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If it had a spiral on it and rotated we could hypnotise the bad guys.

That would be so much cooler than the nacelles!

And more funtional.

Rochey wrote:(how the hell was the dish supposed to move?!)

The dish on the original Constitution class was supposed to move a few degrees around. Never implemented though. Although it showed up in a couple of fanmade vids. Voyager looks like it has an NX class style dish. It has a glowing blue part, with an actual dish-type attachment in front of it. I'd imagine that to be the part that moves.

Crushproof wrote:

Rochey wrote:(how the hell was the dish supposed to move?!)

The dish on the original Constitution class was supposed to move a few degrees around. Never implemented though. Although it showed up in a couple of fanmade vids. Voyager looks like it has an NX class style dish. It has a glowing blue part, with an actual dish-type attachment in front of it. I'd imagine that to be the part that moves.

That sort of makes sense. After all, they can't expect all debris to pass directly in front of the beam emitter. Another idea would be to have the entire deflector retract in combat. If Voyager's is anything like the E-E's, and hitting it with phaser fire would destroy half the ship it's surprising they don't protect it more. Then again, given Starfleet safety standards, maybe not.

That would be the most boring special effect ever "OMG the dish is moving a few degrees!!!!"

Teaos wrote:That would be the most boring special effect ever "OMG the dish is moving a few degrees!!!!"

Bwahahaha, so true! But then, that's about the same as the nacelles =)

Hmm. How could we get the saucer section to move?
*imagines it spinning around on top of the ship*

I suppose it could bend round to point over the nacelle if the ship was being followed, to focus the sensors or somesuch.

Maybe the saucer section could extend and retract back over the engineering hull for... ummmm.... for no apparent reason at all.

I was thinking more in terms of the ship looking over its shoulder.

I know - I wasn't making fun of you, I was making fun of the idea of a mobile saucer section. The topic of this thread is an example of what happens when something is created before it is planned or designed... which seems to have happened on a number of occasions in Star Trek. In this case, a starship was created with variable geometry nacelle pinions, with no real design purpose for this feature. It may have looked "cool" on the rare occasions in which the feature actually made it on screen, but there are a whole buch of, well, us out there who are willing to create a three-page forum thread because we demand some sort of sense, an not just "neat" SFX, from the world of the show(s) we love.

Wait, so is the variable geometry nacelle design supposed to eliminate that whole warp deterioration from the TNG [sarcasm]classic[/sarcasm] "Force of Nature"

That seems to be the most popular explanation, though nobody has eversaid how.

Yeah we did. Look back and ther was a bit about a elongated Z axis distributing the pollution more thus causing less damage.