[Spaceships] Star Trek Ships

[elustran]

Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen

They have exhaust, but as far as I know, it's not reaction exhaust. They're not throwing it backwards to get thrust, they're just venting the waste products from the reactor, or something. Or, at least, so said the TNG Technical Manual. Like all statements about Star Trek technology, it's probably been contradicted by some other source. :-)

That sounds more correct - it makes more sense if they're magical 'impulse' engines, and the exhaust is simply high energy particles from the antimatter reactor or something.

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Why not design the warp nacelles as smaller spacecraft - say two Size Modifiers smaller - packed with subwarp/warp engines, power sources, an external clamp to secure it to the main ship, and damn little else? Then you could have a powerful drive system that can generate excess power for the rest of the ship.

[hackbarth]

After much deliberation, I gave the NX-01 two stardrive modules (hit the port nacelle MUST be supported on any Star Trek RPG treatment) and a super conversion torch drive.

Originally Posted by hackbarth

So I'll alter the design in the initial post once more to SM+12 and super conversion torch. I assume that all that deuterium is being converted to near-c ions, and that the result is a faint trail of matter that can be detected as it happens in the series. If almost all of the matter is converted in energy it explains why we dont see a huge trail of exhaust.

Note that all federation ships have ramscoops in the frontal part of the nacelles.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=38352

[hackbarth]

Also this is a good site about the runabout, with deckplans and various modules. Here they got good deckplans also.

[Tinman]

IIRC the phazers could fire in all directions. Acording to spaceships the weps would have to be in the middle section to do that.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by hackbarth

After much deliberation, I gave the NX-01 two stardrive modules (hit the port nacelle MUST be supported on any Star Trek RPG treatment)

So if you disable one nacelle, you travel at half-speed?

It shouldn't be about the physical engines; it's about what you can do if part of your ship is damaged. If taking out one nacelle disables your warp drive, then both nacelles count as one engine.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Tinman

IIRC the phazers could fire in all directions.

I don't believe you do. The big ships could only fire phasers forward and the runabouts are in even more need to manuever about in combat.

[ed_209a]

I can't comment on the smaller ships like the runabouts, but in the larger ships, like Galaxy, Akira, etc, the field of fire of an individual phaser array was proportional to the length of the phaser array.

If you check almost any picture of the next-gen Enterprise, you will see a dark circular stripe on the saucer, about half way in. That is a phaser array. Most next-gen Federation capital ships will have something similar.

The two large phaser arrays on the top/bottom of the Enterprise saucer looked like they had close to 270 degree arcs, while smaller segments elsewhere were probably more like 45-60 degree.

[hackbarth]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

So if you disable one nacelle, you travel at half-speed?

Why not? I'm not a trekker (meaning, someone who knows enough of the canon to resolve these kind of things) but I remember that you have ships with one, two, three and four nacelles in the Federation.

I can't say what happens canonically when one nacelle of a multi-nacelle ship gets disabled, but the rules on Spaceships pass the believability test for me. Lose a nacelle and your warp-9 ship is now warp-7 (or whatever, warp velocity is funny-math).

And THIS IS FUN! I think this trumps "this isn't canon" any day. But that is my opinion and this is a forum, fire away!

[ed_209a]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

So if you disable one nacelle, you travel at half-speed?

It shouldn't be about the physical engines; it's about what you can do if part of your ship is damaged. If taking out one nacelle disables your warp drive, then both nacelles count as one engine.

IIRC, it isn't the number of nacelles that are important, but whether the warp fields they generate are balanced or not.

I agree with the point about multiple nacelles counting as one engine for damage purposes.