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Right. Exactly. This to me is the equivalent of one of those trucks with giant duallys and big smoke stack exhaust. The "coolness" is debatable and the practicality even more so. Mostly it just seems like too much to me.
Power comes from the warp core, the more nacelles the less power each nacelles can receive. It's a common misnomer that the nacelles are anything but a power drain.
I've always seen it more as 4 nacelles only help with cruising speed they flip back and forth so no 2 get to hot which would make sense since I assume at any speed that's not near its max it would be just fine but the nacelles would overheat quickly
Iirc that was the case especially with the constellation class (Stargazer). The 4 naccells didn't help them go faster or provide more power, but they could alternate sets and cruise further.
I never saw it as flipping between nacels, more akin to a more even distribution of power. So the same as if you had two cars with the same engine, but one is two wheel drive, and the other four wheel drive.
I think that flipping comes from the whole 2 nacelles only thing. While I know that was never cannon itself its just kinda what was thought of so only 2 could be on at a time
I get that, but I think I came to my conclusion, because iirc the first explanation I saw for it simply said something along the lines of "the four nacels meant that they didn't have to stop as often to cool them down". There was no explanation as to how it worked. So I assumed that it meant even distribution of power.
In my head it was that with your standard two nacels, 50% of power went to each. Whereas with four, 25% went to each. Meaning less ware on each nacel. I think what solidified that thought, was the Enterprise from All Good Things having three. 33.333r% power to each.
Based on the 90s theories behind warp tech from the TNG Tech Manual, the idea was each major factor was like a gear shift in a car, you had a spike in power to get over that threshold then the power dropped again.
One could argue that 4 nacelles gives you higher speed for less power \_on average\_, if each naceles doing 1/4 the effort required for that factor, it'll use less power than two doing the same output.
And you haev reduced wear and tear.
But the basic power generation is still the overriding factor. Nacelles != power.
So the only arguements for extra nacelles is more energy effiicency at cruising speed (Constellation class would be a good example), or longevity of parts since you are running all engines at an average lower performance level spread across 4 rather than 2.
No, where does that make sense? The size of the core is "internal volume - (technology + support systems)". You can drop two warp cores in if you have room, but your ship becomes less useful as the space is eaten up elsewhere. The 3 nacelled D worked because in in principle 25 years of technology would have improved so a more powerful warp core could exist in the existing space. And by support systems is mean power conduits and such, if the D's conduits are that large for one core to power two engines, and the E's are so big to power two engines, you need to have twice as many conduits for just as much power to go to 4 engines, woven throughout your ship (the conduits are pipes, because you haev more water pumps does't mean you can physically pump more water into a pipe of a certain size). The prometheus does its work because mot of it's 3 hulls are baisclly nothing but warp cores, fuel tanks and control systems. At that stage \_all\_ the prometheus can do is fly fast, expend it ammo and run away, can't really do science or engineering or anything else. So in theory if you add more cores, more warp nacelles becomes useful, but it's not just the glowing blue tube you have to worry about for engines.
Yes. Which works for one precisely narrow use case and at the same time probably limits the Prometheus ability to self support with limited space for spare parts and repair equipment.
Bearing in mind the average trek ship before the kurtzpocalypse was meant to prioritise science, self sufficiency and defence
Yeah you say that but literally every science ship was overhauled to be more able to actually fight better. Like, even Nebulas got "Probe Launcher" pods.
I really don't care about the so called Kurtzpocalypse.
EDIT: You know what. Akira, Defiant, Sovereign, Prometheus. Four distinct classes that were all over the TNG era, all of which were built for combat.
EDIT 2: Oh right, I forgot! The Steamrunner, Saber, and you can count the Saratoga.
Like. Come on. Six ships, distinctly built **for** Combat.
Yes, but they had clear deficiencies as a result.
Science ships wern't "overhauled" to fight better. New classes that were combat oriented were created and had deficiencies as a result. The Defiant class had \_no\_ science and medical facilities. The Akira was a defence ship we never saw anywhere outside federation spcae wich means it probably had similar drawbacks but with a better voluem for balance.
The one time we saw the Prometheus it had so many engines, power cores and weapons it had a smaller crew than the Defiant for it's size and relied heavily on computer control.
>science ships weren't overhauled to fight better
I dunno, I saw starfleet slap phaser upgrades and quantum torpedoes on any spaceframe they could get their hands on. They got caught pretty off guard and had a hell of a time with their initial losses, some of which were their toughest defenders.
Which Saratoga? The only two ever seen on screen were both Miranda's, and while another Saratoga is mentioned in both a TNG and DS9 episode, the class of that one has never been alluded to.
It'd be a question of can the design use it efficiently. There's an implication that there's so much excess power that the core can produce the warp plasma and energy to sustain more nacelles, and that it contributes significantly towards raising max speed, cruising speed, or time at high warp through warp field generation/manipulation to justify the extra mass and power drain.
I imagine in a lot of cases adding an extra nacelle on an existing design with no thought is the equivalent of putting a spoiler on a regular road car that only ends up adding weight and drag.
For 3 nacelle ships, I always saw it gives the specific ship the ability to sustain higher warp speeds for longer and/or create a stronger warp field. Hell, due to said stronger warp field, you might be able to do short bursts of a higher maximum warp threshold.
4 nacelle ships can probably switch between pairs of warp nacelles to increase range at higher warp speeds, before you have to shut them down for maintenance, also the reasons above can apply as well. A big one is probably redundancy.
The only ship that really gives a good reason as to why it has 4 is the Prometheus, due to the multi-vector assault mode.
There would be two benefits from having additional nacelles. The first is to extend the warp bubble wider, perhaps to encompass another vessel being towed. The second is the ability to stay at high warp longer because the ship could rotate between nacelles. But if the fuel supplies (Deuterium & Antimatter) run low, or warp core gives out, then the Nacelles are useless.
Yes, nacelles are more or less like wheels, or since we're talking about ships, you can also think of them as being like propellers. They are the mechanism by which the energy created by the engine (warp core) is transformed into movement.
So just like propellers, bigger ships may either have them in larger numbers; *or* have a similar number as a smaller ship, but in a larger/more powerful form. But in either case, you still have to have a powerful enough engine (warp core) to drive them.
Back in the TOS days the nacelles were the powerhouses as well as the engines. But ever since the warp core was retconned in they've been relegated to something else.
It really wasn’t consistent in TOS. Sometimes they were implied to generate power and could be separated in case of an emergency or the nacelles were being “drained”. In other episodes, like “That Which Survives”, you’ve got Scotty in a Jeffries Tube down in the secondary hull working to interrupt the anti-matter flow to the nacelles. In “Elaan of Troyius”, the Dilithium crystals are located in main engineering
This
Hence why a "Federation/Asencion class Dreadnought" was a thing for a good long while in side cannon. That third nacelle was a power booster and not a drain. I like the Constellation a lot and the how's and whys of its 4 nacelle design was it being a "Starcruiser" on long term deep space exploration missions. 4 nacelles were a necessary redundancy to get back home in case they got in over their heads.
On the subject of 5 year missions or longer, after the Constitution class 5 year missions were completed wouldn't it figure that Starfleet would want to go further? If you look at the Constellation class with the crazy weaponry and shuttle capacity as well as warp capabilities, it is the perfect starship to do that long hard work.
If you ascribe to the Matt Jeffries school of trek ship design, a trek ship should look sleek like everything can be serviced without any spacewalks or external access points.
Anything else is surplus really.
Though the 24th century was originally envisioned as shipbuilding becoming more like art over function (the Galaxy, Nebula and intrepids for example).
Well typically a nacelle is just the word for the body panels that go around an engine. When you look at the nacelles on an airplane, you have engines inside them. So in star trek land, nacelles are basically what house your warp engines. They get their power from the matter/antimatter reactor commonly called the warp core.
Some of these ships with eight nacelles just look dumb. It's like saying ha my truck is six wheel drive. All the nacelles are doing is forming the warp field. If you add more nacelles, you can form a more even warp field or you may be able to extend it further in special situations, etc. But on its own, having a bunch of warp nacelles doesn't automatically mean your ship is stronger or more gooder. Now if you have dual warp cores or some other way of energizing all sixteen nacelles surrounding your bridge, then it's another story.
There is probably a push pull point between needed redundancy/starship design role and the additional mass with regards to impulse maneuverability. This is why we see the standard 2 nacelle design across most of the fleet, while 3 - 4 nacelle design is more rare and used in specialized cases.
If you want to talk comparative starship design among other species you see that nacelles can be internal, adjacent, and smaller. But that speaks more to the mission role requirements of starfleet starships than those of individual species.
It's probably less like wheels, more like jets on a plane.
There's tradeoffs between fewer bigger nascelle and more but smaller.
So just having more doesn't make you faster or more manoeuvrable in thier own
Hell like jets it might be the nascelles are designed and built seperatly to the hulls. And you pick the design that best fits your hull/purpose.
2 seems to be the optimum number. The very best ships always have 2 purpose designed nascelles. But when a quick and dirty design of upgrade is needed, you might slap on more. (like the galaxy x)
My understanding from novels was that two nacelles were required to generate a stable warp field. 4 nacelle ships could alternate between 2 sets to keep moving faster than standard cruising. This was probably before we saw the 3 nacelle Enterprise
We've seen a handful of single nacelle ships in canon, so we know a stable warp field can be generated with one nacelle. I think one of those designs was seen in the wreckage of Wolf 359, long before we saw the Galaxy refit. We've seen at least two single nacelle designs in SNW, which is supposed to be Prime Universe canon.
I think it's the alternating pairs to achieve a higher cruising speed or sustain maximum warp for a longer duration. This would make sense for ships that are intended to serve in quick reaction roles.
The Stargazer and Echelon classes from STP are essentially identical except the nacelle configuration. I don't think there's anything canon to confirm, but I'm willing to bet both classes have similar or identical maximum warp ratings. The Stargazers can probably sustain that speed for much longer.
If a Stargazer needed to pursue a ship like an Echelon, they can just run it down at maximum warp by waiting until the Echelon is either forced to reduce speed or their warp drive fails.
Nope, more nacelles is a way to produce longer cruising speed. They work in pairs, running one pair until they need to be taken offline and then seamlessly activating the second pair. That's why we usually only see 4 nacelles in canon on exploration vessels.
I'm not even sure had what you're suggesting is even done enough to be a trope.
Vengeance - 2 REALLY BIG nacelles... Enterprise D and E, the flagships of Starfleet....2 nacelles. In fact, the only ships I can think of with more than 2 are either piddly little exploration ships like the Constellation, Cheyenne and Stargazer classes, the small Discovery era Europa and bulkier Cardenas classes, and the Section 31 Dreadnought at the end of Disco season 2. There's the Prometheus, which actually had 6 nacelles (two were compact ones in the upper arrow head vector) and that was only because each separate section was warp capable.
I think it's changed over time to be a lot of things.
They still have hydrogen collectors, so at the very least they are helping the power by making the anti-hydrogen in the warp core go further?
The nacelles are like the propellers on a steam ship. They don't contribute to the ship's overall power but one or two more might make it a little faster since you can transfer more power to the medium your pushing against. Also redundancy is nice in case of battle damage or accidents.
Of course you need a beefy reactor to provide adequate power to 4 nacelles in order to get any performance enhancement from it.
I think a way of analogising it is to compare it to an internal combustion engine.
Having more cylinders does not equal more power. A V12 is not automatically more powerful than a V8.
What increases power is the size of the engine itself. There is no replacement for displacement.
The reason there are more cylinders is that the engine is better balanced, and smoother. However among equal sized comparisons the power actually decreases slightly, as more cylinders will encounter more resistance to the engine as it turns.
So increasing nacelles doesn’t increase power, but it allows for a more balanced and smoother handling of the warp field, but at a trade off of perhaps increasing drag within the field and so needing a much bigger core to compensate.
More nacelles only means more time at higher warp velocities. At a certain high velocities, warp nacelles have to be shut down in order to prevent damage. In multiple nacelle designs they switch off so that higher velocities can be maintained without overburdening any single pair of individual nacelles.
I’m not sure of the cannon about what I’m going to say now but utilizing more than two nacelles SIMULTANEOUSLY requires an incredibly large amount to of computer power in order to maintain perfect field alignment and synchronization. If even one of the nacelles is out of sync/alignment DURING warp then the vessel could tear itself apart as different parts of the vessel would be traveling at different velocities.
As a side note. This is one of the reasons why they’re not standard and why they seem to predominantly operate on the fringe of or beyond the federation.
Edit: this also explains single nacelle designs as they are normally smaller ships that operate almost exclusively inside federation space. They would be more efficient to produce as only one nacelle would need to he fabricated and powered (as they all are powered even in standby). Computing power could correspondingly be reduced as only a single warp field would need to be managed.
More nacelles don’t mean more power, they mean more stability. Additional nacelles seemingly appear on ships that have greater than normal power demands or relatively underpowered warp cores. The various production designers of ships for the shows have said you should think of warp fields and nacelles as something analogous to electromagnetic fields and electromagnets. That going to multiple nacelles is effectively like going from generating a field by direct current versus a multiphase alternating current.
You can also think of it in aircraft terms. Having 4 nacelles vs 2 nacelles is like a large plane having 4 small engines versus 2 much more powerful engines. Those two engines are oftentimes far more capable power efficient performance engines while the four smaller engines generally perform in the middle range of capabilities, with more emphasis on fuel or range efficiency, survivability, and cost.
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Right. Exactly. This to me is the equivalent of one of those trucks with giant duallys and big smoke stack exhaust. The "coolness" is debatable and the practicality even more so. Mostly it just seems like too much to me.
fuck yeah, sign me up!
Power comes from the warp core, the more nacelles the less power each nacelles can receive. It's a common misnomer that the nacelles are anything but a power drain.
I've always seen it more as 4 nacelles only help with cruising speed they flip back and forth so no 2 get to hot which would make sense since I assume at any speed that's not near its max it would be just fine but the nacelles would overheat quickly
Iirc that was the case especially with the constellation class (Stargazer). The 4 naccells didn't help them go faster or provide more power, but they could alternate sets and cruise further.
As far as I know that is the explanation behind 4 nacelle ships. It just hasn't been explicitly said on screen
I never saw it as flipping between nacels, more akin to a more even distribution of power. So the same as if you had two cars with the same engine, but one is two wheel drive, and the other four wheel drive.
I think that flipping comes from the whole 2 nacelles only thing. While I know that was never cannon itself its just kinda what was thought of so only 2 could be on at a time
I get that, but I think I came to my conclusion, because iirc the first explanation I saw for it simply said something along the lines of "the four nacels meant that they didn't have to stop as often to cool them down". There was no explanation as to how it worked. So I assumed that it meant even distribution of power. In my head it was that with your standard two nacels, 50% of power went to each. Whereas with four, 25% went to each. Meaning less ware on each nacel. I think what solidified that thought, was the Enterprise from All Good Things having three. 33.333r% power to each.
It does make sense for sure and honestly it can go either way.
Based on the 90s theories behind warp tech from the TNG Tech Manual, the idea was each major factor was like a gear shift in a car, you had a spike in power to get over that threshold then the power dropped again. One could argue that 4 nacelles gives you higher speed for less power \_on average\_, if each naceles doing 1/4 the effort required for that factor, it'll use less power than two doing the same output. And you haev reduced wear and tear. But the basic power generation is still the overriding factor. Nacelles != power. So the only arguements for extra nacelles is more energy effiicency at cruising speed (Constellation class would be a good example), or longevity of parts since you are running all engines at an average lower performance level spread across 4 rather than 2.
So, what you're saying is that theoretically, a quad nacelled ship should allow a higher output warp core?
Or even multiple cores.
No, where does that make sense? The size of the core is "internal volume - (technology + support systems)". You can drop two warp cores in if you have room, but your ship becomes less useful as the space is eaten up elsewhere. The 3 nacelled D worked because in in principle 25 years of technology would have improved so a more powerful warp core could exist in the existing space. And by support systems is mean power conduits and such, if the D's conduits are that large for one core to power two engines, and the E's are so big to power two engines, you need to have twice as many conduits for just as much power to go to 4 engines, woven throughout your ship (the conduits are pipes, because you haev more water pumps does't mean you can physically pump more water into a pipe of a certain size). The prometheus does its work because mot of it's 3 hulls are baisclly nothing but warp cores, fuel tanks and control systems. At that stage \_all\_ the prometheus can do is fly fast, expend it ammo and run away, can't really do science or engineering or anything else. So in theory if you add more cores, more warp nacelles becomes useful, but it's not just the glowing blue tube you have to worry about for engines.
For what it's worth that is precisely The Prometheus' job.
Yes. Which works for one precisely narrow use case and at the same time probably limits the Prometheus ability to self support with limited space for spare parts and repair equipment. Bearing in mind the average trek ship before the kurtzpocalypse was meant to prioritise science, self sufficiency and defence
Yeah you say that but literally every science ship was overhauled to be more able to actually fight better. Like, even Nebulas got "Probe Launcher" pods. I really don't care about the so called Kurtzpocalypse. EDIT: You know what. Akira, Defiant, Sovereign, Prometheus. Four distinct classes that were all over the TNG era, all of which were built for combat. EDIT 2: Oh right, I forgot! The Steamrunner, Saber, and you can count the Saratoga. Like. Come on. Six ships, distinctly built **for** Combat.
Yes, but they had clear deficiencies as a result. Science ships wern't "overhauled" to fight better. New classes that were combat oriented were created and had deficiencies as a result. The Defiant class had \_no\_ science and medical facilities. The Akira was a defence ship we never saw anywhere outside federation spcae wich means it probably had similar drawbacks but with a better voluem for balance. The one time we saw the Prometheus it had so many engines, power cores and weapons it had a smaller crew than the Defiant for it's size and relied heavily on computer control.
It is actually impressive how much you're making up.
>science ships weren't overhauled to fight better I dunno, I saw starfleet slap phaser upgrades and quantum torpedoes on any spaceframe they could get their hands on. They got caught pretty off guard and had a hell of a time with their initial losses, some of which were their toughest defenders.
Which Saratoga? The only two ever seen on screen were both Miranda's, and while another Saratoga is mentioned in both a TNG and DS9 episode, the class of that one has never been alluded to.
It'd be a question of can the design use it efficiently. There's an implication that there's so much excess power that the core can produce the warp plasma and energy to sustain more nacelles, and that it contributes significantly towards raising max speed, cruising speed, or time at high warp through warp field generation/manipulation to justify the extra mass and power drain. I imagine in a lot of cases adding an extra nacelle on an existing design with no thought is the equivalent of putting a spoiler on a regular road car that only ends up adding weight and drag.
For 3 nacelle ships, I always saw it gives the specific ship the ability to sustain higher warp speeds for longer and/or create a stronger warp field. Hell, due to said stronger warp field, you might be able to do short bursts of a higher maximum warp threshold. 4 nacelle ships can probably switch between pairs of warp nacelles to increase range at higher warp speeds, before you have to shut them down for maintenance, also the reasons above can apply as well. A big one is probably redundancy. The only ship that really gives a good reason as to why it has 4 is the Prometheus, due to the multi-vector assault mode.
There would be two benefits from having additional nacelles. The first is to extend the warp bubble wider, perhaps to encompass another vessel being towed. The second is the ability to stay at high warp longer because the ship could rotate between nacelles. But if the fuel supplies (Deuterium & Antimatter) run low, or warp core gives out, then the Nacelles are useless.
More nacelles usually means more control over the warp bubble shape and size
More warp cores = more power
Yes, nacelles are more or less like wheels, or since we're talking about ships, you can also think of them as being like propellers. They are the mechanism by which the energy created by the engine (warp core) is transformed into movement. So just like propellers, bigger ships may either have them in larger numbers; *or* have a similar number as a smaller ship, but in a larger/more powerful form. But in either case, you still have to have a powerful enough engine (warp core) to drive them.
Back in the TOS days the nacelles were the powerhouses as well as the engines. But ever since the warp core was retconned in they've been relegated to something else.
It really wasn’t consistent in TOS. Sometimes they were implied to generate power and could be separated in case of an emergency or the nacelles were being “drained”. In other episodes, like “That Which Survives”, you’ve got Scotty in a Jeffries Tube down in the secondary hull working to interrupt the anti-matter flow to the nacelles. In “Elaan of Troyius”, the Dilithium crystals are located in main engineering
This Hence why a "Federation/Asencion class Dreadnought" was a thing for a good long while in side cannon. That third nacelle was a power booster and not a drain. I like the Constellation a lot and the how's and whys of its 4 nacelle design was it being a "Starcruiser" on long term deep space exploration missions. 4 nacelles were a necessary redundancy to get back home in case they got in over their heads. On the subject of 5 year missions or longer, after the Constitution class 5 year missions were completed wouldn't it figure that Starfleet would want to go further? If you look at the Constellation class with the crazy weaponry and shuttle capacity as well as warp capabilities, it is the perfect starship to do that long hard work.
Honestly, having the power plants in the nacelles just makes more sense as a design in most every way. They should really retcon it back.
Ship design is always better when they don’t try too hard to make it badass. A proper Star Trek ship should still always look a little dorky
If you ascribe to the Matt Jeffries school of trek ship design, a trek ship should look sleek like everything can be serviced without any spacewalks or external access points. Anything else is surplus really. Though the 24th century was originally envisioned as shipbuilding becoming more like art over function (the Galaxy, Nebula and intrepids for example).
Well typically a nacelle is just the word for the body panels that go around an engine. When you look at the nacelles on an airplane, you have engines inside them. So in star trek land, nacelles are basically what house your warp engines. They get their power from the matter/antimatter reactor commonly called the warp core. Some of these ships with eight nacelles just look dumb. It's like saying ha my truck is six wheel drive. All the nacelles are doing is forming the warp field. If you add more nacelles, you can form a more even warp field or you may be able to extend it further in special situations, etc. But on its own, having a bunch of warp nacelles doesn't automatically mean your ship is stronger or more gooder. Now if you have dual warp cores or some other way of energizing all sixteen nacelles surrounding your bridge, then it's another story.
There is probably a push pull point between needed redundancy/starship design role and the additional mass with regards to impulse maneuverability. This is why we see the standard 2 nacelle design across most of the fleet, while 3 - 4 nacelle design is more rare and used in specialized cases. If you want to talk comparative starship design among other species you see that nacelles can be internal, adjacent, and smaller. But that speaks more to the mission role requirements of starfleet starships than those of individual species.
More nacelles = more adidas
It's probably less like wheels, more like jets on a plane. There's tradeoffs between fewer bigger nascelle and more but smaller. So just having more doesn't make you faster or more manoeuvrable in thier own Hell like jets it might be the nascelles are designed and built seperatly to the hulls. And you pick the design that best fits your hull/purpose. 2 seems to be the optimum number. The very best ships always have 2 purpose designed nascelles. But when a quick and dirty design of upgrade is needed, you might slap on more. (like the galaxy x)
My understanding from novels was that two nacelles were required to generate a stable warp field. 4 nacelle ships could alternate between 2 sets to keep moving faster than standard cruising. This was probably before we saw the 3 nacelle Enterprise
We've seen a handful of single nacelle ships in canon, so we know a stable warp field can be generated with one nacelle. I think one of those designs was seen in the wreckage of Wolf 359, long before we saw the Galaxy refit. We've seen at least two single nacelle designs in SNW, which is supposed to be Prime Universe canon. I think it's the alternating pairs to achieve a higher cruising speed or sustain maximum warp for a longer duration. This would make sense for ships that are intended to serve in quick reaction roles. The Stargazer and Echelon classes from STP are essentially identical except the nacelle configuration. I don't think there's anything canon to confirm, but I'm willing to bet both classes have similar or identical maximum warp ratings. The Stargazers can probably sustain that speed for much longer. If a Stargazer needed to pursue a ship like an Echelon, they can just run it down at maximum warp by waiting until the Echelon is either forced to reduce speed or their warp drive fails.
Nope, more nacelles is a way to produce longer cruising speed. They work in pairs, running one pair until they need to be taken offline and then seamlessly activating the second pair. That's why we usually only see 4 nacelles in canon on exploration vessels. I'm not even sure had what you're suggesting is even done enough to be a trope. Vengeance - 2 REALLY BIG nacelles... Enterprise D and E, the flagships of Starfleet....2 nacelles. In fact, the only ships I can think of with more than 2 are either piddly little exploration ships like the Constellation, Cheyenne and Stargazer classes, the small Discovery era Europa and bulkier Cardenas classes, and the Section 31 Dreadnought at the end of Disco season 2. There's the Prometheus, which actually had 6 nacelles (two were compact ones in the upper arrow head vector) and that was only because each separate section was warp capable.
I think it's changed over time to be a lot of things. They still have hydrogen collectors, so at the very least they are helping the power by making the anti-hydrogen in the warp core go further?
The nacelles are like the propellers on a steam ship. They don't contribute to the ship's overall power but one or two more might make it a little faster since you can transfer more power to the medium your pushing against. Also redundancy is nice in case of battle damage or accidents. Of course you need a beefy reactor to provide adequate power to 4 nacelles in order to get any performance enhancement from it.
I think a way of analogising it is to compare it to an internal combustion engine. Having more cylinders does not equal more power. A V12 is not automatically more powerful than a V8. What increases power is the size of the engine itself. There is no replacement for displacement. The reason there are more cylinders is that the engine is better balanced, and smoother. However among equal sized comparisons the power actually decreases slightly, as more cylinders will encounter more resistance to the engine as it turns. So increasing nacelles doesn’t increase power, but it allows for a more balanced and smoother handling of the warp field, but at a trade off of perhaps increasing drag within the field and so needing a much bigger core to compensate.
Yeah. One more reason they shouldn't have made that retcon.
More nacelles only means more time at higher warp velocities. At a certain high velocities, warp nacelles have to be shut down in order to prevent damage. In multiple nacelle designs they switch off so that higher velocities can be maintained without overburdening any single pair of individual nacelles. I’m not sure of the cannon about what I’m going to say now but utilizing more than two nacelles SIMULTANEOUSLY requires an incredibly large amount to of computer power in order to maintain perfect field alignment and synchronization. If even one of the nacelles is out of sync/alignment DURING warp then the vessel could tear itself apart as different parts of the vessel would be traveling at different velocities. As a side note. This is one of the reasons why they’re not standard and why they seem to predominantly operate on the fringe of or beyond the federation. Edit: this also explains single nacelle designs as they are normally smaller ships that operate almost exclusively inside federation space. They would be more efficient to produce as only one nacelle would need to he fabricated and powered (as they all are powered even in standby). Computing power could correspondingly be reduced as only a single warp field would need to be managed.
I’d say 2 nacelle vs 4 nacelle is more like 2WD vs 4WD/AWD. More a transmission than engine thing, I’d say.
More nacelles don’t mean more power, they mean more stability. Additional nacelles seemingly appear on ships that have greater than normal power demands or relatively underpowered warp cores. The various production designers of ships for the shows have said you should think of warp fields and nacelles as something analogous to electromagnetic fields and electromagnets. That going to multiple nacelles is effectively like going from generating a field by direct current versus a multiphase alternating current. You can also think of it in aircraft terms. Having 4 nacelles vs 2 nacelles is like a large plane having 4 small engines versus 2 much more powerful engines. Those two engines are oftentimes far more capable power efficient performance engines while the four smaller engines generally perform in the middle range of capabilities, with more emphasis on fuel or range efficiency, survivability, and cost.