Spoilers ST Discovery - Starships and Technology Season Four Discussion

Kovich is an enigma, purposefully so, but who knows if there's any real explanation to his idiosyncrasies. He pulled out a Gilligan's Island reference last week, and NO ONE IN THE ROOM would understand that.

As for this week, some good stuff. I know the focus is on "Picard" for all sorts of good reasons, but there's lots to mine here too.

- The shuttle doesn't HAVE a door after all..?! People just beam aboard from the shuttle bay? Why even GO to the shuttle bay, then? Personal transporters are cool and all but there's no real logic to why they need to walk anywhere. They were ready to go before their hero walk down the corridor, and there was no need for everyone to assemble down there if all they had to do was tap once and go.

- Programmable matter is part of the Tron suit biofilters, which actually makes good sense here. One wonders why they weren't wearing them in the first place, instead choosing to head down to the Strange New World in their fancy S3+ away suits and THEN changing. I get that changing is probably a matter of one button and Iron Man CG, but still...

- I didn't know that a "Dyson Ring" was a thing... Sphere, yes. But even Freeman Dyson's original study didn't comprise a hard shell, but the construction of thousands of spherical worldlets (using Jupiter as the source material) arranged in a spherical pattern around the sun. You can Google the rest.

- I'm guessing that the steaming banana is a deep cut reference to Lower Decks, which is awesome. But it still begs the question of who would ever NEED a steaming hot fruit.

- It hasn't been stated in the season thread yet, but I've learned the combo PADD / Tricorder / Transporter badge is called a "tricom" in production, but not yet in dialogue. Here, you can clearly see the UI say "Tricorder Mode - Status Active" at one point. It seems there is a standardized hand gesture that brings the UI up in the needed mode, and then you interact with it as needed.

- Jet is seen wearing her tunic open at the top this week. Notably, it shows that the clasp at the tunic neck opens down the middle, which is not now the actual costume works (it buttons on to one side and exists to conceal the zipper pull). So here we have a case of a specific costume being made to demonstrate the futuristic tech that holds it together when all zipped up, which is cool. Recall how Ensign Ro removes her uniform top back in "Ensign Ro", unzipping down the front with a seamless opening, where the costume zipper is inaccessably down the back of the neck.

Mark

 

"Dyson Ring" makes for a easier Mega Construct to achieve and is just a fancy word for "Ring World".

 

Is Kovich actually a 32d century prime universe being?

 

He could be from the future for all we know.

It's not like StarFleet has a habit of going around and "Quantum Dating" every StarFleet Officer to make sure that they aren't time travelers from the future.

 

Yes.

 

I did some math for how fast Discovery was traveling at Warp Speeds after they hopped out of the Mycelial Network near the Galactic Barrier.

It appears that it took Discovery ~6.5 minutes to cover ~9 light years.

According to my Warp Factor Scale 3.0:
That becomes somewhere between Wf 57-58 on my scale which is pretty damn good.

For reference, Wf 9.9 on the TNG scale, according to Tom Paris, comes out to Wf 20 on my scale.

The USS Equinox's enhanced Warp Drive using Nucleogenic Energy from the dead interdimensional Aliens was Wf 43 on my scale.

SubSpace Vortex Drives seen in ST:ENT that were used by the Xindi are Wf 73 on my scale.

The Millenium Falcon's HyperDrive is Wf of 122.X on my scale.

Quantum SlipStream (Version 1) is at Wf 145 on my scale
Quantum SlipStream (Version 2) {w/ Consumable Benamite Crystals} is at Wf 825 on my scale.

 

Not even Dyson 'Sphere' is a thing. Freeman Dyson actually presented the idea of a Dyson SWARM. Someone else later on suggested a notion of a sphere (to which Dyson himself cringed due to the engineering impracticalities).
A Swarm is something we could have constructed in real life for a while now.

I don't know whether a Dyson Ring would be 'simpler' than a swarm though, since a Swarm implies its constructed of 10km large solar collectors (each of which could act as its own city)... so a Swarm would actually be easier to make than a 'ring' when you think about it because each structure is smaller, and all you have to do is tell automation to repeat it rather than having to interconnect a massive solid structure around the sun itself.

That's assuming we were watching things unfold in real time... and the problem is that Trek cuts these parts out heavily.
Still, given the fact time was of the essence, 6.5 minutes to cover 9 Ly's seems within the realm of possibility (if not a bit unimpressive for 32nd century).

Its about 33.2307 Ly's per day, or 12,129.23 times speed of light... much lower than Warp 9.9 (or 21 473 x c as Tom Paris stated in 'The 37's') though.

Its possible Disco wasn't travelling at maximum Warp (which could be much higher than Warp 9.9 in that case), or it was intricately limited by its hull design and unable to sustain higher Warp speeds?

 

That's the assumption I'm going with given the data that is available to me. So I'm going to treat it like it's in real time.

Your expectations for humanity and the UFP is for everybody to be "Proto Q" by this point.

So you expect FAR more advancement than what I'm willing to find credible by this point in time.

It's faster than Warp 9.9 as referenced by Tom Paris when he stated it in "The 37's".

I did the math already, see above.

Even then it's "Fine" as a speed measurement.

Nothing amazing, even QSS (Quantum Slip Stream) ver 1 is still faster.

 

My expectation for that to happen was not unreasonable considering what we saw in the 24th century technology wise and where it can go.
The writers on the other hand barely pushed anything forward.

My bad.
Its late and I calculated incorrectly
That actually comes out to 1,993 light years per day, or 727,753 times c.

If accurate, that's actually not bad. It would place it at just above Warp 9.95 (if we go by my scale, and the idea that with every increment past 9.9 speeds increase exponentially).

QS v1 = 300 Ly's per hour (at its absolute maximum). For sustainable speeds which could be maintained for longer periods of time - aka 60 000 Ly's in 3 months the speed is lower, around 666.666 ly's per day (or 243,333 times c).

QS v2 = 10 000 Ly's per minute (14.4 million Ly's per day, or 5.265 billion times c).

So, whichever Warp speed Disco used, and if that was real time, it was certainly faster than 'sustainable' QS v1 (but not its temporarily sustained maximum), and definitely slower than v2.

 

My calculations for QSS ver 1 & 2 are a bit different from yours.

But that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things since the Warp Speed shown is similar to what I had listed on many of my Faster StarShips top speeds for the 26th century using normal Warp Drive.

 

The 300 Ly's per hour and 60 000 Ly's in 3 months were taken from 'Hope and Fear' episode (dialogue) directly.
From that, I surmised that V1 maximum was 300 Ly's per hour (which much like maximum Warp can't be maintained indefinitely, though I suspect the fake Dauntless could maintain it for longer than VOY could have what with being designed for it), whereas the sustainable speed was much slower at 666.666 Ly's per day (or 27.7 Ly's per hour - aka, 10.83 times slower).

As for v2 = 10 000 Ly's per min... granted, this was an estimation based on what was initially stated in 'Timeless' dialogue... aka, that troubles didn't start until 17 seconds into the flight... so, that doesn't leave a lot of time for VOY to disperse the slipstream with future Kim's corrections, meanwhile, the ship continued to be battered while waiting on the corrections. So, I'm being a bit conservative here based off the dialogue as is.

Wouldn't it be nice if the writers actually made a table of all Warp speeds along with QS v1 and v2, stuck to those and outlined for us in the dialogue which speed the ship is using (which wouldn't really be more than extra few seconds)?

 

For my 26th Century Head Canon:

QSS Ver 1 operates at Warp Factor: 060-180
@ Wf 145, you'll be traveling at 30.4514018704439 ly per minute

QSS's main consumable resource is the SIF (Structural Integrity Field).
The nature of traveling in Quantum Slip Stream does damage over time to the SIF. If you go back and watch the Voyager episode, you will notice that their SIF gradually decreases over time as they travel through QSS. Since all StarShips need to prevent their hulls from buckling and have a fatal issue in space where their ship gets ripped apart via torsional stresses, there is only 1x SIF active due to the nature of how SIF is routed through wave guides built into the main hulls of the vessel's super structure and needs to be on to keep the vessel in tact.

If they want to replenish the SIF field, they can hop out into normal space, take a few minutes to replenish the SIF Shield Generators to full, then hop back into QSS Ver 1.

Unlike regular shields in battle where I have multiple layers, SIF can't have multiple layers due to the way it's physically routed. That means traveling at QSS is time limited due to SIF % levels, but reasonable with the faster you travel, the faster the damage to the SIF occurs. Of course the scaling isn't perfectly linear for SIF damage over time.

QSS Ver 2 operates at Warp Factor: ~825 ~= 10,000 ly per min
That requires a very consumable SBC (Synthetic Benimite Crystals) that decays with usage.
The damage over time to the SIF doesn't occur fast enough to really matter while the degradation of the SBC is MUCH faster.

In my Universe, it takes {2 years, 65 Days, 8 hrs, 44 mins, 36 sec(s), & 735 ms} to grow 1 standardized SBC on a industrial scale. Each SBC lets you use it for {4 hrs, 39 mins, 35 sec(s)} to travel at those extreme speeds. During those 4 hrs, 39 mins while you're traveling at QSS, you can literally cross the vast distances between galaxies.

You can literally cross ~2,793,602 ly in that time frame.
Travel to the Andromeda Galaxy in that time frame is reasonable since the Andromeda Galaxy is ~2,500,000 ly away.

Due to the valuable nature of the SBC, each Captain is only allowed to hold a few of those crystals on board each ship. We wouldn't want another StarFleet StarShip to accidentally get lost in another galaxy and have no practical way home. The lessons of the Enterprise-D & Voyager taught StarFleet that they must be ready for nearly everything, including finding ways to get home if they're far away.

That would require them to have a Technical Writer on staff to take care of stuff like that and for them to have one that cares about this kind of stuff.

 

I liked this week's episode, even if there wasn't much tech to discuss. 10-C's technology was already outstripping the 32nd-Century Federation's best, which is already frustratingly tough to keep track of.

- Figuring out communication was genuinely nice, and probably something that hasn't been portrayed like this since Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel. But you'd think that a universal translator, which is definitely programmed for stuff like emotional and proverbial context between humanoids, would be more helpful in this process? The gang had barely gotten to communicating with mathematical logic (A + B = C and so on) when 10-C figured out that replicating the bridge would be comfy for the crew to work from? Are they trying to say that 10-C built an ant farm for our heroes to figure out the lights and all?

- I recognize that Tarka isn't nominally in the kidnapping business, but after all the centuries of Starfleeters being kidnapped, you'd think that they would get around being rendered technologically helpless by simply removing the combadge / tricom. Here, Reno manages to keep ahold of an emergency comm unit, but why ISN'T something like that built into the very fabric of the uniform by this point? Or injected? Or implanted?

- Hey, why are they using the same shuttlebay set from the Stargazer last week? :P

Mark

 

Answering your closing question, Mark: they're not!

The live-action footage for PIC was recorded in California, not Toronto, yes?

 

Pretty sure they were making a joke

 

Dyson never postulated a SOLID SPHERE be built that would take all their Sar systems mass and then some.
- Dyson ring
- Dyson sphere
- Dyson bubble

 

I think if any civilization had the ability to even start a project on that scale then the logical progression would would be to continue until all their systems matter was consumed, or as much as technically possible.

 

If the species was Ecologically Friendly, would they really consume an entire Star System in their pursuit?

 

I don't know.

We only saw rings. They could have just stopped there as adequate for their needs, or they ran out of material. We don't know which.

 

One would hope not. One would hope energy production would move away from such raw material consumption.