G4 is replaying Season One of ST:TNG. I had forgotten how truly wretched that season was. But I wonder if someone knows the “explanation” for something I observed. When the Enterprise is being pursued by Q, they get up to Warp 9.3, then seperate the saucer section from the rest of the ship. Picard takes the saucerless Enterprise back to battle Q. Worf sails on with the dependents in the saucer.
Question: Wouldn’t saucer-seperation at warp cause the saucer to immediately drop out of warp? The second it was clear of the warp field, shouldn’t it just disappear?
Huh. Twenty-one years, and that’s never occurred to me. They did make it pretty clear that the saucer section can only travel at impulse speeds, didn’t they?
Was the saucer section ever separated again before Star Trek: Generations?
Maybe once or twice. When TNG was in pre-production the original idea was (since the crew now included families :dubious: ) was that whenever the Enterprise went on a “military” mission the crew would perform a saucer seperation and the families & civilians would stay in the saucer section while the drive section would go off and fight (hence “battle bridge”). After the pilot the producers realized that it was way too expensive and too much of a hassle to do it on a regular basis. IMHO it was an asine idea to have families and children on the ship in the first place. Civilian staff (including a few married to Starfleeters) would make sense, having children was idiotic.
Actually, that was one of my biggest nitpicks at the start. The warp engines and the warp nacelles are what develop the warp field. The whole reason for having the warp nacelles out from the main body of the ship (at least somewhat, see the later Defiant and runabouts for a slight deviation from this idea) was because of some undisclosed (or decided after the fact) reasoning of warp field production and needing to be somewhat separate from the main body, blah blah blah …
So, the saucer section had no warp engines, no nacelles, and there’s no way (canon from later eps of TNG) that the warp field could still envelope it after the rest of NCC-1701D turned around to face the Flying Chain Link Fence, since large warp fields were unstable at best.
There were some later explanations written, I think by Okuda, but it still feels rather unsatisfactory. Notice how few times they ever even suggested saucer separation after EaFP. Off the top of my head, the only other ep I recall actually using it was rescuing Locutus/Picard from the Borg, and that didn’t involve warp speeds.
IIRC according to the semi-non-canon STNG Technical Manual, both the saucer section and the photon torpedos use something called a “warp sustainer”, which can maintain a warp field for a time, but not generate one.
I think the ability to separate was hinted at in TOS (The Original Series).
I’m sorry I can’t recall the episode, and it’s possible my memory is completely off the mark, but what I remember is this:
Kirk is down on a planet (don’t remember if he’s alone) and something is threatening the ship if it doesn’t get out of orbit. Scotty is on the ship and Kirk tells him something like “Get the ship out of here! Use auxiliary power, warp drive, [bold]crack out of here in the main section if you have to[/bold], but get that ship out of here!”
I don’t recall that the part about “crack(ing) out of here in the main section” was ever explained, but years later after the TNG pilot, I heard other fans saying that Kirk had been talking about separating the main body and saucer section.
After googling a bit, I find this page:
on the Star Trek Wiki that says it happened in the TOS episode ‘The Apple”, although I don’t see that they quote any dialog similar to what I remember. But at least someone thinks it was mentioned in TOS.
OK then. By that “logic,” If the Enterprise is zipping along at Warp 4 and suddenly the warp core goes bad, they could eject it and still be doing trans-light for awhile. Like long enough to get them somewhere to get the engine fixed. EaFP seemed to indicate that Farpoint Station was quite a way away from where they encountered Q, so the saucer section would have had to maintain the warp for hours, if not several days.
I complained about the stupid saucer separation but warp speed maintained thing the very night the episode aired. And yes, it happened long enough ago that it can now drink. To think we’ve been subjected to substandard Star Trek spinoffs for that long… :eek:
I don’t think so. From my understanding of the technobabble, when the warp field collapses or is shut off, the ship drops into normal space with the same velocity it had when it went into warp. Warp drive lets you ignore all sorts of niggling little realities of physics.
