Say what you will about Discovery but the ship is amazing.
At least until Season 3. I HATE those detached nacelles.
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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I wonder how you do maintenance on detached nacelles. Do you beam over to the nacelle? Is there a permanent staff on board each nacelle?
The nacelles reattach when going warp or using the spore drive. The only time the nacelles are unattached is at station keeping and sub-warp speeds.
Been watching discovery for the past couple of days and you can clearly see them reattaching when getting ready to go to warp and when getting ready to utilize the spore drive. You can clearly see this in season 3
The nacelles only reattach for the Spore Drive. There’s a scene is season 3 or 4 where they almost lose a nacelle at warp because they aren’t attached.
I just watched that episode the other day. The nacelle was attached until the explosion. Also in every episode I have seen since the detachable nacelles were implemented, the nacelles attach prior to going to warp. Currently watching the series now.
Fair enough. Unlike most of the shows I’ve only seen most of the Discovery episodes once so I must have misremembered.
Well since the warp drive has to be completely shut down for it to be safe to enter a nacelle I'd say maintenance is probably like a once a year kinda thing.
Also I don't think the nacelles stay detached when the warp drive is shut down, I think it was shown that they'll "reattach"
Like the Galaxy Class saucer section.
I'm hoping for a scene in the final season of Discovery where on their last legs and out of weapons to defend themselves against some way more powerful enemy ship, in a hail mary move they detach the nacelles and tell them to "go to warp" with warp fields only big enough to surround the nacelles themselves, sending them at warp speed into the opposing vessel as improvised weapons.
That wouldn’t work as each nacelle would need its own warp core.
Clearly if they work while detached, they must get their power without a direct physical connection to the warp core. Most probably they need proximity to the warp core (or to the wireless power transmission nodes near where the nacelles attach when not deployed or whatever,) but they certainly seem to be able to start up and go to warp without being attached. Ostensibly once they're no longer close to the rest of the ship, the warp field(s) would collapse and they wouldn't get "very far." But surely "not very far" when dealing with warp speeds would still be a few light-seconds at least. (Maybe more if they chose the specific warp factor carefully. The nacelles might even have small power storage relays (like capacitors in present-day electronics) in them that might take a little bit to run down.) Plausibly much more than far enough to ram into (or fully through) an enemy vessel staring Discovery down while the bad guy of the season monologues at Discovery's bridge crew over a subspace hail.
(Nerd debate!)
I think even when they look detached they are still physically attached to the ship with that smart alloy or whatever it’s called that just looks invisible. In the scene when they’re at warp and they almost lose a nacelle you can see this smart alloy keeping the nacelle from flying off away from the ship.
I wonder if there is a canon reason why detached nacelles are better.
Newton is still the deadliest son of a bitch in space.
The Voyager J raises more questions like this. The saucer, engineering section and nacelles are all detached.