Tech question

[Graham Kennedy]

So I was looking at my two nacelled destroyer design, and thinking that with that low mass and huge engines it would likely be faster than a Constitution. Which makes sense, for a Destroyer / scout type.

But it got me wondering, it's commonly thought that the Constitution class were the fastest ships in the Federation of their day. But is there any actual statement to that effect in the show? I really can't think of one. About the only quote that springs to mind was Captain Styles' statement that he was looking forward to breaking "some of Enterprise's speed records". But that use of the plural indicates that the Enterprise holds several such records, at least.

Which is fine, but it does bring up the point that there are a whole lot of different speed records, rather than just "fastest ship there is". And that's how it is in the real world - consider aircraft, where there are all sorts of speed records - fastest jet, fastest aircraft, fastest aircraft that takes off and lands under its own power, fastest passenger jet.

Point being, if there are a whole bunch of Starship speed records, then it doesn't necessarily follow that "fastest ship" is one of the ones that the Enterprise holds. It might, for example, hold "fastest heavy cruiser", "fastest ship of over 200,000 tons", "fastest average over 30 days", etc, but without being the actual fastest ship there is.

So anybody know any quotes that would clarify this?

[McAvoy]

I don't think there is one. But Enterprise did go pretty fast, I think Warp 14 (can't remember offhand anymore). You could say by having the Enterprise going that fast even though it was not by design and needed outside factors,to do it.

Transwarp was supposed to be this next best thing in FTL. It would make sense it would be much faster than regular warp.

[Graham Kennedy]

Ugh, that Warp 14 thing really bugged me. If they can drive the ship to Warp 14 and not have it blow up instantly, how the hell are they supposed to be worried about doing Warp 8 or 9? You'd be like, Warp 12 is a mild risk at best.

[Mikey]

Well, just because something was acheived doesn't mean it's advisable or safe... or even preictably duplicatable. Ken Norton didn't just defeat Muhammad Ali, he beat Ali like a rented mule. That didn't mean Norton would always beat Ali, in fact Norton subsequently lost 2 fights out of 2 to Ali. What I'm trying to illustrate is that acheiving Warp 14 might have happened safely, but that's not an indication of itself that going that fast would be consistently safe.

To answer your question, I don't recall anything specifically referring to Enterprise (or the Connie-class in general) as the fastest ship or class. To play devil's advocate, you referred to a nacelle-to-mass ratio; however, the Connie might (and probably does) have a larger warp core/reactor, and possibly a more advanced one to boot.

[Teaos]

The speed record could mean speed over distance, the conny could have far better endurance but lower top speed.

[Graham Kennedy]

Well, just because something was acheived doesn't mean it's advisable or safe... or even preictably duplicatable. Ken Norton didn't just defeat Muhammad Ali, he beat Ali like a rented mule. That didn't mean Norton would always beat Ali, in fact Norton subsequently lost 2 fights out of 2 to Ali. What I'm trying to illustrate is that acheiving Warp 14 might have happened safely, but that's not an indication of itself that going that fast would be consistently safe.

To answer your question, I don't recall anything specifically referring to Enterprise (or the Connie-class in general) as the fastest ship or class. To play devil's advocate, you referred to a nacelle-to-mass ratio; however, the Connie might (and probably does) have a larger warp core/reactor, and possibly a more advanced one to boot.

By my figures (and Blender lets you measure the volume of an object, so I'm probably pretty close) the total volume of the ships is 205,000 m^3 for the Constitution and 127,000 m^3 for the Saladin / Hermes. So it's 63,500 m^3 per nacelle for the Saladin / Hermes and 102,000 m^3 per nacelle for the Constitution - a 60% increase.

So even assuming that the Saladin has half the power generation capacity of the Constitution - which we'd expect, for it to be able to power one nacelle rather than two - it should still have an extremely comfortable margin over the Constitution class in terms of power to mass ratio.

Now we could argue that maybe the Saladin doesn't have half the power output, maybe it only has a quarter of the output. That would make the power to mass ratio more like 127,000 for the Saladin and 102,000 for the Constitution, making the Connie faster.

But if the Saladin only has half the power needed to run a Constitution nacelle, then then why on Earth did they fit that nacelle to it in the first place? To me, that screams for a cut down nacelle with half the length - and I did exactly that when I was doing my own spin on the Saladin class, actually. The nacelle looked too long, too big for the cut down saucer, so I tried shortening it to something more in proportion. I guess you could argue that it just wasn't worth the money to develop two versions of the nacelle design. Easier to just fit a full size nacelle to the Saladin and run it at half power, maybe? And it sure would give the class plenty of growth margin, since you could drop a more powerful reactor into the design at some future point and get more speed out of her.

The other possibility is the hull configuration. I've long thought that the Constitution's configuration is probably one of the most efficient there is, since Starfleet so often goes with some variation of it. We know that there are forces involved in going at warp speed, something akin to aerodynamics in the real world (warp dynamics?) So maybe the Saladin configuration, whilst cheaper and simpler to build, is a poor warp shape that just can't take advantage of all that extra nacelle to mass ratio?

Incidentally, having checked the TM, Joseph lists the Saladin's top speeds as Warp 6 and 8, just like the Constitution. So apparently there really is something that stops it being faster.

Though of course, the Enterprise exceeded the stated specs on many occasions, both under alien influence and not. In the Paradise Syndrome, for instance, they held Warp 9 for several hours. No doubt that's Scotty's influence at work.

[McAvoy]

It's possible that the Connie was capable of Warp 14 if it had the available energy, technology for an upgrade.

Then again, you cant for example make a old style reciprocating engine achieve 100k hp if it was designed for only 25k

EDIT: The speed record could be in reference to the refit. We can assume the refit was faster than the original Constitution. It could also be that when originally designed the refit had a higher ceiling that Spock and Scott exploited over other redit Constitutions.

[sunnyside]

I was also going to mention the "speed records" which I took to come from a combination of the Constitution class being fast to start with, and with Kirk and Scotty being Kirk and Scotty, the Enterprise was the one out of the class that was pushed the hardest and survived.

However the general trend in the series seems to be that bigger ships are faster at warp, and may or may not be faster at impulse (though certainly less maneuverable). I'm wondering if that isn't inspired at least in part by the nature of real world ships where, due to wave making resistance, it turns out that big long ships can actually achieve faster speeds than smaller ships (hence fast battleships).

I don't think nacelle size corresponds very well to speed between contemporary ships. Consider the fairly swift for it's time Intrepid class with it's stubby little nacelles. Size might count for something else, like system life, efficiency, or warp bubble size/stability.