Are you talking about entire ship composed of HoloMass save for a holoprojector, or something like the Romulan ship from ENT that is an actual ship with holoemitters on the outside to fool enemy ships?
Ah, see, I mean something completely different. Imagine a computer core that projects an entire ship for people to live in and explore with. (Actually, the Romulan ship was piloted by an Aenar, not an Andorian.)
On the assumption that the NCC-1701 employs some form of degenerate matter as reaction mass - which is really the only way to rationalize both the on screen performance of the impulse engines and Scotty's "almost a million gross tons of vessel" line in Mudd's Women - it could be argued that extracting, processing and compressing that stuff requires at the very least a starbase-level refueling facility, as there was absolutely no mention made of the possibility that the Enterprise was capable of refueling herself in any episode or any piece of production documentation of which I am aware. The production of anti-matter, of course, would be at least as problematic, hence my assumption that the pallet would contain separate tank/containment farms for each substance. Presumably the Enterprise employs a tightly integrated closed-cycle life support system (the vent-a-crapper featured in ST:TFF notwithstanding ), so the CHON and trace element requirements would be comparatively minimal, and they could always be easily replenished if not from comets and carbonaceous-chondritic asteroids then from the surface of M-class planets. I propose that the partitioning of the secondary hull's internal volumes would have been optimized according to the fuel and cargo requirements predicted by Starfleet analysts for a 5YM. The extended mission pallet would be employed only for exceptional circumstances where a total space vehicle refit to increase operational range would fall outside of Starfleet's budget and/or timeline. No invocations of TOS-R, please. I'm trying to eat breakfast. Being the shameless pedant that I am I would hesitate to assign to TOS speculative technologies that were not being discussed in the aerospace sciences and engineering community at the time of its production(*). Theorizing about self-reproducing systems for spaceflight applications only became (briefly) fashionable in the late 1970s with NASA's analysis of self-replicating lunar factories conducted by Georg von Tiesenhausen et al to say nothing of the Advanced Automation for Space Missions study from 1980 which, as I noted, would have suited the TMP-era perfectly. TGT * Yes, people, I know that space opera warp drives and transporters usually fall well outside the realm of polite shoptalk amongst professional physicists and engineers. My reference was to real-world speculative technologies that were seamlessly "backported" into TOS, such as the planetoid colonies of Friday's Child or the human engram-impressed supercomputer of The Ultimate Computer.
Limiting a starship to the range allowed by its onboard stores of antimatter would seem to me to be incongruous with the level of technology that could warp space. In other words, I'd think that the problems of economically (in terms of space and energy expenditure) producing antimatter would be solved before a space warping, gravity and antigravity manipulating propulsion system would be engineered. But admittedly, that's just my uninformed ruminating. On the subject of applying von Neumann's ideas from his 1966 work Theory of Self Reproducing Automata... didn't Arthur Clarke write about his monoliths being self-replicating in a sequence edited from 2001? While it's true such creations were never mentioned in Star Trek, as you have pointed out before, the existence of a self-replicating, 11,000 mile long cell in "The Immunity Syndrome" raises the subject of what might happen should even one von Neumann probe begin to over replicate. Maybe that episode alone is reason enough to think Star Fleet would defer to Sagan and decide against producing such devices.
It would work well to explain why the Enterprise couldn't send a shuttle to the planet surface in "The Enemy Within"; it had just returned from its mission near the Galactic edge. Maybe the Enterprise had stored two such modules, at the expense of shuttles. Or maybe the decoupling procedure you outlined above was considered too expensive compared to the life of an expendable junior officer
"We can maintain this speed for only seven hours before we exhaust our fuel, but it can refuel itself indefinitely." - Spock in The Doomsday Machine (31:16 on the R1DVD). Did Spock lie or exaggerate, and if so, wouldn't (the admittedly suicidal) Decker have noticed something amiss considering that he himself had been the CO of a virtually identical starship? One still requires an energy source for the conversion process, and short of ZPE a star is really the only viable option. 2010: Odyssey Two, actually. IIRC Clarke references the work of von Tiesenhausen and Darbro at NASA-MSFC in his Afterword. It must be noted that von Neuman's interest regarding this particular field was with the investigation of theoretical cellular automata that were capable of self-replication and only self-replication. This functionality would only be a miniscule subset within the global capabilities of the machine civilizations we did encounter in TOS/TMP, ranging from the MuddBots to The Planet of Living Machines. The Thasians, Metrons and Organians may also have been manifestations of post-biological life. Any self-replicating probes released into the galactic ecosystem would find themselves subjected to the same evolutionary drivers and constraints as every other starfaring lifeform in the Milky Way. The subsequent adaptations would - one may assume - enlarge their scope of operation in proportion to their greater internal complexity, thus making them a true civilization and not simply a virus. As for the space amoeba, it was a parasite, and obviously far too simple an organism even with its natural defenses to survive an encounter with the second white blood cell of the Milky Way's immune system, the Intrepid being the first. Sagan was a specist, and I'm pretty certain that we would have got a pretty clear indication of the role of self-replicating technologies in the 23rd century Starfleet had GR and JvP remained with the TOS film series. Oooh, good one! I honestly hadn't thought of that. TGT
My interpretation of that line was that the speed necessary to stay ahead of the berserker was in excess of the ship's ability to replenish its supply of fuel, but I admit I am reading into that to serve my own view of the technology. I knew I read this somewhere. I think it might be in The Making of 2001, but in any case, someone else read it as well... http://spore.wikia.com/wiki/Monoliths http://www.physicspost.com/articles.php?articleId=113&page=4 EDIT: It wasn't TMo2001, it was this article in Cosmos: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1683 No doubt. If they could use the idea of berserkers and Bracewell probes, why not address the notion of self-replicating spacecraft? As you've mentioned previously, panspermia was on their minds. So was the relation of biological, post-biological and artificial intelligence to one another. Self replicating spacecraft would be a natural extension of such a line of inquiry. As for the use of the hangar bay, though... I still like the idea of modular cargo bays better. Like I wrote -- idiosyncratic.
Fair enough, but then why would Kirk need to sign a fuel consumption report while the Enterprise is in (presumably a satelloid) orbit over Gamma Hydra IV in The Deadly Years? Somebody is obviously misremembering something, as I honestly cannot recall any self-replicating abilities being attributed to the monoliths in any 2001: A Space Odyssey related volume, whether it be Kubrick's shooting script, Clarke's novelization and his Lost Worlds of 2001, Jerome Agel's The Making of Kubrick's 2001 or Piers Bizony's 2001: Filming the future. Certainly, had Post-GR Trek been produced by LitSF aficionados who possessed even the slightest interest in speculative astronautics and related technologies. Bennett, Berman, Nimoy and Abrams evidently need not apply. Even modular cargo bays would still be no substitute for raw volume. TGT
Well, the presence of means of producing fuel doesn't make that fuel free or easy. The Making of Star Trek tells us on page 203 that I have assumed this means the ship collects matter perhaps (but not necessarily) in the form of free hydrogen, and processes it into degenerate matter for storage. And that, it can then be further processed into different forms as needed. One of those forms could be antimatter. I also accept that Probert and Kimble show the refit Enterprise with antimatter storage vessels in the forward keel of the secondary hull. When I drew that area on a prospective cross section of the original ship, I similarly showed antimatter storage. I assume either ship's stores can be replenished at base, perhaps because the process of creating antimatter is the most difficult and costly -- meaning least efficient -- fabrication of all. But if it can't be done at less energy expenditure than it produces, it would not have a "self sustaining travel range." However, if the process (or the process of producing other consumables) were without cost, that range would not be so limited. This doesn't mean I don't think a starship would be constrained by range -- it has an operations limit after all. If it is going to be operating beyond its normal patrol radius, I can see it being outfit with an extended mission pallet that might take the strain off its onboard facilities by either aiding them in syntheses of consumables, or simply providing them with the surplus degenerate matter and antimatter needed for the mission.
Sure, had the NCC-1701 been commanded by a respectable, conservative CO who economically glided from one star system to another collecting samples of alien pond scum from the surface of M-class worlds all the while making it a point of personal and professional honor to avoid even the slightest hint of trouble. But really, how much fun would that show have been to watch? Generating anti-matter aboard ship is problematic even in the 24th century, if the ST:TNG-TM by Sternbach & Okuda is anything to go by. Please, let this thread not degenerate into an argument over the intended meaning of the phrase, "self-sustaining". The time may have come for me to ruthlessly suppress my visceral hatred of both Shatner & Nimoy and begin watching TOS from The Cage to Assignment: Earth - possibly along with TAS although the painful absence of both Matt Jefferies and Harvey Lynn from the production may force me to declare it a deuterocanonical source - without touching the Fast-Forward button on the DVD remote in order to gain a few more data points concerning the operational characteristics of the Enterprise's propulsion system. Well, why didn't you just say so in the first place? TGT
No need to watch real Star Trek: here are the highlights. "Mark of Gideon": Yet this probably only refers to life support power, not dashing-across-the-galaxy power. "By Any Other Name": No mention of running out of fuel in either 300 or "thousands of" years. But of course, Kirk has no need to be techno-specific, and the Andromedans could do magic on more than just speed. "Day of the Dove": However, Kirk isn't particularly sane at the time, and might be overtly poetic even if he were. Or he might acknowledge the fact that the alien entity puppeteering them has the ability to twist reality to its needs. Later in that episode, the ship threatens to come to a halt because dilithium is deteriorating. But that's different from "running out of" dilithium, not analogous to a fuel shortage at all. Rather, it's more like the thing that happens in "Mudd's Women": ship's power is only said to be "Mudd's Women": Loss of that crystal doesn't mean loss of power, just loss of means of using that power. To each his own, but my take on this all is that a Constitution in the 5-yr mission configuration is capable of considerable feats of eventless, linear warp travel - perhaps of self-refueling via ramscoop-type devices, perhaps of more advanced magic. However, combat maneuvers and impulse drive result in high fuel consumption without the possibility of simultaneous replenish, which necessitates more mundane types of fuel management. It's a pity we never see this type of management, of course; probably it involves classic hoses and pumps in the usual case, or swapping of fuel modules, and only rarely takes the form of dips into gas giants or oceans. Anyway, such a model would allow even for the disgusting VOY "Demon", where the ship is short of fuel yet can cross interstellar distances in search of a refill. A ramscoop replenishment mechanism might allow the ship to tread water at warp speeds, but wouldn't be enough to refill the tanks, and any attempt at slowing down and looking for concentrated hydrogen would consume too much of the existing fuel - unless the concentrated depot was rich enough. Timo Saloniemi
Remember the Dyson sphere epsiode? well my new idea is to have something similar, a smaller dyson sphere that covers a planet, the inside of the sphere would be completely covered in transporter emitters whilst the outide area would be covered in shipyards, the transporters would beam matter up from the planet and this would go through a replicator type system and create parts for starships, the ship building would be completely automatic with parts literally being fitted together during replication, any parts that cant be replicated can be fitted manually. The dyson sphere itself could be designed to split into seperate parts when the planet has been completely 'eaten' and the sphere parts can move on to another similar size planet to begin again. The sphere can be powered by either quantum singularities or by beaming up and utilising the deuterium on the planets they consume.
This is essentially my view as well, and points up the one thing I believe is the weak link in the "self-sustaining" chain -- dilithium. Whatever magic this stuff is supposed to do, it doesn't last, and it can't be replenished. And that is a very, very bad thing unless some Ben Childress is around and you've got a couple of rent-a-brides to trade. So, the "extended duration pallet" has to come with dilithium crystals, and/ or babes.
Don't forget that "The Doomsday Machine" gave viewers another complication: the Planet Killer emitted an energy dampening field, so powerful that once the Constellation had been wrecked in combat, "the antimatter has been deactivated", according to Washburn. Spock also complained to Decker during combat "We must retreat, Commodore! The energy drain--!" So apparently the Planet Killer's energy aura effected the Enterprise's power systems, perhaps not unlike the giant space amoeba in "The Immunity Syndrome". This caused the Enterprise, crippled because of damaged warp drive, to burn non-antimatter fusion fuel even faster.
I'd love to see you compose the set-up paragraphs of such a fan fiction story or mini-series, set in either the TMP era or The New Era (2379 & Beyond.) It sounds interesting. A new "Utopia Planetia" assigned to an area in a deep pocket of the Beta Quadrant borderng on the Gamma Quadrant. A new "A.Q. Alliance" port designed as a logistical support outpost & watchtower. Keeping an eye on the Borg & another eye on The Dominion (or pockets of Jem Hadar that've broken free of Ketracel White dependance.)
I think that could be done, (especially in fan fiction,) as sentient tools (Exocomps) capable of being deployed to create a Federation Comm Network re-tracing the Voyager's path to the Ocampan sector have been created by Federation Scientists already. (In the TNG episode "The Quality of Life".) Now that Quantum Slipstream has been experimented with, I think its somewhat possible to seed exocomps into low-threat areas in order to conduct "communications network" missions as the U.F.P.'s influence gradually increases to meet each other from both ends of Bajor's wormhole.
Seconded. Dilithium is such an interesting element of Trek, one of the very few original gimmicks that warrants and allows for further study apart from the phaser, the transporter and the general warp engine. Unlike those other things, dilithium seemed to serve a slightly different story purpose in different stories, which makes the explanations all the more entertaining. My "Trek tech that should exist" might just as well be dilithium-associated. We hear of "dilithium ore" being hauled around in ENT. This would make little sense if the crystals in there were fist-sized: just pick them out of the ore and leave all the slag behind. So probably the crystals in yer regular ore are microscopic. Which brings us to the ping-pong paddles that serve as dilithium crystals in "Alternative Factor" et al. Those could be holders for an array of microscopic crystals, a poor man's choice when the larger lumps are not available. The technology of microcrystal holders would compete with big lump technology, but for a long time it wouldn't be worth the while to build reactors that take the lumps. Only after those lumps could be grown artificially would it make sense to accommodate their macroscopic facets in the annihilation foci. The system on Scotty's bairns could be among the first to accept uncut dilithium in addition to the paddles. The paddle system would require some extra nursing: a hit on the power system would throw the microshards out of alignment, so Lt Masters would have to take them out of the warp core and place them in a realignment chamber, and keep watch against variable-bearded madmen while futuristic forces nudged the shards back to a configuration where their inherent subspace fields reinforce each other. And of course, "lithium cracking plants" would be ones separating the microcrystals from the ore in a process that literally (rather than petrochemically) involves cracking the stuff... Timo Saloniemi
I'm going to go off the deep end here and speculate that an entertaining conception of dilithium might be as a quantum state "super atom" created from lithium, that is used to refract negative energy to the proper dimension anti-gravity "ribbon" to maintain a warp bubble. The super atom is stabilized in some form of crystalline lattice. There really should be an emoticon for utter and complete bullshit.