Warp 12
- Thread starter Wingsley
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You are familiar with the term "scale", are you not? A M/ARC from a Galaxy class (or even an impulse engine) produces many many thousands of times more power than a shuttle (or Doc's DeLorean) could ever withstand.
A nuclear reactor is a nuclear reactor. Perhaps I was less impressed by your attempted hyperbole than you were?
You are familiar with the term "scale", are you not?
But not more than phaser bank can withstand, evidently. We've seen the Enterprise do that at least once; also, the TMP refit incorporated that functionality into its basic design.
Also, the Orion fighter craft from "Journey to Babel" is an excellent example of a small craft -- shuttle size or slightly larger -- designed to take the full power of a starship reactor. I'm sure we would see some serious shit when that baby hits 88...
Not even close. The amount of power put out by a small generator (whatever power source) is much less than that put out by a large generator.
Not one ounce of hyperbole in my statement. Plug a little bitty device into a huge source of power and it goes "poof". That's basic engineering.
Example: an 8 hp outboard motor has a power rating of about 6 kw. Just ONE of the reactors on a Nimitz class carrier produces ~300 MW effective generating capacity.
Hook that to your fishing boat outboard and see how long it takes before you have a flying cloud of shrapnel.
No, the redesign incorporated the ability to draw more power than before by taking it directly from the warp engines. NOWHERE was it said that the phasers could take 100% of the power of the warp engines.
Not even the E-D could do that. In BOBW, when they channeled energy directly through the navigational deflector, it burned out so many circuits that it took them over 10 hours to fix, and that was LESS energy than the core could put out because life support, gravity, lights, other systems were all still online.
No, the size of a "scout ship" (per the transcript), which implies perhaps a small vessel, but not necessarily a shuttle.
And it was designed to utilize 100% of its reactor, which was of appropriate size for the spaceframe.
Again, you ignore size and scale.
Well, to be sure, the amount of power produced by a 2015 model "Mr. Fusion" is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.21GW.
The A2W fission reactors that powered USS Enterprise have a COMBINED output of 850MW; Enterprise had eight of those reactors, housed in four powerplants the size of cargo planes.
Basically: four of these
are 70% as powerful as one of these.
Science fiction is funny like that!
Especially if it's got a flux capacitor!
It was the use of the warp engines to feed the deflectors and then the phaser banks that crippled the Enterprise in "Paradise Syndrome." How, exactly, did that happen if they weren't putting full warp power into those phaser banks?
And the only other thing canonically identified as a "scout ship" in Trek history is the ship Data was flying in "Insurrection."
How big was that ship, again?
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That wasn't Sulu, that was Chekov. And he doesn't refer to Kruge's ship at all, it's what he thinks he saw for an instant before it vanished from his long-range sensors.
Grissom wouldn't be a scout either since it's significantly larger than a bird of prey in just about every dimension. But then, it is a survey vessel, maybe Chekopv spotted one of its landing craft?
Kirk seems to think otherwise. "Could be Grissom..."
Or the detected energy output?
Or, as I said, he might have thought Chekov had seen one of Grissom's landing craft.
That sounds highly unlikely. Also Grissom and the Bird of Prey seem to be roughly the same size in terms of mass that would be picked up on long range scan for an instant.
In terms of mass, not even close. The Bird of Prey is a shorter length overall than Grissom and lacks Grissom's double hull; purely as a question of MASS, it is twice to three times as large as the bird of prey.
Radar cross section may be another matter, if both ships for whatever reason give off a similar reflection at a distance. On the other hand, Chekov spotted the bird of prey as it was cloaking and its cross section was already reducing rapidly; if anything, it would have appeared SMALLER than normal.
Either way, this doesn't compare very well to the ship that attacked them in "Journey to Babel" which was equipped with "standard phasers" approximately starship-size in yield. Compares even less to the scout ship Data was flying in "Insurrection," the only such vessel canonically identified as such.
Trek engineering isn't shy about covering several orders of magnitude on a stride. That's how warp drive is defined: a ship or a shuttle can putter along at speed A and then increase to ten thousand times that speed, with one and the same powerplant.
We have no a priori reason to think SIFs would be different from warp drives. Pump in a zillion times more energy, get a zillion times more output. There's no good reason to think in terms of mechanical power or heat or anything like that. A computer doesn't mind being given a task a million times harder than what it is "rated" for, even if it may take a bit more time to complete this task - there's nothing physical involved in the "rating" or the "tasking" that would endanger the machinery.
I don't think the implication is there.
Rather, it's a case of "Is it a bird? Is it a plane?" No, it's neither, and it's not in the size range of either. And that is what Kirk is saying.
"I think I saw a scout!"
"Bullshit, young padawan. You probably just saw the Grissom."
Although of course Kirk only says that to calm down his friends. He knows the odds of Chekov being mistaken are fairly low, and he already fears for the worst.
Timo Saloniemi
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