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Nacelles seems to be a very standard size and shape within Starfleet. I was thinking that maybe they are not built on sight with the ship but built off sight on like an assembly line. A very large assembly line. The nacelles would be calibrated or slightly modified for whatever class it would be attached to. For example I doubt the nacelles on the Galaxy and the Nebula are identical.

Though it does seem the nacelles on a Miranda is slightly different than those on the Constitution. The front part seems to be more rounded on the Miranda.

I also think seeing a much wider variety of ships with unique nacelle design might show a new leap in production or design method that doesn't require standardization.

Makes sense to me.

The building method as we usually see it in Trek is quite old fashioned - essentially building the entire ship in a single huge spacedock. Modern shipbuilding takes the "lego" approach, with hull sections built all over the place then taken to a dock to be welded together. It would make perfect sense to me that there's a "nacelle factory" somewhere that churns out nacelles for every class and sends them to places like Utopia Planitia as needed.

As for standardisation, I wonder if replictors and similar tech don't negate many of the advantages. When a replicator factory can churn out a unique design just as easily as it can a standard design, simply by using a different pattern, then a lot of the need for standardisation is removed. Not all... but a lot. This could also explain why engineers in the field seem to have enormous leeway to adjust the specs of their systems.

Well maybe that is the reason why we are seeing more unique nacelle designs and even ones more integrated into the hull like the Steamrunner because of replicator technology advanced enough for more uniqueness.

Building modules like they do now, would certainly make it easier to build on planets and then assemble in orbit.

I would think that it would be easier to get small pieces into orbit than (larger) modules.

The problem with replicators is you have single-bit errors, and even dedicated engineering items will still be built in a factory (for example, the conduits from Phantasms were built in a factory using a new type of welding).

For nacelles, they may be near similar sizes, but the number of ships available to Starfleet means you can have lots of nacelles built that are the same size, and still have a large variety of nacelle sizes. Plus you have older ships whose designs have been discontinued, but are still present in large numbers. So those nacelles may be seen, even though the nacelle cooking facility has been changed over to a newer design.

The real question is if the nacelles are different just on the outside, but also on the inside. If the difference is only on the outside, that would just be a case of changing the structural elements and bending the hull layers differently, while the internal coils are identical to half a dozen ships with a similar size (their spacing may be altered slightly). If the difference is internal, then you may need a dozen or more different nacelle designs, but if Starfleet is proportional in size as the world navies are in terms of population, then assuming the Federation has 100 billion people there would be 280 ships that are galaxy sized (20 carriers active, with the Federation having ~14 times the population of Earth), plus another 112 under construction. This gives plenty of capacity for there to be multiple types of nacelles, without each nacelle being a custom job.

We know that replicators can produce functional items of technology such as computer cores (The next Phase) and energy weapons (Civil Defense). So any errors produced are apparently not that big a deal.

I hate to do my Captain Seafort impression here, but if we're talking about replicators being used for manufactory remember that they are incapable of producing a manhole cover.

Mikey wrote:I hate to do my Captain Seafort impression here, but if we're talking about replicators being used for manufactory remember that they are incapable of producing a manhole cover.

But somehow can create a huge variety of food and super complicated objects like parts or a phaser. But a manhole cover is a literal piece of circular shaped steel. I think in this case, we can ignore that as a inconsistency.

It's certainly inconsistent, but there it is: it wasn't seen by chance as part of the background, it was explicitly stated that the hatch cover couldn't be replicated.

Come to think of it maybe it couldn't be replicated because it doesn't fit in the alcove? I mean how would you replicate something bigger than the replicator itself?

This is without measuring the replicator or a man cover.

Given that the hatch in question was the one on the front of the warp core, I suspect that the problem was material rather than dimensional.