Backup warp reactors and engine nacelles

[aridas sofia]

How Kirk could make an impulse engine explode within the Doomsday Machine must then depend on some quality other than fusionreactorness in the impulse system.

Exactly why I made the impulse engines on my cross section of the 1701 a pairing of an exotic drive system and an antimatter-initialized fusion system. I doubt such a drive would produce a 97 megaton explosion, but that mysterious exotic system leaves a big "maybe" in there, and the presence of antimatter is always good for drama, particualrly if you're making it for your propulsion system anyway.

 

[FalTorPan]

If a typical Starfleet mission profile is for a starship to be far from Federation support for weeks, months or years, then to me it makes perfect sense for the ship to have two matter/antimatter reactors, each of which is capable of supplying power to all of the ship's systems, including warp drive.

At least in the tech manuals, the Enterprise-D has been shown to have three completely redundant computer cores, redundant fusion generators, multiple transporter emitters and phaser banks providing somewhat overlapping operating "arcs," and redundant impulse engines (one set per hull). Given the diminutive size of a "warp core" relative to the rest of the ship, it seems illogical that there would be only one instance of the only type of reactor that can power the ship's FTL capability.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Well, let's pretend that the 1701-D's engine design is done well.

The 1701-D was supposed to operate waaaaay beyond the borders of the Federation for extended period. (Okay, the storytellers forgot all about that eventually, but that WAS the original intent!)

In other words, it was not expected to be able to rely on "Starfleet AAA" to show up and tow it back to home base for a tire rotation.

Now, we keep talking about "a core" as though it's a single piece of hardware. But it's not, and we all know that.

In the TNG vein, the "warp core" consists of multiple interrelated subsystems. You have an intermix chamber (with a supposed "dilithium articulation frame" inside), you have a matter injector, you have an antimatter injector, and you have acceleration core elements.

We all know that the Galaxy class was a horrible example of "single point of failure" design... as seen with the Yamato, the Odyssey, and the Enterprise. Despite the ship being intended to be very survivable, what we really see is that it seems to blow up REAL GOOD! We also know that its weak point was the warp core assembly. Each of the ships I mention above were destroyed due to reactor failures. (In fact, if you take into account some of the funky time-travel stuff in TNG, the Enterprise was destroyed by warp core breach MANY MANY TIMES.)

Now, I seem to recall an episode where the main reactor is severely damaged but not destroyed, too. In fact, I seem to recall Geordi having to rebuild the intermix chamber. So they either had spares, or the ability to "easily" replicate the parts needed to do those repairs. (Anyone recall the episode?)

Basically, in that episode the ship was stranded, essentially helpless... but it DIDN'T BLOW UP (for once!).

It's entirely reasonable to assume that the Galaxy class carries replacement parts (in case power is down and you can't run replicators) for most of the key components of the intermix assembly... injector nozzles, field coils, dilithium articulation frame, etc, and maybe even a spare intermix chamber housing. THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS HAVING A COMPLETE PRE-BUILT REACTOR ASSEMBLY JUST SITTING AROUND. But it makes sense and fits with on-screen evidence.

We know that the Forager was given dual cores. Evidently, the #2 core wasn't actually powered up, but just stored, completely assembled, so it could be pulled out and slipped into the core tunnel. Silly, really... since you could have just had it in the same spot but fully set up and could switch over to it in a moment's notice without any additional shipboard space being taken up!

So there's a precedent for having REPLACEMENTS... aka "spares".. in the TNG/VOY era. It's just very poorly implemented. IMHO, of course.

The distributed smaller-core solution just makes so much more sense from a safety, maintainability, and combat-readiness standpoint. Yet we have to accept that, at least for a time, this was the "design standard" for the Federation.

There's significant reason to believe it was otherwise in the TOS and TMP eras. And there's no reason to believe that the pendulum won't swing back the other way (to a cluster of smaller-individual-output generators instead of one single-point-of-failure main core).

In fact, looking at the results of the "Dominion War," and the TNG-era tendency for Galaxys to be killed so easily, I think it's inevitable that the next generation of ships to be designed would abandon the "one core" concept in favor of a distributed system. Now, every ship we've seen so far was on the drawing boards long before the events I'm mentioning, so it's not unreasonable to assume that each of those would remain single-core in design philosophy. But later ships, and also any ships being refit, would likely see that "one big core" replaced with multiple smaller cores which add up to an equivalent (or even greater!) power output.

Maybe that cluster of cores might even look like "Scotty's Bairns." Sorta makes ya go "HMMMM" doesn't it?

 

[Captain Robert April]

First off, it's still an open question as to just how much Jefferies fleshed out the technical details of the Enterprise, with the main indicators being "not so much", and this is for one key reason: It wasn't his job.

Matt Jefferies was the Art Director, not the technical advisor. For technical stuff, they talked to Kellem DeForest, to somebody at JPL, or Rand, or the writer had to explain it himself and make his case to the producers. THEN they brought in Jefferies, where his directive was to make it look good, not explain it.

The warp engines were there because Roddenberry said the ship was gonna have warp drive (which prompted Jefferies to ask "what the hell is warp drive?"), and from there Jefferies drew upon his experience and, based upon the thought that these "warp engines" that Roddenberry insisted on are very powerful and very strange, so let's mount 'em on struts in nacelles and keep 'em well away from the hull, so if one blows up or just fries, it won't require tearing the ship apart to replace the thing. But how the thing worked? Not a clue, and not his job to figure it out, because he was not a writer.

The engine room was there because a script came up requiring one, specifically "The Enemy Within". Luckily, that script was pretty early, so the set was probably there from the beginning of regular production, but considering the description is "the lower levels", and we're given a vast room filled with the guts of the ship. What do the big orange glowing tubes do? Who the hell knows? It just looks big and massive and technical and really really powerful and that's what's required for that set. How it all works is up to the writers.

The result, of course, is a very mixed up and sometimes contradictory record of how the ship works.

Later productions learned from this and did a more thorough job of nailing the technical details down ahead of time.

Now, to the matter at hand, the only time we ever saw a starship completely out of reach of a friendly port while fully functional was, somewhat ironically, the seemingly never in disrepair Voyager, and even in that case, the Writer's Tech Manual shows a backup warp core stowed just forward of the TARDIS-like hangar deck. Otherwise, regardless of the oft-stated five year mission, never has a ship been more than a few days away at high warp away from a convenient starbase, where a professional repair crew was ready and waiting to patch up all the boo-boos that had accumulated on the last adventure. So, there never really appears to be a need to outfit a ship for more than a few months' worth of supplies and equipment.

What might be interesting is to work up a ship intended to really be out there for years at a time, with no contact whatsoever with a friendly port outside of subspace radio. Probably something the size of a Constitution class ship with a crew of no more than 50, with the rest of the interior space for supplies, equipment, replacement parts, and samples of whatever weirdness they find way the hell out beyond the rim.

 

[aridas sofia]

Oh, goodness, Bob. You do fine until you venture into the realm of clairvoyant history. Then your divining of the intent of the dead runs squarely into the kinds of things that a little research would clear up.

From Matt Jefferies, on why he was chosen to design the Enterprise:

The question has been asked a number of times: why the network or the studio decided that I was qualified to do the show. Basically it was due to my aeronautical background, with four years as a flight test engineer, my combat time, plus my own private license and me being an aviation illustrator, and I have to say a successful one because I sure as hell wasn’t starving at it. That’s what got me the thing and Gene and I hit it off right off the bat due to our mutual experience in the opposite ends of the world in World War Two.

Sounds like he was qualified.

I needed an envelope to design to, anything else is pie-in-the-sky time and isn’t going to work. So I spent a lot of money on old Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon comic books.

I’d been a member of the Aviation Writers Association for quite a few years and I had the material that had been produced by NASA, NACA at that time, Douglas, Northrop, Lockheed, Boeing, all their work on possible space work. I pinned all that up on the board and said, "That I will not do".

Sounds like he did plenty of technical research, from art, space and aeronautical sources.

You are right when you point out that production was rushed once the series was underway, and how that must have influenced the ability to keep up with all the details. You are wrong when you ignore the year they spent researching everything before they even filmed the first pilot. A lot of thought went into all they did, and a lot of that thought came from Matt Jefferies. Did he get memos from Kellam Deforest via Roddenberry? Maybe. But he certainly, by his own account, had reams of technical material, plus the information Roddenberry got from the Air Force and NASA, and it was up to him to distill all that into design work. That's the reason for the incredible look of utility to everything he did -- to the point that the bridge was studied by the military and the sickbay was studied by manufacturers of hospital equipment and the doors were studied by supermarkets and...

In short, you again overstate your case.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Are you sure?

Remember, his job was to produce designs to meet the expectations of the producers, and he drew upon that experience to do that, but that doesn't mean knew what a warp plasma injector was or how the dilithium crystal articulation matrix operated, because that wasn't his job, it was the writer's and the producer's.

He did work with the writers to figure out what the hell it was they were talking about and from there, come up with something that looked like it made sense, but stop looking at his position like he approached it like Probert, Sternbach, and Okuda, because he didn't come into it with a wealth of built up knowledge of how the Star Trek world operated like the other three. Just like the rest of the merry band, he was making it up as he went along. Always with an eye to be as consistent and believable as possible under the circumstances, but hey, it was just a tv show, and one that was lucky to not be saddled with a Saturday morning timeslot between The Jetsons and Space Ghost.

Be careful you don't find yourself overstating Jefferies' case, which you often do.

 

[aridas sofia]

I never wrote that he came "into it with a wealth of built up knowledge of how the Star Trek world operated like the other three." Thank God he didn't. If he had we wouldn't have given a damn about what they did a year after the show went off the air, nevertheless forty years. And I'll say for any and all to read that in my not so humble opinion, Andy Probert's best work in the Trek genre was when he was as free of such restraints as possible -- which he often seemed to be. Put people in a technobabble box and they will start pulling Eaves-isms out of their ass out of sheer rebellion against the idiocy of what's being asked of them.

As for Jefferies, he wouldn't have known a warp plasma injector from a dilithium crystal articulation matrix, because ya' know, that kind of technobabble was the invention of folks like us, the tech heads. It was picked up upon by the later show's artists to make us happy, but I believe that was a very, very mixed blessing. Why didn't Jefferies care about such things? Because even Roddenberry didn't care about such things. They conceived of a set of designs that had the sense of utility underlying them, because they had a set of assumptions built up from a firm knowledge of where science and engineering currently were, and enough imagination to guess where it might go.

AND ENOUGH SENSE TO NOT INSERT SUCH STUFF INTO SCRIPTS THAT REALLY NEEDED TO FOCUS ON THE DRAMA. That, of course, left the tech stuff to us, THE FANS, to imagine, ruminate and debate. Thus making the original Trek (and TMP) much, much more interesting and enduring than its wrongheaded progeny.

 

[westwords2020]

Is there agreement that a backup warp reactor or dispersed reactors and retractable emergency warp nacelles is an okay idea or not?
Interesting discussion going on here.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Well, you know where >I< stand on the issue.

* "Single point of failure" is bad.

* "Backup" reactors are OK, but not nearly as good of a solution as "distributed loading" across multiple smaller reactors.

* "Spare nacelles" makes no sense, but having the warp drive be able to work with some coils damaged does.

* Having some form of FTL propulsion on each potentially-independent element of a ship, however, is an absolute MUST-HAVE for me.

* Whatever solution is implemented, it should allow the ship to shut down damaged systems and still operate effectively, and should allow the ship (under ANY configuration) to operate in a productive manner. The above items are simply how I see these issues being address most effectively.

* We know that in the TNG era, some of this was done, and some was NOT done. But we also see the consequences of that sort of thing (Yamato, Odyssey, Enterprise, etc). If the Enterprise D had multiple smaller cores, might it still be in existence "today?" I think so, if this were all in a "real" universe. Of course, the real reason that the ship was popped was because the guys doing the show wanted a new ship... so they'd have destroyed it no matter what the "design" was.

 

[Bill Morris]

I brought up this subject of dual warp cores several months ago in Trek Tech with regard to the Akira class, because it appears to have two warp-core ejection ports on the bottom of the saucer, clear of the keel and directly below the highest point on each of the dual engineering hulls, which would also place dual cores clear of that narrow section of the shuttlebay (near the rear doors). And that's how I placed them in the cutaway I was making, even though all the other fan-made Akira MSDs show a single core extending through the shuttlebay and down to the bottom of the keel, where there is definitely no ejection port to be seen on the CGI. There are other possibilities, of course, like a horizonally placed core. But with two, only one has to be used at a time to feed the nacelles, and the ship can travel at warp with one core completely shut down for maintenance.

And even though the Steamrunner class has a single core in the pod, it also has the main deflector back there, as well, which the Akira doesn't.

About the pylons, I assume they would have many structural members, making it not so easy to completely have a nacelle come off with a single phaser hit on a pylon.

 

[westwords2020]

It should be pointed out that the TOS Enterprise hull survived a very near nuclear explosion and the Constellation while horibly damaged was not outright destroyed by the Planet Killer in Doomsday Machine indicating that the hulls are very tough nuts to crack.

 

[ntypical]

You will find a major problem with simply having multiple smaller warp cores. It is called entropy. Having multiple warp cores will not be like having multiple engines on a jet. A jet does not suffer from entropy as severely as multiple warp cores would because the jet is expending its energy instantly on the air around it, and the losses from heat are much lower because the energy does not have to travel as far. The warp core has to transfer its energy to the nacelles, in the form of warp plasma. You would find that you would have a lot more energy losses having multiple cores because you would have to cover more distance from point A (warp core) to point B (nacelles). So you could say that 4 Cores operating at one fourth the power of the one large core would actually provide less energy to the nacelles.

Could you have multiple cores? Sure you could, you would have to quadruple the systems, and storage spaces. But you could do it. But it would not provide the same amount of power unless you oversized these smaller cores, in which case you would be talking about eating up even more resources and space.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

ntypical said:You will find a major problem with simply having multiple smaller warp cores. It is called entropy. Having multiple warp cores will not be like having multiple engines on a jet. A jet does not suffer from entropy as severely as multiple warp cores would because the jet is expending its energy instantly on the air around it, and the losses from heat are much lower because the energy does not have to travel as far. The warp core has to transfer its energy to the nacelles, in the form of warp plasma. You would find that you would have a lot more energy losses having multiple cores because you would have to cover more distance from point A (warp core) to point B (nacelles). So you could say that 4 Cores operating at one fourth the power of the one large core would actually provide less energy to the nacelles.

Could you have multiple cores? Sure you could, you would have to quadruple the systems, and storage spaces. But you could do it. But it would not provide the same amount of power unless you oversized these smaller cores, in which case you would be talking about eating up even more resources and space.

Entropy is simply the tendency of all systems to move from order to disorder. It's most commonly associated with thermodynamics, of course, where what it basically says is that heat tends to dissipate rather than stay in one spot. (That's the Cliff's Notes version.)

So, how exactly do you associated this known, well-understood concept with your argument re: multiple cores? Again, you can't just toss out a word. Entropy, in thermodynamics, is defined by theories and equations. It has its own "standard variable" under thermodynamics, "Q." Entropy basically means "losses" in that sense... unrecoverable, unusable thermal energy.

The only way I can see that you MIGHT be meaning to apply this is by assuming that you have four boilers and each is lossy, versus one much hotter boiler with less surface area for lost heat. But matter-antimatter reactions aren't (at least in Treknology terms) primarily thermal in nature at all. There's effectively no physical contact between the energy (call it warp plasma if you wish) and the transfer mechanisms, so the even in those cases you're not talking about much in the way of thermal losses.

So how, then, do you associate entropy with this again? Maybe you have a valid point, but I'm not seeing it. If thermal losses due to radiated and convected heat aren't significant (and they AREN'T in this case... otherwise, the crew would be instantaneously vaporized, considering the amounts of energy being released!)... why would entropy be a factor?

 

[ntypical]

Please read the whole post.

As I said before. Energy in the form of warp plasma, that is fed from the core, to the nacelles will suffer from losses.

Because you can not have two cores in the exact same place. One would have to be further from the nacelles than the other. Allowing for more heat to bleed off the system, ending in less useable energy reaching the nacelles. Also because you would essentially be using more WPS conduits you would see even more of a loss.


entropy[/url(“Entropy is a function of a quantity of heat which shows the possibility of conversion of that heat into work.”)

In this case my use of the word was dead on, because you have less heat in the form of WP to convert into work.

And no they are would not be instantly vaporized. We all know that warp plasma is very hot. But due to effective re distribution methods in the WPS they are able to use a majority of that lost heat for other things. But they can not put that heat back into the system that drives the ship. SO you are still looking at losses to the nacelles. So the over all losses would be greater from multiple cores for the reasons stated above, and in my previous post.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

ntypical said:Please read the whole post.

I did read your whole post. I simply believe that you're applying a term... entropy... in a sense that it isn't really applicable to.

As I said before. Energy in the form of warp plasma, that is fed from the core, to the nacelles will suffer from losses.

If you want to start tossing around real science terms like entropy, you've gotta be consistent in applying real science to the discussion. "Warp Plasma" does not in any way represent energy. Plasma is a form of MATTER, not of ENERGY.

How "warp plasma" is used to CARRY ENERGY is a subject that's been debated in this forum several times. Some people would argue that this plasma is made up of the reactant products of the matter/antimatter reaction, but that's not really reasonable, since a m/am reaction results in essentially complete annihilation of mass and conversion of said mass into energy (in accordance with the famous E=mc^2 bit we've all seen so many times).

So what is "warp plasma?" Well, the three most common arguments seem to be:

1) It's used as a high-efficiency conductor... plasma IS very effective as carrying electrical charge, as it's totally and completely dissociated (as compared to metals where you only have loosely-bound electrons carrying that charge, in plasma the positive and negative elements are totally unbound).

2) It's used to carry heat (which I think is your argument).

3) It's used as a form of wave-guide medium (similar to fiber-optics) to carry electromagnetic energy.

There is a fourth option, of course, which is the TRUE answer:

4) It's used to carry magical mystical "technobbablish energy."

Well, addressing the three forms of energy we actually understand... electromagnetic potential differences, electomagnetic radiation, and thermal energy... are the only places we can apply real science. So I'll ignore #4.

Well, the next thing to consider is how this could actually be used to DRIVE anything.

- Electromagnetic potential differences... ie, electricity... can be used to generate all variety of field effects. We know warp drive is a field-effect system, so this seems like the most likely approach.

- Electromagnetic radiation can be used to ... well, to illuminate stuff, sometimes in very esoteric ways (and perhaps a strong enough "beam" with a perfect enough focus could actually create a pseudo-singularity?) Usually, though, unless we want to scan something or burn something, we always need to convert E/M radiation into electrical energy prior to it being useful. And even scanning really requires a conversion from E/M into something else (say a chemical film as in an x-ray, or a video camera, just for example).

I'm at a loss how thermal energy... which is, really, just vibration... would be able to be used to create a field-effect propulsion field. Perhaps you have an idea?

Anyway, what you SHOULD have said is "energy, in the form of either electricity, E/M radiation, or heat, is provided to the nacelles. Plasma is NOT a form of energy, it is a form of MATTER.

Because you can not have two cores in the exact same place. One would have to be further from the nacelles than the other.

Really? So, are the two nacelles also in the exact same spot? Because by your argument, made just here, the nacelles cannot be the same distance from a single core.

Allowing for more heat to bleed off the system, ending in less useable energy reaching the nacelles.

ONLY if you assume (1) the warp engines run on heat, and (2) there is minimal insulation capacity in warp transfer conduit construction. (Which lead to my comment about vaporizing the whole crew, by the way).

Do you have ANY IDEA how much energy is generated by the annihilation of one gram (assume 0.5g of matter and 0.5g of antimatter in perfect annihilation).

Assuming a perfect annihilation, this gives you 8.98755E+13 joules of energy per gram of fuel annihilated.

Converting that into a term that you can understand a bit better, assuming you're in the US or someplace else where this is used, that gives you 2.496542e+7 kilowatt-hours.

24,965,420 kilowatt-hours per gram of reactant.

Now... I wasn't able to pull up, in short working order, a total power generation list for the USA, only for certain sectors. But as an example, all nuclear power plants in the USA put out a total YEARLY output of 674,000,000,000 kilowatt-hours (hydroelectric is a bit lower... about half as much... and everything else I found was listed in terms of fuel consumed and I didn't feel like doing the conversions!)

This translates to the equivalent of 26,997 grams of reactant... or just 27 KILOGRAMS... being able to match the total power output of the entire US nuclear power program. And that's 1/2 simple hydrogen, so we're talking about 13.5 kilograms of antimatter... a bit under 30 lbs.

Now, if that much energy was being transferred in the form of HEAT, and if even the most infinitesimal amount of that escaped into the ship's interior as lost heat, you'd be vaporizing the crew.

So you need to ensure that you have a condition where no reactant product heat can escape into the ship's interior. This would be done by the use of magnetic containment... preventing ANY physical contact between the superheated transfer medium and the containing conduits. No atmosphere, nothing. ZERO PHYSICAL CONTACT.

Anything else will simply kill the crew and melt the ship!

You've gotta take the SCALE of the thing into account... ya know?

If this system has heat, either as a desired method of energy transfer or as an undesired but unavoidable byproduct, you've got to isolate the hot material from everything, and establish PERFECT insulation.

In which case, a few extra meters of virtually-perfectly-insulated travel would be insignificant.

Also because you would essentially be using more WPS conduits you would see even more of a loss.

Not really. Sure, the shorter the length the better the efficiency, but the loss per meter of plasma transfer conduit would be infinitesimal compared to the power carried by them.

A bigger concern would be the amount of power required to run the isolation/containment field generators for the conduits. That might actually be MEASURABLE, though still insignificant compared to the power output of the system.

entropy[/url(“Entropy is a function of a quantity of heat which shows the possibility of conversion of that heat into work.”)

In this case my use of the word was dead on, because you have less heat in the form of WP to convert into work.

WIKI is not the best resource... it's a great place to start, but not the end-all/be-all of resources.

Entropy is simply the tendency of the universe to move from order to disorder. You see this as much in thermal situations (a hot spot on an object tends to dissipate to a more uniform elevated temperature throughout the object), certainly, but you also see it in what's called "brownian motion"... put some food color in a glass of water and it dissipates uniformly... going from being highly organized (a drop) to being highly disorganized.

That's entropy. And in thermodynamics (which every engineer has studied in depth, though mechanical guys like me focus on it to a ridiculous extent) this SOMETIMES means "energy which is considered lost." But it remains entropy even if the energy was never intended to be used.

Whoever wrote that article was evidently a combustion engineer, since the way he described it was typical for how internal combustion engine guys talk about this. In that case, you have mechanical energy (basically displacement of a piston) and you have waste heat.

But there is NOTHING associated with the real meaning of Q that relates in any way to mechanical work. It's just about the amount of energy that you lose and can't get back due to the tendency of the universe to move towards disorder.

And no they are would not be instantly vaporized. We all know that warp plasma is very hot. But due to effective re distribution methods in the WPS they are able to use a majority of that lost heat for other things.

We know that? You think that they channel the ship's coffee-maker past the warp plasma conduits?

The TRUTH is that we know NOTHING about this... because there is no such thing as a "warp plasma conduit" in real life. But trying to apply real science to it (as you were doing, and which I'm playing along with) means that the above statement really is nonsensical. Waste heat is waste heat. If you USE that energy for some purpose, it's not actually "waste heat" anymore, is it? It's a "tap" off of the main power out.

Of course, you ALWAYS have losses... that's what your reference to Q should have told you. And the change in entropy over time... delta-Q... is always positive. So the waste heat MUST be dissipated from the ship in some manner, or else the crew will be crispy-fried faster than you can snap your fingers.

But they can not put that heat back into the system that drives the ship. SO you are still looking at losses to the nacelles.

Demonstrate, please, how you believe that HEAT somehow is translated into field-effect energy at the warp nacelles? It's not a boiler running a turbine (which, for the record, is how modern nuclear and combustion-based naval vessels work). Or do you think that's what it's doing? I think it's quite clear that heat is either (1) wasted energy, or (2) must be converted into some other form through some process to become usable.

So the over all losses would be greater from multiple cores for the reasons stated above, and in my previous post.

I GET your point, perfectly well. But short of having the m/am reaction occur INSIDE THE WARP COILS, you'll always have this issue. And in every "treknology" example we've ever been given, the reactor is always a reasonable distance from the field generation hardware (in the case of the 1701-D, for instance, it's the better part of a kilometer away!)

 

[David Schmidt]

Wow. Makes you wish someone would write another Tech Manual (is there an Okuda in the house...?).
When working these things out for myself, I totally immerse myself in the Trek'verse, and reverse-engineer what we see/hear into policy and design doctrine.
Regarding multiple warp cores: I agree it would be handy to have a spare (such as Intrepid). Do I think all starships have an assembled/disassembled spare warp core? No, but certainly the long range vessels do. Do I think said spare warp core is online? I SURE AS HELL HOPE NOT.

As seen on various shows, severe shock/jolt to a ship from weaponry strikes can destabilize a warp core. If you do have a spare, you would want it offline - and preferably bubble-wrapped like Mom's best crystal. If you survive the engagement in which the primary core failed, then you would unwrap the spare, check it for damage, and then install it. I'm fairly sure that Intrepid's spare core was in a protective coccoon, and not able to simply power-up. They would have to have work bees transfer it to the warp core location.

Why wouldn't all ships have a spare? Mass. I'll admit I was brought up on classic science fiction (Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, etc.). Smaller ships - especially if they are intended to move fast - can't afford the mass penalty. And those warp cores may look small compared to the ship - but they are multiple decks tall, and the tritanium and transparent aluminum structure is probably the third most massive object in the ship (after warp coils and antimatter generator).

 

[ancient]

Couldn't the impulse reactors be considered a redundant power generator? They may or may not have enough juice to run the warp systems by themselves, but the ship certainly doesn't go totally dark the second the warp reactor shuts off.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

ancient said:Couldn't the impulse reactors be considered a redundant power generator? They may or may not have enough juice to run the warp systems by themselves, but the ship certainly doesn't go totally dark the second the warp reactor shuts off.

Oh, they DEFINITELY are a secondary power source.

We know this much:

1) The main power source for every Trek ship is matter/anti-matter anihilation.

2) TOS ships had a system called "Auxiliary power" (always assumed, but never truly established, to be the fusion reactors associated with the impulse drive).

3) TOS ships had batteries which stored power for short-term backup in case of main power failure.

4) TNG-era ships DEFINITELY have fusion-based reactors at the impulse engines.

And as I was pointing out, above, as long as you're not trying to warp the fabric of space/time, the power output from a fusion reactor (aka a "hydrogen bomb on a leash!") will put out enough power to do pretty much whatever you need to do. So yeah, you're absolutely right. (And, in-universe, were it not so, Starfleet would have all died in space accidents long ago and everyone in the Federation would now be speaking Klingon!)

There's one other issue I'm not going to address because there's NO science to support it in any way. That's deflectors and shields. How much power goes into those systems? Can the fusion reactors power THEM sufficiently in a combat situation, along with everything else? No way to say... since they are, effectively, "magic."

So the REAL issue is with FTL maneuvering. Now, we know that at the outset of TNG, it was attempted to "redefine" things so that all combat would occur at sublight... phasers wouldn't operate at FTL, etc, etc... only torpedos could even be used. Eventually, they slyly dumped that... and it's a good thing, too, IMHO.

So let's talk about warp-speed travel, and warp-speed combat, as the main issues. Fair?

In warp-speed travel... ie, PEACEABLE movement... if the m/am reactor goes down in a way that can be repaired in the field, you mainly lose transit time. An inconvenience (especially if you're carrying medical supplies that will save gazillions of lives among the Leather Goddesses of Phobos or something) but not something that's gonna kill the crew and destroy the ship.

If it goes down in a way that CAN'T be repaired in the field, you're stranded... and have no choice but to call the Intergalactic AAA to come give you a tow.

Now, if you're in a critical situation (combat, say, or trying to escape from a Genesis wave or a trilithium-based supernova) and your main reactor isn't working... you're in trouble. You either power it up and take the risk, or you shut it down and play "sitting duck" with your far more powerful and more maneuverable enemy or just watch the pretty Genesis wave comin' right at ya.

This is why having a distributed system makes more sense. If your total "warp power" load comes from, say, four smaller cores instead of one big "all-encompassing" core, and if one core is damaged or breaks down, you don't have to risk leaving it operational. You can SAFELY SHUT IT DOWN and still function with 3/4 of the total reactor power you'd normally have available.

And since, as was pointed out by another poster, above, most US Navy ships make sure that each reactor can put out the "nominal" requirement that the ship is supposed to "normally" need. So you'd still have PLENTY of combat power and manuevering power... just a little less headroom. Maybe you'd have to boost the output of these to their rated values (causing their individual lifespans to start decreasing) in those situations, instead of running them at a small fraction of their rated output (which would be the NORMAL situation).

Distributed systems are always better. The main reason you don't have them everyplace is that distributed systems are also more complex, as a general rule. Tuning four reactors to work "in sync" might be more difficult than just one. But c'mon... in the TNG-era, it's hard to believe that you'd have a hard time maintaining THAT if you can do all the other magical stuff that they do.

 

[ancient]

Now there's no way of knowing for sure, but the design of the Ent-E warp core and the Defiant warp core both seem to have multiple parallel glowy shafts running to their dilithium chambers. It's possible that there are an equal number of crystals stored at that hub and they can all act independently.

Of course, they're clearly all right next to eachother and in INS Geordi ejects them all at once, but it's possible that the ENT-E/Defiant cores are actually made up of smaller cores.

 

[Captain Robert April]

A primo example of how the ship performs on the fusion reactors versus the warp core, I offer up "Elaan of Troyius". With the matter/antimatter reactor out of commission, shield power couldn't be maintained as long or as high, and all she could do was, to quote Scotty, "wallow around like a garbage scow against a warp driven starship." Then, after the improvized repairs had been completed, Kirk held back on bringing the core back online, lest the Klingons detect the increase in power output and realize that the sabotage had been countered.

As I've said before, the technical references that point toward an internal M/ARC, they're very specific, whereas the nacelle references are kinda vague and sometimes contradict themselves.