D'Deridex Turbolift System
- Thread starter James Wright
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Something like an accretion disk of swirling deuterium falling into the singularity; at both Y-axis of the disk you get a polar jet (as in a natural black hole) spitting out high energy radiation and plasma at close to the speed of light. Add a couple of dilithium assemblies in the path of these jets and you can probably generate warp plasma.
This is in line with my pet theory (articulated in a fanfic or two) that the Romulans, for some political and/or technical reasons, have never used antimatter for power generation and therefore use different means to get the same effect.
They're artificial. At a guess, I'd say they're probably produced using red matter, a Romulan trademark. Considering the artificial black holes in NuTrek didn't last very long, they probably need a fairly large amount of it to create a stable mini-singularity, plus some kind of antigrav containment vessel to keep it contained.
Romulus is a military dictatorship with a fascist government. A quantity of antimatter small enough to fit in a tylenol packs enough energy to demolish entire buildings. No matter how good Romulan security is, a resourceful enough agent could suicide bomb the entire senate in a power grab. So it's probably a given that antimatter is on the list of STRICTLY prohibited substances in the Empire.
There may also be technical reasons. We know that DS9, for example, uses fusion reactors, and probably so do most space stations and civilian vessels that don't use warp drive. I would venture that antimatter is a very inefficient power source for anything other than a warp engine, so the inclusion of an antimatter generator on ships like the Enterprise-D may have freed up valuable economic resources for the harvesting of deterium and dilithium and other materials useful in non-propulsive technologies; antimatter refinement would be a niche industry that is difficult to justify economically. If the Romulan Empire has cash-flow problems, they may not be able to AFFORD the refineries in the first place.
Probably. Just like everyone else in the universe.
DS9 has all these things, why should the Romulans have to do without?
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.
{snip}
I had a feeling it was you, Mr. Wizard. This is meant as a compliment: your posts simultaneously make me feel ten times smarter and ten times dumber.
Now that's interesting. It also casts that line in the writers' explanation of why
the Enterprise had to fire on the Narada to make sure it was destroyed because the Narada was "designed to travel through black holes."
Red matter. Brilliant.
I like both of those explanations.
^If I'd done the computation myself instead of using a java calculator, I'd feel smarter. 
Unfortunately, I haven't had the gumption to independently verify the derivations. The Hawking radiation calculator can be found at http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/ . Make sure to hit return after changing one of the variables.
I'm not a big fan of red matter because of its extreme handwavium-type properties (if it was just a captured strangelet, I could at least let it go for being neat ). But from an in-universe perspective, red matter also seems to be a Federation invention which the Romulans--Nero notwithstanding--did not have access to, particularly during the critical days/months/whatever it took for the Hobus superluminal supernova (
) to reach Romulus.
And at any rate, making a truly artificial singularity is going to be a tremendously inefficient process. I don't even know how you'd go about it. You can create black holes with particle colliders, but a 275,000 ton one? Or even a 10,000 ton one? (Burns at 3.5 exawatts and rising, and lasts 84,000 seconds, i.e., less than a month.) Remember how weak gravity is. Only vast masses can overcome the electromagnetic effects and degeneracy pressures.
However, even if antimatter is a heavily restricted substance in the Empire, as I believe you're right in asserting, it still doesn't explain why their military would not use it, when it's shown as being more effective and less "cantankerous" than the singularity drive. Heck, almost as often as not, the D'Ds we see in Trek are suffering from major equipment failure, stopping time, pulling Irishmen through time, falling through time, basically the singularity drive should not be used in an environment with time. All the annihilator reactors do when they fail is blow up. Except that one time, in AGT, and that other time, in Cause and Effect... well, I still can say that's demonstrably not an effect of the mass-energy conversion.
At the least, you'd think they'd use antimatter for their torpedoes--but they don't, they use continue to use plasma (thermonuclear?) torpedoes. At least they do until NEM, when they seem to swtich to pho-torps. Possibly as a result of occupying the Cardassian antimatter energy infrastructure?
The other thing about an annihilator reactor is that you can turn it off. You can never turn off a singularity drive. It will keep spitting out radiation until it evaporates. It will get increasingly hot, until finally it will explode. No 100-year life cycles for the Romulan ships. Whereas the Feds' Mirandas and Excelsiors keep going strong.
Oh, this reminds me, the singularity drive may be the reason the D'D has no impulse drive system. The mass of the singularity probably makes Newtonian propulsion ridiculously impractical--although I wonder how much more impractical than the clearly much-heavier-than-they-say Fed starships.
Also, I'm not sure antimatter batteries were never installed. Although I'm a big defender of fusion-run warp drive (Zef Cochrane did not have a particle collider in his back yard, or a dilithium mine, and the Rom BoP's maximum, emptied-tanks speed was not one billionth of the Enterprise's), it stretches credibility to think that fusion could run replicators, transporters, weapons, shields, holodecks, and so forth.
I go on about this, I realize, but the economics of Star Trek fascinate me at least as much as the science and technology.
Unfortunately, I haven't had the gumption to independently verify the derivations. The Hawking radiation calculator can be found at http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/ . Make sure to hit return after changing one of the variables.newtype_alpha said:
I'm not a big fan of red matter because of its extreme handwavium-type properties (if it was just a captured strangelet, I could at least let it go for being neat
). But from an in-universe perspective, red matter also seems to be a Federation invention which the Romulans--Nero notwithstanding--did not have access to, particularly during the critical days/months/whatever it took for the Hobus superluminal supernova () to reach Romulus.And at any rate, making a truly artificial singularity is going to be a tremendously inefficient process. I don't even know how you'd go about it. You can create black holes with particle colliders, but a 275,000 ton one? Or even a 10,000 ton one? (Burns at 3.5 exawatts and rising, and lasts 84,000 seconds, i.e., less than a month.) Remember how weak gravity is. Only vast masses can overcome the electromagnetic effects and degeneracy pressures.
An interesting notion, to be sure. I doubt it's totally unregulated in the Federation, either, however (just as I doubt I could get my hands on a significant amount of uranium in the United States, although the electricity with which I'm writing this was probably generated by it). I'm positive the power generation plants on Earth, if they are antimatter, are 1)probably beneath enough rock to contain the explosion due to any Praxis-lite accident, and far enough away from each other so as any malfunction with one plant would not cook off other stockpiles; and 2)highly circumscribed as to who may access them.
However, even if antimatter is a heavily restricted substance in the Empire, as I believe you're right in asserting, it still doesn't explain why their military would not use it, when it's shown as being more effective and less "cantankerous" than the singularity drive. Heck, almost as often as not, the D'Ds we see in Trek are suffering from major equipment failure, stopping time, pulling Irishmen through time, falling through time, basically the singularity drive should not be used in an environment with time.
All the annihilator reactors do when they fail is blow up. Except that one time, in AGT, and that other time, in Cause and Effect... well, I still can say that's demonstrably not an effect of the mass-energy conversion.At the least, you'd think they'd use antimatter for their torpedoes--but they don't, they use continue to use plasma (thermonuclear?) torpedoes. At least they do until NEM, when they seem to swtich to pho-torps. Possibly as a result of occupying the Cardassian antimatter energy infrastructure?
The other thing about an annihilator reactor is that you can turn it off. You can never turn off a singularity drive. It will keep spitting out radiation until it evaporates. It will get increasingly hot, until finally it will explode. No 100-year life cycles for the Romulan ships. Whereas the Feds' Mirandas and Excelsiors keep going strong.
Oh, this reminds me, the singularity drive may be the reason the D'D has no impulse drive system. The mass of the singularity probably makes Newtonian propulsion ridiculously impractical--although I wonder how much more impractical than the clearly much-heavier-than-they-say Fed starships.
I dunno. DS9 was pretty crappy, though. I bet you couldn't run a replicator and a lamp on the same circuit.
Also, I'm not sure antimatter batteries were never installed. Although I'm a big defender of fusion-run warp drive (Zef Cochrane did not have a particle collider in his back yard, or a dilithium mine, and the Rom BoP's maximum, emptied-tanks speed was not one billionth of the Enterprise's), it stretches credibility to think that fusion could run replicators, transporters, weapons, shields, holodecks, and so forth.I go on about this, I realize, but the economics of Star Trek fascinate me at least as much as the science and technology.
I don't see how, considering Spock had to promise the Romulans to save their planet in order to use it. Apparently Nero held Spock responsible, which implies that Spock had to make a pretty heavy deal with the Romulans to get access to the red matter and--perhaps--Nero felt Spock was just using the supernova as an excuse to get access to it himself and then stood by and watched Romulus burn.
With present technology, so is making antimatter. Apparently 24th century technology has made these processes far more feasible.
You don't need mass to create a black hole. In trek terms, you simply need something that decays into a huge amount of gravitons in a tightly enclosed space, and this seems to be what red matter does. You may think of it as "neutron source" in the analog of an atomic bomb: it decays into gravitons and triggers a chain reaction that causes other matter to decay into gravitons. If you don't contain it properly, the black hole expands until it consumes all available mass and then "fizzles out." This would be a very short lived phenomenon, and probably justifies the terminology "Forced quantum singularity." A natural singularity wouldn't need to be forced, nor could it be contained artificially, don't you think?
Who better to restrict the supply than people who could actually put it to good use in a regime change? Certainly the existence of the Tal'Shiar suggests that a rebellion within the military is one of the things the Empire fears most. They were good enough to prevent this for hundreds of years, but then the Dominion War empowered people like Shinzon and the Remans whom the Romulans were not so good at spying on.
No, I think the reference from Nemesis is just a bad line (or maybe Shinzon did some trick with duranium shadows and whatnot?) but the Romulan use of plasma weaponry may reflect a mastery of fusion power or fusion-based energy that surpasses the Federation. In a modern analog, the lack of available nuclear energy has lead some countries to use different types of air-independent diesel engines for submarines, instead of nuclear reactors as used in the U.S.. With enough development, some of these AIP designs--while themselves cantankerous--could easily rival nuclear powered submarines in a number of mission roles.
Sure you can. Just cut off the reactant supply. (and if it's fueled by red matter, cut power to whatever's sustaining it and let it implode).
Why? We don't know the energy requirements for most of these things, but we've seen them used from time to time even with warp power shut down. Only really power-intensive systems like warp drive and shields seem to require the main reactor in the first place, with fusion reactors powering the rest. In fact, I'd be surprised if all civilian starships in the Federation had matter-antimatter reactors.
This is explained in the "comic prequel."
Essentially, it worked like this - Spock discovered that Romulus was in danger, and went to the Senate. He was dismissed summarily, but one of the sympathetic Romulans, a mining-ship captain named Nero, was present and confirmed Spock's description of the Hobus nova (having seen its effects in person). Nero managed to at least get Spock a provisional "we'll listen" response from the Senate.
Spock proposed that a Vulcan invention... "Red Matter"... could be used to collapse the "Hobus nova" and save Romulus. But the Romulan senate refused to back him up, basically telling him to go try it on his own, but without their support.
Spock then traveled towards Vulcan aboard the "pre-borgified" version of Nero's ship, which was intercepted by Remans at the border. The Enterprise, under the command of Captain Data (in B4's body) came to save the day. Aboard the Enterprise, Nero read up on Federation history.
The Enterprise arrived at Vulcan, but Spock wasn't even going to be allowed to meet with the Vulcan High Command... until Ambassador Picard, the Federation Ambassador to Vulcan, stepped in. Still, the Vulcan High Command declined to intercede, fearing what might happen if the Romulans gained access to this "Red matter" technology.
Nero turned back, heading to Romulus to try to save at least his own family, leaving Spock to try to salvage the situation any way he could, but with a warning... if Romulus was destroyed, Vulcan would face the same fate.
Spock eventually managed to get ahold of a quantity of Vulcan's "Red Matter" and a custom-built ship created by a civilian Geordi LaForge called the "jellyfish," and set off on what was essentially a suicide mission to drop the "red matter" into the Hobus nova.
Meanwhile, Nero arrived at Romulus in time to see it destroyed. Moment later, Federation ships arrived... offering help. Nero, driven mad by seeing his world destroyed, assumed that they were there to "pick Romulus's bones"... to seize territory and so forth. So he beamed mining charges into the "rescue ships" and destroyed them. He then "rescued" the surviving members of the Romulan Senate... killing the Praeter for his culpability in the death of Romulus, and "somehow" managing to get information about a secret Romulan "Area 51" from the other soon-to-be-deceased Romulan senators.
It was there that he got his ship retrofitted with the modified Borg tech. And then set off to intercept Spock, who was on his way to stop the nova... too late to save Romulus. Nero decided that if Spock must have waited, with the intent of seeing Romulus destroyed, but had been able to save it if he'd wanted to.
The rest you know from the tiny "mind-meld flashback" in the movie.
I, personally, think that this is critical background information, and needed to be part of the flick. I get why it was left out (after all the whining over the length of "King Kong" and so forth). But that, and the bit with Nero imprisoned in Rura Penthe (where he lost his ear-tip) are things I wish they'd gone ahead and told us about in the movie. It would have made so much more sense, and made the character a real 3-dimensional character rather than a generic cardboard cutout "mustache-twirling" type.
Yeah, I get it that Abrams and/or PPC have been firm that the comic is "not officially part of the story." But I, personally, reject that. Because without the stuff in the comic, the film's storyline is just... well... weak.
When they said Shuttlebay Two, I believe they were usually referring to the one at the aft end; I thought maybe Shuttlebay One is the facility in the underside of the saucer where the Aeroshuttle docks.
Closer to topic, I thought it was interesting that the Sternbach article I referred to other contains a piece of Tim Earls art that diagrams a Romulan singularity core. One of the callouts on that drawing is "dilithium housing," so even in that conception of the system, dilithium does seem to have some role in it. I like the speculation that assigns different and interesting principles to dilithium.
I always loved the D'Deridex class. I wish we'd gotten to see D'Deridex vessels along with the Valdore-type in Nemesis. How do they compare for size? It always seemed to me like the Valdore-type was basically a D'Deridex cut in half.
Which is about as canon as my own personal musings at this point.
When you add the stuff in the comic it goes from "weak" to "stupid." I'd rather tolerate a weak trek story and fill in the blanks with my imagination (which I have done for every movie since TSFS) than try to make sense of some of the rubbish we got from the Countdown comics.
I just want to point out one thing, about TNG Warbirds...
They are not necessarily slower than a Galaxy-Class ship... the times we've heard mention of them being slower has ALWAYS been when they are cloaked, and at warp... this MIGHT be due to some factor concerning the quantum singularity drive... perhaps if they go any faster while cloaked, either the warp or cloaking fields will interact with, and disturb each other. But never has it been explicitly said that an UNcloaked Warbird at warp was any slower than a Galaxy-Class.
And, c'mon... Voyager has ONE Shuttlebay... all you have to do is look at the freaking ship to know that.
They are not necessarily slower than a Galaxy-Class ship... the times we've heard mention of them being slower has ALWAYS been when they are cloaked, and at warp... this MIGHT be due to some factor concerning the quantum singularity drive... perhaps if they go any faster while cloaked, either the warp or cloaking fields will interact with, and disturb each other. But never has it been explicitly said that an UNcloaked Warbird at warp was any slower than a Galaxy-Class.
And, c'mon... Voyager has ONE Shuttlebay... all you have to do is look at the freaking ship to know that.
