A Quick Engine Rundown
Wow!!! Some great information in your posting. There wasn’t anything explaining the reason for the engines that were on the rear of the ship. If the two outrigger pods are the main impulse engines, then the smaller ones at the rear of the ship are boosters? Anyway a diecast model of the ship would look very nice on the book shelf indeed!
@nevernormalnormal
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Thank you so much! :D
After I saw this in my inbox, I went back to re-read the article (discussed in this post) and looked at some of the footage of Sirena in flight. I think your interpretation is probably spot-on!
If I understand the article correctly, the arrangements of the engines would be something like this:
[design from the official star trek shop, labels added by me]
When she was built, La Sirena started out with impulse engines at the back and the big warp nacelles at the sides. At some point, someone added a rig at the back that allowed for large cargo modules to be docked to the ship and towed.
(Goodness knows I’m not an expert in starship design, but I’m assuming the rig would be the part at the centre back of the ship above (or possibly including?) the cargo doors, and maybe the two spikes next to it.)
The cargo modules were big enough to block the original engine, which is why, in the same refit, the pods at the side that are now the main impulse engines were added. So far the info given by the ship’s designer Mark Yang.
Extrapolating from that, I would assume that it might have been impossible or simply inconvenient to take out the original engines at the back of the ship. They can probably be powered down when Sirena is towing cargo (or anything else) but when she’s flying solo, they might get some power diverted to them to act as additional boosters.
In general, I find the history of this ship really fascinating! We know she’s a “Kaplan F17 Speed Freighter”, so she was probably designed to transport relatively small amounts of cargo at very high speeds. In an interview, production designer Todd Cherniawsky likened Sirena to an ancient tugboat. To me, that sounds like the modification that turned her into a rig for towing cargo came a good while before Rios acquired her. (La Sirena is at least 50 years old and Rios has had her for ten at the most.)
So, when Rios went looking for a ship, he found one that could do both: act as a respectable freighter, towing large cargo modules, which is probably not the most high-stakes or lucrative line of employment, but also transport presumably very valuable goods at speed. Also, if we’ve learned anything from Firefly and Star Wars, small, manoeuvrable, and above all fast starships are ideal for smuggling.
There is a lot to think about here and I can’t wait to see what else might be in the material published along with the model of La Sirena in April, and what they do with the ship in season 2!