Correct, but the “Battle Bridge” was intended for use only after saucer separation (giving the children, et al, a chance to “get away”). I still think it would be a futile gesture. Everyone on board the saucer would either (a) be blown to smithereens by any hostile vessel, (b) be taken prisoner and used for experiments or sold as slaves throughout the Galaxy, or (c) eventually suffocate in the icy cold of space.
Evidence of just how futile it would be is that the “Battle Bridge” was seldom even mentioned after the awful first season.
Saucer separation was not something done during battle, but something done because the warp core seemed to get breached every week or so. (In TOS the transporters go out, in TNG it is the warp core - they seem to have regressed.)
The secondary bridge existed in TOS time, that is where Kirk ran Decker’s ship in “The Doomsday Machine.” Redundancy is quite necessary in this kind of situation, though I don’t think you could fit much of the bridge crew in there.
Well, in regards to the bridge location, it seems to me that the firepower of the future spaceships is probably pretty impressive.
The Memory-Alpha wikipage on photon torpedos describes many types of power yields. It even states that an unshielded Ent-D could be destroyed by firing it’s own torpedos at a target “too close”. Photon torpedo | Memory Alpha | Fandom
Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter where you stick the bridge in terms of weapons vulnerability. Even in the center of the secondary hull, a fully powered weapon is going to blow through a dozen decks with ease, unless you make your ship out of neutronium.
Right off the top of my head, I can remember the episodes where Picard ordered Worf to take the saucer to “safety” before engaging another ship; Geordi was (God knows why!) left in command, and the first thing he did was to send the saucer off and then turn around and go back to give battle (why not just keep running?); and Worf told a visitor that without the saucer, the Enterprise was a “formidable” warship.
Seems to me also that it was Voyager that was always in imminent danger of a warp core breach. How many times did this actually happen on TNG?
Not only did Kirk use Auxiliary Control in “The Doomsday Machine,” intruders could use it (or Engineering) to take control of the ship, like the space hippies did (if I remember correctly).
Without some kind of inertial dampening, yes. I’ve always thought such a capacity would be an integral part of any drive system, along with artificial gravity.
Being “thrown around” is an understatement. Most likely, you’d be reduced to something resembling strawberry jam on the walls (assuming* they’d* be left intact).
There’s no indication in these (admittedly brief) descriptions here that the hull of the ship itself experiences G-forces of any kind.
Many screenshots in the various series show that the warp field does not touch the hull, but indeed encloses a volumn larger than the ship generating it.
In relative terms, the ship is “at rest” with everything else enclosed within the same warp field.
At the bottom of the “warp field” entry is a non-canon explanation/theory on how motion is granted to the whole. (“Layers” of fields within the same warp bubble are manipulated, and act against each other, resulting in motion in the desired direction.)
Unintended/uncontrolled collapse of the warp field is probably a “bad thing”.
This article indicates that they are indeed used by ships for warp, as bad things happen when they don’t. Which raises a question for you math majors:
What is the “G” force acceleration equivelant if the Ent-D goes from a standing start to warp 9.6 (say, 850c) in under 30 seconds (as seen on the pilot episode)?
when the Seaview got rocked they were thrown from side to side. do you expect the ST crew to be less. they both stared danger in the face and didn’t blink.
By simple math that’s 867 million gees, though presumably the warp drive can’t even work without some form of inertial damping.
From the Memory Alpha Impulse Drive article: In The Motion Picture, The Enterprise traveled at warp 0.5 from Earth to past the planet Jupiter, a distance of (at a minimum) 390,674,900 miles, in 1.8 hours, making that speed approximately equal to 97,026 kilometers per second (217,041,611 miles per hour), or roughly 1/3 light speed.
If the average speed was 1/3 c, then we might say the peak speed was 2/3 c, and that the ship took 0.9 hours to accelerate to that (and the other half to decelerate). If so, we get that the impulse drives alone can accelerate the ship at over 6100 gees.
If you got the gravity control (or whatever) to counteract three quarters of a billion gees acceleration, it seems some of those episodes’ plots need another lookin at…
Something to consider: Logically, inertia dampening would be an inherent property of a warp drive, but judging from Trek technobabble (particularly on Voyager) it seems to be a separate system that kicks in for both warp and impulse power.
I find it particularly amusing whenever Voyager comes under attack, and the shields fail and they drop out of warp, Tuvak (or Harry, or Tom) reports “Inertia dampeners are off-line!” Seems to me he’d be “chunky salsa” before he could even get the words out!
