Earth ship Valiant

[CorporalCaptain]

It's very difficult for me to reconcile the idea of a dish that aims in a particular direction with the idea that deflector beams can be directed in any direction with equal ease.

It would help if we knew what a deflector beam actually does. But, just like the Bussard collector, this technology has one definition in noncanon, backstage books but none in the actual episodes or movies. All we ever see or hear it do is "alternate modes" or "special adaptations", with nary a hint to what its normal mode of operation would be.

I don't think that's true. In the wormhole segment of TMP, Ilia tries to use navigational deflectors to keep the asteroid from hitting the ship, but they're inoperative. That would seem to be their normal function, established canonically.

---

I'm going to call bullshit on the Enterprise being unable to blast out of orbit on Delta Vega if their attempt to regenerate the warp drive fails. If they can make it to bases that are yeeeeaaarrsss away, they can blast out of orbit of one freakin' planet and escape its star system. If Delta Vega would trap them like that, then it's going to be the skeleton of Kirk's great-great-great-...-great-granddaughter who makes it to the nearest starbase.

 

[Ronald Held]

Maybe the intent is without warp drive Mitchell might attach them while escaping the Delta Vega system?

 

[Warped9]

The thing is as with many adventure stories the plot is often what defines what can and cannot be. It's little different then telling superhero stories and depicting his abilities in an inconsisten manner.

If the Enterprise can still get to Delta Vega in a few days then it should have enough power to break orbit if need be. The same thing happens in "Mudd's Women" the the ship is dangerously low on power because of the burnt out dilithium crystals. What, no spares?

It's a plot device to create tension. A writer crafting a novel might think of his way out of this by finding a way to create peril in a way that's consistent with the ship's abilities. But on television and in many films they create a sense of peril where none should exist if they stayed consistent with what has already been established.

To me this speaks of the writers not yet really knowing the parameters of what the ship can and cannot do and/or they thought none of the viewers would notice such an inconsistency.

 

[Timo]

I don't think that's true. In the wormhole segment of TMP, Ilia tries to use navigational deflectors to keep the asteroid from hitting the ship, but they're inoperative. That would seem to be their normal function, established canonically.

I'm referring specifically to the navigational deflector beam and dish, which might be related technologies but might not be directly involved in the act of deflecting. The plural term "navigational deflectors" is used several times in Trek, and e.g. seems to provide wide-angle protection against the weapons of the Montagues and the Capulets in "The Outrageous Okona". That's fine and well - "navigational deflectors" would simply be the same as all other deflectors, protecting the ship from all directions, only they'd be the weakest variant.

The TNG Tech Manual also makes a distinction between the deflectors and the deflection beam. The former plays a canonical role in all-around protection; the role of the latter is not clarified on screen.

I'm going to call bullshit on the Enterprise being unable to blast out of orbit on Delta Vega if their attempt to regenerate the warp drive fails.

Good point, and an excellent chance to bullshit our way out of the jam, too.

Ahem, let's see... Kirk says that bit in two pieces: "We'll be trapped in orbit here" and "We haven't enough power to blast back out". The two need not be literally connected: if the ship won't have enough power to reach civilization, then she's going to be trapped somewhere, and "in orbit here" is as good an option as any.

That is, the act of entering orbit may not be the one that traps the ship, and the trapping itself does not consist of the inability to break out of orbit. The act of fiddling with the power packs may be the dubious step, and the results will move the next-nearest base to the "centuries away" category, meaning the crew could just as well spend the rest of their lives on the orbit of the cracking plant planet.

The same thing happens in "Mudd's Women" the the ship is dangerously low on power because of the burnt out dilithium crystals. What, no spares?

I don't see the objection. The plot already featured our heroes exhausting their cache of spares, after all.

Sure, Scotty seems to think it unusual that only a single crystal is on line towards the end. But in the teaser, the crystals are being used one by one, as if one were the spare for the previous one. Taken in the wider context, it would seem that somewhere between one and four crystals are needed for moving the ship, and all the rest are spares. That's details, though: the episode itself goes to the necessary effort to establish that spares are gone.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Warped9]

^^ Considering what we later see the ship go through it still sounds weak.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The act of fiddling with the power packs may be the dubious step

Yeah, OK, that would work, with the appropriate tweak of dialog: "We'll be trapped in orbit there, if Scotty breaks my effing ship."

 

[blssdwlf]

I can reach into my bag of tricks and postulate that there are different classes of navigational deflector systems. Perhaps there is a low power system that works well enough for certain classes of maneuvers that doesn't require a dish?

Or what if standard navigational deflectors (note plural) require no main dish and all maneuvers are available to the ship?

Ships with a giant sensor dish would have a deflector built into it to help "tunnel a sensor path" for better long range resolution. The side benefit is that you get an additional multi-purpose deflector for pushing moons out of the way

That would mean that the heavy cruiser connie can just plain do more, such as:

The Paradise Syndrome uses a deflector beam from the Enterprise. IIRC, the original effects didn't show where the beam came out of, but the remastered effects have it coming out of the dish.

remastered FX: http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x03hd/theparadisesyndromehd0510.jpg

Hmm. The beam doesn't appear to be coming from the dish (or at least not from the center of it). The beam looks like it is originating from the port side from a point on the engineering hull.

 

[blssdwlf]

If they can make it to bases that are yeeeeaaarrsss away, they can blast out of orbit of one freakin' planet and escape its star system. If Delta Vega would trap them like that, then it's going to be the skeleton of Kirk's great-great-great-...-great-granddaughter who makes it to the nearest starbase.

A couple of things:

If low orbit can slow a ship at warp speed down to a few hundred km/s why couldn't the weaker impulse engines also have a hard time powering away requiring more power to fight the gravity or magnetic pull than flying in deep space.

They were in a hurry to get rid of Mitchell - perhaps they needed to expend more fuel than intended to accelerate and decelerate to Delta Vega in as short a period of time instead of taking a more economical acceleration profile.

 

[Warped9]

Were talking about a starship's impulse engines, not some contemporary chemical fuel rocket. If you've got engines with the power to push a 190,000 metric ton ship to high percentages of light than those engines can easily push you out of orbit and out of the system. What's even more amazing is how powerful those engines are given their comparatively small size in relation to the rest of the ship.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I can reach into my bag of tricks and postulate that there are different classes of navigational deflector systems. Perhaps there is a low power system that works well enough for certain classes of maneuvers that doesn't require a dish?

Or what if standard navigational deflectors (note plural) require no main dish and all maneuvers are available to the ship?

Ships with a giant sensor dish would have a deflector built into it to help "tunnel a sensor path" for better long range resolution. The side benefit is that you get an additional multi-purpose deflector for pushing moons out of the way

That would mean that the heavy cruiser connie can just plain do more, such as:

The Paradise Syndrome uses a deflector beam from the Enterprise. IIRC, the original effects didn't show where the beam came out of, but the remastered effects have it coming out of the dish.

remastered FX: http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x03hd/theparadisesyndromehd0510.jpg

Hmm. The beam doesn't appear to be coming from the dish (or at least not from the center of it). The beam looks like it is originating from the port side from a point on the engineering hull.

I'm not going to comment further on the quality of the remastered effects, except to say that I find that the idea of a train wreck on top of another train wreck doesn't begin to describe how ill conceived a lot, if not most, of the new FX shots were, especially the ones involving the Enterprise.

Perhaps they refer to navigational deflectors in the plural routinely, because the idea is that when the system is operating, it's always continuously targeting multiple objects simultaneously.

But, multiple simultaneous beams need not imply multiple emitters. (ETA: This could be especially true on smaller craft, such as the Aurora, as well as shuttlecraft. To travel at warp, I'd expect even a shuttlecraft to need at least basic navigational deflectors. Photon torpedoes on the other hand, not as much, anyway.)

In real life, a transmitter dish routinely transmits modulated output that expresses the mathematical combination of multiple signals.

If the focal properties of the deflector dish can be dynamically adjusted just by controlling field parameters, I don't see any reason why a single deflector dish couldn't serve as a multiplexer for multiple simultaneous navigational deflector beams, by essentially emitting a modulated signal. (ETA: I believe this would be consistent with the application of the dish in TNG: The Loss, where they use the dish to reflect a whole set of frequencies simultaneously, to simulate the signature of a cosmic string fragment.)

Now, I'm not saying that all navigational deflector beams have to come from the dish; I think I've already made that clear. But I think it's also clear that the main dish is the most powerful emitter. Sending a Miranda-type ship to deal with the out of control asteroid in The Paradise Syndrome should be totally inappropriate, if you see what I mean. (ETA: And we seem to completely agree on this, at least.)

ETA: To clarify what I meant by some maneuvers being unavailable, perhaps the Miranda-class has to change course somewhat more often than a connie, say to evade high momentum/heavy debris that it cannot deflect in time at warp speed, but the situations when those types of course changes are needed occur only rarely. Additionally, maybe it's the number of independent targets that can be deflected in time that's smaller on the Miranda's, or maybe it's a combination of all that. That sort of thing would mean that not giving Miranda's a dish could be justified by a cost-benefit analysis, especially under the consideration of the types of expected missions, including whether they involve going into uncharted space. Whereas on the other hand, when going to uncharted space, it might be deemed much more essential not to require that the cruiser must always have a wide berth from unexpected heavy objects or clusters of smaller objects, etc.

Were talking about a starship's impulse engines, not some contemporary chemical fuel rocket. If you've got engines with the power to push a 190,000 metric ton ship to high percentages of light than those engines can easily push you out of orbit and out of the system. What's even more amazing is how powerful those engines are given their comparatively small size in relation to the rest of the ship.

Exactly.

I think Timo's idea, which to me requires that we should tweak Kirk's dialog to mean that he's worried about the recharging effort totally shorting out the ship, is the right call.

 

[Timo]

There's an alternate approach that would match the existing dialog:

If you've got engines with the power to push a 190,000 metric ton ship to high percentages of light than those engines can easily push you out of orbit and out of the system.

But with damaged engines, it may turn out that you can only do one such "push" - namely, the one that will slow you down from your high relativistic speed to orbit around Delta Vega.

Getting back to the speed that will take you to civilization is a massive effort in real world terms, and quite possibly no walk in the park for damaged impulse engines, either. Quite realistically, the delta-vee you have available might be capable of taking you all the way to Earth, or to orbit around Delta Vega, but not both.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Here are a couple of reasonably accessible treatments of relativity from two American universities, for everyone's reading pleasure!

"More Relativity: The Train and The Twins" (University of Virginia): http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/sreltwins.html
Table of contents (University of Virginia): http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/lecturelist.html

"The Relativistic Rocket" (University of California, Riverside): http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html
Table of contents (University of California, Riverside): http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/index.html

 

[blssdwlf]

Were talking about a starship's impulse engines, not some contemporary chemical fuel rocket. If you've got engines with the power to push a 190,000 metric ton ship to high percentages of light than those engines can easily push you out of orbit and out of the system. What's even more amazing is how powerful those engines are given their comparatively small size in relation to the rest of the ship.

However those impulse engines are dependent on how much power is available to do the pushing and where they happen to be.

We've seen in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" that if they are low on power and in a planet's atmosphere it takes a long time to just climb out of the atmosphere (or even build up power to start climbing).

We've also seen in times of aggressive acceleration like in "The Doomsday Machine", "Elaan of Troyius", "The Immunity Syndrome" and arguably, "WNMHGB" that impulse power can be used up very quickly.

But in times where they don't push the impulse engines hard, like in "The Paradise Syndrome", impulse power isn't a problem.

Pushing in a hurry a nearly million ton ship to high relativistic speeds or even low FTL speeds (depending on your interpretation) with impulse engines to Delta Vega could easily use up so much power to not be able to power back out of orbit.

Hypothetically, if they accelerated more leisurely to Delta Vega it might not be a problem to leave orbit, but by the time they arrive Mitchell would've been unstoppable.

 

[Timo]

Pushing in a hurry a nearly million ton ship to high relativistic speeds or even low FTL speeds with impulse engines to Delta Vega

I'd rather argue that it would be a question of pushing the ship from the relativistic speed she already possessed, to her virtual-standstill meeting with Delta Vega. The effort would then detract from the journey home, unless it resulted in the ship regaining her near-infinite sources of power; not making the effort would allow the ship to continue towards civilization, as opposed to being "stranded".

As for dialogue cues, the ship is first said to be heading home on impulse power, but then Mitchell warns Kelso not to "activate" the starboard impulse packs. This sort of suggests coasting after an initial boost...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

I'd rather argue that it would be a question of pushing the ship from the relativistic speed she already possessed, to her virtual-standstill meeting with Delta Vega. The effort would then detract from the journey home, unless it resulted in the ship regaining her near-infinite sources of power; not making the effort would allow the ship to continue towards civilization, as opposed to being "stranded".

As for dialogue cues, the ship is first said to be heading home on impulse power, but then Mitchell warns Kelso not to "activate" the starboard impulse packs. This sort of suggests coasting after an initial boost...

That's a very good point. At the time before diverting to Delta Vega the Enterprise could have already committed (accelerated to a cruising speed) to heading back to the nearest Earth base and that could've used up almost half her impulse power. They had no reason to expect to do a diversion so any side trip to a planet other than their original destination (requiring full deceleration) could leave them without power to blast back out of orbit.

 

[yenny]

Y'll know that vega is only 25 lyrs from earth. It's in the Lyra constellation. Also Vega is a polar star, which put in the northing area of the galaxy. How far is it from the outer reached of the galaxy? I don't know. But it probably not that far.

 

[yenny]

Also, a spaceship or starship would not travel alone the galactic plain, but above it or below it.

 

[Warped9]

I wouldn't put too much stock in the planet's name since these sort of things were added to give the story a sense of credibility because the name is familiar. In this case I highly doubt the planet Delta Vega has anything to do with the actual star we know as Vega.

 

[B.J.]

Y'll know that vega is only 25 lyrs from earth. It's in the Lyra constellation. Also Vega is a polar star, which put in the northing area of the galaxy. How far is it from the outer reached of the galaxy? I don't know. But it probably not that far.

The north ecliptic pole is not the same as galactic north, so even though Vega is relatively close to Polaris, it's pretty close to the galactic equator from our POV. Not only that, but even if it was in the direction of galactic north, 25ly is a small percentage of the thickness of the galaxy, and would still be a long way from the edge.

 

[Timo]

It should indeed be noted that Vega is not a constellation, but an individual star; currently, there is no constellation named Vega, so there cannot be an individual star named Delta Vega, either. (Or a planet named after its mother star, as the situation with these Greek-letter Trek planets probably usually is.)

But many of the stars in our galaxy are hidden from our view by dust clouds and the like. Warp drive would change that overnight, as even a very short "side step" would allow us to peek past the obstacles and see new stars. Possibly, then, a cluster of stars in the exact direction of Vega would be added into a constellation named Vega, with Alpha Vega just 25 ly from Earth but Delta Vega more like 1,800 ly away.

On the other hand, the reboot movie offers an interesting alternative. There, a planet named Delta Vega is located in a completely different part of the galaxy. No, we don't know exactly where, but it's close to Vulcan, which lies neither in the direction of the star Vega nor close to the "edge" of the galaxy, by any definition of edge.

If Delta Vega was named after Nero messed up the timeline, there's one way two places in different directions would have equal chances for the name. Rather than the fourth-brightest star in the constellation Vega, the planet could be the fourth owned by the VEGA corporation, just like Dytallix B sounds like it would be the second one added to the Dytallix business empire... Perhaps VEGA was bolder in a timeline where giant Romulan starships didn't materialize out of nowhere and blow up Federation hardware, and established Delta VEGA farther out?

Timo Saloniemi