A transporter-less Trekverse
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Away teams and undercover operations are at less safe.
To give a more in depth response it would drastically change multiple plots render quite a few episodes impossible and would render the universe unrecognizable.
You mis-spelled Babylon 5.
All ships would be equipped with the same Shuttlecraft Elves as Voyager had, so any shuttles lost would be replaced overnight without draining resources.
I don't believe ship design would be affected much at all. The NX-01 was designed under this restriction because, at the time, transporters were not approved for living beings. Those are the exact parameters for this discussion. NX-01 had a saucer and 2 nacelles. The only difference was the transporter was a small thing kept in the corner (so it looked). So, the transporters would continue to be small things or maybe they would be only the cargo transporter designs. We would not have scenes in transporter rooms. No beaming up the security guard in Tomorrow is Yesterday and offering him soup. Rejac gets shoved out an airlock, No Tuvix. Commander Sonak dies in a shuttle accident.
I do not think it's tactically sound to have the saucer separate all the time, especially in TOS. Nor is having the bridge component turn into a lander tactically sound. You have situations like Friday's Child or Errand of Mercy where the Enterprise is in a combat situation while the landing party is on the surface.
I do like the suggestion that the Captain's Yacht or the Aeroshuttle would have been used commonly. That makes more sense. Of course, that's nothing more than just another type of shuttle. You are facing a limitation of stealth with a shuttle. Landing a shuttle on many of the planets we saw on Trek would have violated the Prime Directive.
And the quick escapes would have to be reworked. No beaming Kirk out of the Constellation at the last second before exploding inside the Doomsday Machine. They would have had to dig Data up after he was buried in Thine Own Self.
I do not think it's tactically sound to have the saucer separate all the time, especially in TOS. Nor is having the bridge component turn into a lander tactically sound. You have situations like Friday's Child or Errand of Mercy where the Enterprise is in a combat situation while the landing party is on the surface.
I do like the suggestion that the Captain's Yacht or the Aeroshuttle would have been used commonly. That makes more sense. Of course, that's nothing more than just another type of shuttle. You are facing a limitation of stealth with a shuttle. Landing a shuttle on many of the planets we saw on Trek would have violated the Prime Directive.
And the quick escapes would have to be reworked. No beaming Kirk out of the Constellation at the last second before exploding inside the Doomsday Machine. They would have had to dig Data up after he was buried in Thine Own Self.
Very interesting discussion. I'm designing my fantasy hardish sci-fi Star Trek series. The ship is small so everything has to be compact. I have two shuttle pods and one 4 man shuttle; they are semi-collapsible SSTO lifting body designs. Considering that right now we can only get a small payload into orbit for a large amount of fuel. A shuttle would have to be a very efficient SSTO. I'm curious what future technologies could do to improve the ratio of payload to fuel.
It's not easy being stealthy, when you have to burn your huge rocket engine to gently land your shuttle capsule on the planet's surface.
It's not easy being stealthy, when you have to burn your huge rocket engine to gently land your shuttle capsule on the planet's surface.
I'm curious what future technologies could do to improve the ratio of payload to fuel.[/QUOTE]
Futuristic fuel compounds that provide better energy for the same amount of fuel.
Gravity nullifying systems similar to Star Wars repulsorlift or Star Trek anti-gravity units. I, personally, thing artificial gravity could very well be possible and a repulsorlift system would be application of that technology. Like a tractor/repulsor beam. Perhaps technology spun off of this: http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/
Futuristic fuel compounds that provide better energy for the same amount of fuel.
Gravity nullifying systems similar to Star Wars repulsorlift or Star Trek anti-gravity units. I, personally, thing artificial gravity could very well be possible and a repulsorlift system would be application of that technology. Like a tractor/repulsor beam. Perhaps technology spun off of this: http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/
I'd mentioned a bit of that, the difficulty of sneaking into big cities. Also, our heroes would have to have ground vehicles for getting around. Looking at our technology, high-quality roads were rare until the early 20th cy. in industrialized nations, "high quality" here meaning permitting engine-driven vehicles to travel at typical present-day highway speeds. The best that anyone did before then was to use smooth or flat stones or sometimes logs (corduroy roads), and even those were not very common outside of cities.
Not to mention no rescuing Captain Christopher.
An alternative is to land at some sizable distance then travel on the ground. One can also give oneself some stealth by landing and taking off at night. But one will then have to travel on the ground.
That seems rather contrived. I recently wrote a story in which someone heckles that episode with
There seemed to be only a single transporter in all of the TOS Enterprise, and transporter malfunctions were prominent parts of some of its episodes. Or else there were several of them and they all used the same transmission and reception module. Not very good design.
However, TNG and later had much less use of transporter misbehavior.
From Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation, to consume less propellant, one needs greater exhaust velocity. But to get off a planet, one needs enough thrust to counter the planet's gravity. To date, it has been difficult to have both. There is the further problem that most existing high-exhaust-velocity engines only work in a vacuum.
The best exhaust velocities of some chemical-rocket fuels, rounded off a bit -- hydrogen-oxygen: 4.5 km/s, kerosene-oxygen: 3.5 km/s, (hydrazine family) - (nitrogen-oxide family): 3.0 km/s, solid fuels: 2.5 km/s.
One can get much higher exhaust velocity with alternatives like ion engines. Dawn's do 30 km/s. But Dawn's engines have very wimpy thrust. Each of the three has a thrust of 90 millinewtons. In fact, the spacecraft's rocket engines were "on" for much of its travel time.
One could use an air-breathing engine the final bit of the way, or even unfold a propeller to land like a helicopter.
It is difficult to get much more exhaust velocity with chemical reactions. But alternatives may do better.
If one tries to get faster with a thermal system, one has a serious problem of keeping the engine from overheating. Existing chemical rocket engines also have that problem, though a successfully solved one.
A nonthermal system may avoid that problem, but there is still the problem of the interaction of the exhaust and the atmosphere.
In the various Star Trek series and movies, most spaceships have artificial gravity, and that gravity seems to be always on. One may use that technology to make an antigravity drive, something suitable for powering a shuttlecraft. That could make such a vehicle land and take off in VTOL, helicopter-like fashion.
For traveling on a planet's surface, it might be possible to use an antigravity version of jetpacks. One would hover over the surface and move across it.
Of course, for a sufficiently large planet, even chemical rocket engines become infeasible for actually leaving one's solar system See this page at NASA's site, for example:
Orbit would still be feasible at that point, but get a large enough super-Earth, or a thick enough atmosphere, and you might not even be able to achieve that. Our current technologies probably couldn't launch from Venus's surface out of the atmosphere even considering just atmospheric density alone, for example.
Great information.
That's true. The problem becomes, you have to heft the extra weight of the engine after it becomes useless.
This is definitely a topic I want to research more. But that would be an interesting conundrum. Yes we can land on the planet and return, but doing so would harm their atmosphere.
True. I want to avoid artificial gravity and anti-gravity. On the ship I'm designing "gravity" is provided through acceleration. Though I'm wondering if some sort of inertial dampening system would pretty much be artificial gravity already. Also, I still haven't figured out how this would work in a softer sci-fi FTL situation. Can you "accelerate" inside a warp bubble to provide artificial gravity, without it affecting your warp velocity?
That would be an interesting concept. Crew stranded on a planet like this with no hope of rescue. Though you'd have more pressing problems to work about like gravity and atmospheric pressure. (Yes, that pun was intended.)
Gravity and acceleration are equivalent, so yeah, anything that alters inertia would by definition also be capable of manipulating gravity.
Since it's never come up, there's no official answer, but I'd think that should be possible. I mean, since there's still motion aboard ship, you could clearly have a vehicle accelerating inside a ship within a warp bubble at 1g, so what would keep the ship itself from accelerating at 1g?
Edit: Assuming you mean specifically as shown in Trek, of course. If it's your own FTL system, you make the rules anyway, so what you say goes.
You can't have "hard sci fi" trek without totally screwing up the premise and basic building blocs of the universe.
In my opinion,
In my opinion,
that's a perfectly valid opinion. Could you provide examples?
Obviously warp drive would be one of those things, unless you want a "Star Trek" that is set in the 1990s-2062. But that kind of runs contrary to the "Star" part of the title. "Sol Trek?" Earth's sun is a star though.
Having earth and/or humanity could be a basic building block. Though I can imagine stories without either.
Without warp your limited to the solar system and sleeper colonies, without transporters your limited to ground shuttles, without big ships and fancy tech the "grandeur" isn't there. Hard sci fi the way you want limits you to the solar system really.
