As Joseph's family tells it, it was money. Gene was all in favour of Joseph's work when it was helping to keep interest in Trek alive after TOS was cancelled. But when TMP was authorised, Star Trek got a new lease of life - and the last thing Gene wanted was to have to pay royalties to Joseph for putting his material up on the screen. So he not only ignored Joseph's stuff, he pretty much went out of his way to discredit it. Some say Gene invented the whole idea of a Trek Canon for that specific purpose.Atekimogus wrote:I think it was a very elegant solution and made perfect sense with Franz Josephs modular star-ship design approach. Never quite understood why Roddenberry was so hell-bent on destroying Josephs work. (Maybe Money?)GrahamKennedy wrote: Yeah, I think it was the original TM that said each warp nacelle was a whole propulsion unit in one - reactor, drive, everything. Makes sense and would give redundancy assuming a ship could limp along on one nacelle.
It's hard to get across to people just how large these ships are and how tiny their internal systems are in comparison. Even Voyager, which is not a large ship, is absolutely huge. It's easily two or three times the volume of the largest Supercarrier in service today. Yet conduits are a couple of feet across, warp cores ten or fifteen. It would be TRIVIAL to pack these ships with vastly more systems.Galaxy class....maybe. But every other ship? Again, most of theses nice cutaway-pictures are not strictly canon, but still, most ships other than GCS are rather cramped imho and it's just not the warpcore, you would need to add twice the fuel-capacity, twice the plasma conduits etc. etc. but what would you REALLY gain?
Fuel tanks we don't really know about, though they seem quite small. But the ships have stupidly long endurance anyway, I'd happily forsake half their endurance for twice their power.
It's pretty clear that in "normal" flight, more power does indeed equal more speed. Though doing this routinely may require larger (or even more) nacelles, and this is one area where making larger/more systems would indeed be impractical.Your ship isn't able to fly any faster, since obviously the ability to travel warp 10+ depends more on techno-babble magic than on raw energy.
We don't know how large the stuff inside the hull is behind a phaser strip, no. But I find it hard to believe that it's all that large, given how tiny everything else is. For example Defiant's phaser cannon are at least as powerful, yet they are about 20 feet long and 6 feet across.You gain an (supposed) advantage in tactical situations but then we don't really know what kind of systems are "behind" each phaser stripe. We only see the stripe, have afaik a very crude cutaway from the TNG TM, but no idea were/how they are connected to the energy-grid and what kind of additional systems they need, so just doubling them could again tremendously increasy the complexity and expense of the ship, quite to the point where it is considered nonsensical when a ship with a single warpcore is expected to handle 99% of the situations that arise. And for the 1% were it isn't enough, it is tactiaclly more viable to just take the second warpcore, take the second set of phaser stripes and build a cheap second starship hull around them. (Cheap example but I guess you know what I mean).
Yes, the Galaxy was a well thought out design most ways, but that was kind of silly.The only instance imho where a second warpcore would be justified is the Galaxy Class. Not because it would have enough space to incooperate a second set without enlarging the hull, simply because - at least at first - it was fully expected to make widespread use of saucer seperation. Now while at first that sounds like a good idea (get rid of all the things you don't need/don't want in a battle, living space, civilians labs etc and go only into battle with the essential stuff) it falls completely apart when you realize that the civilians who are supposed to be safe are quite litterally sitting ducks without warpdrive and that the battle-sections just left the ships two biggest phaser banks behind. (Maybe protecting the sitting ducks?).
I think the main reason they avoided saucer separation wasn't cost so much - they could simply have reused the stock footage of the separation once they had it, and building up a library of separated hull stock wouldn't have been that hard. But it just kills the story dead. One, you have to spend a couple of minutes of screen time showing the separation sequence, which is dull once you've seen it. Two, you then have two stories going on, the "what's the battle hull doing" story and the "what's happening to the saucer" story. It's one of those things that makes some sense in universe, especially if you're stupid enough to stuff a starship full of children, but as a story feature it sucks.Anyhow, having saucer seperation just as lifeboat...fine whatever. But making seperation a tactical doctrine and then fail to provide a warp drive for the saucer....epic fail imho. Now officially the reason we don't see more saucer seperations was that the special effects were to expensive....I wonder however if it isn't more the case that after season 1 or so they realized how stupid the whole concept was in the first place. (Just to have the even more stupid voyager writing stuff revisit it with an even more moronic seperation ship....I mean as cool as the prometheus looked...what a stupid ship imho. The only vialbe reason for saucer seperation was completely ignored)