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Why do Voyagers nacelles swing up and down? I thought I recalled someone once saying they increase warp speed when they're up, but would it not be easier to just leave them up permanatly in that case?

Supposedly (and this is not absolutely official, as far as I know), they are an early attempt to reduce subspace degradation caused by high energy warpfields. The idea being that the environmental impact of a variable geometry nacelle arrangement is somehow less than a standard arrangement.

My guess, while this worked in the case of the Intrepid class, other advances focusing on nacelle design worked just as well and may have been more structurally sound, so variable nacelles don't appear much after the Intrepid.

How would being able to change the arangement of the nacelles have an effect though? I've never seen them swing around when the ship is moving, to me that suggests its where they're positioned that counts.

Who knows!

Like I said, I don't know if it was the official reason. I first thought that it was because the impulse engines needed one geometry to operate and the warp engines required another, but that's silly since other (unofficial) sources say the impulse engines operate at warp to provide some acceleration. Even if they didn't work that way, why increase the complexity of the system?

Perhaps there are small changes that happen as a relation to speed? (yes, I know that's really, REALLY fishing... ), so when in operation they move a little, and they swing down at impulse to allow maintenance access?

*shrugs*

Really, probably because it looked cool.

The real world reason is that TPTB wanted the ship to be more animated than previous ships, thus the nacelles swing up when it goes to warp.

As for a Trexplanation, sorry no clue there.

The Trek explanation is correct, from what I remember: Variable geometry nacelles improve efficiency, detract from the subspace degredation as presented (and then forgotten) in TNG, etc.

Also, if I remember correctly, there was some behind the scenes or making of Voyager thing here in the states before the series came out, and it was intended that we'd see the nacelles in a variety of the positions depending on the type of space they were going through, speed, etc. But I don't believe that it ever came out to be like that.

I always figured that because the warp coils are such huge pieces of solid metal that by altering the position adjusts the vessel's center of thrust depending on which engines are being used.

I believe It created a elongated Z axis thus dispersing the subspace distortion over a larger area thus reducing the harm.

Pure speculation though is that by raising the warp coils up above the main body the star ship the warp distortion may be dispersed more.

The eddies created around the out side of any object in motion would spread the any pollution out more than if it was kept in the slip stream.

Yeah, in real life they probably just thought it was a good idea.

Pure speculation though is that by raising the warp coils up above the main body the star ship the warp distortion may be dispersed more.

But then why aren't the warp coils positioned permanently above the ship and just fixed in place?

The explaination is probably (like some suggested) that it improves effeciency. What I want to know is how is it going to do that?

It is believed that the Warp Nacelles are supposed to be raised higher the faster the Warp velocity they're travelling at is. Unfortunately simple VFX crew laziness and liberal re-use of stock footage meant that the nacelles were only ever seen horizontal and around 30 degrees elevation.

Well, that sort of explains it.

Maybe at lower speeds it doesn't matter so much but as a ship gets faster it produces exponentially more amounts of pollution thus needing a special features to help disperse it.

I still don't understand how being able to move the nacelles reduces pollution.
*Goes off mutering about writters*

In my opinion it doesn't reduce the amount of crap being thrown out of the ship its how it is dispersed. With a bigger dispersal the damage is lessened. Maybe subspace is only damaged if the pollution reaches a certain point.

Like how humans can with stand low amounts of radiation (X rays) but high amounts damage us.

By having an elongated Z axis and the nacelles raised out of the slip stream the pollution is more dispersed and thus of lower damage.

But why do the nacelles need to swing? They could just put them in a fixed position where they need them, couldn't they?

(Am I the only one here who thinks this topic is going around in circles? )