How did the Phoenix Warp with No Dilithium¿

[Henoch]

In the TNG ep "Force of Nature", the Enterprise crew "field saturate" the nacelles ahead of initiating a warp pulse that accelerates them to warp and keeps them there for about 2 minutes. This is done because an active warp drive inside the subspace rift they need to enter to save a science ship's crew will expand the rift and disable the warp engines.

We aren't given details, but the saturation of the nacelles takes about 30 minutes, so at the least we know that power can be supplied to nacelles gradually. It could be therefore that you COULD slowly charge up for a short warp jump using a less powerful energy source than antimatter.

No where in the episode does the M/MA reactor go down, rather, it is implied it is the source of power to initiate the warp pulse out of the warp engines. The warp engines were brought up to maximum power levels (implies M/AM power) then released as a superpower pulse. The warp pulse was initiated outside the subspace rift, then they "coast" at warp speed through the rift without using the warp engines.

 

[Timo]

Yet if "bringing up to power" is a thing for warp engines, that is, if they can act as giant capacitors, then the argument about using a coal furnace or a gerbil wheel for the purpose (and just taking more time) seems sound.

But the whole saturating thing seems to be separate from doing the warp pulse. You need M/AM for the pulse, but with saturated coils, you then coast for two minutes, while without saturated coils, you probably coast for 0.2 seconds. We never learn how the coils get saturated - does some Ensign rub a cat against them? But it doesn't sound like a procedure Cochrane could use to achieve what he did.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Henoch]

That's if the one millionth lower power level from the impulse system doesn't take a million times longer (500,000 minutes or about a year) to reach maximum power in the warp engines, or, pegs out at one millionth the power level.

 

[Timo]

Well, setting the goal at powering a Galaxy class warp engine might not be doing Cochrane's engineering solutions justice. For all we know, his much more modest warp drive was merely a hundred times more power-hungry than his subllight drive, and could be brought to full power by running that fission pile for the duration of the fancy time-consuming acceleration.

Cochrane certainly didn't appear worried about power. He kept an eye on the speedometer needle, rather than the gas tank one, and once breaking the lightspeed barrier, he just kept going, until Riker managed to convince him that this would be a good time to drop out of warp and avoid a terminal kaboom.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

The Bell X-1 of warp

 

[Deks]

Well, setting the goal at powering a Galaxy class warp engine might not be doing Cochrane's engineering solutions justice. For all we know, his much more modest warp drive was merely a hundred times more power-hungry than his subllight drive, and could be brought to full power by running that fission pile for the duration of the fancy time-consuming acceleration.

Cochrane certainly didn't appear worried about power. He kept an eye on the speedometer needle, rather than the gas tank one, and once breaking the lightspeed barrier, he just kept going, until Riker managed to convince him that this would be a good time to drop out of warp and avoid a terminal kaboom.

Timo Saloniemi

Real life scientific studies on creating and powering an actual Warp drive now posit the energy requirements were brought down to sufficiently low level where a fission based nuclear reaction would be able to power it with relative ease (and its possible that in Trek, Earth managed to develop Fusion technology at some point before 2063 - which means Cochrane could have used simple fusion reactor to power his Warp drive at the time - assuming the approach was similar to what we posit of our hypothesis and theories on Warp drive function).

Seeing how fast we're progressing thanks to exponential developments and returns... and recent advancements in Fusion (in part thanks to AI and adaptive algorithms), I wouldn't be surprised if we manage to start testing our own real life Warp drive in the next few decades.

I suspect its possible development of M/AM technology was also fairly near in 2063.
Once Earth got its act together post First Contact, its technology and science would have skyrocketed forward by a massive amount because the planet would no longer be 'fractured' and many old approaches and ways of thinking would have been left behind.

 

[Alpha C]

Real life scientific studies on creating and powering an actual Warp drive now posit the energy requirements were brought down to sufficiently low level where a fission based nuclear reaction would be able to power it with relative ease

I wouldn't equate the Alcubierre metric with Trek warp drive, because for one thing, it doesn't really work like it (despite the name being popularly used) - e.g., nothing like subspace involved. Different physics, so potentially different energy requirements too (and for that matter, different universe altogether ).

I wouldn't be surprised if we manage to start testing our own real life Warp drive in the next few decades.

If you can beat causality (remember, all FTL travel is time travel, no matter how you do it), and come up with a replacement theory for relativity that despite doing away with some of its most basic principles still provides the same experimental results... well, who knows. Though I don't want to turn this into a debate whether FTL travel is possible IRL.

 

[Ronald Held]

I still cannot see why a fusion reactor cannot power a low warp engine. In 2063 a M/AM reactor might produce more energy per reactants, but might be much larger in volume.

 

[Alpha C]

Truthfully, there's no evidence for or against. I for one like the idea. And since warp drive's physical basis has no relation with how the real universe works there's really no way of tellng. Really, the only thing we can demand of Trek science and engineering is that it's at least somewhat self-consistent, and lord knows it's already a mess .

 

[Timo]

Dilithium is great for doing M/AM, apparently. But is it also a vital element in a warp engine in all cases, regardless of the nature of the power source? Romulans for one seem to find great value in dilithium, despite going for those AQS power sources of theirs big time, and we don't know of any alternate market for the crystals besides warp engines.

We might think that the magic of warp is all in the coils, and if you huff and puff into those hotly enough, lo, FTL. But episodes like "Fair Trade" suggest that the plasma going to the coils is already magical in itself, rather than merely a conduit of energies. And we still don't know the nature of energy being carried by the plasma from the power event to the coils. In Fed engines, that energy comes out of the dilithium, or at least through the dilithium, which in itself is seldom claimed to be particularly energetic, and even in "Alternative Factor" needs to be stolen from a special energizing chamber in order to do good for the bad guys. But having the energy come out/through the crystals might be absolutely vital, even if it goes into the crystals from a fission pile, a coal furnace or a zillion cats being rubbed real fast.

The amount of energy might not be all that crucial or remarkable in the end. Even the makeup of the warp coils might not be that significant, and Cochrane could cobble them together from fairly ordinary materials, and Geordi and Reg then fix it with basic copper. But at some point, we need to bring in the magic, to make it all plausible. And having it all hinge on dilithium, rather than power as such, is in keeping with everything Trek tells us. Indeed, it's a big part of what has been recently told: other ways of doing FTL (annd yes, those are legion) are more difficult and costly, not less.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

I have this idea that they are tapping into zero point somehow and just don’t know it. Zero point energy would explain Nomad’s incredible power for its size. I say Tan-ru had a zed-pm from the Ancients circa Stargate: Atlantis

 

[matthunter]

Well, if we hold the DS9 Tech Manual as a valid source (which is a bit iffy given some of the ship stats in the back), quantum torpedoes either access zero-point or something close to it.

 

[Timo]

And canonically, antimatter explosions indeed are a gateway to other realities: photon torpedo detonations were credited as the reason for the opening of the temporal rift that took the E-C out of the Narendra fight and then back.

Might well be there's a threshold there. Use an ounce of antimatter, and suddenly the resulting explosion is way bigger than the expected E=mcc. Q-torps might just do that in a more controlled fashion, using relatively tiny annihilation bombs plus some new secret trick to trigger ZPE detonantions of desired yield (including really low yield, as typically seen).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Boris Skrbic]

Well, if we hold the DS9 Tech Manual as a valid source (which is a bit iffy given some of the ship stats in the back), quantum torpedoes either access zero-point or something close to it.

A source isn’t universally valid or invalid; rather, we have to bear in mind that Rick Sternbach and Doug Drexler had more accurate information on some topics than on others. Most of the manual is about the space station detail-designed by Sternbach himself; he also designed the runabouts (with help from Jim Martin), the escape pods reused from VGR, classes like Vor’cha or Galor… Just because readers probably weren’t too interested in the inner workings of a mining station doesn’t mean that we should look at the book as a Dominion War resource first and foremost.

 

[Timo]

It's easiest to treat all sources as universally invalid, though: even when the author of a backstage book has solid and explicit ideas on how some piece of fiction in Star Trek is supposed to work, he or she is seldom in a position to put those ideas into action. The "idea folks" have little influence over aired Trek, after all - except through people who are fans of the ideas but not quite part of the downtrodden profession that generates them.

Basically nothing out of the DS9 TM has popped up in the "Trek reality". A paragraph from the TNG TM was lifted to explicate the workings of warp engines for ENT "Demons", but everything else is just bits and pieces that pay lip service to TM ideas at best.

Of course, there's always LDS, so never say never. But "sources" generally describe a universe fundamentally unrelated to the "Trek reality" that they attempt to describe.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Boris Skrbic]

Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach did have influence on TNG right down to teching up scripts with line-by-line suggestions, in addition to writing memos on how things work and then the internal tech manual that led to TNGTM. The writers did seem to listen to the extent they needed to, the assumption being that people like Okuda and Sternbach had answers for everything they weren’t particularly concerned with.

The DS9TM is different in that Rick Sternbach had moved on from TNG/DS9 to VGR and the published book came too late to have much of an impact beyond small bits like the deck plans and the revised MSD appearing onscreen, aside from the Defiant pathfinder reuse as Equinox. The material is still in the same class of background information, though, as is all the BoP development done for the Rotarran Haynes manual.

My point is that if an idea successfully supports the framework of explicit or implicit requirements set by writers or VFX people, then it can be accepted as elaboration upon those bits and pieces; if, on the other hand, those in charge really need something different, then the supporting idea has to be revised or thrown out entirely. It’s all a part of maximizing predictive power, and one way to do that is by examining behind-the-scenes resources presented to those in charge, even if not all of it ends up in the actual canon.

 

[publiusr]

Masao had a lot about early fusion reactors and how they survived antimatter engines.

My ideal fandom ship would be for a Reliant atop a refit Enterprise secondary hull. The Reliant hangers with as big a retro-fusion plant in the place of the hangers...Chandley class Impulse but Enterprise type nacelles from FASA...the best pre-Excelsior ship you could have...until Constellation/Stargazer came along.

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

So perhaps Cochrane had a fairly regular antimatter annihilator at the core of his warp drive, and just used an inferior sort of lithium crystal for harnessing the energies?

Warp physics is complete magic anyway and I don't think we even have order of magnitude estimates of how much energy is involved (either from on screen info or the tech manuals)

We aren't given details, but the saturation of the nacelles takes about 30 minutes, so at the least we know that power can be supplied to nacelles gradually. It could be therefore that you COULD slowly charge up for a short warp jump using a less powerful energy source than antimatter.

Geordi did say "nacelles charged and ready," as they were getting ready to launch the ship. And the Sternbach quote about being able to do entire reaction in the nacelles would make the Kelvin, with its apparently habitable Engine Room in the nacelle make more sense. (Of course, I do not necessarily consider the Kelvin or NX-01 canon, but when an idea supports it, it is worth mentioning.) If there are "nacelle control rooms" prior to TNG, then the reference to Engineering in "B deck" from Court Martial works, with that particular version of the engine room being in the lower part of the nacelle, the equivalent of 1 deck below the bridge.

This does not rule out a "warp core," even in TOS, as a reactor in the body of the ship that charges the nacelles when needed, or adds more power, or whatever. (I still say that it should have been in the outboard pod on the NX-01, as Drexler intended originally, and not in the saucer).

In TAS, the staging of one scene suggest that there are huge crystals in the nacelles, though. Perhaps Cochrane just had a different type of crystal?

 

[publiusr]

Could be. There is something in theoretical physics called a Q-ball (from SUNSHINE) that might do in a pinch.

It wouldn’t do for a starship, but for a Bell X-1 type warp prototype or munition? Good enough. I have this theory that Dr. Soran used a souped-up merculite rocket. It’s range about 1 AU or so before detonating…an Uber-Sprint missile that does a warp jump straight to target…a star in this case. It just has to work once. Siphon the energy off a little at a time…you get Phoenix. Fusion is enough…IRL a new magnet has been devised that only needs 30 watts, not 200 million IIRC.

Back in ‘93 we had two strangelets that passed through the Earth at 200 km/sec leaving linear earthquakes…we actually don’t look for those anymore but I think they may be responsible for mysterious booms in some Fortean incidents…no plume.

In TOS, I have this feel that early spaceflight was more gradual. In First Contact, Zeph’ had to improvise, maybe finding one of these things a shuttle orbiter brought back that gave him the energy density needed to jumpstart things without the gradual increases due to WW III. A left-over Titan II with the nugget was supposed to be a weapon. After things fell apart, Zeph disobeyed now-moot orders and tried to do something to redeem his Oppenheimer type past.

A naturally found Q Ball allows even a crumbling society to do a brief warp just long enough to get noticed.

 

[David cgc]

And the Sternbach quote about being able to do entire reaction in the nacelles would make the Kelvin, with its apparently habitable Engine Room in the nacelle make more sense.

The elevator Robau exits is shown coming down from above, but he still couldn't have been going to the lower warp nacelle because he was heading for the shuttlebay in the upper engineering hull. It must've just had to go up and over some obstruction in the route to get to the shuttlebay.