Different warp core configurations?

[Graham Kennedy]

I'm mulling over writing an article on warp core design...

In TOS, we never really saw anything that was positively identified as the matter/antimatter reactor. The closest we came was the thing in the middle of engineering which seemed to have the dilithium crystals in it, and so is presumably the reactor or at least the upper part of it. Bit weird since there's no conduits coming off it, but okay.

In TMP they give us a big swirly vertical light tube. It's unclear exactly what that is... another big swirly light tube comes off it and goes back aft towards the nacelles. This makes it seem like a power conduit rather than a reactor. So the actual reactor could be below the set we see in TMP. But one suggestion is that there is no reactor as such - it's all the reactor, with the M/AM stream intermingling and reacting continually as it moves along.

TNG followed the vertical core idea, but with a twist - now the reactor is a single unit, with large glowy pipes coming in from above and below - matter from above and antimatter from below, if the TNG TM is to be believed. So the whole structure is a big vertical tower, still. And TNG era reactors have kept up with this idea of a vertical tower - Voyager did it, the E-E did it, etc. Even Defiant did it, though given the shape fo the ship it have stumpy little short glowy pipes.

What I'm wondering is, is there any reason to do it this way? Couldn't you just rotate the whole warp core 90 degrees and have it lying horizontally? There seems to be some need for the fuel conduits to be long - they are very long on the GCS and E-E, and on the Intrepid. The Defiant has stumpy ones, so in universe I always assumed that there must have been some design penalty to that, a reduction in efficiency say. But if they could flip the core horizontally, even the Defiant could have a pretty long one. So to speak.

And what about multiple warp cores? We always see a single core with two power conduits feeding out to the two nacelles. Could you have two cores, one feeding each nacelle? Certainly each core is very tiny - the E-D engineering hull is 450 feet wide, and the diameter of the warp core is what, about 8 feet? You could fit a dozen abreast, let alone two.

Powering each nacelle from a different core would provide great redundancy and battle damage resistance - you could dump a damaged core and still run around at warp, albeit at reduced speed/efficiency. So why don't they do this?

Any thoughts?

[Teaos]

Gravity? I know its man made gravity on ship, but maybe they had a choice of having it be in a gravity filled room upright or on its side in a zero gravity room which would make it harder to access.

[Tyyr]

Set designers don't think like engineers. Few ships run off a single power core. Those that do are purely because of space limitations, ie. Nuclear submarines. Most nuclear carriers use at least two reactors.

Personally I always liked three. One providing power, one backup, and one down for maintenance, and horizontal.

[McAvoy]

Set designers don't think like engineers. Few ships run off a single power core. Those that do are purely because of space limitations, ie. Nuclear submarines. Most nuclear carriers use at least two reactors.

Personally I always liked three. One providing power, one backup, and one down for maintenance, and horizontal.

Well in ships it is done as a redundancy. Basically reactors replace boilers in steam propulsion. One of the reasons why the Enterprise had eight reactors.

One of my pet peeves is when people think of nuclear reactors as this magical super battery like thing that puts off power without a turbine. Nuclear reactors will do no more than what a boiler will do if the turbine is the same design. Only they will have greater fuel range.



As we see in Trek those cores are very... finicky things.

[Tyyr]

The Enterprise had eight reactors because they didn't have a sea going design with enough steam output at the time to go with fewer.

The amount people don't know about power generation is staggering. I swear, most people seem to think we just hook an extension cord up to a hamster on a wheel.

[Vic]

Well, a genetically modified hamster yeah.......

[Captain Picard's Hair]

And what about multiple warp cores? We always see a single core with two power conduits feeding out to the two nacelles. Could you have two cores, one feeding each nacelle? Certainly each core is very tiny - the E-D engineering hull is 450 feet wide, and the diameter of the warp core is what, about 8 feet? You could fit a dozen abreast, let alone two.

In the first Abrams Star Trek, after the red matter is ignited to form a black hole right in the middle of Narada (wacky physics but whatever, this is Trek...) the Enterprise is caught in its gravity well. Scotty proposes to eject the core to blow out of the gravity well. If I'm not mistaken, we actually see not one big thing ejected but a number of small things. It then gets a bit more confusing since the Enterprise then continues on at warp after breaking free (so it's not clear exactly what is ejected).

The most recent film gives us a different sort of reactor, a big sphere with lots of conduits coming out in all directions. Given the way it seems to be integrated it doesn't seem that could be ejected at all.

As to the vertical orientation, I did notice the peculiarity, especially in the case of Defiant.

[McAvoy]

I wonder if the vertical design has anything to do with the conduits that lead out to the nacelles. Like a design that we do not see within the core that requires the core to be vertical because some quantum flux capacitor has to be perfectly perpendicular to something.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

I wonder if the vertical design has anything to do with the conduits that lead out to the nacelles. Like a design that we do not see within the core that requires the core to be vertical because some quantum flux capacitor has to be perfectly perpendicular to something.

You could still have that angle, with a reactor oriented horizontally along the long fore-aft axis of the ship.

[McAvoy]

I wonder if the vertical design has anything to do with the conduits that lead out to the nacelles. Like a design that we do not see within the core that requires the core to be vertical because some quantum flux capacitor has to be perfectly perpendicular to something.

You could still have that angle, with a reactor oriented horizontally along the long fore-aft axis of the ship.

I guess there could be a reason because of the design standards of time. But the Defiant is this stubby but chubby warp core and all the others are long taking up several decks. I wonder why the length.

[Tyyr]

Based off the TNG tech manuals the length is used to help focus the matter/anti-matter streams more precisely for more complete and prompt utilization of the fuel.

[McAvoy]

So... the Defiant is short ranged then. I like that.

[Atekimogus]

And what about multiple warp cores? We always see a single core with two power conduits feeding out to the two nacelles. Could you have two cores, one feeding each nacelle? Certainly each core is very tiny - the E-D engineering hull is 450 feet wide, and the diameter of the warp core is what, about 8 feet? You could fit a dozen abreast, let alone two.

Powering each nacelle from a different core would provide great redundancy and battle damage resistance - you could dump a damaged core and still run around at warp, albeit at reduced speed/efficiency. So why don't they do this?
Any thoughts?

Now I know it is not canon and therefore probably instantly dismissed but I think it was int he TOS technical manual or somewhere else of a similar source that said that during TOS each nacelle also contained the very reactor powering it all in one neat package, the rather primitive idea here was that if something goes south with the reactor they just loose the nacelle, that is why they are so far outside the ship. (Maybe I find the blueprints somewhere, was a nice cutaway picture)

Personally I find the idea of one neat combined package inside a nacelle rather neat.


Now as to why not multiple warpcores...while surly possible, maybe the other systems onboard don't have the capacity to make use of it? Just as often as we see the ship run dry of energy, we see certain systems overloading...so maybe in most cases a second warpcore (while no doubt handy in peak-situations) would be just a rather wastefull thing to have. So running with two cores would be unneccessary and having one spare in case they need extra juice would entirely depend on how fast they can power the thing up to peak efficiency. I guess at least in TNG it still takes to long to power up an additional core, to make tactical use of it.

(Maybe it is also a bit like wartime-germany not wanting to build 4 engine bombers since they knew their industry is already struggling to supply enough engines for two-engine planes. Something similar could also be a factor in warp-core design.)

[Graham Kennedy]

Now I know it is not canon and therefore probably instantly dismissed but I think it was int he TOS technical manual or somewhere else of a similar source that said that during TOS each nacelle also contained the very reactor powering it all in one neat package, the rather primitive idea here was that if something goes south with the reactor they just loose the nacelle, that is why they are so far outside the ship. (Maybe I find the blueprints somewhere, was a nice cutaway picture)

Personally I find the idea of one neat combined package inside a nacelle rather neat.

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.

Now as to why not multiple warpcores...while surly possible, maybe the other systems onboard don't have the capacity to make use of it? Just as often as we see the ship run dry of energy, we see certain systems overloading...so maybe in most cases a second warpcore (while no doubt handy in peak-situations) would be just a rather wastefull thing to have. So running with two cores would be unneccessary and having one spare in case they need extra juice would entirely depend on how fast they can power the thing up to peak efficiency. I guess at least in TNG it still takes to long to power up an additional core, to make tactical use of it.

It does seem kind of weird though... given that they apparently have so much space in the ships, they could have more of the same systems. Like you could easily put twice as many phaser banks/arrays onto any ship we've ever seen. With a second core to power them you've now got a ship that is twice as powerful.

(Maybe it is also a bit like wartime-germany not wanting to build 4 engine bombers since they knew their industry is already struggling to supply enough engines for two-engine planes. Something similar could also be a factor in warp-core design.)

Hmm, could be I guess.

[Atekimogus]

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.

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?)

It does seem kind of weird though... given that they apparently have so much space in the ships, they could have more of the same systems. Like you could easily put twice as many phaser banks/arrays onto any ship we've ever seen. With a second core to power them you've now got a ship that is twice as powerful.

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?

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. 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).


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?).

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)