Do you prefer the hulking majesty of a Galaxy class, the sleek curves of an Intrepid class, the retro-futuristic Constitution or something else?
I’ve grown quite fond of the Danube class runabout. Small, agile, warp capable, and weapons. Most of the amenities of a larger ship in a smaller package. Where the large ships are like flying cities, the runabouts are more like space RVs and the quadrant their open road. There’s just something more personal about them that appeals to me.
In “Scavengers”, right after Discovery gets her refit, Saru says, “even her nacelles are now detached, improving maneuverability and enabling us to be more efficient in flight.”
I found this pretty puzzling, but it eventually dawned on me that the explanation is probably seen most clearly with Book’s ship. There are a few times when we see his ship rearrange itself on the fly to navigate the many, many debris fields present in the post-Burn galaxy - it looks like the detached bits let them dodge debris without actually changing their course or speed.
We do get a glimpse of Discovery doing something similar late in season 5, when they ram their way into the Breen dreadnaught - the nacelles tuck themselves up and behind the saucer, reducing the ship’s profile.
Good catch. I knew Book’s ship did the fancy, in-flight reconfiguration but never caught the Discovery refit using similar capabilities. Guess it was a subtle thing I just missed.
Edit: The other “how” I’m still struggling with is how the detached nacelles receive the warp plasma from the core. Is it more efficient to just do a continuous transport of warp plasma? Are there many, distributed warp reactors in each nacelle/throughout the ship? I long for the technical manuals on these newer models lol.
I don’t have a satisfying answer for that one - wireless power transfer is NBD in the TNG era, so maybe it’s just an extreme version of that?
Reno once had a line about replacing the warp plasma conduits with “polaric” ones, so maybe they don’t use plasma at all?
But the Athena seems to, so 🤷
Never even thought of that. There was a lot of dialog and plot points about finding alternatives to warp after the Burn, and we know they still use dilithium as a regulator, so I assumed they’re still using the same M/A reaction as before. But it’s very possible they extract the energy from the reaction in completely novel ways now.
Was just assuming the same way as we’ve always known because (checks notes) the nacelles still light up blue lol.