How do they repair ships in outerspace?

[I_r_Heart_ST]

Alright, we all know they laser up eachother all the time.. But my question is, how the heck do they repair the ships? I mean those things are huge! They cant land that sh*t on a planet to repair it. Do they like use astronauts? That has to take a long a** time. They cant afford to be repair it all the time.

So my question is. How do they do it?

 

[Myasishchev]

Probably industrial replicators in the 24th century, and presumably orbital mirror- or laser-driven smelting/processing/casting plants in the 23d and earlier, similar to those described by Gerard O'Neill. In both eras I imagine dudes in spacesuits figure heavily in checking the work of the industrial robots.

Or, they just land 'em back in Iowa, in the JJverse.

 

[I_r_Heart_ST]

So these industrial replicators from the 24th century... do they have em on the ships themselves? I cant imagine them being small enough for ships to carry around. And could you expand on the orbital mirrors or laser powered powered smelting plants?

 

[Myasishchev]

Re: industrial replicators...

I want to think someone somewhere said they have (presumably small?) ones on the Enterprise-E, at least. I know they have big-ass ones, that are powerful enough that fifteen of them qualified as significant foreign aid to Cardassia in the aftermath of the Klingon invasion. As for ship repair yards, I figure they're rather large.

They're never clear how "industrial replicators" actually differ other than being bigger. I always figured industrial was a catch-all term for replicators that are capable of at least making the small, ubiquitous consumer replicators that people eat and get their clothes from. I also have a theory that consumer replicators aren't heavy duty enough to utilize higher atomic numbers than calcium or so--lack of iron content, for example, would actually help explain why replicated food is not supposed to taste right. Industrial replicators are also likely to be finer-tuned, since they have to make complicated machinery as opposed to a mass of pseudo-chicken that may or may not have articulated cells with membranes, mitochondria, Golgi apparati, and so on.

Then again, little replicators sometimes are able to make machines. Maybe they're just little versions of industrial replicators--we've only seen those kind in military installations, where instant access to weapons and/or tools would be mission critical.

My main beef regarding replicators is the notion that they're capable of nuclear-level change, which would be an order of magnitude sillier than even instant custom chemicals.

Re: orbital material refining...

As for mirror-driven smelting, it's pretty much just mirrors positioned so as to reflect sunlight onto whatever you want to (s)melt, refining iron or any other metal out of useless ore. Enough sunlight is capable of acheiving the temperatures to make steel from iron, and in principle enough sunlight is still capable of melting the fake materials they build starships out of, with virtually zero economic cost for the energy. I'm not 100% sure of the actual mechanics of the mirrors and the production facilities, unfortunately--that's for people who understand calculus. Also, it's been a few years since I've read Gerard O'Neill's "High Frontier," the seminal treatise on the feasibility orbital colonies and factories.

I do recall that raw material would ideally be shot up from the moon, or mined from an asteroid, however, instead of carried up at great expense from the surface of the Earth. Even transporters (and probably especially transporters) don't get around the basic fact that 100,000kg of iron (or any material) is going to require a certain amount of minimal energy to escape Earth's gravity, and that it's going to be a lot.

 

[Timo]

To be sure, starships should be quite capable of landing on planets for repairs - assuming they weren't broken in a specific way that precludes this!

The Voyager was seen doing repairs both while floating in outer space (they could e.g. reel their warp core back in with shuttlecraft after it had been ejected) and down on a planetary surface (they landed in "Nightingale" to swap warp coils, despite the fact that such coils are supposedly heavy equipment - so clearly they don't need space for its zero-gee qualities, and can defeat planetary gravity with their machinery easily enough).

It's too bad we have never quite followed repair procedures up close or for any length of time. In the opening credits of DS9, we see a couple of spacewalkers doing manual welding and hauling components; we also see, earlier in the credits, a small work pod scurrying around. So probably there is at least an element of manual labor in the process - but it's not the cumbersome work it is today, since apparently Star Trek spacesuits can be quickly donned, their antigravs make moving stuff very easy in zero gee (that is, they remove the nuisance of inertia), and their welding tools are precise and work quickly. So perhaps there's a limited need for robotics, since the work is not all that laborious, or requiring of great accuracy or strength or stamina?

I'd also tend to ignore the role of gravity wells in repair logistics. Artificial gravity is so reliable, ubiquitous and apparently dirt cheap in Trek that the problem seems to have gone away completely. Either the AG systems cheat and circumvent the need for energy, or then the energy they use is simply so cheap that lifting a starship's worth of raw materials is no more expensive than making a cup of tea. (Literally: if you can make a cup of tea out of pure energy, you are already on an interesting level of personal wealth...)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unicron]

And Jackill's tug modules included several designed specifically for heavy transport or construction duty, including a factory pod and a pod for carrying replacement nacelles for a ship that had had to jettison its to survive.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

They keep a jack and a spare nacelle in the trunk.

 

[T'Girl]

The industrial replicators on the Enterprise may not be capable of producing a complete warp coil. Instead they crank out sub-components which the crew then assembles the old fashion way. The giant replicators at the utopia planitia yards could produce a full size warp coil.

So perhaps there's a limited need for robotics

With the exception of Data and the exo-comps, we don't see robots in the federation, in the post scarcity economy of the 24th century, maybe that's what keep everyone from laying around.

if you can make a cup of tea out of pure energy, you are already on an interesting level of personal wealth

How free is the stuff that comes out of the replicators? Not in terms of money, but energy? If you were to replicate a kilogram of anti-matter (carefully), shouldn't it consume at least a kilogram of anti-matter in the warp reactor to produce the power? Maybe it's two kilos in the reactor to produce one kilo in the replicator slot. This would explain why we see food still being grown.

TANSTAAFL

 

[Myasishchev]

I am never gonna concede that replicators (or transporters) actually convert mass into energy and back. That's insane. Here's why.

Assume you have been cryogenically frozen, and the Enterprise crew has reluctantly awoken you to a world of condescension. You would very much like to eat a chicken tender. Commander Data says you can replicate a .1kg human nutritional supplement no. 96 (known on ancient Earth as a "chicken tender") via a mass-energy-mass process. But wait, you say:

1)You can't just convert mass to energy. You could accelerate it to near the speed of light and smash it into something, I guess. But realistically, I suppose you can throw antimatter at it--but that still winds up with less energy than you had mass due to the creation of neutrinos.
2)Okay, assuming you can "just" convert mass to energy, or don't care about the antimatter that already cost you vast inefficiencies to produce, you now have perhaps a dozen thermonuclear bombs' worth of energy instead of my chicken tender. Even if you are containing this somehow, you must have a fiber optic tube full of several exajoules worth of gamma rays.
3)Assuming you can contain and channel that energy, confining it to the point that it results in spontaneous creation of mass, you don't get matter alone. Instead of my chicken tender, I have a plasma made of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons (and electrons and positrons flying every which way as well). This does not taste as good.
4)Assuming you can manipulate the weak force parity violation that may or may not be responsible for baryogenesis and the dominance of matter, you will not be able to produce the heavy atoms like carbon and oxygen molecules that constitute most of my chicken tender's mass. You're just going to get hydrogen, maybe with some helium and a sprinkling of lithium thrown in.
5)Assuming you can then fuse the resulting H and insubstantial He, and Li ions to get heavier atoms, you still have to recapture all the electrons that are thrown everywhere. I do not want my chicken tender to be ionized please.
6)Assuming you've thrown equal antimatter against at least a half-chicken tender mass, confined the resulting gamma rays and either forgotten about the neutrinos that make up nearly 60% of the reaction products or found a way to use them; gotten around the pair-production problem; reenacted nucleogenesis in order to build up atoms all the way up to iron (an endothermic process); recaptured all the electrons; and then used very precise force fields and extraordinarily powerful computers to rearrange these atoms into molecules, cells, and finally muscle tissue...

7)Congratulations, future, you just spent an astronomical amount of energy, with wastage on the order of at least 60% and probably much, much more, on a chicken tender.

And not even a very good one, either, to listen to them complain.

 

[T'Girl]

You would need some sort of material to start with, as I understand it the replicator converters things through a transporter LIKE mechinism. If you wanted food, could it use anything as it's base, or would it need to use some form of protein? If you wanted a glass whatever does the replicator pull from a stock of silica sitting in a sealed bin in the bowels of the ship?

And if you ask for a dilithuim crystal, would get one or just a chunk of ordinary quartz?

 

[Myasishchev]

I reckon they have a tank full of several ten thousand tons of sewage. If it were kept under significant pressures or temperatures, I'm not sure how usable proteins would hold up. Depending on oxygen content, it might be mostly water and methane, or water and graphite. If the temperature is above ~1600C, the silica would be in its liquid phase; afaik as long any oxygen is bound up in water and silica, the methane ought not oxidize.

 

[James Wright]

I have a question, in the Enterprise episode "Minefield" did the Enterprise-NX-01 return to earth to replace the hull plate that had the Romulan mine attached to it, at the end of the episode did Archer give an order to set a course for Earth?
Just curious!

James

 

[STR]

It always seemed more plausible to me that a replicator doesn't create matter, just organizes it. There's tanks of raw material (not necessarily sewage, but that wouldn't hurt) that are fed through to the replicator and in a process of 3D deposition (similar to 3D printing or a nanolathe for the TA fans out there) builds the chicken finger by the molecule.

On a related note, beaming doesn't convert a human being into a couple of h-bombs worth of free energy, but uses some kind of as-yet unknown physically phenomenon (quantum entanglement, but easier) to literally teleport the exact atoms from A to B.

As for the original post, a starship should be incredibly modular. With a few tools (that hyperspanner they always talk about maybe) and a lot of time you shouldbe able disassemble the Enterprise-E in its entirety. So if you, say, ram the front 100 meters of your ship to pieces, you unlatch the entire damage front of the ship, discard it, and replace it with replicated modules one section at a time. Option B would be to call a starbase, fly to it, and replace the whole thing with a brand new bow replicated while you where on route. Of course, on screen, they show these things as if they were built by hand like 18th century ships-of-the-line, which is anachronistic and therefore stupid.

 

[Timo]

With the exception of Data and the exo-comps, we don't see robots in the federation, in the post scarcity economy of the 24th century, maybe that's what keep everyone from laying around.

It could just be that robots in the 24th century have shapes other than humanoid. The good old "mechanical man" style of robot has been argued to be useful because it can become labor capable of operating all the same tools as a human. But it may actually be smarter to build the robot in the shape of that tool, and not go for generalized "laborers" at all. Smarter in the technological sense - and smarter in the psychological.

How free is the stuff that comes out of the replicators? Not in terms of money, but energy?

Well, dirt cheap. Otherwise, the UFP couldn't afford to dish out free food from its replicators. Apparently, energy is more or less free, or else starships would be unaffordable. Or in the reverse, if starships are affordable, then it makes no sense to regulate replicator use, shipboard or elsewhere.

As for how replicators operate, I think we can skip most of the "real-world" parts of the process because (as STR says) we already acknowledge the existence of transporters.

The whole "phased matter" field of physics is alien to us, but seems to be the bread and butter (literally!) of our heroes' technology. Apparently, this "phasing" is a simple process for converting matter to something intangible and "energy-like" and also back. And while one can argue that such a process always needs matter as a starting point, one may equally well argue that such a process needs phased matter or energy as the starting point, while matter is the intermediate stage.

I have a question, in the Enterprise episode "Minefield" did the Enterprise-NX-01 return to earth to replace the hull plate that had the Romulan mine attached to it, at the end of the episode did Archer give an order to set a course for Earth?

They didn't return to Earth - they sent out a general call for help and waited. After all, the point was that the ship wasn't safe for sailing through hostile spaces, or at high speed. At the best speed they could manage, Earth would have been ten years away, according to Archer.

There was hull damage in "Shuttlepod One", half a year earlier, but that didn't require outside repair assets; apparently, the ship had enough hull material in its stores to repair a largish damaged cargo hold hatch all on her own. The damage sustained in "Minefield" was greater, though, preventing polarizing of the hull (or at least parts of it) for protection, and extended to some hardware beyond the hull as well.

They specifically said in "Dead Stop" that they didn't have enough raw material to do the repairs, but if they did, they could have done the repairs by themselves in three-four months.

All later starships would probably be better off, not just because of having better onboard repair facilities, but because there'd be more tenders and repair ships around to come and help them in the middle of nowhere. Still, for example in TNG "Phantasms" it was considered better to tow the damaged starship to port for repairs than to attempt on-the-spot repairs by the ship's own assets or by assets brought in by a tender. And that was after supposedly fairly minimal damage to the power train (although it really turned out to be something else again).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Saturn0660]

The same way they do it in the military now. You carry tools and spares parts and stock. And much like todays military there is only so much damage you can repair on your own.

Hell, are there not ships in a carrier fleet that are nothing but machine shops?

 

[USS Jack Riley]

They keep a jack and a spare nacelle in the trunk.

Except the thing is a pony nacelle and, therefore, too small, underpowered and can only maintain Warp 1. After that, the thing starts cavitating causing every weld and screw to come loose and the fillings to fall out of every crewmembers' teeth.

 

[QuasarVM]

With a blow torch! Just like you saw in the Abrams Trek early trailer (building the ship in that scene, but you know what I mean...)!

Mwahahahaha!!!

 

[Myasishchev]

With a blow torch!

And a pair of pliers.

 

[QuasarVM]

Don't forget the monkey wrench!

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I have a question, in the Enterprise episode "Minefield" did the Enterprise-NX-01 return to earth to replace the hull plate that had the Romulan mine attached to it, at the end of the episode did Archer give an order to set a course for Earth?

No, they didn't return to Earth. Enterprise sent out a distress signal, and were directed (by a passing Tellarite ship) to the automated repair station seen in the next episode, "Dead Stop".