Attn: Rick S. -- Re: SPOILER?: Colud Cochran Really Go To Warp?
Brett Heppes
Rick,
Any comments or clarifications would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Brett Heppes
Cupertino CA
Todd McNeil wrote:
>
> athol-brose wrote:
> >
> > In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.961126...@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu>,
> > Daniel Fessak <dfe...@shiva.Hunter.CUNY.EDU> wrote:
> > >I have a problem with Cochran going into warp at the end of FC. It's my
> > >understandind that you need dylithium crystals in order to go to warp and
> > >that dylithium is not found on earth. So how does he go to warp?
> >
> > I'm more worried about how he -- and Geordi and Riker -- got *back*. In a
> > spaceship that was essentially a capsule. To the same place that they
> > started from. Without crashing into the Earth at excessive speeds.
> >
> > --
> > athol-brose -- cinn...@one.net -- http://w3.one.net/~cinnamon/
>
> I'm even more worried about why Geordi and Riker needed to be with
> him on the ship.
>
> --
> -Todd
>
> Homies gonna get ya!
> My crappy Quadbox page:
> http://www.peg.apc.org/~toddm/
essee...@aol.com
Well, I'm not Rick :), but I could give it a shot.
Cochrane found a way to regulate the matter/antimatter (M/AM) reaction
without dilithium. Perhaps her found a way to shunt the plasma directly
to nacelles without having to use a dilithium articulation frame like they
do on Starfleet vessels "now". After all, we didn't see a dilithium
chamber in the movie.
And as far as Riker and La Forge go (without getting too much into
timelines), perhaps they were SUPPOSED to be there after all to make the
timeline work. I don't know, but it's possible.
Just my $0.02.
S C Q Askew
essee...@aol.com
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/1226
Brad Stethem
essee...@aol.com wrote in article
<19961203004...@ladder01.news.aol.com>...
> Cochrane found a way to regulate the matter/antimatter (M/AM) reaction
> without dilithium. Perhaps her found a way to shunt the plasma directly
> to nacelles without having to use a dilithium articulation frame like
they
> do on Starfleet vessels "now". After all, we didn't see a dilithium
> chamber in the movie.
You don't have to have a M/AM reaction for warp drive. The M/AM reaction
just provides the plasma to power the warp coils (or whatever primitive
version of a warp coil Cochrane was using). This plasma could be supplied
by a fusion reaction, too. Not all species in Star Trek use M/AM reaction
to power thier warp drive.
Rabindra Tambyraja
My understanding was that dilithium crystals were used because they a
stream of antimatter can safely pass through them and the resulting energy
stream when that antimatter stream collides with an opposing matter stream
can be steered by altering the shape of the dilithium crystal. So maybe
Cochrane was using an alternate power source. What that was I have no
idea.
Rob Tambyraja
Richie Kennedy
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Rick Sternbach
In article <587k77$4...@sequoia.idir.net>, ken...@idir.net (Richie
Kennedy) wrote:
Cochrane probably *did* have matter and antimatter in some type of
reaction chamber, since standard fusion wouldn't cut it in terms of energy
output. Dilithium regulates current M/A reactions, but Cochrane might have
controlled the reaction with some other system.
Rick
Rick Sternbach
In article <rtambyra-041...@gummere48.resnet.haverford.edu>,
rtam...@haverford.edu (Rabindra Tambyraja) wrote:
Well, the dilithium might not be needed if Cochrane's warp propulsion
system produced enough energy to crack the lightspeed barrier in a
different manner. We use dilthium on most starships because it's the
system we're used to. As was mentioned by someone else, the Romulans use a
different system employing a quantum black hole to make the require
energy; most likely they don't need dilthium.
Rick
mco...@earthlink.net
Rick, your remarks about antimatter bring up a question that has
intrigued me a lot. Have noticed in tech manual, that all non FTL
vehicles from probes to shuttlepods can use any power source from exotic
batteries to fusion. But ONLY matter\antimatter anihhalation
powerplants for any warp velocity ships.
I thought it merely a question of power. But the impulse engines of a
starship, if you think about it, generate MORE brute force power than
even the warp core. It takes a lot more than even terrawatt strength to
hurl objects weighing around a million tons at over ten kilometers per
second accelleration!
The only rational explanation, and this is purely hypothetical on my
part, is that due to some technobabbly stuff, warp coils can only
generate the subspace density burst to acheive faster than light
velocities ONLY from the specific energy signature created by proton
antiproton anihhalation. I don't know the exact physics, but when
protons and antiprotons meet, they do not instantly turn into energy,
but undergo a chain reaction where they convert into exotic short lived
particles like kaons and pions which decay into positrons electrons and
neutrinos before finaly converting into gamma rays.
Yeah, so someone might bring up why the romulans use micro black
holes. Well, micro black holes, real low mass ones on the brink of
"evaporating" have peculuar quantum properties where one could
hypotheticaly stablize it with a matter stream, and the hole, emits so
called Hawking radiation, which is particle and ANTIPARTICLE pairs. In
effect a micro quantum antimatter generator.
Mark V. Weber
There is a reference book out there, old and valuable which might shed
some light on this. It is STAR TREK: The Spaceflight Chronology. It is
contributed to, in part, by .... Rich Sternbach! (Great book - collector's
item - even if the timeline is off) - ANYway, in this book earlier warp
drives were running anti-matter spiked fusion reactors.
Mark
Just a little off the top.
A. Boelyn
kasey
Actually hawking radiation is a side effect of virtual particles.
normally in space partcles (in particle anti particle pairs) are beeing
created and then anihalating each other(this is a quantum level
effect/fluctuation) these are called virtual particles. normally they
imedaitly anihalate each other, but if they are created to close to a
black hole one particle can be suked in while the other goes free.
the free particle is hawking radiation.
however since the total massenergy of the universe must remain constant
(conservation of energy/mass) this new mass must be offset by a loss
somwhere, since it grabbed the extra particle the loss is from the black
hole. the net effect being that the black hole radiates.and the small
the black hole the faster it radiates. a small enough black hole (much
much larger than the ones the vulcans use, in fact larger than could fit
in the death star) would be unnable to "eat" mass faster than it lost it
to hawking radiation. and since the smaller the black hole the faster
the radiation, one the size the vulans supposedly use would blow them
higher than up about a microsecond after its creation unles you found
some kinda neet trick to stop it <read technobabble>.
Kasey
Robert B. Adam
> >> > >> Cochrane found a way to regulate the matter/antimatter (M/AM)
> > reaction
> >> > >> without dilithium. Perhaps her found a way to shunt the plasma
> > directly
> >> > >> to nacelles without having to use a dilithium articulation frame
> > like
> >> > >they
> >> > >> do on Starfleet vessels "now". After all, we didn't see a
> > dilithium
> >> > >> chamber in the movie.
>
Everyone seems to be forgetting original trek here. Even the great
Enterprise herself didn't start out with dilithium crystals. They used
lithium crystals (remember the lithium cracking station!). The
Enterprise didn't receive dilithium crystal until late first season TOS
(which was near the end of Kirk's third year in command, and 22 years
into the ship's career!)
I assumed that Cochrane's ship, the Pheonix, used lithium crystals,
since lithium exists on earth where as dilithium does not. It took the
Federation and Starfleet to 2267 to incorperate dilithium crystal into
all there ships! That's 104 years after the Pheonix's first flight.
So Cochranes ship did in fact use matter/antimatter--just that it used a
different crystal to regulate the reaction!
Nimuul
Rick Sternbach
In article <58ek7a$2...@news-e2d.gnn.com>, Mark V. Weber <Dutc...@gnn.com>
wrote:
<big snip>
>
> There is a reference book out there, old and valuable which might shed
> some light on this. It is STAR TREK: The Spaceflight Chronology. It is
> contributed to, in part, by .... Rich Sternbach! (Great book - collector's
> item - even if the timeline is off) - ANYway, in this book earlier warp
> drives were running anti-matter spiked fusion reactors.
>
> Mark
> Just a little off the top.
> A. Boelyn
The one big problem with this book is that it was written by
non-series/non-feature people. I had a bit of a job trying to keep some of
their tech from going haywire; I consider the SFC to be non-canon, even
though I worked on it. Not enough of a Trek script or tech infrastructure
existed back in the late 70s to insure that any of the books were
internally consistant, though the fiction writers/editors seemed to have
policed themselves in the years prior to TNG's start date.
Rick
Adam Bailey
In article <58htsp$7...@sjx-ixn6.ix.netcom.com>,
tap...@ix.netcom.com(Timothy Applegate) wrote:
> >> Cochrane probably *did* have matter and antimatter in some type of
> >> reaction chamber, since standard fusion wouldn't cut it in terms of
> energy
> >> output. Dilithium regulates current M/A reactions, but Cochrane
> might have
> >> controlled the reaction with some other system.
> >>
> >> Rick
> >
>
> Forgetting one thing Rick... It took Lily 6 months to scrounge up
> enough titanium to build a cockpit, how many millenia did it take her
> to scrounge up enough anti-matter to power a warp flight? If A-M were
> common in the 21st century, someone would have used it as a weapon and
> annihilated (literally) his enemy, rendering the planet uninhabitable.
First off, it was announced a few weeks ago that American scientists had
managed to create a teeny tiny amount of antimatter. It's already
happening.
Furthermore, we have the technology TODAY to make the planet
uninhabitable. I forget the exact statistic, but just between the US and
Russia, there's enough nuclear firepower to annihilate everything on the
planet several times over.
The technology exists. We just have to assume that in Trek's World War
Three, no one was insane enough to obliterate everything. They did enough
damage as it was.
--
Adam Bailey | Chicago, Illinois
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-| "Do not take life too seriously;
ad...@tezcat.com | you will never get out of it alive."
ada...@aol.com | - Elbert Hubbard
Finger for PGP | http://www.tezcat.com/~adamb
Timothy Applegate
>> Cochrane probably *did* have matter and antimatter in some type of
>> reaction chamber, since standard fusion wouldn't cut it in terms of
energy
>> output. Dilithium regulates current M/A reactions, but Cochrane
might have
>> controlled the reaction with some other system.
>>
>> Rick
>
>
Forgetting one thing Rick... It took Lily 6 months to scrounge up
enough titanium to build a cockpit, how many millenia did it take her
to scrounge up enough anti-matter to power a warp flight? If A-M were
common in the 21st century, someone would have used it as a weapon and
annihilated (literally) his enemy, rendering the planet uninhabitable.
Chris
(Future Star Trek tech supervisor)
Timothy Applegate
In <adamb-09129...@news.niu.edu> ad...@tezcat.com (Adam Bailey)
writes:
had
>managed to create a teeny tiny amount of antimatter. It's already
>happening.
At about 11 atoms at a time...
And I doubt after a nuclear holocaust, many multi-kilometer particle
accelerators would be in working order.
>Furthermore, we have the technology TODAY to make the planet
>uninhabitable. I forget the exact statistic, but just between the US
and
>Russia, there's enough nuclear firepower to annihilate everything on
the
>planet several times over.
How much is needed, 50,000 megatons? What I'm saying is that if
anti-matter were as common as it (supposedly) needed to be, someone
would have used it.
>The technology exists. We just have to assume that in Trek's World War
>Three, no one was insane enough to obliterate everything. They did
enough
>damage as it was.
>
>--
>Adam Bailey | Chicago, Illinois
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-| "Do not take life too seriously;
>ad...@tezcat.com | you will never get out of it alive."
>ada...@aol.com | - Elbert Hubbard
>Finger for PGP | http://www.tezcat.com/~adamb
Chris
TrintWilliams
> >You don't have to have a M/AM reaction for warp drive. The M/AM
reaction
> >just provides the plasma to power the warp coils (or whatever primitive
> >version of a warp coil Cochrane was using). This plasma could be
supplied
> >by a fusion reaction, too. Not all species in Star Trek use M/AM
reaction
> >to power thier warp drive.
> >
> The Romulans come to mind... Artificial "Black holes"
Hasn't it been semi-established that the Cardassians use fusion? DS9 does,
and I think I've seen a schematic (non-cannon) labeling a fusion core on a
Galor Class cruiser. Maybe they also use a M/AR power source, but what
would be the use of a fusion reactor then? Also, even though M/AR is
presumably more efficient/energetic than fusion, the Cardassians aren't
particularly efficent (that's why they rape worlds for the resources, like
Bajor). A nuclear engineer friend of mine (not a joke) commented when I
showed him the Tech. Manual that a "slow fusion burn", whatever that is,
could provide the necessary energy requirements discussed in the Warp Drive
chapter.
thinking too much as usual,
trintwilliams
Joshua Bell
Rick Sternbach <rster...@earthlink.net> wrote in article
<rsternbach-06...@max1-so-ca-17.earthlink.net>...
> Cochrane probably *did* have matter and antimatter in some type of
> reaction chamber, since standard fusion wouldn't cut it in terms of
energy
> output. Dilithium regulates current M/A reactions, but Cochrane might
have
> controlled the reaction with some other system.
Rick,
What goes to the warp coils in Federation tech is high-energy plasma,
right? And the M/A reaction is just the best source of this for Federation
ships, right?
Just wanting to make sure that I interpreted the TM correctly. My
understanding is that the M/AMR is a big plasma source - excess matter in
the reaction absorbs the energy (c/o the dilithium) and becomes high energy
plasma ready for the nacelles.
I'm asking just to make sure that there's no magic going on (well, no more
than normal!) and that you *could* use fusion power for Federation-style
warp nacelles, if you had a big enough fusion generator pumping out plasma.
If there is magic (it's doped plasma or something), what's the secret? ;-)
We've (.tech) speculated that the (big) Romulan ships stream matter at the
quantum singularity, and let either Hawking radiation or just the infall
X-ray emissions energise part of the matter stream which becomes plasma and
is sent off to the nacelles.
We've also speculated a bunch that older Federation ships predating the
Constitution-class used fusion drives which had a *very* limited range,
thus making the 1701' such a big deal and explaining away all the
references to "breaking the time barrier" in "The Cage" and such. There are
a bunch of current newsgroup threads and past discussions talking about how
it might not have been called "Warp" until just before the 1701', making
the Romulan War with non-warp ships feasable.
Thanks,
Joshua
PS: Of course it's just a show. Consistancy is just fun!
--
Joshua Bell d i m e n s i o n X
jsb...@dnx.com --------------------------
http://www.dnx.com/jsbell/ http://www.dimensionx.com/
James C. Stutts
In article <adamb-09129...@news.niu.edu>, ad...@tezcat.com (Adam Bailey) writes:
>In article <58htsp$7...@sjx-ixn6.ix.netcom.com>,
>tap...@ix.netcom.com(Timothy Applegate) wrote:
<snip>
>First off, it was announced a few weeks ago that American scientists had
>managed to create a teeny tiny amount of antimatter. It's already
>happening.
I think the point was that antimatter would be difficult to obtain in a somewhat
haywire economy after a nuclear war. Current production methods require a
particle accel., magnetic bottle for storage and other hardware that one
would not likely find in a shanty town. The scenario shown in the novel
"Federation" was a bit more realistic. Antimatter is *expensive*!
JCS
Dave
Timothy Applegate wrote:
> Forgetting one thing Rick... It took Lily 6 months to scrounge up
> enough titanium to build a cockpit, how many millenia did it take her
> to scrounge up enough anti-matter to power a warp flight? If A-M were
> common in the 21st century, someone would have used it as a weapon and
> annihilated (literally) his enemy, rendering the planet uninhabitable.
If I remember correctly, in Robert Forward's book "Mirror Matter"
he puts forth that in actuality, anti-matter wouldn't make a good
terrestrial-based bomb, and you'd actually get much more
"bang for the buck" with a plain old fusion bomb. Anyone correct
me if I'm wrong or fill in the details I've forgotten.....
dave
--
**************************************************************************
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Dayton, OH 45433-77765
dl...@afit.af.mil
"The opinions expressed here are not the opinions of the employer."
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Rick Sternbach
In article <01bbe637$21931e20$6aa6...@death.dimensionx.com>, "Joshua
Bell" <jsb...@dimensionx.com> wrote:
I believe we've established that the energy required to crack lightspeed
is only available with M/A reactions, which are a million times more
energetic than fusion (which is a real calc), so that seems to preclude
using fusion for plasma heating for warp. Impulse engines are laser- or
electron beam-initiated fusion, and emit terribly feeble orange glows on
our models, compared to the hot blue-white from those jagunda warp
nacelles <g>.
Rick
mco...@earthlink.net
I aint no phycisist, but I doubt antimatter is thousands of times more
powerfull than fusion. Fusion transforms around 2% mass into energy,
compared to 100% for antimatter. Since fusion power plants don't
require exotic contaimnent vessels, although they would probably be
bulkier still than antimatter cores even idealisticaly designed, in just
pure gigawatt outputage, it's still possible for fusion to generate
sufficient engergy.
Antimatter I believe has one major advantage in that proton\antiproton
collisions produce short lived particles that have a heck of a lot more
"kick" than the measly neutrons and positrons of fusion. Only problem
is these particles only last a couple of nanoseconds, the warp plasma
woud have to be travelling at near lightspeed for them to reach the
nacelles before they decayed into softer positrons neutrinos and gamma
ray partiles.
And Rick, them impusle engines may make a little glow, but for the
speeds you rate for them, they generate more, LOTS more power than the
warp core. I'll get back to that later, but the fuel tanks of starships
are physicaly not big enough to provide fuel for relavistic speeds.
Suffice it to say, I can only imagine all these trek ships using
antimatter because either warp coils can only generate an FTL capable
field from the specific particle decay of proton\antiproton
anihhalation, or warp drive requires brief bursts of really really
unbelivable power densities in the plasma, like millions of joules per
cubic inch interacting with the coils.
Dave
mco...@earthlink.net wrote in part:
> And Rick, them impusle engines may make a little glow, but for the
> speeds you rate for them, they generate more, LOTS more power than the
> warp core. I'll get back to that later, but the fuel tanks of starships
> are physicaly not big enough to provide fuel for relavistic speeds.
This was a major stumbling block to me as well. First off, I don't buy
and never will buy the idea that the little red glowing impulse engine
panels "actually" represent "conventional" fusion torches capable
of giving hundreds and thousands of G's of acceleration. My favorite
speculation is that the impulse fusion rockets actually exhaust into
subspace. Clearly they are non-Newtonian in nature.
As to the fuel tank problem, I finally folded and began speculating
that the fuel must be stored extradimensionally. In other words the
deuterium tank is actually a "tesseract" or hypercube of some sort,
that, kind of like a TARDIS, is bigger on the inside than on the
outside.
And if anyone is going to start talking about "Bussard ramscoops"
in my presence, they're are going to have to explain why the
"collectors" aren't out in front of the ship where they belong,
as opposed to being tucked away in the middle of the ship, *behind*
the saucer section!
Shane
If you try to annalyse (sp?) every gadget on the friggin ship its going
to drive you nuts. Just accept that the impulse engines glow and don't
try to figure out why. Its asthetics. If your going to spend time doing
that then spend it on something totally stumping such as why the ship
doesnt spin yet it has gravity? Why isnt everybody smashed into jam
everytime the ship jumps into warp? What if the ship turns upside
down, does the floor become the ceiling? When they flush the toilet is
the waste matter recycled back into the food stuff? Who cleans the wall
to wall carpet? Is there a laundry room to use incase the replicators go
down? What keeps all of the cool adornments on all of the coffee tables
throughout the ship from falling off the table and breaking when the
ship is in battle and smashing about? When the away team beams down why
doesnt the grass they materialize on become imbedded in their feet? If
one becomes dis-assembled inside the transporter buffer than why could
Mr. Barclay see things while he was in the buffer? Every time somebody
gets sick why dont they just put them in the buffer and beam them back
out the way they were before they were sick? If the holodeck failsafes
are off and somebody is shooting at Picard, obveously the bullets are
real, why don't the bullets that miss impact on the back of the
holodeck wall? Doesnt the holodeck have a simple OFF switch? Do
replicator rations apply when your in the holodeck?
--
|SHANE L. ULRICH |Hailing From|
|WORK: Shane_Ulrich_at_...@stream.com|Gresham, OR |
|HOME: shane...@sprintmail.com |USA |
|www.cyberhighway.net/~slulrich/main.htm|USA | |