6.3 Emergency Shutdown Procedures

Hardware failures and override commands can place abnormal stress on the total impulse propulsion system, requiring various degrees of engine shutdown. System sensors, operational software, and human action work in concert to deactivate impulse propulsion system components under conditions such as excessive thermal loads, thrust imbalances between groups of individual engines and a variety of other problems.

The most common internal causes for low-level emergency shutdown in Starfleet experience include fuel flow constriction, out-of-phase initiator firings, exhaust vane misalignment, and plasma turbulence within the accelerator stages. Some external causes for shutdown include asteroid\meteoroid impacts, phaser fire, stellar thermal energy effects and crossing warp field interaction from other spacecraft.

Emergency shutdown computer routines generally involve a gradual valving off of the fuel flow\particle beam generations, and shutdown of the fusion initiator power regulators, simultaneously decoupling the secondary accelerators by bleeding residual energy into gravitic power cells. As these procedures are completed, the driver coil assembly coils are safed by interrupting the normal coil pulse order, basically setting them to neutral and collapsing the field. If the shutdown is a isolated engine, the power load distribution is reconfigured at the first sign of uncontrollable trouble.