Bussard Collectors

[thesovereignman]

Bussard Collectors seem to be an integral part of a starship. They collect hydrogen from space and do something with it (What exactly?) They are generally seen in the form of red bulbs of various shapes and sizes, from bulbs in the original enterprise and NX-01, to ovals on the Enterprise C and D, to two smaller Diamonds split in the middle in E, And ovals again in the Enterprise J.

Now, The problem I face is in th Enterprise refit, A, and B. They have no bussard collectors that I can see. So how do they aquire their hydrogen, and what is hydrogen even used for?

 

[C.E. Evans]

Bussard collectors are good for topping off a ship's deuterium (matter) fuel tank, or at least making sure it doesn't fall below a certain point between refuelings at a starbase, IMO.

The Constitution refit and other ships of its era also had bussard collectors, but they were of a different design. They may even have been referred to as something differently--like "space-energy matter sinks" possibly--but they probably did the exact same thing regardless.

 

[Trekker4747]

Bussard Collectors seem to be an integral part of a starship. They collect hydrogen from space and do something with it (What exactly?) They are generally seen in the form of red bulbs of various shapes and sizes, from bulbs in the original enterprise and NX-01, to ovals on the Enterprise C and D, to two smaller Diamonds split in the middle in E, And ovals again in the Enterprise J.

Now, The problem I face is in th Enterprise refit, A, and B. They have no bussard collectors that I can see. So how do they aquire their hydrogen, and what is hydrogen even used for?

The Ent-A and B likely had the bussard collectors, just not one's we recognise (red, bulbs.)

The collected hydrogen is used as the matter component of the Matter/Antimatter reaction in the warp drive, it may possibly even be used in the fusion drive/reactors.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, though even then pretty sparsely spread out given the vastness of the universe. To "really collect it" the ships must fly through a nebula.

 

[T'Girl]

The bussard collector is like a big funnel, a force field or part of the warp field, miles across that collects the very thin interstellar gases (mostly hydrogen) as the ship travels through space, the fast the ship moves, the more gases get collected. The gas is taken into the ship, compressed into a semi-frozen slush for storage and used as fuel.

While Picard's ship scooped up deuterium, it's possible Kirk's ship simply collected hydrogen, what they needed was a counterpart to the antimatter they were carrying. Combine hydrogen and anti-hydrogen in the warp core, and you get lots of energy.The ship also needed fuel for the impulse drive, if impulse is a baby space drive then it needed fuel for it's own reactor. If impulse is fusion rockets, then deuterium could be seperated from the hydrogen for fuel. Deuterium is approximately one atom in 6,500 atoms of hydrogen.

Before I was told different, I thought the bussard collector on the TOS Enterprise wasn't the half globe but the vent-like rings several meters back, to me they look like gas intakes.

The Enterprise A has all kinds of big vent-like openings, both in the front of the nacelles and slighty back on the sides. The Enterprise B has a horizontal intake vent-like structure across the front of it's nacelles, which could be the bussard collector.

 

[thesovereignman]

Thanks I guess the TOS nacelle design was more efficient, for starfleet designers to revert to a version of it in the 24th century.

 

[Timo]

To be sure, no onscreen source ever tells us what the ramscoops do. We only hear them mentioned thrice: in TNG "Samaritan Snare" and "Night Terrors", their job is to blow out hydrogen, not to collect it, while in ST:INS, they are used for scooping up dangerous gases in a dense nebula and then venting them where they do the most harm to the enemy.

So there's no real proof that the scoops help gather more fuel for the starship. They scoop up stuff, yes, but perhaps mainly in order to get it out of the way, so that the ship can move faster or more easily.

It's odd that the scoops would be in the nacelles if their purpose was to collect fuel. After all, fuel is not stored in the nacelles, at least not according to backstage sources in ENT and TNG and DS9, and not according to some TOS dialogue and scenes (but other scenes may disagree). It would be an awfully long way down from the nacelles to the tanks, for no obvious reason. AFAWK, the nacelles cannot use simple hydrogen for anything much - they use warp plasma, which is produced out of the hydrogen in the engineering hull.

One might claim that the scoops are in the nacelles because that's (almost) as good a place as any other. But that doesn't really convince me, since all the known ramscoops have been in the nacelles. What could be the reason? Does the scooped-up hydrogen get used in some sort of a nacelle process we don't yet know about - say, cooling, or diluting or enriching the warp plasma, or something like that?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

traditional Bussard collectors use magnetic fields to collect interstellar matter.
Somewhere I read that the speed of a craft using such a device is limited to ~.1c.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The bussard collector is probably part of the navigational deflector anyway. It's the only thing on the ship powerful enough to generate the thousands-of-kilometers-in-diameter forcefield that a practical bussard collector would need to fuel or even realistically replenish a warp drive.

 

[Timo]

Yet the ship probably has even more powerful things than the deflector dish aboard. Namely, the warp engines themselves.

Which makes perfect sense: a minor additional manipulation of the warp field would provide the scooping field, warping space so that the hydrogen would either be attracted to the ramscoops, or would simply be at the ramscoops when the field went up and redefined the dimensions of space.

Scoops placed elsewhere in the ship would have to have their own dedicated warp engines or subspace field generators or whatever you choose to call them. A waste of space and payload, that.

I'd still postulate that the intake of hydrogen is only a minor side product of the main functionality of the ramscoops. Cochrane would have had no use for it in his propulsive prototype, yet ramscoops were present in that design already. So yeah, I strongly support the idea that the ramscoops are part of the protective deflection system of the ship - a more cost-efficient way to negate the effect of interstellar matter on warping ships than the use of combat shields or pressor beams would be. Warp engines would "want" to attract space and matter towards their forward ends anyway; this mechanism simply boosts that effect, and then renders the incoming matter harmless and sometimes even makes use of it.

Usually, though, it may simply vent it back at the other end of the warp engine, dispersing it to space, and creating the distinctive warp trail that the plotlines suggest is more commonly created and easier to follow than an impulse trail.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Actually, I think the warp engines would double as deflector elements, with the leading edge of the field producing a bow shock that knocks most things out of the ship's path. That explains why the Phoenix had "ramscoops" but no deflector dish, and why most Romulan and Klingon designs also have nacelles but no visible deflectors. It's more likely that all practical warp engines also act as deflector systems, and that the "main deflector dish" is an extra device featured on Starfleet vessels that happen to do alot of non-combat operations.

 

[Timo]

Agreed in principle, although I'd think the warp field would be likelier to suck in matter than to deflect it...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

The navigational deflector job would be to push aside the very material that the bussard collector is intended to gather. A hydrogen atom (or a large molecule) striking the ship at warp six would do considerable damage. The deflector pushes all objects out of the way, creating a clear path for the ship, the bussard field then seperates the light weight atoms from heavier things like rocks. The hydrogen must also be accellerated to the ship's speed, channeled towards the intakes, inside the ship materials like helium are ejected. If the ship only makes use of deuterium, then the majority of the hydrogem would be discarded overboard as well. The intakes are located in the engines because the inhabited parts of the ship need to be shielded from the effects of the warp field.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The navigational deflector job would be to push aside the very material that the bussard collector is intended to gather.

That's why I don't think that's how the deflector actually works. I think it creates a sort of funnel that deflects material into the collector through the warp field.

 

[The Castellan]

I'm thinking the hydrogen might be used like a last possible chance to survive, if the ship's power fails. Sorta like keeping things going, the minimal needs at least, before help can arrive or a solution is found.

I just wonder why they went from bulbs to grills to bulbs again? And why ships of the Miranda, Contellation, Oberth, and others never had the replacements?

 

[Ronald Held]

You are talking about shaping the warp field, while traveling on the impulse engines, to guide gas into the collectors?

 

[T'Girl]

Given how sparse the gas is, I don't think you could collect enough a sublight speeds to make it worth your while. But at warp six (216 c), even with a collector field only a single mile across, you're gathering over forty million cubic miles of material per second. You have to collect it faster than you consume it.

Of course there is also the possiblity of taking the Enterprise through the upper atmosphere of a gas giant or even the upper atmosphere of any class M world. Earth's upper layer is mostly hydrogen and helium.

 

[Timo]

You have to collect it faster than you consume it.

Not necessarily - only if you want to ride forever on free gas. If you collect slower than you consume, you merely get fewer extra lightyears out of it, but you still get some.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[C.E. Evans]

I'm thinking the hydrogen might be used like a last possible chance to survive, if the ship's power fails. Sorta like keeping things going, the minimal needs at least, before help can arrive or a solution is found.

That's how I look at it too.

Although not canon, the TNG Tech Manual basically says the same thing.

I just wonder why they went from bulbs to grills to bulbs again? And why ships of the Miranda, Contellation, Oberth, and others never had the replacements?

Possibly just the design of that era, IMO. The grills might be no better or worse than bulbs. I think the Excelsior-class nacelles originally had grille-type bussard collectors but then went to a glowy bulb-type design a few years later (at least the Enterprise-B had them anyway)...

 

[thesovereignman]

You have to collect it faster than you consume it.

Not necessarily - only if you want to ride forever on free gas. If you collect slower than you consume, you merely get fewer extra lightyears out of it, but you still get some.

Timo Saloniemi

I think what was being said is that going at warp 6, collecting that much gas, that there should be no possible way to consume faster than you collect.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

And I again submit the possibility that the NACELLES is a retarded place to put the collectors in the first place since the ship's fuel is being stored in the primary hull, not in the nacelles, and it is better to place that collection hardware close to the bulk of the machinery that is going to process and utilize that incoming matter (namely, the fuel lab, warp core, impulse engines, whatever else) instead of having to pipe it all the way down from the nacelles just to process it, react it, and then send drive plasma back up TO the nacelles along parallel lines.

This gives is an explanation for a number of Trek oddities, most notably the lack of visible deflector dishes on some vessels (Reliant, Oberth, most alien designs). If the glowy things at the end of the nacelles are deflector elements instead of ramscoops, this simplifies 99% of all shuttlecraft/small craft/alien of the week designs that have nacelles and go to warp but don't have visible navigational deflectors: deflection might be an integral part of a basic warp field, with the ability to use deflectors effectively while NOT at warp is a trick mostly performed by advanced warships. The main deflector dish would then be an "extra" device, like the reinforced bow on an ice breaker, that can push interstellar particles out of the ship's way or scoop hydrogen clouds and interstellar particles INTO the ship to be processed as fuel.

The other thing is, the main deflector has a better field forward of the ship in the vast majority of Starfleet designs, so even if you must take the backstage sources at face value, the main deflector is still BETTER POSITONED to act as a ramscoop anyway. Even if one insists that past/current designs have not used it in this way, simple efficiency would probably result in FUTURE designs doing so, freeing up those spaces in the nacelles to be filled with other hardware like, say, Defiant style pulse phasers or even more deflector hardware.