Considering the alignment of the engines, wouldn't a spaceship tumble end-over-end if it were constructed like the Enterprise?
by 
HungryGuy
ANSWERS: 4
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It is easy to think so when you look at it! However, these were not "propulsion" engines. Roddenberry did not want to have to mess with too many special effects, so he proposed engines that didn't give off any smoke or exhaust or anything like that. Warp Engines, as envisioned by Roddenberry, move a ship along by "warping" the fabric of space. As the space is "warped", the ship just rides on top of it like a surfboard. With ideas like this, it's anybody's guess if the Enterprise would stay upright or not! In reality, though, all Roddenberry really wanted was a spaceship unlike anything the audience had ever seen before. He wanted an all out, original shape that also photographed well from any angle. The Enterprise is more a masterpiece of art than a technical milestone (but don't tell the Trekkies that).
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The warp nacells created a warp field around the ship. The nature of this field was such that, by themselves, the field generators could not ecompass the ship in a properly balanced manner, hence Jeoffry Tubes: they would allow the field to resonate through the tubes to more fully encompass the ship. The warp field would allow the ship to slip into another dimension where the speed of light was faster, thereby allowing thrust to be more effective at higher speeds. The actual thrust comes from thrusters positioned all over the ship and the Impulse Drive (stands for Internaly Metered Pulse Drive). The Impulse Drive, by itself only produced sublightspeed travel, however, when the ship "sidestepped" into these atlernate dimensions, it was far more effective.
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Shape of a vessel is irrelevant in space. There is no gravity and no aerodynamics. Look at the Lunar Excursion Modules from the Apollo missions as a real life example. The command module of the Apollo and the Space Shuttle are aerodynamically shaped because they operate within the atmosphere as well as in space. The LEM was designed to operate ONLY in space.. hence the odd shape.
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The warp nacelles don't provide any type of actual propulsion. Instead, they only create the warp field around the ship. If they did provide thrust, the ship likely would tumble, due to the fact that the thust vector is nowhere near the ship's center of mass. The starships seen on Star Trek get around this by having the actual propulsion (whether it be at warp or sublight) provided by the impulse engines. Both the original (Constitution Class) and TNG (Galaxy class) Enterprise have their propulsive engines at the back of the saucer section, almost directly at the ship's overall center of mass, as does Voyager. The Defiant (from DS9) and Enterprise (from that show) have impulse thrusters to either side of the ship's center of mass, balancing the load between them.
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