LOL... that's funny. It's not my design, so I can't dictate how it looks. I agree with you that it would probably cause catastrophic damage to the warp engines. My only possible reasoning for the design is that bussard collectors collect hydrogen, and impulse engines probably expell some hydrogen. So perhaps some of the impulse emissions are "re-absorbed" through the bussard collectors and "re-stored" as fuel. Or maybe there's some kind of an electro-magnectic field in that area that re-directs the impulse emssions away from the bussard collectors. Honestly though, I really don't know. All I know is that's how the reference looked. Even the original designer (who only made a plastic model of the ship) says my model is very accurate to what he made. So I'm not going to mess with it. Hey, this is Star Trek... things that would be bad ideas are some how, in ways that we do not understand, being good ideas. Should I point out Voyager and Enterprise (I sincerely appologize to any Voyager and/or Enterprise fans if I offended them by that comment)?