Bussard Collectors

[Bill Morris]

Here are Rick Sternbach's comments from March 31 in the now-closed thread about use of Bussard collectors in the first warp flight of Zephram Chochrane's Phoenix:

Couple of things - I don't believe the Bussard collectors were necessary as collectors on this sort of early flight. However, the primitive ionizing beams and mag fields projected by the Bussard units would have been critical to debris removal in Phoenix's flight path. Also, for early warp engines, dilithium would not be necessary to do a proof-of-concept flight. Deuterium and antideuterium could still provide hot plasma in the engine system, just not super-tuned. It's the space-warping qualities of the nacelle coil alloys that's the key thing. Meteoric materials, lab-grown verterium cortenide or its nearest equivalent in the higher atomic numbers could achieve FTL. The refinements came in time.

Rick

This suggests that they may do some of the work of deflectors in warp flight.

 

[Timo]

...Or indeed all the work, on those ships that lack big glowing deflector dishes.

Indeed, Kirk's ship first has glowing red domes on the nacelles but none on the hull, and then has a glowing dome on the hull but none on the nacelles. (But then we get Terrell's ship which has neither!)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cary L. Brown]

^Excellent thoughts. I suppose we could also imagine that perhaps the bussard collectors have some other role in the nacelles other than supplying fuel used to develop a warp field. When you look at engine compartments in various machines, there will be mechanisms in there that serve purposes that don't relate directly to propulsion such as heating, cooling, or power generation. We could postulate the gallactic particulate picked up by the bussard collectors or a process created with their collection serves a purpose in the nacelles other than warp field generation.

Well, you may know that I've spent a lot of time working out the "innards" of the TOS warp nacelle (my own version, based generally on some images seen in TAS, and with some other assumptions added in as well... ie, not "official canon").

I decided that the "red swirly thing" isn't actually where the hydrogen is scooped into the nacelle at all. The intake is the black ring, aft of those hemispheres.

Remember that Matt Jefferies was an aerospace guy... and he was thinking in aerospace terms as he did his work. Basically, the Enterprise wasn't a rocket ship, and the engines weren't rocket engines... they were "jet engine" analogs.

So... the nacelles were the source of power for the ship, as well as propulsion. Because that's how it works in jet aircraft. (Look at any large jetliner... the engines are in nacelles, hung from the wings, or in the tail section in some cases.) A generator is attached to the gearbox of each jet engine, which produces raw (unusable) power. A hydraulic pump is also present on the gearbox, typically. There is an "engineering bay" somewhere on the aircraft where the raw electrical power and unmanaged hydraulic pressure are converted into controlled, useful energy to power the onboard systems.

My approach sort of merges the "Franz Joseph" idea with this element of Matt Jefferies' design philosophy... the "red dome" is basically a space/time "jet intake" and the white dome at the aft is basically a space/time "jet exhaust." FJ called these the "acquisition sink" and "restoration..." well "restoration something," I can't recall it offhand right now.

I just think that the "space/time acquisition sink" acts as a big gravity well... but projecting gravity in a conical region ahead of the ship, not omni-directionally. The "side effect" of this is that matter is drawn into the path of the ship, towards the nacelle front centerlines.

Large objects get pushed out of this region by pulses from the navigational deflector. Small particles ("sand") bounce off the forward shields, which are tuned to permit only hydrogen to pass through.

The hydrogen is drawn by this gravity into front center of the nacelle. But it cannot enter the nacelle there, so it sloughs off and is captured by the black "scoop ring" aft of the space/time acquisition sink.

SO... this is part of the "bussard hydrogen harvesting subsystem" but is also part of the "warp drive propulsion system" as well.

 

[MatthiasRussell]

^ As an aerospace engineer myself, this makes sense to me for the same reason. The jet engine comparrison is an apt one and make much more sense than the rocket engine comparison. It is an interesting idea that the domes are part of the warping process but this does go against the fictional documentation on nacelles. Jefferies did clearly have a different idea than the later TNG designers did and having an aerospace background as opposed to an artistry background, his concepts make more sense to me.

 

[MatthiasRussell]

...Or indeed all the work, on those ships that lack big glowing deflector dishes.

Indeed, Kirk's ship first has glowing red domes on the nacelles but none on the hull, and then has a glowing dome on the hull but none on the nacelles. (But then we get Terrell's ship which has neither!)

Indeed. This could explain ships like Mirandas with low frontal profiles not having a deflector.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

...Or indeed all the work, on those ships that lack big glowing deflector dishes.

Indeed, Kirk's ship first has glowing red domes on the nacelles but none on the hull, and then has a glowing dome on the hull but none on the nacelles. (But then we get Terrell's ship which has neither!)

Indeed. This could explain ships like Mirandas with low frontal profiles not having a deflector.

I've always sort of assumed that the need for a "deflector beam" is based upon how far you're expected to be from a base, and how fast you're expected to go for extended periods of time.

Every ship will have basic ("anti-sand and dust") shields... including a "reliant" type ship. Every Fed ship with warp nacelles will draw in matter with those, and filter it out with the shields. And every ship can maneuver, or use weapons, to deal with larger obstacles and objects.

It's mainly in the case of the long-range ships, which may be well beyond the frontier without hope of support, where efficiency becomes that much more crucial.

I think it's probably more efficient to fly in a straight line, and push junk out of your way with a deflector beam, than it is to steer around the junk, or to blast it to dust with your weapons systems. But, of course, the added mass of the deflector beam system has an adverse effect on maneuverability, and cost, for that matter.

As time went on, the need for these devices became more commonly accepted, but even in post-TNG-era times, not every ship design receives a deflector beam. Just more of them...

 

[Albertus]

It has been my understanding from watching the shows and reading the Tech manuals that the Bussard collectors are not used routinely to collect hydrogen gas. The collectors appear to be used only if the ship is running low on its liquified stores.

Or in an emergency, can be used to uptake other gasses - such as Metrion gas - as seen in ST:Insurrection.

The fact that other classes of ship do not seem to have Bussard collectors suggests that they are either not required (because they seldom travel beyond their point of no return and thus need no emergency replenishment system) or are configured within the hull in such a way as to appear absent.

The red, nacelle cap look of the Collectors is entirely an ongoing product of the original 1701 design.

And again, according to the Tech manual (and never mentioned or seen on screen, to my knowledge) the anti-matter spin reversal generator on deck 42 of the 1701-D is supposed to be used only in an emergency as the power consumption to anti-matter production ratio is so high as to be non-viable as a steady source of that material.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

It has been my understanding from watching the shows and reading the Tech manuals that the Bussard collectors are not used routinely to collect hydrogen gas. The collectors appear to be used only if the ship is running low on its liquified stores.

Or in an emergency, can be used to uptake other gasses - such as Metrion gas - as seen in ST:Insurrection.

The fact that other classes of ship do not seem to have Bussard collectors suggests that they are either not required (because they seldom travel beyond their point of no return and thus need no emergency replenishment system) or are configured within the hull in such a way as to appear absent.

The red, nacelle cap look of the Collectors is entirely an ongoing product of the original 1701 design.

And again, according to the Tech manual (and never mentioned or seen on screen, to my knowledge) the anti-matter spin reversal generator on deck 42 of the 1701-D is supposed to be used only in an emergency as the power consumption to anti-matter production ratio is so high as to be non-viable as a steady source of that material.

Yeah, the problem with that, though, is that the amount of energy which can be generated from stored hydrogen and antimatter stores would be dramatically insufficient to provide the amount of power that these same sources claim is required to do the job.

We actually did the math a couple of years ago... in this forum... about just how much annihilation mass would be required to produce the sort of energy that's called for. The numbers just don't work...

The ship really does need to be perpetually "harvesting" as it flies... or else it will be at a dead stop pretty rapidly. The tankage is only sufficient for getting the ship out of a "lean" area of space.

 

[blssdwlf]

There was an interesting hypothetical discussion in the Star Trek Original Series forum a while back where for TOS the power generation (or regeneration) was a bit like energy+dilithium = stored power+more antimatter from another dimension (like zero point energy). I think it was in TNG where the idea that the primary power came from matter+antimatter and the role of dilithium changed from storing/giving magical power to regulating antimatter reaction into warp plasma.

(I don't think it has ever been mentioned in TOS that the 1701's red caps are bussard collectors. Then again, I don't even recall the gold dish in front of the secondary hull labeled as a navigational deflector until after the series ended.)

 

[Timo]

The thing is, we know how much energy one can get out of fusing a set amount of hydrogen or deuterium. But we don't know how much energy one needs to operate a warp drive, because that technology is fictional and based on fictional laws of nature; for all we know, once one learns the trick, warp drive can be fired up with the power cell of a mobile phone. Nothing in the rules against that. (Although the drama works best if warp drive consumes quite a bit more than that...)

We can take a stab at another fictional technology, the mechanism by which Starfleet flips matter into antimatter according to the TNG TM. The book claims that the energy content of ten units of deuterium flips one unit into antideuterium, which is a wonderfully advantageous ratio and should make antimatter dirt cheap.

But the book doesn't quite specify what sort of "energy content" is being discussed; it probably isn't what one gets out of fusing ten units of deuterium. If it means annihilating ten units to produce one anti-unit, then the process is indeed quite expensive, as it will take a lot of fusing to match the energies available from annihilating... (Or then it takes five or ten anti-units to annihilate the deuterium and produce the one anti-unit, which of course isn't the pinnacle of practicability.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I found a few items in my own files which were part of that old conversation... I thought I might share them here, in case anyone's interested.

These basically spell out just how much theoretical energy can be created from 100% efficient annihilation of the mass captured by a bussard collector system at various speeds.

This does not take into account the "energy cost" to "flip" matter into antimatter, or the energy cost to propel a starship at a given velocity, or any other energy cost for that matter. It ONLY considers the question "how much mass can you collect" and "how much energy would that translate into?"

But it's an interesting starting point for the conversation, isn't it?

(FYI, "min" and "max" always refer to the free hydrogen density... thus why "min" is sometimes the larger number... just wanted to clear that up!)

Shot at 2009-07-24

Several lines below are "corrections" of what you see, above... due to a decimal-point-location error in the equation I'd used.

Shot at 2009-07-25

 

[Ronald Held]

I vaguely remember it took 8 atoms of D to make anti-D. Perhaps this came from the TNG technical manual?