I’m wondering what, if any, in-universe justification there could be for such a design. I sincerely doubt that additional nacelles are actually going to result in a faster ship; I feel like top speed is a function of the power of the warp core combined with the physical limitations of the ship itself to withstand a powerful warp field (see: “She’ll fly herself apart, sir!” from Star Trek VI).
So this would absolutely have to be some kind of insane experimental test bed trying out a novel warp configuration. Or maybe it’s designed to be a warp-speed tug for moving planetoids from one system to another. Or it could be designed for massive redundancy, say for extremely long missions where you’re only running 2-4 nacelles at a time, but you want to be able to swap them out without having to rely on a starbase for repairs.
Or a weird experiment in efficiency, where you’re running like 15 nacelles or whatever, but the way the individual fields line up it ends up being more than the sum of it’s parts so it only actually takes 1/2 the power of a standard design.
I’m wondering what, if any, in-universe justification there could be for such a design. I sincerely doubt that additional nacelles are actually going to result in a faster ship; I feel like top speed is a function of the power of the warp core combined with the physical limitations of the ship itself to withstand a powerful warp field (see: “She’ll fly herself apart, sir!” from Star Trek VI).
So this would absolutely have to be some kind of insane experimental test bed trying out a novel warp configuration. Or maybe it’s designed to be a warp-speed tug for moving planetoids from one system to another. Or it could be designed for massive redundancy, say for extremely long missions where you’re only running 2-4 nacelles at a time, but you want to be able to swap them out without having to rely on a starbase for repairs.
In any event, this is absurd and I love it.
Or a weird experiment in efficiency, where you’re running like 15 nacelles or whatever, but the way the individual fields line up it ends up being more than the sum of it’s parts so it only actually takes 1/2 the power of a standard design.
Warp tug for pulling massive objects is what I was thinking too