The nacelles would not be at 90 degree angles in a tri configuration though
2 nacelles wouldn't slow it down its actually faster than the stingrays as the stingrays go at 3.4 cruise and this ship goes at 3.6 cruise.
Faster than that because we retrofitted the warp 5 engines on them.
The refit increased cruise warp from 2.2 to 3.4
That is the refit speed, these are cruise speeds. And it stats that 2 would make it cruise at 3.6 the stingray refit cruises at 3.4.
It's faster than the refitted stingrays with 2 nacelles and it's never going to be going faster than them while in a fleet and it will almost always be in a fleet so it doesn't get destroyed
I cannot actually find it at the moment so that might not be true, I do remember Roddenberry originally only wanted nacelles in pairs and gave the reason that odd numbers destabilized the warp fields. Though it appears that this wish of his was never actually made into canon so three should be fine if we pass the prototype roll.
WE MOST CERTAINLY DONT
2 Nacelles is only 10% slower than a refitted stingray. And the it says cruise, not sprint speed, so the battleship would still be able to catch romulans with a 0.9 warp advantage over their warp 4 at a sprint
Cruise speed, which is the most important, is explicitly stated to be 10% less than that of the Stingray in the update.
That honestly seems to be a mistake on the QM's part, because the warp factor details match up with the NX instead.
And it's explicitly listed as 3.6 which is faster than 3.4 of the stingray though slower than the nx 3.8 which might be what they meant instead of the stingray.
If the experiment really rolls badly, going by previous prototyping, we'll still have to use three nacelles but it'll be slower and/or have some severe drawback. We won't get to go back and replace them with 2 or 4 nacelles. (Maybe if it completely 100% fails?)
Yoyodyne is good in this period. But I still prefer the higher cruise speed four nacelles offers over three.
