No need for a generation ship if you can travel much faster than
Light.
Light.
Killer Asteroid
- Thread starter MAGolding
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Was the Fabrini rock-ship travelling FTL though? The engine was described as an old fashioned atomic type, emitting a trail of debris and hard radiation. It was due to reach its target of "Daran 5" in 396 days, but that could easily have been in the same solar system where the Enterprise encountered it in the episode.
As far as natural phenomenon going FTL, am I misremembering or didn't the cloud in Obsession go warp speeds? And what about the lights of Zetar?
The Lights were explicitly declared unnatural for their FTL ability. It appears the dikironium cloud was defined as unnatural as well, apparently meaning there can be lifeforms out there that can do warp speed, but not dumb rocks or dust clouds.
Which is a bit silly, because
a) how do you tell the difference? Some life is pretty dumb.
b) there most definitely are FTL shockwaves and whatnot in Trek, and (as far as the heroes can tell) these are neither machines nor lifeforms, but instead exactly what we today would call a natural phenomenon (akin to wind or earthquakes).
As for high speed asteroids, surely those aren't unnatural even in our reality? Extreme speed differentials are made possible by the basic relative movements of our galaxy and its heavenly bodies, and never mind the role of exotica such as big kabooms or steep gravity wells. Trek would have more kabooms and spatial anomalies, many with the capacity to accelerate dumb rocks to high speeds or shift them to alternate planes of existence or whatnot. Even FTL need not be out of the question, with "tachyon eddies" and the like.
But in "Paradise Syndrome", it is the planet that the heroes declare freakily unnatural, not the asteroid. The "asteroid alley" part is treated as a natural phenomenon and one of the very factors that make the existence of the Earth-like planet so unnatural. A FTL rock would surely be considered a freak, right? Even if a relativistic one might not need to be considered that, at least not in Trek.
Timo Saloniemi
Which is a bit silly, because
a) how do you tell the difference? Some life is pretty dumb.
b) there most definitely are FTL shockwaves and whatnot in Trek, and (as far as the heroes can tell) these are neither machines nor lifeforms, but instead exactly what we today would call a natural phenomenon (akin to wind or earthquakes).
As for high speed asteroids, surely those aren't unnatural even in our reality? Extreme speed differentials are made possible by the basic relative movements of our galaxy and its heavenly bodies, and never mind the role of exotica such as big kabooms or steep gravity wells. Trek would have more kabooms and spatial anomalies, many with the capacity to accelerate dumb rocks to high speeds or shift them to alternate planes of existence or whatnot. Even FTL need not be out of the question, with "tachyon eddies" and the like.
But in "Paradise Syndrome", it is the planet that the heroes declare freakily unnatural, not the asteroid. The "asteroid alley" part is treated as a natural phenomenon and one of the very factors that make the existence of the Earth-like planet so unnatural. A FTL rock would surely be considered a freak, right? Even if a relativistic one might not need to be considered that, at least not in Trek.
Timo Saloniemi
No asteroid is travelling FTL. Ejection from a star system is likely tens of kilometerers per second. With some Trek technobabble maybe but the Fabrini Rock was in normal space-time.
Maybe. Or some peculiar natural phenomenon. But whilst an asteroid travelling at .5 c would certainly be extraordinary, it certainly isn't impossible.
I'm fine with that, but it only makes the idea that Warp 9 is only lightspeed less plausible.
I always took the time warp examples as a rather special case. The way I've generally thought of it is that warp drive can move you through spacetime extremely quickly (space and time being aspects of a single thing). Under normal circumstances it moves you through space rapidly, but when you throw gravity into the mix it moves you through space slowly because it's moving you through time rapidly.
But the extreme gravity seems to be a requirement - being in close proximity to a sun, black hole, etc. We really don't see many cases of warp speed being in the outer solar system.
Elaan is one I'd have to recheck, though.
But it would require an extraordinary amount of energy, especially for something described as being the size of Earth's moon. Since I am no scientist, I did a little googling on this subject
https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-needed-to-push-a-spacecraft-to-half-the-speed-of-light
This is around twice the amount of energy that our sun produces in 1 second, just to heft that measly 1,000 ton ship. The moon is 73,476,000,000,000,000,000 times more heavy! That is equivalent to the entire output of the sun for 4,656,627,880,447 years (which coincidentally is also the age of the sun!)
Actually that's a thousand times more than the age of the sun.
But again - ultimately, this is not impossible.
Somebody (you?) mentioned earlier, one could assume that it was pushed. That may be so. Or if my hypothesis that Enterprise saw a collision outside the system that started all this off is true, then perhaps that collision was something special - perhaps not one rock hitting another, but a large black hole striking a planet or something. Falling into a black hole can cause up to 40% or so of the mass of a given body to turn into energy. You'd have to model it to really know, but it seems to me that such an encounter could easily liberate enough energy to winde up with a fragment that was going at the required speed.
So imagine something planet-sized encountering a rotating black hole in interstellar space, a light-month or so from the planet. The planet is ripped apart by the black hole, with most of it converted to energy in a colossal explosion of energy. A moon-szied chunk of the planet is thrown out at relativistic speeds.
The Enterprise sees the flash and comes to investigate. They see the fragment hurtling towards a planet and contact Starfleet to report.
Starfleet says "Investigate the planet. If it's inhabited, do what you can to divert the asteroid. If not, observe the impact."
Hence why Kirk and co were on the planet at the beginning, why they had to depart so quickly, why it was so hard to deflect the asteroid. It explains a lot. And it avoids warp drive being massively slow.
That's kind of like the supposed "168 scientific errors in Armageddon". One being that there would be no way in hell of diverting an asteroid (or anything else) the size of Texas when its already that close to Earth.
Of course IIRC they made the asteroid in Armageddon the "size of Texas" in order to make it bigger than the comet approaching Earth in Deep Impact.
Well that was embarrassing. Can I play the English card and claim that I was talking about a British billion? Maybe?
That's an incredibly specific set of circumstances, but I suppose in theory anything is possible. However, let's not forget that the asteroid deflector on the planet handled this supposedly freak occurrence with incredible ease. I know that the planet is said to be in an asteroid alley of sorts, but just how often do demi-lightspeed moon sized objects happen by in order for the Preservers to over-engineer the machine to this degree?
Assuming a 3 hour Warp 9 dash for a 0.5c rock, that would put the Enterprise's speed at 240c. If we using the model that warp speed is NOT affected by the proximity of a star, then 240c is really very slow for Warp 9.
On to Elaan of Troyius:
Sulu then counts down the Klingon cruiser approaching (at better than Warp 6) at increments of 10,000 kilometres every 3 or 4 seconds. His timing puts the Klingons at around 3,125 kilometres a second, barely more than 1% of lightspeed
Later, the Klingons are still harassing the Enterprise and still apparently doing Warp speed:
This time Sulu counts down in increments of 100,000 kilometres, somewhat irregularly but we can asume that the Klingons simply alter their speed - they drop from 18,182 km/s to 8,333 km/s (6% to 3% LS)
Suffice to say that for a warp driven starship within a solar system, the Klingons move at anything but FTL!
Sorry these comments are off the specific topic of the asteroid itself.
This also brings up two questions: how powerful is that artifact and why does it's beam not knock the planet out of orbit?
If it's just a pusher beam, the base must be being pushed against, the base being on the planet, for it to push that much mass it would either burrow itself down into the planet or move the planet.
Maybe the planet is artificial and the artifact is just one of the nodes that protrudes from the internal structure.
I would have liked more exploration of this "Preserver" culture, but that's a bit off the asteroid topic.
One more thing, I don't know how many of you know about Star Fleet Battles, but one of the scenarios was a Klingon frigate pulling an asteroid towards a Federation colony world and as the captain of the Federation heavy cruiser you need to stop it before it hits the planet.
A possibility: The beam doesn't just push the target asteroid, but also encapsulates it within a subspace field, thus lowering the target's mass. O'Brien uses a similar field in the pilot episode of DS9 and the TNG Tech Manual talks about "subspace driver coils" which effectively do the same thing (thus sidestepping the pesky issue of how the ship can accelerate to 25% of lightspeed without carrying many times its own weight in fuel)
Interestingly enough, tractor beams in Trek are consistently utterly non-Newtonian.
A perfect example of this is "The Naked Now", where Wes Crusher as a hobby project cobbles together a small tractor beam emitter and uses it to lift a heavy-looking piece of furniture. He holds the combination of the apparatus, the beam and the chair with his hands, showing absolutely no strain from either the weight or the considerable momentum arm.
Other instances abound where locking a fast-moving massive object into a tractor imparts negligible forces on the party emitting the beam. Perhaps the beam locks both ends to the underlying (subspace?) matrix of the universe/galaxy/whatever, rather than to each other? Or then it automatically reduces the inertial mass of the targeted party to zero, while doing little to the inertia of the targeting party and allowing it to serve as a solid Newtonian anchor.
Timo Saloniemi
A perfect example of this is "The Naked Now", where Wes Crusher as a hobby project cobbles together a small tractor beam emitter and uses it to lift a heavy-looking piece of furniture. He holds the combination of the apparatus, the beam and the chair with his hands, showing absolutely no strain from either the weight or the considerable momentum arm.
Other instances abound where locking a fast-moving massive object into a tractor imparts negligible forces on the party emitting the beam. Perhaps the beam locks both ends to the underlying (subspace?) matrix of the universe/galaxy/whatever, rather than to each other? Or then it automatically reduces the inertial mass of the targeted party to zero, while doing little to the inertia of the targeting party and allowing it to serve as a solid Newtonian anchor.
Timo Saloniemi
Maybe when Spock headed to intercept the asteroid he went outside the solar system at Warp Nine - the long way. Instead of going sublight within the system That way the asteroid may have been going less than Warp
Yeh I'm getting desperate here. I can't see that any 'natural' object could travel as fast as the Enterprise at Warp 9 in 3 hours in only 3 months unless we've established you can't travel Warp within a star system.
Worse than that - it's only TWO months!
This episode's use of time and distance is a head scratcher though, and has been for years
They really only cared about making the plot work, and adding some tension. To make things happen as desired, they greatly underestimated the speed of warp 9.
The best solution would have been for the ship to pop over to the asteroid effortlessly at warp 1, become crippled by the deflection effort, and then limp back to the planet for two months. But they wanted a high-speed chase to jazz things up, and that took priority over techno continuity and even logic.
Anyhow, Gerald Fried's music and Sabrina Scharf as Miramanee totally save it for me. It's still a top favorite of mine.
This is one of those adventures where the heroes have little need to get to the bottom of the weird scifi concept (Miri's planet being a second Earth, Miramanee's planet being in an asteroid alley), and can settle for sorting out the immediate problems and saving the day. It just falls in the category where the heroes acknowledge (some would say lampshade) the oddity and then move on.
The side effect is that of making it easier for the audience to swallow additional oddities and the fact that the heroes leave them uncommented or tackle them in counterintuitive ways. The slow warp nine dash would probably stand out more if set against a more mundane background... But since something really odd is going on with the asteroids anyway, weird speeds warrant no further comment.
Timo Saloniemi
The side effect is that of making it easier for the audience to swallow additional oddities and the fact that the heroes leave them uncommented or tackle them in counterintuitive ways. The slow warp nine dash would probably stand out more if set against a more mundane background... But since something really odd is going on with the asteroids anyway, weird speeds warrant no further comment.
Timo Saloniemi
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