This is addressed in the tie-in Klingon Bird of Prey Owners' Workshop Manual. In short, Klingon vessels from the 22nd century onwards haven't used warp coils but rather warp wings, flat plates that are energised to create a warp field around the ship. These have the benefit of being much less prone to leaking radiation that might reveal the presence of a cloaked ship.
The Bird-of-Prey achieves warp flight using a different system of
energized alloys from other ships in the IKDF fleet. Most
civilizations that are capable of faster than light travel use
circular or oval rings of space-bending metals and composites. The
familiar ’warp coils’—housed in stand-off nacelles or incorporated
within a starship hull—warp space and provide propulsion when they are
exposed to high energy plasma. Early Klingon, Vulcan, and Romulan
vessels used this system to make their way through interstellar space,
employing a variety of cryogenic fuels and antimatter to achieve
greater and greater speeds and distances. While plasma reactions had
originally been triggered directly within the nacelles, advances in
pumping super hot plasma from remote—and protected—engines allowed
for larger, more powerful systems. Magnetically lined conduits could
be routed through different ship structures. Crystalline materials
such as ikemenite, faslonite, and dilithium became standards for
regulating the furious energies and smoothing out the plasma
frequencies within the core. Design engineers within the Imperial
Klingon Defense Forces, with ship commanders taking an active role in
deciding what systems were to be installed in their ships,
experimented early in the 22nd century with reshaping the usual
nacelle configuration for new classes of fast, stealthy attack
vessels. It was determined that the sequential energizing of warp
alloys did not necessarily require the ‘coils’ to be coils at all, but
the alloys could be compacted into flat sheets. Beginning with Klingon
vessels of the 2120s, the energized warp wing was born, leading to the
development of the 23rd-century B'rel-class Bird-of-Prey with its
imposing bird shape. In the B'rel-class, plasma produced in the twin
warp cores is allowed to fill and pressurize the central horizontal
conduits that lead to the wings, through penetrations in the
engineering hull on Deck 5. Each central conduit has a variable
aperture duct, which works in concert with the wing hinge to provide
different amounts and pressures of plasma to the warp system depending
on the flight mode—liftoff/landing, cruise, and attack.
