Engineering -- Warp Engines?

[TIN_MAN]

And as blssdwlf points out, only "charged" crystals can tap the ZPE, as long as the crystals remain charged up the ship has an unlimited amount of fuel, but if they become drained or damaged for any reason they cease generating fuel until and unless they can be recharged/regenerated?

 

[blssdwlf]

^^That sounds rather good using only charged crystals to tap into zpe to generate M/AM. We might even be able to go and tie in the "heavy subspace interference" in "The Doomsday Machine" with the ship's energy drain* as it interfered with the ability to regenerate power from zpe.

*Although I think the complete deactivation of the antimatter on the Constellation was due to a different, unseen type of attack from the Doomsday Machine.

More and more reading this it sounds very plausible in the context of TOS!

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Y'all might be interested in this dialog snipped from One Of Our Planets Is Missing by Marc Daniels:

SCOTT [OC]: Keeping the deflectors this high

[Engineering]

SCOTT: Is putting an enormous strain on the engines, Captain. Especially the antimatter. What with the maximum power demands and all, the reserve is falling fast.

[Bridge]

KIRK: How much time do we have?
SCOTT [OC]: Twenty one minutes, sir.

[Engineering]

SCOTT: But if the indicator goes below two anti-kilos, the engines won't regenerate.

[SNIP]

Captain's log, supplemental. The Enterprise has only fifteen minutes left before her power is drained and we are left helpless.

[Engineering]

SCOTT: If we don't stop the power drain right now, that'll be the end of us.
KIRK: And if we do stop, we'll be drawn into one of the villi and the ship will explode.
SCOTT: Captain, you said that villi are antimatter. If we could get a piece of it, I could put it in the antimatter engine and it would regenerate. We'd have enough power for the engines and the shields to go on maximum again.
KIRK: We need both the matter and the antimatter engines regenerated.
SCOTT: Matter's no problem. We could beam aboard some of the planet chunks out there. And we can cut a piece of the antimatter villi with the tractor beams and transport it aboard like that.
KIRK: Bring it aboard? If the antimatter touches the inside of the ship or any of us, we'll be blown to bits.
SCOTT: I can rig a force field box that'll hold the villi suspended in the centre. Then I can take it into the antimatter nacelle, put it into the regenerating chamber and release the forcefield by remote control.

Apparently the engines also function like some sort of antimatter breeder reactor, but where instead of generating new fissile material it generates antimatter?

 

[TIN_MAN]

Yeah, this fits in rather well actually. Perhaps the "charging" of the crystals is precisely via the initial "two anti-kilos" of anti-matter required to "prime" the reactor and start the whole system?

By the way, in real science, we haven't yet collected enough anti-matter to study and see if it has ant-gravitational properties or not, but if it does, then "anti-kilos" would be an apropriate term?

 

[Mytran]

Just to throw in in my 2 cents here: I've also often wondered if the spinning blades and lightshow in the front of the nacelles was meant to represent (in TOS anyway) the creation or annihilation of super-energies, such as antimatter.

 

[TIN_MAN]

I see those forward end caps as spherical tanks (or "pods") that hold the matter fuel in a plasma state (hence the light show)?

And if we assume there are Bussard collectors, these would probably be the louvers running around the housing just behind the domes. In this case, the spherical pods would be temporary holding tanks for the freshly aquired space dust, which of course, would be in a charged ionized form, at least initially.

The "fan blades" remind me of the propeller-like fans inside chemical reactors which keep the gases/liquids stirred up. But in the Enterprise's case might cause condensation via rotational forces?

The aft spheres on the other hand, might be the anti-matter "pods"? Such a location would be ideal for ejection if need be. This would also explain why this area changes appearance so often, because different "aft pod assemblies" are designed and tested in turn, one a rectangular affair, the other a series of small (TNG style?) pods, and finally a single sphere.

 

[Wingsley]

If the front caps of the nacelles (the "lightshow") are indeed Bussard ramscoops, and if we assume the assembly in the middle of the warp engine room floor is some kind of zero-point dilithium energy facility, could it be that the ramscoops are used while in a star system (or nebula) to draw in as much ambient hydrogen as possible into the nacelle storage tanks so that dilithium facility can power a conversion of the captured hydrogen into deuterium and antimatter?

 

[TIN_MAN]

Sure, that makes sense.

 

[blssdwlf]

Still excluding TNG from this but thinking of it from a TOS to TMP angle... what if what we know as the "light show" from the TOS-E nacelles were brought in to the secondary hull in TMP? When Kirk looks down the power shaft, it isn't the antimatter storage or the core that he is looking at but the formerly "light show" part of the nacelle making antimatter and shunting power up to the energizers/nacelles/impulse and everything else?

 

[Wingsley]

I would assume that the new zero-point perspective we're talking about recently in this thread would make the apparatus fundamentally the same as TOS, just structured somewhat differently. The nacelles would still contain the bulk of the matter and antimatter (and their reactors), and the "power shaft" could link to either a control reactor in the secondary hull (where Spock was killed) or it could be that the power shaft is the link to the zero-point apparatus.

Keep in mind that there would still be matter and antimatter reactants in the saucer and secondary hulls anyway, but in limited quantities.

 

[Captain Robert April]

 

[Timo]

In this "tapping universal energies" interpretation, the nacelles might be rationalized a bit differently from the usual "they contain kaboom-prone things" or "they emit deadly rays" ideas.

Perhaps the engines are located outside the ship proper because that's where they are the most exposed to these mystic energies of the universe? That is, they are huge antennas for gathering ZPE or whatever, and they get the best reception when located some distance away from other metallic/massive/whatever bodies.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

ZPE is beyond the scope of anything considered for Federation engine design in any Star Trek series, whether TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, ENT, or MOV. ZPE enters Star Trek canon with the quantum torpedo, if at all, and was not explored by writers of Star Trek TV or movies either before or otherwise. Regardless of how an FTL engine might someday work in real life, I don't believe retconning ZPE into TOS engines is an appropriate exercise. What I mean is that I would be dismissive of any such fanwank.

There is a remote possibility that if you hand wave enough, perhaps there is a connection between ZPE and the artificial quantum singularities used in Romulan Warbirds of the 24th Century. If this is so, then the distinction made between Romulan and Federation technology further supports the idea that ZPE has nothing to do with canonical Federation engines.

That said, I encourage you to explore ZPE. Go for it! It just ain't classic Trek.

 

[Timo]

The point isn't whether ZPE engines in TOS fit Trek canon, but whether the makers of TOS were thinking of something akin to ZPE engines.

And certain quotes above do suggest an engine that doesn't use any onboard fuel but instead energizes or regenerates itself by sucking its energies from somewhere else.

It would indeed be awkward to try and fit such thinking into the wider Trek framework now. But it may have been what TOS technology was all about, behind the curtains. It's just that I, too, am of the fan category that doesn't really care about behind-the-scenes stuff as much as I care about the fictional universe itself. And for its continuity, which is probably best served by taking the TOS references about antimatter and shoehorning them into the same context as the TNG references about antimatter - that is, as the primary fuel of the warp engine.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Well said.

 

[blssdwlf]

ZPE is beyond the scope of anything considered for Federation engine design in any Star Trek series

If you examine "all of Trek", you'll find that the dialogue of TOS warp engines is beyond the scope of the later TNG+ productions and you must do a lot of hand-wavium to shoe-horn it in, technology-wise.

What we do know from TOS is:

• The power "regenerates". ("Mark of Gideon", "WNMHGB", "The Naked Time")
• Range is not a problem with intact dilithium ("By Any Other Name")
• Dilithium can be used to view "other universe" phenomena ("The Alternative Factor")
• Subspace interference can reduce power generation ("The Ultimate Computer")
• Warmed up antimatter mixed with matter are used to start the engines ("The Naked Time")
• Dilithium is not needed for the m/am reaction, but is required to generate energy ("Elaan of Troyius", "The Paradise Syndrome")
• The dilithium can be bypassed at a reduce energy ability only if the dilithium converter assembly is undamaged
• The ships of TOS are significantly faster than later TNG+ shows... 1000 LY per day, vs 50 LY per day at respective maximum speeds ("Obsession", "That Which Survives")

The TOS engines do operate in a manner resembling a ZPE engine.

Now as to shoe-horning TOS into TNG, just call them two parallel universes with differences in technologies. Similar stories and events, but slightly different technology to get there. For example, "Relics" has Scotty retelling the story of how they could not restart the engines without a proper phase-lock requiring 30 minutes while in "The Naked Time", the engines could not be regenerated with cold antimatter for at least 22 minutes. Two different technology points but similar story outcome, or as Homer Simpson would say, "Close enough"

 

[Wingsley]

Yes, my use of "ZPE" as an energy technology was only a placeholder for discussion purposes. I seem to recall Aridas Sofia having something to say about power coming from "degenerate matter", but I never understood what that meant.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

First of all, blssdwlf, some of your data is incorrect or misleading.

• I take issue with By Any Other Name. The Kelvans modified the engines for the 300 year trip. We can't really draw any conclusions about the endurance of pure Federation technology from this episode.
• Instead of The Ultimate Computer, don't you mean The Doomsday Machine?
• The warp scale used in TOS is not the same as the warp scale in TNG. This was obvious immediately to TOS fans when we viewed Encounter at Farpoint during its first broadcast. See this Memory Alpha article for more information. In other words, the effect of this recalibration is that the ships of TOS were generally slower than those of TNG+, which is illustrated in the charts in that article.

Second of all, ZPE has nothing to do with this or what's left.

 

[Timo]

There are few exact speed references in TOS, but those tend to indicate speeds vastly greater than the TNG ones, for which there are several exact speed references. But we could always treat the TOS cases as exotic outliers... Say, "Bread and Circuses" describes a short hop, which might well be significantly faster than cruise speed or even a long hop (one that takes minutes instead of seconds).

On the issue of power regeneration, we might need to specify which power. In "Mark of Gideon", Kirk was solely concerned about life support power - which might regenerate the way air conditioning power regenerates when a car moves forward and expends its primary fuel... In "Where No Man", regeneration in turn referred to engines rather than power, and we might speculate on engines that literally heal themselves so that they can again start consuming fuel and turning it into motive power. Indeed, if crystals are important to warp engines, they could well recover a lost crystalline structure when external energy is applied on them, perhaps in the reverse of the normal procedure - after which they could again start doing things the normal way and degenerating.

As for all the cases where dilithium is removed from the machinery but things don't shut down, "Alternative Factor" and "Mudd's Women" both indicate that there's plenty of dilithium to remove there. If only some of it is taken out, naturally the machinery will continue to function even if dilithium is absolutely vital for this functioning.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CorporalCaptain]

There are few exact speed references in TOS, but those tend to indicate speeds vastly greater than the TNG ones, for which there are several exact speed references.

I don't understand what you mean. Could you please give a particular example involving stated speeds? You are familiar with this Memory Alpha article, which I pointed to immediately upthread, in which it explains that TNG:Warp 9 is faster than TOS:Warp 11, right?