D'Deridex Turbolift System

[Praetor]

^That's an interesting theory.

Myself, I'd have liked to see smaller ships riding with the D'Deridex inside the chasm - sort of "piggybacking."

 

[Abercrombie]

Maybe they have closed circuit transporters like on Stargate Atlantis. Just step into the turbo/transporter, select your destination, <transport> step out of a different turbo/transporter near your destination.

 

[James Wright]

There appeared to be two cargo bays located in the bow of the lower hull, does anybody know where the shuttlebay is located?

James

 

[JNG]

I don't, but I bet there is more than one (Enterprise-D had three and the warbird is something like six times her size), and/or that those cargo bays serve that purpose also. They aren't exactly hurting for space. I like the inside belly of the lower hull or the back of the head as candidate locations as well.

 

[Praetor]

I think those two panels are on its "shoulders" are supposed to be shuttlebays but I'm still waiting on a clarification on that. From what Mr. Probert told me, those lower cargo bays are also TMP-style combo shuttle/cargo bays.

Have a look at these.

 

[James Wright]

Thank for posting the link Praetor, the pictures are impressive!

James

 

[JNG]

I am super curious about the two structures with three "doors" (or something possibly resembling doors) that I have marked with dorky red arrows in the following picture:

How big do those scale out to be? Are they, as I suspect, big enough to allow small craft in or out? They may be something completely different like matter intakes, but I wondered this because another set appears adjoining the cargo bays.

Wonder if Mr. Probert had anything in particular in mind for them.

 

[Praetor]

I was wondering that myself. I was thinking some kind or matter intake or sensor array. Hopefully when Mr. Probert gets back to me, we'll know.

 

[Santaman]

Hmm, they could also be torpedo launchers...

 

[Praetor]

This is true.

 

[noknowes]

Well, Mr. Probert wanted to maintain line of sight between the warp nacelles, so that's why the unusual double-hull feature is on the model (and distinctiveness is always good). The Romulan version of warp drive might derive significant advantages from this, or perhaps the large size would make it a bad idea not to do this.

It is also possible that there is some way to sling cargo modules or something along the hulls, making use of the space between them. This would illustrate the value of the huge size as well; you could probably haul enough at a time to get a listening post or small colony set up!

And while it could be all of these, my favorite idea about the double hull is that it has something to do with optimal cloaking function. Wouldn't it be interesting if the cloaking field had multiple lobes like a warp field and somehow redirected signals so they passed through the "clean" space at the center of the ship instead of always having to bend them all the way around the outside of a spherical or oblong field? I can imagine the advantages of this.

I wish we'd gotten to see one of these on the big screen.

It would have been great to see it on the big screen.

The reason fr the space between the hulls is the quantum singularity safety and power aspect aspect.Interstellar gas falls into or impinges upon the singularity and this power is sucked off.

The singularity occupies the space between the 2 hulls.

 

[Myasishchev]

I remember when I was watching Generations in the theater, they were talking about the Romulan source of the trilithium, and I was like, Sweet! Romulans are gonna be in the movie.

Instead I got the Duras sisters. Stupid Generations.

 

[General_Phoenix]

I remember when I was watching Generations in the theater, they were talking about the Romulan source of the trilithium, and I was like, Sweet! Romulans are gonna be in the movie.

Instead I got the Duras sisters. Stupid Generations.

Yeah, and a D'Deridex taking out the Enterprise-D would have been easier to stomach.

 

[Birdog]

Well, Mr. Probert wanted to maintain line of sight between the warp nacelles, so that's why the unusual double-hull feature is on the model (and distinctiveness is always good). The Romulan version of warp drive might derive significant advantages from this, or perhaps the large size would make it a bad idea not to do this.

It is also possible that there is some way to sling cargo modules or something along the hulls, making use of the space between them. This would illustrate the value of the huge size as well; you could probably haul enough at a time to get a listening post or small colony set up!

And while it could be all of these, my favorite idea about the double hull is that it has something to do with optimal cloaking function. Wouldn't it be interesting if the cloaking field had multiple lobes like a warp field and somehow redirected signals so they passed through the "clean" space at the center of the ship instead of always having to bend them all the way around the outside of a spherical or oblong field? I can imagine the advantages of this.

I wish we'd gotten to see one of these on the big screen.

It would have been great to see it on the big screen.

The reason fr the space between the hulls is the quantum singularity safety and power aspect aspect.Interstellar gas falls into or impinges upon the singularity and this power is sucked off.

The singularity occupies the space between the 2 hulls.

The episode of TNG that has the warbird and the "D" frozen in time showed that singularity is in a chamber in the engine room. I always assumed that the engine room is located in the tail.

 

[JNG]

^Yes, I think "The Next Phase" showed a similar setup, and if I remember correctly, its script specified that the Romulan engineering facility should reflect very different principles than that on Enterprise-D.

One note about the launching bay discussion: I happened to be watching "Improbable Cause" last night, and Tain specifies that the runabout is in the Warbird's "Launching Bay 3." So, probably to no one's great surprise, there are at least three on there.

 

[Praetor]

Wasn't there a reference suggesting the engine room was in the "head" in "Timescape"? I'm not fond of that idea and would be happy to ignore it.

Mr. P said he thought originally that the upper and lower hulls would split engineering upper and cargo/support lower, and that the warbird would probably have a horizontal type core along the spine. We now know that to be a singularity core.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Wasn't there a reference suggesting the engine room was in the "head" in "Timescape"? I'm not fond of that idea and would be happy to ignore it.

Mr. P said he thought originally that the upper and lower hulls would split engineering upper and cargo/support lower, and that the warbird would probably have a horizontal type core along the spine. We now know that to be a singularity core.

Well, there's some room for interpretation there...

Is the power generation through a singularity? (If so, I'd be curious to hear anyone's explanation for how a "sink" can actually generate usable energy.)

Or, is the propulsion, not the power generation, through a singularity? This makes a fair bit more sense, and isn't (colloquially) incompatible with someone saying that the ship is "powered by" a singularity... sort of like how old-style vessels were "powered" by sails.

I'm hard-pressed to understand how something that swallows everything... including light... somehow generates power, and simultaneously doesn't swallow up the ship. Having an artificial singularity projected forward of the ship, on the other hand, would be a remarkably efficient method of sublight drive (if you were able to project such a point)... and is fairly compatible with the methodology proposed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre (google him!). It even "sorta" hints at why the "warbird" might have a structure something along the lines of a ring...

 

[Praetor]

^Good points, all. I don't really have any specific answers. The Romulans seem to have ordinary warp drive, and it seems to be the singularity itself that is unique. Wasn't there some speculation on here once that gamma rays spat off by a black hole might be convertible for power?

 

[JNG]

Wasn't there a reference suggesting the engine room was in the "head" in "Timescape"? I'm not fond of that idea and would be happy to ignore it.

Mr. P said he thought originally that the upper and lower hulls would split engineering upper and cargo/support lower, and that the warbird would probably have a horizontal type core along the spine. We now know that to be a singularity core.

Well, there's some room for interpretation there...

Is the power generation through a singularity? (If so, I'd be curious to hear anyone's explanation for how a "sink" can actually generate usable energy.)

Or, is the propulsion, not the power generation, through a singularity? This makes a fair bit more sense, and isn't (colloquially) incompatible with someone saying that the ship is "powered by" a singularity... sort of like how old-style vessels were "powered" by sails.

I'm hard-pressed to understand how something that swallows everything... including light... somehow generates power, and simultaneously doesn't swallow up the ship. Having an artificial singularity projected forward of the ship, on the other hand, would be a remarkably efficient method of sublight drive (if you were able to project such a point)... and is fairly compatible with the methodology proposed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre (google him!). It even "sorta" hints at why the "warbird" might have a structure something along the lines of a ring...

The Voyager Technical Guide for Writers mentions harnessing x-ray emissions of the captive singularity, while Mr. Sternbach's article on Romulan propulsion methods gives a more detailed description: a fuel such as cryogenic deuterium, helium-3 or carbon-60 (and these were just the preferred fuels...I figure you'd have a lot of options and that's probably an advantage of the system) is fired into the singularity in three streams tangential to the "equator" and energy is harnessed from the acceleration and compression of the matter to near-infinite density. The article has it as a little tiny singularity, 275,000 metric tons, held in check by "both magnetic and gravitic fields."

I like that it is alien, potentially quite dangerous, but might allow easier fuel availability for a people sometimes suggested to be resource-poor compared to the other major powers in Trek. Ron Moore described the Romulan system as a "cantankerous" drive, so I get the feeling that it probably requires a lot more nursemaiding than the M/A warp drives of Our Heroes (which, of course, use the Northstar system).

 

[Myasishchev]

^Good points, all. I don't really have any specific answers. The Romulans seem to have ordinary warp drive, and it seems to be the singularity itself that is unique. Wasn't there some speculation on here once that gamma rays spat off by a black hole might be convertible for power?

I said once that it may evaporate through the Bekenstein-Hawking mechanism, providing energy that way.

According to a neat Hawking radiation calculator, if the 275,000 ton figure is what we're going by, a singularity of that size would last "in the wild" 1.7 billion seconds (around ~54 years), and its Hawking luminosity would be a bit more than 4.7 quadrillion watts () and rising.

That initially seems a little excessive, but it might not be.

Alternatively, a (much) more massive (and hence more stable) singularity could be used less exotically as an power source by funneling an arbitrarily high amount of hydrogen toward it. I think, without doing any actual research , that the gravitational energy released prior to crossing the even horizon, as X (and gamma?) photons, would be roughly commensurate with the quantities (assume for the moment >1g/s) of antiparticles converted into gammas in a Starfleet matter-antimatter annihilation reactor. Remember that each gram of matter, either regular or anti, contains 89.9 petajoules (quadrillion joules) of energy.

Interestingly, if we assume it's more like 1 kilogram per second at maximum output, the power in watts is closer to that released by a 275,000 ton singularity but still much higher (~90 petajoules per second, or 90 petawatts). We would probably want them to be rather close, so we can actually calculate within rough boundaries the fuel expenditure of a starship using the 275,000 ton figure. 100 grams per second yields 9 petajoules, comfortably superior in output to the Romulan B-type warbird and perhaps the reason why the Galaxy-class is remarked to be faster than our beloved D'D, since we can probably assume "more power" = "higher warp factor."

But can we always, independent of other variables? Warp factor may be dependent on the amount of mass in the system one is attempting to accelerate by a warp field. Yet, we don't know which way this relationship goes--it may actually be that the vast weight of the singularity drive is marginally useful, if we assume, as we probably shoul, that warp is gravitational in origin, since it generates its own gravity directly instead of through the intermediary of warp coils. (I say marginally, and I mean very marginally, because the gravity of 275,000 tons is practically nil--but the point is it wouldn't cause a drag. In the gas-acceleration method of pulling energy from a black hole, however, the black hole might be so massive as to be integral to the warp field itself!)

At any rate, we have to acknowledge also that in either iteration, the singularity core is by far the least efficient per gram means of mass-energy conversion of the three options presented in the Trek universe, the other two being fusion and annihilation reactors, making up for this lack of efficiency by simply being rather large.

A few interesting questions and inferences can be made regarding the singularity core:

Where do they come from? Miniature black holes might have been formed in the early universe and just chilled since but they probably aren't that common. Artificially creating black holes of sufficient mass to be stable energy sources seems like it would require more energy than they would be worth. I wonder if stellar black holes could be forcibly separated using the 24C's mastery of gravity. It would paint the Narada in a whole new light, mining black holes instead of asteroids!

It's still an open issue as to why antimatter isn't used instead. The Federation must produce antimatter somewhere, likely using X-ray binaries as sources of radiation to power particle accelerators, very likely at a highly inefficient rate. The Romulans may have isolated black holes, not black holes with nearby stars to suck the mass out of, in order to produce the intense radiation needed to power a solar collector-particle collider.

If this is the case, what does the Romulan civilian energy regime look like? Surely they aren't powering Romulus through black hole evaporation. Might the poor mass of Romulans be relegated to fusion? This might mean no replicators, no holodecks, nothing that the average Federation citizen takes for granted in his or her cushy antimatter energy regime.

Finally, if your power source is a black hole, why do you have dilithium mines on Remus? This is strong evidence toward my theory that dilithium is a mirror, in this case used to contain the Hawking radiation (or, alternatively, the Casimir radiation from accelerated gas) emitted by a black hole. Dilithium is not, per the TNGTM, a magical antimatter channeling device.