft that have to fly long distances have at least two engines, which is kind of a balance between redundancy and cost/maintenance. If one engine dies, you can still get home on the other. The NX-01 was actually forced to use one nacelle for a short while, so we know it's possible in-universe.

For a single-nacelled ship, at least if that nacelle dies it won't fall into the ocean, so they'll still survive, it just may take a long time to get help. Maybe with those configurations it's possible to take one or more warp coils or other parts offline while the rest of the engine is still functional? It might not be as efficient or powerful, but at least they won't be stuck in the middle of nowhere.

 

[Dukhat]

Um, everybody does know that Gene's "starship design guidelines" was just BS he pulled out of his ass in order to invalidate Franz Joseph's tech manual simply because they had a falling out, right? And that GR never took that stuff seriously, right? And that before the falling out, GR was completely fine with FJ's stuff, right? And that the "paired warp coils" nonsense with GCS nacelles doesn't really negate the fact that there's only one, three, etc. nacelle "housings," which is what a nacelle is, not how many coils it has.

Now with that said, I see no reason whatsoever why ships cannot have odd-numbered nacelles.

 

[Vance]

The odd-nacelled ships never really bothered me (though I prefer the vertical placement of the Saladin to the placement of the Federation). I can definitely see them working just fine on their own, even with Roddenberry's 'retcon' rule. The problem for me was that the point of the rule was only to eliminate the Technical Manual ships as 'canon' since they were now 'impossible' by Gene's rules. Screw that.

As for the Freedom, et al., the 'double nacelle' thing is just another retcon to explain why the ships 'really' follow Gene's rules, even when they don't. If the Freedom's nacelle is really doubled-up, does that mean the Galaxy has four?

Stupid, all around.. just stupid.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Um, everybody does know that Gene's "starship design guidelines" was just BS he pulled out of his ass in order to invalidate Franz Joseph's tech manual simply because they had a falling out, right? And that GR never took that stuff seriously, right? And that before the falling out, GR was completely fine with FJ's stuff, right? And that the "paired warp coils" nonsense with GCS nacelles doesn't really negate the fact that there's only one, three, etc. nacelle "housings," which is what a nacelle is, not how many coils it has.

Now with that said, I see no reason whatsoever why ships cannot have odd-numbered nacelles.

I don't think anyone here has said that they can't or that "Gene's starship design guidelines" was something to be taken seriously.

 

[Wingsley]

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, Roddenberry's "rules of two" do offer some helpful guidelines... buuuuuut... Sisko's Defiant shows us that rules are meant to be broken.

That having been said, if I wanted to envision a TOS-era light "destroyer/scout" type Federation starship-of-the-line that would blend into Roddenberry's rules, a ship like Forbin's new Minmus looks like a winner, hands-down.

 

[Unicron]

As far as the "rules" go, Gene only created one specific rule: nacelles have to be in paired or symmetrical arrangements because he assumed they were the Trek equivalent of propellors, and you needed pairs to create a stable warp field. The best modern analogy would probably be a helicopter, which requires two rotors to balance each other's torque. If one rotor gets damaged, the helicopter becomes unstable. Some of the other rules, particularly the LOS rule, were invented by Andrew Probert for TMP because one of his initial ideas was for the refit Enterprise to have a visible energy effect passing between the nacelles. He could elaborate more on them than I can.

I don't really know exactly how much substance there is to the famous legend that Gene supposedly invented the rules just to spite FJ. I think his conception of needing a balanced field probably goes back much earlier, but I don't know exactly. Personally, I do think pairs are the most optimum configuration, but that odd-numbered arrangements aren't necessarily less reliable. They just generate a different form of warp field that may have unique issues compared to a ship with an even number of engines.

 

[Santaman]

I've got no problems with a single nacelle ships or a tripple nacelle ships or ships with more of them as long it doesn't become ludicrous..

I have far more problems with [insert insult] who aim impulse engines at something important like the nacelles and/or the pylons...

 

[bryce]

I remember reading on one of the movie promotion sites that the Kelvin's nacelle had a *set* or warp coils in it. But I don't know how official that is, because it was on a site that was doing an add tie-in with the film.

 

[Captain Robert April]

The one-nacelle-balancing-the-other probably has its origins in, of all places, the Spaceflight Chronology, and its tale of the ill-fated three-nacelled USS Tritium, with the discovery that while two nacelles balance out the irregularities in the warp field and smooth out the ride, a third nacelle actually accentuates and exaggerates those irregularities, to the point where the ship couldn't get past Warp Three without shaking itself to pieces.

 

[Vance]

The one-nacelle-balancing-the-other probably has its origins in, of all places, the Spaceflight Chronology, and its tale of the ill-fated three-nacelled USS Tritium, with the discovery that while two nacelles balance out the irregularities in the warp field and smooth out the ride, a third nacelle actually accentuates and exaggerates those irregularities, to the point where the ship couldn't get past Warp Three without shaking itself to pieces.

Well, the third nacelle of that type. We can chalk it down to a bad warp design considering how early it is. I mean, we do a see a third-nacelle on a Galaxy class eventually, after all.

Sadly the 'odd warp engines' was indeed a 'dick' move by Roddenberry who was attempting to decanonize Franz Joseph since most of the rules somehow discredit every single ship in that book, as well as some that have appeared on screen (even in TOS!). Karen Dick confirmed this some time ago.

 

[Bill Morris]

Well, the third nacelle of that type. We can chalk it down to a bad warp design considering how early it is. I mean, we do a see a third-nacelle on a Galaxy class eventually, after all.

But the three-nacelled Galaxy class had the hardware of two nacelles in each nacelle housing (three pairs, if you like).