would like to discuss Romulan Tech with anyone who is interested
I would like to discuss Romulan Tech
- Thread starter mikemonica
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^Might as well post this here, as it's something that's been bugging me--
You can't turn an evaporating black hole off. That has got to be a cooling issue--at least (hey, maybe we can finally explain the weird construction of the D'Deredix; the double wings are a liquid helium circulator).
You can't turn an evaporating black hole off. That has got to be a cooling issue--at least (hey, maybe we can finally explain the weird construction of the D'Deredix; the double wings are a liquid helium circulator).
I think I remember, long ago, someone suggesting that the double hulls were used to dissipate heat. Although at the same time I think I remember something about dissipating heat in a vacuum doesn't quite work the way this person suggested.
The QS technology would probably indeed be the most intriguing aspect of Romulan tech, with the cloak it powers a close second.
What else is out there? Romulan disruptors, I guess. The starship ones are powerful weapons - what is the difference between their beam and bolt modes? The handheld weapons were of a distinct angular design with giant trigger guards until "The Die is Cast", when they became curvy Ferengi rifles - or did "Colonel Lovok" utilize "hired guns" in a literal sense? Also, the angular rifles and pistols proliferated through the riffraff of the galaxy in TNG, basically becoming the AK-47 of Star Trek - are Romulans playing general weapons merchants, or arming insurgents, or what?
The Romulan plasma weapon from TOS: the same thing as the later "plasma torpedo" first mentioned in DS9, or something completely different? Guided weapon or not? Where does the extreme warp speed of the weapon come from - from the plasma cloud itself, or projected from the firing ship?
Romulan transporter-disrupting assassination devices: their working mechanism? Limitations?
Romulan explosives and detonators: how come they bother with designs easily identified as theirs? What is so good about molecular-decay fuzes?
Any others?
Timo Saloniemi
What else is out there? Romulan disruptors, I guess. The starship ones are powerful weapons - what is the difference between their beam and bolt modes? The handheld weapons were of a distinct angular design with giant trigger guards until "The Die is Cast", when they became curvy Ferengi rifles - or did "Colonel Lovok" utilize "hired guns" in a literal sense? Also, the angular rifles and pistols proliferated through the riffraff of the galaxy in TNG, basically becoming the AK-47 of Star Trek - are Romulans playing general weapons merchants, or arming insurgents, or what?
The Romulan plasma weapon from TOS: the same thing as the later "plasma torpedo" first mentioned in DS9, or something completely different? Guided weapon or not? Where does the extreme warp speed of the weapon come from - from the plasma cloud itself, or projected from the firing ship?
Romulan transporter-disrupting assassination devices: their working mechanism? Limitations?
Romulan explosives and detonators: how come they bother with designs easily identified as theirs? What is so good about molecular-decay fuzes?
Any others?
Timo Saloniemi
One of the things I've noticed about the D'Deridex is that the ship's design encloses a large hollow area. I have a bit of trouble believing the quantum singularity is located in a small containment vessel with a unlocked access door. The ship's shape suspends the infinitely small singularity in the center of this hollow. The singularity moves with the ship. The D'Deridex is the size it is because of the equipment needed to maintain the singularity, maintain it's position and extract power from it.
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Except it can't be in the center of the aperture, we'd see it. It would glow with a Hawking luminosity described thusly: L = 1/M^2 X hc^6/15360piG^2.
Smaller the "singularity," the higher the output per unit of time and shorter the lifespan; the larger the "singularity," the more difficult it would be to wrangle.
I still say the Narada is a black hole miner. Countdown isn't very good anyway.
If the "singularity" does not operate this way, then no useful work is going to come from it. The only thing to do would be to throw hydrogen at it and collect the energy released by the spiral into its gravity well. Which would also be visible.*
*Visible in the sense that it would produce detectable light. I have no idea how much Roy G. Biv light is output by an exploding black hole or accelerated matter during infall. The interior of the warbird's wings would be likely to reradiate in the visible spectrum, however.
Smaller the "singularity," the higher the output per unit of time and shorter the lifespan; the larger the "singularity," the more difficult it would be to wrangle.
I still say the Narada is a black hole miner. Countdown isn't very good anyway.
If the "singularity" does not operate this way, then no useful work is going to come from it. The only thing to do would be to throw hydrogen at it and collect the energy released by the spiral into its gravity well. Which would also be visible.*
*Visible in the sense that it would produce detectable light. I have no idea how much Roy G. Biv light is output by an exploding black hole or accelerated matter during infall. The interior of the warbird's wings would be likely to reradiate in the visible spectrum, however.
Unless one of the main applications for its power were an inner layer of cloaking.
Still, I'd like to believe in what was shown in "Timescape", because going against it would be going against established Star Trek. I much prefer to sneakily go around rather than against.
Also, I'd very much like to believe that QS power is a standard feature of many different sizes and types of Romulan ship, including the one from "Balance of Terror". That would explain why our heroes couldn't correctly identify its power system in that episode: it was too exotic for them.
To be sure, singularities would be technology intimately related to the most efficient and reliable of Star Trek technologies, that of gravity manipulation. It might in fact be relatively easy to use AG to create a sharp gravity well, an artificial quantum singularity. It might then be trivially easy to move this singularity around without inertial effects, again thanks to AG.
And the way to derive energy from the singularity might also be related to AG technology. Starfleet has an arrangement where some shorebound facility packs energy into the creation of antimatter, and starships release it by annihilating the antimatter. The Romulan fleet might have an arrangement where the shorebound facility compresses tiny black holes, and the ships let them "expand back" using AG technology to facilitate the expansion and the tapping of resulting energy release. Or vice versa.
Timo Saloniemi
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Fleet Captain
Well, there are disadvantages to using an evaporating singularity as a power source:
- you can only turn it off by letting it completely evaporate - and then you can't turn it back on;
- in order to extract a significant amount of energy from the singularity, you have to make it very small - on the verge on vanishing through evaporation - in which case you have to be very careful about maintaining it/keeping it from disappearing.
But using singularities also has a very unique advantage:
- you can throw ANYTHING in the black hole (toxic/radioactive waste, you name it) and you get back energy in its purest form - a VERY convenient/efficient conversion.
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The 275,000 ton one postulated by (again, I think
) Probert would've lasted 51 years, iirc. Granted, the useful lifetime might be far less, because the last few years it would burn so much hotter than would be workable...
I liked the 275,000 ton number, because it burned just hot enough to be competitive with (iirc, been a while since I ran the math) a gram per second expenditure of antimatter.
It may be more efficient in some ways--I'm unsure if the reaction products from a black hole are any different than a normal annihilation reaction. I believe the main reactants are e- and e+ pairs, which afaik pretty invariably generate gamma photons. Proton-antiproton reactions lose a lot of energy to useless neutrino creation. On the other hand, the energies of the individual photons in e-/e+ reactions are spectacularly less than that of proton-antiproton collisions of the same kinetic energy, due to the 2000-fold difference in rest mass. This may make a difference to power generation depending on how the materials involved make use of the photons.
Some people say dilithium is some kind of electrically conductive material, and in that model it could make a big difference whether an electron is kicked out of orbit by a gamma photon several hundred times stronger than those produced from an e-/e+ reaction (although above 1.022MeV, pair production and the obvious subsequent problems is going to a problem even within a material capable of stopping large numbers of those high-energy gamma rays).
I like the notion of continually throwing junk into the black hole to keep it radiating steady. That's a good idea. The problem as I see it is that it would be hard to get anything near enough to it that it wouldn't get blown away. A 275,000 ton object compressed beyond its Schwarzchild radius is going to have negligible attractive power outside that radius (which is why I figure normal, stellar-collapse black holes are the original sources of the Romulan power plants...). If the output were magically stopped, you wouldn't feel the gravity of a black hole that small if you were a meter away from it.
) Probert would've lasted 51 years, iirc. Granted, the useful lifetime might be far less, because the last few years it would burn so much hotter than would be workable...I liked the 275,000 ton number, because it burned just hot enough to be competitive with (iirc, been a while since I ran the math) a gram per second expenditure of antimatter.
It may be more efficient in some ways--I'm unsure if the reaction products from a black hole are any different than a normal annihilation reaction. I believe the main reactants are e- and e+ pairs, which afaik pretty invariably generate gamma photons. Proton-antiproton reactions lose a lot of energy to useless neutrino creation. On the other hand, the energies of the individual photons in e-/e+ reactions are spectacularly less than that of proton-antiproton collisions of the same kinetic energy, due to the 2000-fold difference in rest mass. This may make a difference to power generation depending on how the materials involved make use of the photons.
Some people say dilithium is some kind of electrically conductive material, and in that model it could make a big difference whether an electron is kicked out of orbit by a gamma photon several hundred times stronger than those produced from an e-/e+ reaction (although above 1.022MeV, pair production and the obvious subsequent problems is going to a problem even within a material capable of stopping large numbers of those high-energy gamma rays).
I like the notion of continually throwing junk into the black hole to keep it radiating steady. That's a good idea. The problem as I see it is that it would be hard to get anything near enough to it that it wouldn't get blown away. A 275,000 ton object compressed beyond its Schwarzchild radius is going to have negligible attractive power outside that radius (which is why I figure normal, stellar-collapse black holes are the original sources of the Romulan power plants...). If the output were magically stopped, you wouldn't feel the gravity of a black hole that small if you were a meter away from it.
The discussion of caputred quantum singularities is interesting, but it brings up another question in my mind:
In all of STAR TREK, we see several generations of Romulan ships-of-the-line. The TNG-forward ships are undoubtedly built by the Romulans themselves using very advanced technology (by apparent in-Universe Federation standards). But let's also remember that earlier versions of their fleet may or may not have been built by Romulans: "The Enterprise Incident" comes to mind. Spock reported "Intelligence reports Romulans now using Klingon design" as we see Kirk's Enterprise surrounded by Klingon cruisers manned by Romulans. Does this imply that the Klingons had captured quantum singularities harnessed as power sources for this era of their cruisers? Or did the Romulans simply buy Klingon designs from a third party, built their ships to their own specs, with a different power source?
And what about "Balance of Terror"? Is the Romulan Bird of Prey also powered in the same way? Circulated on the 'net is a story of how an earlier version of the "Balance" script also contained speculation that the Bird design may have been stolen from Earth/Federation ships. So did these earlier Romulans ships use their own power source technology, or did they rely on the matter/antimatter reactors built by others?
Of course, it's all nebulous and not strictly canon, but it does make one wonder about the history and design lineage of Romulan starships...
In all of STAR TREK, we see several generations of Romulan ships-of-the-line. The TNG-forward ships are undoubtedly built by the Romulans themselves using very advanced technology (by apparent in-Universe Federation standards). But let's also remember that earlier versions of their fleet may or may not have been built by Romulans: "The Enterprise Incident" comes to mind. Spock reported "Intelligence reports Romulans now using Klingon design" as we see Kirk's Enterprise surrounded by Klingon cruisers manned by Romulans. Does this imply that the Klingons had captured quantum singularities harnessed as power sources for this era of their cruisers? Or did the Romulans simply buy Klingon designs from a third party, built their ships to their own specs, with a different power source?
And what about "Balance of Terror"? Is the Romulan Bird of Prey also powered in the same way? Circulated on the 'net is a story of how an earlier version of the "Balance" script also contained speculation that the Bird design may have been stolen from Earth/Federation ships. So did these earlier Romulans ships use their own power source technology, or did they rely on the matter/antimatter reactors built by others?
Of course, it's all nebulous and not strictly canon, but it does make one wonder about the history and design lineage of Romulan starships...
I think the Black Hole Big Block Hemi came about sometime between the Tomed Incident and TNG... a TOS/TMP-era Romulan fleet would probably be using largely Klingon-derived designs. Before the Romulans got the D-7 design, I'd imagined their ships as being powered via fusion - as per the BoP's crappy engines pointed out by Scotty.
One might think the Romulans stole Klingon ships, or built fakes, in order to infiltrate Klingon space or frame the Klingons. If so, they might have had inferior antimatter power sources rather than classic Romulan singularity ones, for authenticity...
Such fakes would not be their first choice for ambushing the Enterprise, of course. But they didn't really ambush her - she ambushed them! Before this episode, Romulans had also tried to catch the hero ship, and in "Deadly Years" they had used their "BoT" design, which apparently was perfectly good for forcing the Enterprise out of warp.
I'm not sure the engines of the "BoT" ship were all that crappy. The ship seemed to be doing pretty good clip, in terms of scurrying from one Starfleet outpost to the next, on a map where we also got a pretty good idea of the top speed of the Enterprise as she dashed to rescue. Sailing under cloak seemed to slow them down, though. And either the cloak or the plasma weapon brought them low on fuel (the episode doesn't specify which one, although nearly all books and RPGs tend to speculate that the cloak was the power-consuming element there). Would that happen to a QS power system? Perhaps - if it's a "conventional" setup like Myasishchev here expertly describes, it will need fuel. If it's done completely using gravity manipulation, it might not need fuel as such, though.
Timo Saloniemi
I like to think that for whatever reason, the Romulans simply cannot generate appreciable amounts of antimatter--perhaps lacking enough large-but-suitable natural energy sources like neutron stars or x-ray binaries to generate AM at the same rate as the Federation or Klingons.
so despite having a grasp of the technology and science, they relied on fusion in the 23d century and black holes in the 24th. The "D-7 interval" however does suggest antimatter power during that timeframe, at least for those ships, inasmuch as Klingon designs demonstrably run on annihilation reactions.
My take on that is that Klingon supplies of antimatter may have been much more important to the Romulans than the D-7 designs or physical battlecruisers themselves.
It might not be too far a logical leap to suggest that the moment the Romulans figured out how to separate totally degenerate matter from large natural sources (i.e., black holes) was also the moment the Klingon-Romulan agreement fell apart, with the Romulans believing they had no further need for Klingon economic assistance at the expense of their superior technology. With this in mind, might be able to date the advent of singularity driven Romulan birds as far back as TUC, where Ambassador Nanclus surely seems to have a hard-on for killing Klingon chancellors.
Also, I forget if I said this, but I still say that plasma torps--at least DS9 era ones--are just large thermonuclear weapons. They may or may not have antimatter primaries, though, which would make outstanding compressors for large hydrogen secondaries, to the point I don't understand why the Feds don't pack hydrogen in their pho-torps to boost their yields.
What makes you think they don't?
A fairly satisfactory setup would have the torpedo's engines propelled by annihilation of deuterium and antideuterium, with the former in abundance, and possibly even providing propellant mass for the potential sublight engine of the weapon. The package would be standardized in external dimensions, but the interior would perform different functions depending on how it was fueled up.
For long range hits, one would pack up more on antimatter, so that there'd still be some bang left at the target. Basically all matter would be exhausted in propulsion, then, providing no yield boost.
For demolition hits, one would program a more sedate flight profile and favor matter, so there'd be annihilation-primed fusion at the target.
For short range hits, one would specifically skimp on matter while not adding antimatter, making the torp light and maneuverable and exhausting all non-annihilating matter before impact, so there would be no damage to the firing vessel but enough damage to the enemy to make her an easier target for future hits, with progressively greater yield and less maneuverability.
For love pats like the ST5:SFF shot, one would skimp on both matter and antimatter to the desired degree.
All of this could be done simply by remotely controlling two valves in the loader, not requiring any mechanical changes in the torpedo innards themselves. If one had time, though, one might have one's loader robotically install a second warhead cell, or swap the original cell for a special shaped-charge head or close-support midget head or a dispenser for chemical agents or whatnot. But the torpedo would be built from the outset to accommodate differing yield and range and maneuverability combos simply by regulating the amount of reactants added before launch. (Inflight venting of reactants would of course allow for mode changes later on, too.)
As for "plasma" torpedoes, I'd like to emphasize that the weapon in "Balance of Terror" was never considered a torpedo. And the weapons that were considered plasma torpedoes later on, in "Tears of the Prophets", looked like fairly conventional spots of bright light slamming onto starships and going kaboom. I'd thus argue that the "BoT" and "TotP" weapons were in no way related to each other.
The former I'd argue to have been a warp-boosted version of the plasma peashooters of ENT: a dumb, dense, hot particle cloud released at high velocity, but then further boosted by a warp field projected by the mothership, and thus steerable by adjusting the booster field (making it a "semi-active" weapon of sorts, and explaining how its use might deplete the mothership's fuel reserves). The latter would be a true projectile with its own propulsion and steering, just with a "plasma" warhead, whatever that is.
Timo Saloniemi
A fairly satisfactory setup would have the torpedo's engines propelled by annihilation of deuterium and antideuterium, with the former in abundance, and possibly even providing propellant mass for the potential sublight engine of the weapon. The package would be standardized in external dimensions, but the interior would perform different functions depending on how it was fueled up.
For long range hits, one would pack up more on antimatter, so that there'd still be some bang left at the target. Basically all matter would be exhausted in propulsion, then, providing no yield boost.
For demolition hits, one would program a more sedate flight profile and favor matter, so there'd be annihilation-primed fusion at the target.
For short range hits, one would specifically skimp on matter while not adding antimatter, making the torp light and maneuverable and exhausting all non-annihilating matter before impact, so there would be no damage to the firing vessel but enough damage to the enemy to make her an easier target for future hits, with progressively greater yield and less maneuverability.
For love pats like the ST5:SFF shot, one would skimp on both matter and antimatter to the desired degree.
All of this could be done simply by remotely controlling two valves in the loader, not requiring any mechanical changes in the torpedo innards themselves. If one had time, though, one might have one's loader robotically install a second warhead cell, or swap the original cell for a special shaped-charge head or close-support midget head or a dispenser for chemical agents or whatnot. But the torpedo would be built from the outset to accommodate differing yield and range and maneuverability combos simply by regulating the amount of reactants added before launch. (Inflight venting of reactants would of course allow for mode changes later on, too.)
As for "plasma" torpedoes, I'd like to emphasize that the weapon in "Balance of Terror" was never considered a torpedo. And the weapons that were considered plasma torpedoes later on, in "Tears of the Prophets", looked like fairly conventional spots of bright light slamming onto starships and going kaboom. I'd thus argue that the "BoT" and "TotP" weapons were in no way related to each other.
The former I'd argue to have been a warp-boosted version of the plasma peashooters of ENT: a dumb, dense, hot particle cloud released at high velocity, but then further boosted by a warp field projected by the mothership, and thus steerable by adjusting the booster field (making it a "semi-active" weapon of sorts, and explaining how its use might deplete the mothership's fuel reserves). The latter would be a true projectile with its own propulsion and steering, just with a "plasma" warhead, whatever that is.
Timo Saloniemi
ProtoAvatar
Fleet Captain
Thanks!
A problem would be that a singularity is small even by atomic standards.
The wavelength of a "junk" atom/molecule might be too large for the singularity to see and absorb this atom/molecule.
The hawking radiation is believed to be composed from photons. If the energy emitted by the singularity surpasses the energy/rest mass of another quantum particle, then the black hole will emit pairs of particles/antiparticles of this kind along with photons (gamma rays).
About the D'Deridex:
Notice that the emissions of an evaporating singularity cannot be seen in the visible spectrum - quantum particles and gamma rays.
Perhaps the D'Deridex carries its singularity at the center, in that large empty area. We see nothing there because the black hole can't be seen with the naked eye - maybe, if one uses sensors, that area of the ship shines like a small sun.
PS - There are already hypothesis about how to make micro-singularities:
http://io9.com/5391989/a-black-hole-engine-that-could-power-spaceships
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Yeah, but the hull would reradiate them in the visual spectrum as it was heated, and there seem to be no special photoelectric cells or anything to that effect.
I wonder about how you would mechanically couple the force of a rocket (impulse drive, whatever) to a black hole. You can impart momentum to a black hole, to be sure, but it's probably a lot more complicated than doing so to a industrial-sized Penning trap. Pushing on the dilithium cage or whatever used to hold the black hole is just going to increase the frequency of the gamma rays, which would, if mostly reflected, presumably transfer their momentum to the black hole. But it does raise some engineering questions--and might explain the lack of conventional rocket drives on the D'D.
I saw the black-hole drive thing the other day. I guess it's a doable concept, although I seriously question the "present day physics and technology" claim of the article, which isn't really made by the authors in their brief, who, like good scientists, already raised most of the objections I had.
I dunno. TNGTM? -_- A fair point.
But the reaction packets would have to be immaculately set up beforehand for any given yield, except in a planetary bombardment scenario. Otherwise, it's a waste of the antimatter blown out of the reaction area by the resulting gamma ray burst.
I wonder about how you would mechanically couple the force of a rocket (impulse drive, whatever) to a black hole. You can impart momentum to a black hole, to be sure, but it's probably a lot more complicated than doing so to a industrial-sized Penning trap. Pushing on the dilithium cage or whatever used to hold the black hole is just going to increase the frequency of the gamma rays, which would, if mostly reflected, presumably transfer their momentum to the black hole. But it does raise some engineering questions--and might explain the lack of conventional rocket drives on the D'D.
Indeed, that's true. I hadn't thought of that.
I saw the black-hole drive thing the other day. I guess it's a doable concept, although I seriously question the "present day physics and technology" claim of the article, which isn't really made by the authors in their brief, who, like good scientists, already raised most of the objections I had.
Timo said:
I dunno. TNGTM? -_- A fair point.
But the reaction packets would have to be immaculately set up beforehand for any given yield, except in a planetary bombardment scenario. Otherwise, it's a waste of the antimatter blown out of the reaction area by the resulting gamma ray burst.
ProtoAvatar
Fleet Captain
Indeed, that's true. I hadn't thought of that.
Well, a potential solution to the problem is to accelerate the junk atoms/molecules (with a particle accelerator), increasing their momentum and decreasing their wavelength until the singularity can "see" them.
I saw the black-hole drive thing the other day. I guess it's a doable concept, although I seriously question the "present day physics and technology" claim of the article, which isn't really made by the authors in their brief, who, like good scientists, already raised most of the objections I had.
Well, one can always dream.
Imagine - a singularity has the potential to transform ANY matter into energy.
It's akin to matter/antimatter annihilation (perhaps even mare efficient - without the neutrino loss) without the HUGE disadvantage and energy expenditure of having to somehow obtain antimatter.
Just throw in your garbage and you get energy - almost limitless energy.
Yeah, but the hull would reradiate them in the visual spectrum as it was heated, and there seem to be no special photoelectric cells or anything to that effect.
I think that any civilization that can harvest or create black holes has the capability to collect EFFICIENTLY the Hawking radiation.
The hull of the D'Deridex heating until it glows is a horrendous inefficient way of absorbing Hawking radiation.
Indeed, if most of the radiation is collected and transformed into usable energy, the hull of the ship should show no signs of heating.
In the trekverse, a singularity is kept in place, probably, by antigravity containment fields - they force the singularity to move along with the ship.
I think the largest disadvantage of a singularity as a power source for a ship is the mass of the singularity - for example, your figure: 275000 T. It's akin to the ship towing a small mountain.
The D'Deridex is a very large ship - and most of its volume consists of the empty space between those two plates.
Those plates are so large because they need to generate an overgroen AG field, along with equally massive inertial dampners and mass reduction devices.
Even so, the D'Deridex is NOT a maneuverable ship - quite the contrary.
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