As they say in Starfleet, at ease. You’re not the first engineer to have nerves around me and I’m sure you won’t be the last. I gather you’re here from the Voyager enquiry? How can I help?

Certainly a challenging time for my career. Would I be known as the woman who had created the warp drive that destroyed subspace? Would my name go down in history alongside the names of the corporations and individuals that almost destroyed Earth in the 20th and 21st centuries with their pollution?

Fortunately not. Starfleet was well aware of my expertise with warp field theory and sought me out to help solve the problem. While I was packing my bags headed for Utopia Planetia any assumptions about the class VI drive on the galaxy class being the problem were quickly dispelled when the more comprehensive follow up report from the Enterprise clarified that all conventional warp drives generated fields that could cause the damage observed in the Hekaras Corridor.

There was and still is the potential exception of the Romulans due to their use of a quantum singularity rather than matter/antimatter reaction to generate power. For obvious reasons, we are not able to run field tests to confirm one way or the other. But their government has been advised.

The Federation Councils warp factor restrictions were always seen as a very short term measure. There had been so much investment in the latest generation of warp drives that regressing both the Federation and Klingon Empire back to Archer’s era wasn’t going to fly for long, even if we did technically rewrite the warp scale when they got Excelsiors ‘transwarp’ drive working.

Every pilot and chief engineer in the quadrant would be filing complaints.

So we knew we needed a long, or at least medium term solution. The best place to start finding that was with one of the new ship class prototypes. As the Intrepid class was the test bed for the class 9 warp drive it seemed like the ideal candidate.

After we received data from follow up surveys of the Hekarus corridor we theorized that the damage wasn’t being caused by the drive itself, but the shape of the field generated. Starfleet ships, including the Galaxy class, have traditionally generated two or more balanced interacting warp fields that extend far beyond the hull in essentially two large ovals ahead of and behind the nacelles.

The theory behind this approach, which dates all the way back to Henry Archer. Was that the further away the field was projected, the smoother the ride would be for the crew on the Starship that’s at the center of the field. It would also give the ship's computer and helm more time to react to any subspace turbulence or change in interstellar conditions. The curved shape of the fields also helped deflect any unwanted particles or debris.

That theory worked fine in Archer's day, when the galaxy was a lot less busy and starships were a lot smaller. Now we had to ask ourselves whether this could be the cause of our modern day problem. It’s no secret that Starfleet ships have been exponentially growing in size.

This line of thought took us all the way back to 20th Century Earth’s first experiments with supersonic flight. Scientists found that when breaking the sound barrier, aerodynamic drag rose sharply. In order to create craft that could travel at these speeds for extended periods, engineers at the time needed to develop designs to optimise drag. This meant more streamlined designs.

Their first ideas mirrored ours. What if we just make our designs smaller? They reduced wing spans, but that reduced the aerodynamic efficiency at subsonic flight. Most importantly during take off and landing, which needed to be done at slow speeds.

It was then that we found our medium term solution. Variable geometry. As you can see on the Intrepid class today. Just as they designed wings that could extend, or vary their sweep. We designed nacelle pylons that could angle themselves with the warp factor, to streamline the field and avoid permanently damaging subspace.

The first lab tests were encouraging, and were a proven success in field trials with the Intrepid class prototype. The changes were implemented in the final approved design, but most importantly we had proven our theory. The shape of the warp field was the problem.

While the variable geometry pylons would work for the Intrepid, it just wasn’t feasible to redesign every ship in Starfleet to have them. Can you imagine trying to organise the logistics of recalling every ship in the fleet back to drydock? The design time required? And that’s assuming that every design could support them. Galaxy’s saucer is wider than its stardrive, so folding the nacelles a bit closer wouldn’t do much.

Thankfully, the telemetry from the Intrepid tests and data from the subsequent studies of the space where we conducted the trials provided the answer we were hoping for. We could completely remove any permanent damage to subspace, even in regions like the Hekaras corridor, by bringing the warp field in on the Z and X axis to be almost skin tight to the hull, while extending it further ahead and behind the ship.

In layman's terms, we needed to swap two beach balls for a knife.

Updates have been issued fleet wide for ship designs actively in service and we’ve shared our findings with every known power in the hope that they’ll make similar changes. Design wise though, I don’t think we’ll be seeing too many Constitution style necks in Starfleet’s future.