Impulse engines in reverse ; How do they work ?

[Ronald Held]

AFAIR, no Federation ship uses microsingularities.

 

[RyanKCR]

middyseafort said:

The God Thing said:

JuanBolio said:
Well, IMPULSE is apparently an acronym for Inertial Magnatomic Pulse (sic).

Source, pliz?

TGT

Ronald Held said:
One of the old novels had impulse as Inertially Metered Pulse(sic), AFAIR.

It was in Diane Carey's Novel The Final Frontier.

pg. 138
Drake hunted through the vast ship until he finally found the right place. In the bowels of the primary hull, it was the hub of power for sublight travel, as the door panel proudly professed in clean, newly painted bright red letters:

I.M. PULSE DRIVE ENGINEERING
ENTRY AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED

And later:

pg. 139
"Oh, you know, the usual contamination. What does the I.M. stand for, eh?" Cloaking his movement in question, Drake pulled out the mediscanner and casually adjusted it for Graff's estimated age and weight, then started scanning for metabolic inconsistencies.

"The what?" Graff asked.

Drake pointed over his shoulder at the door. "I.M."

"Oh, 'impulse,' you mean? Don't you know?"

"We cannot all be blessed, sad though it is."

"It stands for 'internally metered pulse drive.' We just say 'impulse' for short."

I always like that book's description of the impulse drive. You didn't quote that part here but if I remember correctly they take a fuel pellet and hit it with some sort of regulated pulsed lasers and that creats an amount of energy that is crushed in on itself with some sort of field and it distorse space/time and the ship rides those waves.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

St Nicholas said:

middyseafort said:
removed

I always like that book's description of the impulse drive. You didn't quote that part here but if I remember correctly they take a fuel pellet and hit it with some sort of regulated pulsed lasers and that creats an amount of energy that is crushed in on itself with some sort of field and it distorse space/time and the ship rides those waves.

As requested:

Excerpt from The Final Frontier by Diane Carey pg. 142

"Okay. Impulse engines are powered by high-energy fusion, got it? The fusion is created by a pulsed laser array, mounted all around a fuel tablet. The first pulse causes a fusion reaction which ignites the tablet, which results in a heavier element."

"A heavier series of elements, really," Wood interrupted.

"Which we then hit with another high-energy laser pulse, and we get the second-stage fusion reaction. That releases a hundred twenty percent more energy than the first reaction. Then the pulse hits again, and again--"

"All within a microsecond," Graff contributed ignoring Drake's expression of abject terror.

"That's where the term 'impulse' comes from," Saffire went on. "Internally metered pulse drive."

 

[RyanKCR]

Thank you. Can you quote the rest describing what happens to the engery?

Thanks. I don't have my copy of the book right here. I used that description as a jumping off point for the tech in my Sc-Fi story I wrote and am working on.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

St Nicholas said:
Thank you. Can you quote the rest describing what happens to the engery?

Thanks. I don't have my copy of the book right here. I used that description as a jumping off point for the tech in my Sc-Fi story I wrote and am working on.

Here ya go:

Excerpt from pg. 143, The Final Frontier by Diane Carey

"We use a quirk in nature. We don't allow any of the energy to escape. We crush it back in on itself with an artificial gravity field."

"Our own private black hole," Graff agreed.

"But the energy has to go somewhere," Drake complained in defense of the poor crushed energy.

Saffire nodded. "Any first-year physics student'll tell you the result is spacial distortion."

"Waves of it," Wood added. "Each pulse results in a new wave of distorted space."

"And we just ride the waves," Graff finished, illustrating with a sweep of his hand.

 

[aridas sofia]

Ronald Held said:
AFAIR, no Federation ship uses microsingularities.

Oh. I'm sorry. I wasn't aware that it had been established in the original Star Trek that the nacelles of the Enterprise didn't utilize microsingularities. My bad.

 

[Ronald Held]

This may be too much of a generalization, but I am unaware that any Federation ship up to the 24th century used microsingularities for propulsion. Timo and others can correct me if I am mistaken.

 

[Timo]

Well, the point of canon on this would be that the Romulan use of singularities comes as a surprise to our 24th century Starfleet heroes. From "Face of the Enemy", Data first says he cannot explain the distortion caused by the Romulan ship, after which the informant DeSeve says the Romulans use quantum singularity power sources which might produce this distortion. If singularities were part of Federation technology in any respect (be it as power sources, garbage processors or nasty weapons), Data would automatically include their effect in his speculation on the distortion.

Tiny black holes are a nice way to construct a scifi drive, no doubt about that. But onscreen Trek seems to work on the assumption that Federation technology achieves its spacetime distortions by some other means.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[bryce]

It's simple.

The engines can go from "blow" to "suck".

 

[bryce]

St Nicholas said:

middyseafort said:

The God Thing said:

JuanBolio said:
Well, IMPULSE is apparently an acronym for Inertial Magnatomic Pulse (sic).

Source, pliz?

TGT

Ronald Held said:
One of the old novels had impulse as Inertially Metered Pulse(sic), AFAIR.

It was in Diane Carey's Novel The Final Frontier.

pg. 138
Drake hunted through the vast ship until he finally found the right place. In the bowels of the primary hull, it was the hub of power for sublight travel, as the door panel proudly professed in clean, newly painted bright red letters:

I.M. PULSE DRIVE ENGINEERING
ENTRY AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED

And later:

pg. 139
"Oh, you know, the usual contamination. What does the I.M. stand for, eh?" Cloaking his movement in question, Drake pulled out the mediscanner and casually adjusted it for Graff's estimated age and weight, then started scanning for metabolic inconsistencies.

"The what?" Graff asked.

Drake pointed over his shoulder at the door. "I.M."

"Oh, 'impulse,' you mean? Don't you know?"

"We cannot all be blessed, sad though it is."

"It stands for 'internally metered pulse drive.' We just say 'impulse' for short."

I always like that book's description of the impulse drive. You didn't quote that part here but if I remember correctly they take a fuel pellet and hit it with some sort of regulated pulsed lasers and that creats an amount of energy that is crushed in on itself with some sort of field and it distorse space/time and the ship rides those waves.

I remember that too.

Which would make the engine pretty much a very advanced variation of the British Interplanetary Society's "Dadelus" pulse fusion design (which also used pellets of deuterium, induced to fusion temps/pressures by lasers) which itself was a variation (or refinement) of Dyson's "Orion" nuclear starship design. (But using tiny explosion rather than big bombs).

I like how it has all that design "history" behind it!

:thumbsup:

 

[Colonel Midnight]

DumbDumb2007 said:
Apart from the Starship Voyager how do Impulse Engines in reverse work ? Is there a magnetic filed they use to make the laws of physics alter so the thrust pulls the ship backwards ?

They work very well, or at least as well as the plot dictates that they do. Much like the Heisenberg Compensators.

(My apologies for being snarky. Couldn't resist... )

Cheers,
-CM-

 

[aridas sofia]

Timo said:
Well, the point of canon on this would be that the Romulan use of singularities comes as a surprise to our 24th century Starfleet heroes. From "Face of the Enemy", Data first says he cannot explain the distortion caused by the Romulan ship, after which the informant DeSeve says the Romulans use quantum singularity power sources which might produce this distortion. If singularities were part of Federation technology in any respect (be it as power sources, garbage processors or nasty weapons), Data would automatically include their effect in his speculation on the distortion.

I disagree. He might simply be surprised that the Romulans are using singularities. If the Federation used this technology and believed it was a well protected secret, it might come as a very rude surprise that Romulans were now in possession of the secret.

Tiny black holes are a nice way to construct a scifi drive, no doubt about that. But onscreen Trek seems to work on the assumption that Federation technology achieves its spacetime distortions by some other means.

Of course, the original Star Trek left these details blissfully ambiguous. And yet, cut scenes from BoT made it clear the BoP incorporated stolen Earth technology. It would be a reasonable twist if stolen technology from the 23rd century evolved into a fully-developed threat in the 24th.