Heating rocks with phasers. Once or twice.

[Mres_was_framed!]

In the digital age, the norm is that the states of an analog control map to discrete, finitely many recognized inputs.

We cannot really tell whether the world of Trek is digital or analog,

As consumer tech began to look more digital, Star Trek's look and feel started to look more "computerized" and less "mechanical," if I dare use those terms that way. It would be hard to insist on a fully-digital functionality in TOS specifically. This is all if we are talking about "digitial" in the sense of binary electric computer control. As far as the knob on a phaser, whether it is supposed to spin freely or whether it only clicks form one setting to the nest is not clear to me from the impression I get from the show. The prop itself had numbers on it, I think, which would suggest a way to tell the lower settings from the higher ones.

And do all warp drives need dilithium? If there's a dilithium crystal in the shuttle couldn't they use that one when the ones in the Enterprise fail.

Class F is said to operate on "ion power" in TOS "The Menagerie" anyway, perhaps never annihilating any antimatter at all.

Its fuel is limited, so, range and speed are limited. YMMV .

Your mileage may vary? Is that a pun in this use scenario?

Goes back to the original concept that the warp nacelles were power plants. There wasn't a warp reactor. The engine nacelles produced the power.

The Kelvin (if you accept it as existing) apparently actually has it Engine Room in that nacelle. This might support the idea that the entire warp reactor could be in the nacelle, but apparently this approach was not used later on. I like the idea that she shuttles in TOS had a finite ability to travel at warp, without the possibility of somehow cannibalizing them to replace the main engine system. Actually the Kelvin's true secondary hull was basically just a shuttlebay. Perhaps the "antimatter nacelle" or "antimatter pod" (only when used singularly) in TOS is just the warp drive equipment that is in that ship's secondary hull, the secondary hull being at this time, in a sense, a "glorified" nacelle.

This is separate from TNG where the secondary hull is able to function as a complete ship, despite its position being similar to where the Engineering equipment was on Kirk's ship. This might help explain why the Enterprise-D could reconnect itself without a starbase.

 

[Timo]

As consumer tech began to look more digital, Star Trek's look and feel started to look more "computerized" and less "mechanical," if I dare use those terms that way. It would be hard to insist on a fully-digital functionality in TOS specifically. This is all if we are talking about "digitial" in the sense of binary electric computer control.

Well, that would be the relevant definition: whether the controls are discrete or continuous.

While TOS is all about knobs, it's also all about push-buttons, catering for both continuous and discrete. But in terms of operating logic, this is neither here nor there. Fancy holographic controls would be just as likely to be continuous as the knobs, and would be more so than the push-buttons.

That data processing in Trek should be digital is fairly unlikely, in terms of scifi in general: why would space adventurers be counting with abacuses? But there has been good scifi on abacuses, and Trek is a retro universe in many ways. Plus, the Voth in "Distant Origin" certainly think the 24th century Starfleet computers represent a "simple binary system", which in our terminology sounds very much like a digital one. Voth terminology may vary, of course...

The Kelvin (if you accept it as existing) apparently actually has it Engine Room in that nacelle.

How so? We never see such a room. Instead, it's the shuttlebay that is accessed by taking a turbolift down - even though exterior view shows the bay being on top of the ship...

Engine rooms aren't next to nacelles in the ships where we actually get to see the rooms. Why any ship ought to be different is unclear. Dramatically speaking, "engine rooms in nacelles" is a bad idea because most hero ships have two nacelles but there is only one engineering hero: his or her attention can't be split when everything starts going south. And indeed Scotty solves all his engineering problems single-handedly from a single location that is unlikely to be either of the nacelles - except for "One Of Our Planets Is Missing", where a rare kickstart is performed explicitly from inside a single nacelle, perhaps going well with the sometimes heard terminology of "antimatter nacelle" (which would be the one with the special antimatter kickstarter built in, then).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

How so? We never see such a room. Instead, it's the shuttlebay that is accessed by taking a turbolift down - even though exterior view shows the bay being on top of the ship...

This was explicitly shown in a diagram on a Trekyards episode, but now I forget their source, and I would have to try to look it up. I'm not sure now, but it left me with impression, that it was like many off-screen sources that have been "treated as canon unless otherwise noted," like some ship registries and class names, that are generally taken as correct unless later contradicted.

Obviously the engine room in the nacelle might not be the case, and of course the Kelvin might not even exist in the original TOS time frame. But there are few things that support that location, like the fact that the nacelle is giant compared to TOS ones, for example. I only mentioned this possibility to support another point as I'll explain below.

Dramatically speaking, "engine rooms in nacelles" is a bad idea because most hero ships have two nacelles but there is only one engineering hero: his or her attention can't be split when everything starts going south. And indeed Scotty solves all his engineering problems single-handedly from a single location that is unlikely to be either of the nacelles

I envision the progression being from ships like the Kelvin (large engine pod with only workspace and equipment, no offices or quarters), to TOS (secondary hull with main engine equipment but also some offices and quarters) to TNG (secondary hull has complete ship facilities)

 

[Skipper]

It's interesting how even a portable phaser can shatter mountains, still firefights are depicted like in the old western movies. When people shot with mini WMD, well, all the bloody affair should be very short: the first who shots, wins.

 

[publiusr]

Well, we had Davy Crockett nukes, but you use sidearms as sidearms. Drain a phaser in a big blast, you wind up a sitting duck, assuming you survive the backblast.

I'm still trying to figure out how Spock ignited it. It's energy; how does it burn?

I’m thinking phasers use something like Tibanna gas from Star Wars. That was what the shuttle used. Take the power pack out, insert.

 

[Timo]

The shuttle had a leak Scotty couldn't fix, which is why it lost the fuel. Providing more of the same from the phasers to the system would simply mean all of it would be lost to the leak, too.

But a shuttle probably has multiple propulsion systems. Not only would warp be separate from impulse, as per standard Trek rules - there would in all likelihood be a separate gravity drive for hovering, and this would be the one that allows the heroes to float to space without having any impulse or warp capacity. After all, they do lift off by hovering rather than by anything analogous to rocketing: getting stopped in mid-air by the brutes clinging on doesn't ruin the ascent curve, but merely slightly delays the ascent.

The hovering system might not utilize the fluid fuel the heroes lost to the leak, but battery power, which would be the same sort that makes phasers go ZZZZzzzappp!!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

You are implying takeoff and landing strip use antigravity drives versus thrusters? I can see antigravs being poweted from a different source then impulse or warp drive.

 

[Roundabout]

McCoy also used a Type 1 "pocket" phaser to heat rocks in "A Private Little War" after a Mugato bit Kirk and injected him with venom. Nona, Tyree's wife, witnessed the "magic" and later took the weapon, hoping it would give her tribe an advantage over the "Hill People".

McCoy had another tool in his medical bag of tricks for heating up a cave -- magnasite nitron tablets.

That one tablet sure lit up that cave and presumably provided warmth for the impending birth of Leonard James Akaar. There must have been a whole lot of energy packed in that tablet.

I guess behind the scenes, or in this case behind the rock, there was actually a bunsen burner or something of the kind, that provided the flames.

This scene was from "Friday's Child", as you already know.

 

[Henoch]

The hovering system might not utilize the fluid fuel the heroes lost to the leak, but battery power, which would be the same sort that makes phasers go ZZZZzzzappp!!

Agreed, the shuttle take-off appears as antigravity thrust. We learn that battery power cannot lift the shuttle off the ground. The batteries, as applied to the propulsion system, are used to ignite the fuel burning reactor. Lift off needs the power from the fuel using reactor (fusion?). In addition, the ship has boosters that either burn the same fuel or are also powered directly by the ship's reactor that is burning the fuel. (Portable antigrav units probably do use battery power, but they are only lifting a light load as compared to the duranium-hull shuttle craft plus load. Duranium sounds dense/heavy to me that provides energy/radiation protection without force fields.)

SPOCK: Mister Scott, how much power do we have left in the ship's batteries?
SCOTT: They're in good shape, but they won't lift us off, if that's what you're getting at.
SPOCK: Will they electrify the exterior of this ship?
SCOTT: That they will, Mister Spock!
(He dashes to the rear compartment and puts on big rubber gloves)
SPOCK: Get to the centre of the ship. Don't touch the plates. Be sure you're insulated. Stand by. Are you ready, Scott?
SCOTT: Ready, Mister Spock.
SPOCK: All right. Go. (Scott uses a spanner or something to short out the battery connections) Again! Again!
(It goes quiet and still outside)
SCOTT: I daren't use any more. Not and be sure of ignition.
SPOCK: I believe we've used enough. Mister Scott. I suggest you continue draining the phasers.

Other dialog clearly states that draining the phasers will provide fuel, not simply recharging batteries. As I state somewhere in the above posts, I theorize that phasers are not just energy weapons, rather some sort of plasma particle beam with transporter delivery technology. I like to think that Scotty is oozing the plasma out of the phasers at a low setting, hence the long time to drain it. Since the fuel is later jettisoned out both nacelles, this implies Scotty either repaired the leaky fuel system or bypassed it using alternate fuel tanks in the nacelles. YMMV.

 

[Timo]

I'd argue that a fuel leak that doesn't leave a puddle speaks of a type of fluid fuel that evaporates in outside temperature and pressure, even though it's a liquid in normal storage conditions. If a leak makes the system lose pressure, a small amount might still be left in the tanks, but could not be coerced into traveling into the engines. Yet it could still be sloshed out and ignited for Spock's flare purposes, out there in zero exterior pressure freefall.

I actually think the above is more or less what the writer was thinking of, too. The following is creative reinterpretation instead:

That the batteries won't allow for liftoff to me suggests that they would (which is why Spock asks) but only if there were enough power stored there (which is the real question to which Spock gets the answer). The phaser packs are used to remedy that, providing battery-type power for the type of liftoff Spock was planning on. They might provide it directly, without bothering the battery, or then the draining of the phasers is slowly filling the batteries.

Scott describes the oomph from the phasers as "substitute fuel", and it's clearly not more of the actual fuel, because it requires adjustments to the machinery using it. Since Spock has trouble following the engineer, Scotty appears to be using the terminology somewhat freely, too. It's not this "fuel" that Spock later ignites, but the fumes of the primary fuel. Which, in the freefall conditions, could finally have been used for propulsion, if not for Spock's choice of action.

Why does Scott refer to fuel status with the (nonsense) unit "pounds psi"? Not because there would be X pounds of it left, or because it would be pressurized to Y psi - but because this unit establishes the amount of lift available from the gravity drive with the current battery status. The gravitics can't provide escape velocity, only hover, even if all the way up to orbital height - so when the "fuel status" peters down, the hover turns into a plunge...

Timo Saloniemi