Can a Shuttle tow a Starship? Effects of mass in a vacuum

[Christopher]

^^But gravity is an extremely weak force, and a large body still possesses considerable inertia. A subspace field to reduce the mass of the tractored object would make it easier for a coherent graviton beam to accelerate.

I RL you'd be right. However, deck plates thoughout a ship provide 'artificial gravity' supposedly though graviton manipulation, and they can provide 1 g (and much higher, if IAMD is any indication).

Even so, if there's a means to reduce the amount of energy you need to exert to tow a starship, why not use it? If the means to reduce a ship's inertial mass exists, then it would obviously make tractors more energy-efficient if you could include that function (assuming it took less power than the raw towing would).

 

[Cary L. Brown]

I was just thinking about this and know very little about it but like the small Tugs that we have today that can tow massive Liners across the water (?), where these tugs are realtivley the size of a shuttle copmpared to a Starship I was wondering if it was possible to tow a Starship using a Shuttle even if the ship was running with minimum power and engines at thrusters only?

I think we have seen Tugs in Star Trek particularly the battle scenes in DS9 but I think these Tugs were like 2 or 3 times the size of a shuttle but I think it'd be intersting to see if a shuttle could just as well do the same job and if there would be a size limit on what it could pull, like, say, a Dominion Battlecruiser sized ship?

Two totally different answers, depending on the situation.

ANY ship with a conventional Newtonian thrust-based propulsion system can tow any other ship in sublight, real-space/time situations. Since the towing ship is smaller, the available thrust is consequently smaller too, so the acceleration will be quite low. The means of towing (tractor beam, etc) needs to be able to handle the force resulting from the thrust load as well. But sure, it'll work. It'll just result in very slow accelerations and decelerations.

In warp, the answer is different. We know that a ship needs to "expand its warp field" to encompass any other object it's carrying along with itself at warp... both objects need to be within the field generated by the "towing" vessel. There's also a limit to how large, or small for that matter, any "warp field" can be. A big Galaxy-class can expand its field to a fairly large size... a runabout, by comparison, won't be able to generate a field anywhere nearly as large (or rather, not without the field becoming unstable and collapsing). It takes a lot of energy, and a system capable of manipulating that energy to create the appropriate space/time effects, in order to generate any given "warp field."

So... I'd say that as a rule, a shuttle won't be able to tow a totally disabled starship at FTL speeds. It may be able to tow a ship capable of generating a subspace field (but not a WARP field)... but that's another can of worms (though it's one I seem to keep getting pulling into opening).

 

[Cary L. Brown]

...but later on, particularly on VGR, we routinely had engineers working on dangerous devices just a couple of meters away from the warp core.)

I was particularly amused by a TNG ep that had Geordi and Data testing a phaser rifle by firing it at an energy trap that was directly aligned with the warp core.

Shirly they could have whipped together a firing range set.

I actually managed to figure out why that might be the case (albeit through massive mental gymnastics).

The core is always under energetic conditions that make a mere phaser beam seem inconsequential by comparison. Seems to me that in order to be able to handle the entire power generation of the ship in one little "node," it's gotta be so heavily shielded that no hand weapon could even scratch the paint.

So maybe that's the only place to test the rifle where you don't have to worry about what happens if you miss?

Like I said... "mental gymnastics"... but it was enough to avoid totally dropping me out of my ability to suspend disbelief (which, sadly, happened quite often on TNG).

 

[Guartho]

Yeah, I tend to think of that one as firing a BB at an engine block. But, then there are the episodes where someone points a phaser at the warp core and goes all "neener neener neener, I'll kill us all."

 

[Christopher]

The core is always under energetic conditions that make a mere phaser beam seem inconsequential by comparison. Seems to me that in order to be able to handle the entire power generation of the ship in one little "node," it's gotta be so heavily shielded that no hand weapon could even scratch the paint.

So maybe that's the only place to test the rifle where you don't have to worry about what happens if you miss?

That's a very good idea, except it doesn't explain how Korris in "Heart of Glory" was able to pose a threat by aiming his disruptor at the warp core. (Although technically he was aiming it at the injector shaft rather than the actual reactor, since the director thought it would be cooler to have him up high so he could fall down a few stories, never mind that it directly contradicted the spoken dialogue.)

 

[Cary L. Brown]

The core is always under energetic conditions that make a mere phaser beam seem inconsequential by comparison. Seems to me that in order to be able to handle the entire power generation of the ship in one little "node," it's gotta be so heavily shielded that no hand weapon could even scratch the paint.

So maybe that's the only place to test the rifle where you don't have to worry about what happens if you miss?

That's a very good idea, except it doesn't explain how Korris in "Heart of Glory" was able to pose a threat by aiming his disruptor at the warp core. (Although technically he was aiming it at the injector shaft rather than the actual reactor, since the director thought it would be cooler to have him up high so he could fall down a few stories, never mind that it directly contradicted the spoken dialogue.)

Well, all we REALLY know is that Korris THOUGHT he was threatening the ship.

But maybe... just MAYBE... it wasn't as big of a risk as he was making it out to be.

After all... Picard didn't see any reason to try to separate the ship or eject the core or whatever, did he?

(Watching my neurons doing backflips!)

 

[Timo]

I rather doubt anything Picard could have done would have been quicker than Korris' reflexes...

Anyway, there were instances where VOY heroes and villains resorted to pointing a hand phaser at that ship's vertical warp power thingamabob, too, and people around them were scared stiff.

One might speculate, on the lines of Cary's backflips, that LaForge and Data set up containment forcefields before starting their experiment. After all, this location has been shown to be well equipped for producing forcefields - Wesley's warp bubble is projected in there, too. And the internal security/safety fields in this room might be better than anywhere else.

Also, while that location looks like a monitoring station, it could just as well be primarily intended as a workshop. There are monitors galore in the area closer to the reactor, after all. The spacious room here could have been designed from the start for heavy repairs on major warp core components, and thus lavishly equipped with field projectors, tractor beam manipulators, analysis devices and whatnot.

Timo Saloniemi