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.
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.
Warp tug for pulling massive objects is what I was thinking too