Inertial Dampeners

[CuttingEdge100]

I was thinking about this while I was getting a hair-cut yesterday, while inertial dampers are complete fiction, I was thinking the amount of energy to produce them must be staggering.

I'm not sure exactly what the acceleration rate of any of the ships in Star Trek would be, however considering they maneuver like they're in air, they must pull some serious g-forces.

Just the energy to pull everybody on the ship down to the decks with 1g must be astounding, the amount to literally produce a g-force so extreme that it actually negates any sensation of acceleration or deceleration to what must amount to thousands to millions of g's would probably be the most energy consuming device on the ship, next to the warp-drives and nav-deflector.

Granted, Star Trek has talked about mass-reduction devices which would negate the extremeness of the G-forces produced, and I doubt if any acceleration produced by the warp-drive would actually be felt by the crew... but still.


CuttingEdge100

 

[Bill Morris]

The scripts sometimes give that impression, but a ship traveling at warp is supposed to be stationary within its warp bubble, while the bubble itself doesn't actually move but changes position relative to outside objects by contracting space in front of it and expanding it behind, and something similar is produced by the driver coils of the impulse engines. When using thrusters only, intertia must be dealt with. Those are basically rockets. Then the interial dampers become power hogs.

 

[Timo]

Even turning the Enterprise-D puts a strain on things: thanks to the long momentum arm of the tall ship, a sedate-looking 180 would pulp everybody in Ten-Forward into a centimeter-thick smear on the forward panoramic windows and make Guinan very, very cross.

But we can safely assume that the gravity control or gravity negation technology of Trek works on some sort of a "cheat" and consumes little or no energy. After all, ships otherwise deprived of power still retain their gravitic control, and primitive 1990s cryosats and sleeper ships can operate their gravitics after centuries of neglect, apparently out of the oomph remaining in their batteries.

Perhaps the IDF systems don't as much "insert" or "remove" energy or momentum as they "redirect" it? The energy or momentum isn't taken out of the ship's reserves, but from somewhere else in the universe, and the ship's machinery merely serves as a low-energy "transistor" or "catalyst" in the process.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CuttingEdge100]

LCARS,

From what it was intended the impulse drives were largely nuclear fusion powered rockets, whether impulse engines would use some kind of mass reduction device is simply secondary to the equation.

It does would reduce G-loads though

 

[buzzknox]

LCARS,

From what it was intended the impulse drives were largely nuclear fusion powered rockets, whether impulse engines would use some kind of mass reduction device is simply secondary to the equation.

It does would reduce G-loads though

That changed in TNG. Rick Sternbach said that when they realized Newtonian drives wouldn't provide the required speeds, impulse became a field effect system much like warp drive.

 

[JuanBolio]

I always thought it would make more sense to stack the decks vertically in a starship, rather like a skyscraper with the engines at the bottom and the nose at the top. That way you don't need both an IDF and arificial gravity struggling to pull people in two different directions. You could simply vary the gravity between positive and negative on the deck, depending on what was needed to maintain 1G in the interrior regardless of acceleration.

 

[Timo]

However, the major forces would still come from maneuvering; there wouldn't be one preferred thrust axis to fight against, but a full 4pi selection of maneuvering directions.

And artificial gravity only amounts to a piddling one gee anyway. Even sedate linear accelerations at impulse seem to be in the hundred-to-thousand-gee ballpark whenever we get some sort of a yardstick.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JuanBolio]

However, the major forces would still come from maneuvering; there wouldn't be one preferred thrust axis to fight against, but a full 4pi selection of maneuvering directions.

And artificial gravity only amounts to a piddling one gee anyway. Even sedate linear accelerations at impulse seem to be in the hundred-to-thousand-gee ballpark whenever we get some sort of a yardstick.

Timo Saloniemi

Fair enough. Still, there doesn't seem to be any particularly good reason NOT to stack the decks vertically along the ship's thrust axis, unless warp field dynamics dictate shapes that would make this impractical. I kinda doubt this - we've seen lots of starships shapes, human and alien. They all seem to work just about as well.

 

[Bill Morris]

I always thought it would make more sense to stack the decks vertically in a starship, rather like a skyscraper with the engines at the bottom and the nose at the top. That way you don't need both an IDF and arificial gravity struggling to pull people in two different directions. You could simply vary the gravity between positive and negative on the deck, depending on what was needed to maintain 1G in the interrior regardless of acceleration.

The opening scene of VOY: The Disease demonstrates that the Varo generational ship did have the floors perpendicular to the long axis. The camera did a quarter turn before peeking through a window.

 

[JuanBolio]

I always thought it would make more sense to stack the decks vertically in a starship, rather like a skyscraper with the engines at the bottom and the nose at the top. That way you don't need both an IDF and arificial gravity struggling to pull people in two different directions. You could simply vary the gravity between positive and negative on the deck, depending on what was needed to maintain 1G in the interrior regardless of acceleration.

The opening scene of VOY: The Disease demonstrates that the Varo generational ship did have the floors perpendicular to the long axis. The camera did a quarter turn before peeking through a window.

Must've missed that episode. Cool.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

buzzknox,

From what I remember nuclear fusion or ion drives both could provide velocities up to 0.5c or 0.8c but the acceleration rates were insufficient to reach that speed in any reasonable amount of time...

Ion drives produce remarkably tiny amount of thrust, it would take months or years to get up to speed -- Nuclear fusion drives produced acceleration rates on par with a modern rocket, maybe a little higher, but still it would take a serious amount of time before you'd be up to 0.5c or 0.25c

A mass reduction device does make some practical sense in terms of improving acceleration rates. I'm not sure though if a warp-like device would actually work.

An alcubierre like drive would move the ship, yes, it would suck it forward, and blow it forward at the same time. However the rear part of the ship would have a force pushing it, if you blasted exhaust in that direction the force of the field pushing back on the engine might not be all that useful.

At that rate, it would make using a traditional warp-drive for impulse purposes to be pointless. As for the idea of a static-warp bubble. Don't work. If you actually did that you'd be producing a field that would either suck the ship apart in all directions or implode it in all directions!

Mass reduction if possible would work, but there's one problem -- one, I have no clue how that would work, and two, I have no idea if it would be compatible with a warp-drive.


Timo,

Yeah, but a ship in space wouldn't truthfully maneuver like it's in an atmosphere. A warp drive would produce that effect, but the thing is, I don't know if a mass reduction device would, and I'm not sure if it could be adjusted asymmetrically increasing mass in one area and decreasing it in another, it could compromise the vessel's structural integrity.

Who knows, maybe I'm missing something


CuttingEdge100

 

[buzzknox]

http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/holy-cow-2/#comment-9714

Post 170 by Rick Sternbach
162 – Tim – The driver coil fields don’t have to be exactly aligned with the ship centerline, but can be bent to move the ship in just about any orientation. The fusion exhaust is just exhaust and does afford a bit of thrust, but the coils can propel the ship backwards if necessary. When you want to go “thataway,” the fields and the exhaust are both aligned aft. We discovered back in ‘87 that deuterium fusion thrust alone wouldn’t move a ship fast enough to be Trek-worthy.

It seems that Mr. Sternbach's idea was that the ship was suspended in a subspace bubble and the bubble itself moved, rather than the ship. Effectively, it was the same as the canon depictions of warp drive just at far lower power.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

BuzzKnox,

Yes, but the thing you're not understanding is...

A propulsive warp bubble would have the ship inside the bubble, with the front part of the field compressing space which would be pulling the ship forward, with the rear part of the bubble stretching space out which would be pushing the ship forward.

The ship would be in the bubble and would be apparently not too adversely effected by tidal forces, however if you ejected something out the back it would eventually run into the field which would be pushing in the opposite direction. It would most likely cancel it out. If you fired something forward, interestingly like a retro-thruster, that would work, but not the other way because of the way the field would work.


CuttingEdge100

 

[Ronald Held]

The problem is in impulse maneuvering, not warp propulsion. Then again, it all depneds on how fast the IDF reactions to any acceleration linear or angular.

 

[buzzknox]

BuzzKnox,

Yes, but the thing you're not understanding is...

A propulsive warp bubble would have the ship inside the bubble, with the front part of the field compressing space which would be pulling the ship forward, with the rear part of the bubble stretching space out which would be pushing the ship forward.

The ship would be in the bubble and would be apparently not too adversely effected by tidal forces, however if you ejected something out the back it would eventually run into the field which would be pushing in the opposite direction. It would most likely cancel it out. If you fired something forward, interestingly like a retro-thruster, that would work, but not the other way because of the way the field would work.


CuttingEdge100

What are you planning on ejecting out the rear besides exhaust or a torpedo (which we know has a drive system all its own)? Impulse exhaust disrupts shields (as seen in the episode where Ro defects to the Maquis) so the interaction may not be as simple as you suggest.

Is the warp field stretching and compressing space theory actually from Star Trek canon or from fandom, with the happy coincidence that it can be stretched to fit within Alcubierre's theory?

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I always thought "inertial dampeners" were somehow linked to the artificial gravity system. After all, if you can control gravity from the deck plate, you can control the DIRECTION of gravity from the deck plate; just adjust the grade by computer to compensate for any movement. The thing is, this would probably have a very negative effect on the ship's handling if the ID field is trimming against every motion you try to make, which requires the thrusters to do a lot more work than they normally would.

OTOH, it's also possible inertial dampeners refer to the impulse field or something similar, something that literally reduces the ship's inertia and allows for rapid acceleration from a very small force. But that would be confusing, so I again refer to TMP where some technobabble refers to "inertial stabilizers." I would assume stabilizers are the latter device while "inertial dampeners" are the former, a kind of subspace field that soaks up all of the ship's potential energy and dumps it into the impulse engine exhaust to boost the reactive thrust from the engines.

 

[JuanBolio]

"Dampers". NOT "dampeners". Dampeners would simply make the inertia wet.

I note, with some dismay, that even Spock gets it wrong in the new movie.

 

[Timo]

Actually, both spellings seem to be correct - and they both seem to be correct for both senses of the word. You can't avoid making things slightly damp when you damp/dampen them, no matter how hard you try. And you can market make-it-wet devices or stop-it-from-vibrating devices under the names "damper" and "dampener" alike.

That's etymology for you. To damp/dampen is an act of putting out the fire of things, even in the figurative sense of attenuating something not literally related to combustion.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ Yeah, I noticed that too. I couldn't remember what spelling was correct and when I looked it up in the Mac Dictionary BOTH of them were listed for both uses: "Dampen" in the sense of "to reduce intensity" and "damp" in the sense of "to suppress, 'to damp down'"