The amount of Hawking radiation from a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass. The smaller it is, the faster it radiates. An artificial singularity like a Romulan ship's core could be much smaller than stellar mass and thus give off a lot of Hawking radiation, although releasing all that energy would reduce its mass and it would eventually evaporate unless the mass supply were replenished. The reason we don't see a lot of microsingularities is because they would've long since gone poof by now.
Perhaps, but you don't have to worry about the engine exploding (well, unless you let it evaporate all the way -- again, the energy release gets greater the smaller the hole gets, so its final moments are intense). Plus it's just one of several ways you can get energy from a black hole, so maybe using multiple methods at once could make up for it.
There are probably ways to harness the gravitational potential energy of a black hole, but of course, dumping matter into it is one of those ways, because it converts that gravitational potential into kinetic and thermal energy.
Matter/antimatter reaction would not be a perfect 100% conversion of mass to energy except on paper. Reacting an electron and positron would just get you a gamma ray, but if you annihilate protons and antiprotons -- let alone deuterons and antideuterons as Trek warp drives do -- you'd get a complicated mess of unstable mesons that would then decay into a mix of photons, electrons, positrons, and neutrinos. IIRC, the neutrinos would take away a fair percentage of the energy, because they don't react with anything. You'd also probably have a few unreacted nucleons left over, because those things are really tiny and it's hard to get them to actually hit each other reliably, even with a dilithium lattice channeling them into each other on a microscopic scale. What's left is presumably the warp plasma that goes to the engines. It's not "pure energy" (which is just a fanciful way of saying electromagnetic radiation), just a very hot stream of energized subatomic particles, which isn't that different from what you'd get from the accretion disk around a singularity.
Yes "hawking". Thanks for the spelling lesson haha, but that was a mistake and it was spelt correctly in the last paragraph of that post.
I don't know how to quote paragraphs on here because I'm new so I'll just use quotations and copy and paste...
"Matter/antimatter reaction would not be a perfect 100% conversion of mass to energy except on paper. Reacting an electron and positron would just get you a gamma ray, but if you annihilate protons and antiprotons -- let alone deuterons and antideuterons as Trek warp drives do -- you'd get a complicated mess of unstable mesons that would then decay into a mix of photons, electrons, positrons, and neutrinos. IIRC, the neutrinos would take away a fair percentage of the energy, because they don't react with anything. You'd also probably have a few unreacted nucleons left over, because those things are really tiny and it's hard to get them to actually
hit each other reliably, even with a dilithium lattice channeling them into each other on a microscopic scale. What's left is presumably the warp plasma that goes to the engines. It's not "pure energy" (which is just a fanciful way of saying electromagnetic radiation), just a very hot stream of energized subatomic particles, which isn't that different from what you'd get from the accretion disk around a singularity."
I don't agree with this statement in relation to star trek or even physics in general at some points...
1. Electron-positron annihilation does not always just yield a gamma ray. I'm assuming you're speaking in terms of the overall process of the reaction because you mentioned the final state particles in the deuteron-antideuteron annihilation rather than anything inbetween. So I assume your statement of electron-positron annihilation was all encompassing. With that said... With sufficient kinetic energy involved in the collision, it's possible the reaction produces heavier particles because the rest mass and kinetic energies of the two colliding particles could be enough for that of the rest energy of a heavier particle to be created.
2. I don't think the difference in proton-antiproton and deuteron-antideuteron is relevant here. We're talking about star trek and starships designed with peak efficiency in mind. So it goes to reason that they would be using a type of fuel that would allow for a high power conversion which fits their technology. Therefore, for them, deuterium and antideuterium would be more efficient, regardless of the small cross section the neutrons have for collision, than would electron-positron annihilation. We should assume they have overcome any hurdles involved in making collision possible to a point whereby the mass of deuteron-antideuteron particles and binding energy is converted to "usable" power at the same or higher conversion rates as that of the same mass of electron-positron reactions.
3. There's just no way I see the federation using deuteron-antideuteron annihilation as a form of power generation if they're doing it by only harnessing the matter stream of the subatomic particles yielded from the reactions. It makes no sense considering they can control gravity and change inertia and many other things considered undoable at our present time. Obviously I can't be sure how they explain this stuff, but a matter stream of energized particles from such a poor energy conversion reaction seems so unlikely considering they could just use proton-antiproton reactions for a better result. I certainly prefer to view the anti-matter reactors as employing more efficient methods than modern humans are able to know about right now. That's just me though maybe.
4. Whilst, yes, the reaction would no doubt be a mess by today's standards in terms of resultant particles and our ability to effectively harness some kind of power from all of them considering total annihilation in such a reaction is highly unlikely. But like I said before, I'm talking about star trek here, so I'm assuming that their methods of controlling and channelling energy is far beyond ours. Which was also why I wondered if the writers made an attempt at explaining a singularity drive.
"The amount of Hawkin
g radiation from a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass. The smaller it is, the faster it radiates. An artificial singularity like a Romulan ship's core could be much smaller than stellar mass and thus give off a lot of Hawking radiation, although releasing all that energy would reduce its mass and it would eventually evaporate unless the mass supply were replenished. The reason we don't see a lot of microsingularities is because they would've long since gone poof by now."
Yes "hawking" radiation. Thank you for the spelling lesson haha, but it was only a mistake as you can see it was spelt correctly on the last paragraph of that other post I made.
The reason I said hawking radiation doesn't apply here in such small amounts is because of the size of the black holes used on the Romulan ships. They were huge. They were about a meter in diameter or something like that. Starfleet antimatter reactors produce terawatts of power according to Geordi. Therefore a meter wide black hole isn't going to produce anything close to that amount in hawking radiation. Not even a 1cm wide black hole could.
I read once that a blackhole with the mass of mount Everest could output something like a few million megawatts. Such a blackhole could work to power a starship like in star trek. Yet it basically couldn't even be seen, let alone be a meter across like we were shown in TNG. Perhaps the writers just miscalculated the size of it, or used a larger one for the sake of the show looking good. However I was mostly curious if anyone had insight into exactly how the writers explained how their singularity drives worked. Meaning that perhaps they had some fictional way of explaining things. That's what I was most curious about.
