I've always wondered since the ship design appeared in the TNG finale years and years ago, but just now getting around to trying to find out:
What purpose could the flaps on the pylons possibly serve?
All I can think they might do, is get in the way of phaser firing arcs...
So any speculation?
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Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
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'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Their purpose is to look cool.
A very logical, functional purpose.
Probably the RL reason. lol
The rule of cool
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
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Wasn't one of his reasons to make it look meaner to intimidate would be attackers?
They balance the ship during warp travel, 3 nacelles need to be balanced evenly in a warp field so the pylons compensate for that.
Somewhat countered by the existance of single nacelle ships though. While the Kelvin type has a secondary hull, the Wolf 359 fleet Freedom class doesn't.
> Somewhat countered by the existance of single nacelle ships though. While the Kelvin type has a secondary hull, the Wolf 359 fleet Freedom class doesn't.
Andrew Probert suggested the Freedom-class just has two sets of warp coils in a single nacelle. That was to reconcile it with the Roddenberry "rule" that warp coils have to come in pairs and have line of sight to each other (which he made up to spite Franz Joseph).
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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Could also explain why the Kelvin type has a larger nacelle so to speak.
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> the paired nacelles rule probably only applies to certain types of warp drive, since alien ships seemingly ignore it.
Well, Probert designed the D'Deridex so that the big gap between the twin hulls fulfills the line-of-sight requirement, and we have no idea what kind of propulsion First Federation or Tholian ships use (and the Tholians' general schtick is that nobody has any real idea what their schtick actually IS, anyway). According to him, ships like the Galor that broke the "rule" were designed without his or Roddenberry's input.
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Civilian Transport that was destroyed in ST5.
Tholians.
Ferengi D'Kora....
That's what Probert said in the Ent-D magazine for the Starships Collection anyway, IIRC.
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It's not that large. It's a bit longer than nacelles usually are but it's still as thin in relation to the secondary hull as the Conni's nacelles are
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Compared to the USS Enterprise...
Both pre-refit configurations have the nacelles smaller in diameter vs the Primary Hull. The Discovery configuration's are a bit bigger, but still not comparable like the Kelvin nacelle.
And note I was using the Prime universe version of the Enterprise, as the Kelvin exists in both timelines, and the Kelvin Connie's nacelles vs Primary Hull comparison is wonky as all hell.
I was also comparing the Kelvin to the Prime Connis as the KT Conni has some weird proportions.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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*Sounds of teeth-gnashing and JJ-cursing.*
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
It flares slightly but most of the effect is the lense flare. The impulse block flares more. It's been long repeated that the nacelle has some sort of impulse engine on it due to that lense flare. That is incorrect, it's just a trick of the light.
This post is hardly related to yours, so why quote it? Good question. It makes it look like I'm talking to somebody which is a good way of disguising random facts.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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Kelvin ships apparently do not use the same drive systems a s prime universe ships do. What Kelvin calls "warp" takes them from Earth to Vulcan at transwarp speed, and the special effects they show in "Into Darkness" not only show transwarp style visual effects, the dialog mentions that it is impossible to catch up with a ship in warp which is not true of the prime timeline warp (as several episodes with running battles show).
Nope. They use warp.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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True, they do call it "warp" and except for the extra speed it does act a lot like the jump-style warp that you apparently cannot see out of that the DSC ships use. They both "jump to" warp like a Star Wars ship going into hyperspace and apparently disappear off sensors or otherwise become immune to chasing fire or course tracking, and both seem to be blind when "dropping out" of warp so they end up in debris or asteroid fields that a TOS, TNG, or other old-prime ship would see and avoid easily.
The question isn't really do they use something referred to as "warp", it is more a matter of is what they call "warp" the same thing as what all the other Treks call "warp".
As for the flaps, similar ones on other ships, as well as variable geometry features, were often identified as "warp field shapers" based on the same priciple as the warp sustatiners in tech manuals and whatnot (including offhand answers given by official sources to questions about why starships would have useless fins and moving wings in the vacuum of space) back in the TOS-crew movie/TNG series era. I would imagine they serve the same purpose on the Galaxy-X.
Nope. It's warp, same as all the other warp.
If you look really closely, you'll notice the warp effect always changes and people don't post stupid things about the rainbow bridge from TMP or the silly vanishing act from TOS. It's just a different effect for the same thing.
Your other points weren't worthy of being addressed either as you're deliberately pretending warp hasn't always taken as long as the plot requires it to.
Put some thought into things and stop pretending The KT and DSC are any different from other instances of Trek.
Norway and Yeager dammit... I still want my Typhoon and Jupiter though.
JJ Trek The Kelvin Timeline is just Trek and it's fully canon... get over it. But I still prefer TAR.
#TASforSTO
'...I can tell you that we're not in the military and that we intend no harm to the whales.' Kirk: The Voyage Home
'Starfleet is not a military organisation. Its purpose is exploration.' Picard: Peak Performance
'This is clearly a military operation. Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers!' Scotty: Into Darkness
'...The Federation. Starfleet. We're not a military agency.' Scotty: Beyond
'I'm not a soldier anymore. I'm an engineer.' Miles O'Brien: Empok Nor
'...Starfleet could use you... It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada...' Admiral Pike: Star Trek
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As for how fast it is... it goes at the Speed of Plot.
I think a lot of people already take issue with how fast the Enterprise was able to get from Qo'nos to Earth. As for Earth to Vulcan, it can be argued that we don't know how long Kirk was sedated before waking up. Especially since the next time we see McCoy, he's in an acutal uniform rather than a cadet one.
Now you have me curious, what is the "silly vanishing act from TOS" you mention?
If you are talking about the last scene in The Motion Picture, that was a crude attempt to show the ship smoothly accelerating to FTL speeds using the limitations of physical model photography and 24 frames per second crank speed. Even at the time it was not a great effect, and it was later misinterpreted into that "rainbow bridge" you speak if.
It mostly boils down a combination of the movie industry's notorious lack of regard for TV shows and their producers along with a style shift in the industry as Hollywood started taking science fiction a bit more seriously and in so doing subtly limited it to certain pigeonholes favored by the top executives. And one of the things those executives loved was the success of Star Wars and the idea of a little of it rubbing off if they imitated its style in various ways so everything started taking on the greebley bare steel look of that style and other things like the "jump to lightspeed" idea.
In TOS warp was seamless. In many episodes they left orbit in warp and arrived at their destination without ever using impulse drive at all, sometimes with a battle somewhere in the middle also done in warp. Impulse was more of a backup drive than anything else, unlike it was in the movies and later series like TNG.
TMP used the rainbow circle; the later TOS-crew movies went with a rainbow trail. TNG originated the blue skidmarks. As for what it looked like outside, the TV shows mostly went with a moving starfield because it was cheap. The KT movies introduced that weird scrolling-color thing, probably because someone remembered the hyperspace effect from the SW movies and thought it looked cool. (Same place they got their bigger-is-better obsession too, I think - the various series prior to ENT pretty much avoided that, with the relatively small sizes of the Defiant and Voyager.)
I like the skidmarks; I also like the DSC warp graphic, where there's a brief flash, the ship elongates, and there's that subdued almost-electronic sound.