The torpedo warhead contains its own reactant so the presence or absence of any other substance was irrelevant. In the episode, it was a matter of producing sufficient energy, not a specific type. The idea of torpedoes was discarded out of hand as insufficient, and the deflector dish fizzled. So, they relied on a chemical reaction.
Photon torpedoes and antimatter
- Thread starter Longinus
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The torpedo warhead contains its own reactant so the presence or absence of any other substance was irrelevant. In the episode, it was a matter of producing sufficient energy, not a specific type. The idea of torpedoes was discarded out of hand as insufficient, and the deflector dish fizzled. So, they relied on a chemical reaction.
But no chemical reaction is going to be more energetic than a complete rest mass conversion. Only a tiny bit of the mass is converted into energy in any chemical process.
Again, in "Night Terrors" our heroes believed that releasing a sufficient amount of energy would let the two ships escape. They believed that the deflector dish would do the job. They believed wrong: the trick failed.
So they deferred to the better judgement of the aliens on the other side, and that judgement included releasing hydrogen to the rift. No mention was made of whether the hydrogen caused a release of energy (even though Data somewhat hesistantly speculated that perhaps, just perhaps hydrogen could react chemically with something the aliens had and produce and explosion). The visuals and dialogue were ambiguous on what the hydrogen actually accomplished.
This isn't a very strong argument of torpedoes being a weaker explosive device than a hydrogen cloud, then.
Timo Saloniemi
So they deferred to the better judgement of the aliens on the other side, and that judgement included releasing hydrogen to the rift. No mention was made of whether the hydrogen caused a release of energy (even though Data somewhat hesistantly speculated that perhaps, just perhaps hydrogen could react chemically with something the aliens had and produce and explosion). The visuals and dialogue were ambiguous on what the hydrogen actually accomplished.
This isn't a very strong argument of torpedoes being a weaker explosive device than a hydrogen cloud, then.
Timo Saloniemi
For all we know, the aliens collected Enterprise' hydrogen and then smashed it with a crap-load of antimatter they happened to have on board. Or maybe they used some kind of force field and atom-smashed the hydrogen cloud to create a hell-big fusion reaction.
Or maybe it was just a dubious solution to an otherwise decent episode.
Or maybe it was just a dubious solution to an otherwise decent episode.
Here's something I just thought of - A lot of people think that photon torpedoes did not originally have physical casings, but the episode which introduced them - Arena - also introduced the photon grenade, which most certainly were physical objects which could be picked up and handled with ease.
That's more or less what I assumed - the easiest way to store antimatter (in today's terms anyway) is in the form of antihydrogen. Since the rift's absorbtion of energy was nullifying weapons and systems, there's be no good way to send matter and antimatter out into the rift to make them go boom - so the alien ship sends out antihydrogen, the Enterprise sends out hydrogen, and they meet and go boom in the middle.
...well, yes. Naturally. M/AM reactions produce neutrinos, which do nothing, and gamma rays (photons), which are very bad for you.
I think (correct me if I'm wrong) Vance is saying that a possible weaponizing technique for antimatter is simply encasing it in a breakable magnetic bottle, and then smashing that bottle on something made of matter.
That would undoubtedly have bad consequences for anything made of matter.
I don't know if anyone's floated that idea, though. Vance dismisses it, but I'm not sure it was ever on the table.
It has some real flaws--three that spring immediately to mind are 1)that antimatter that can be contained in a magnetic bottle can be deflected with a magnetic field, 2)almost all of the antimatter will be wasted during the blowback from the initial contact with a matter object, and 3)physical contact is required, and would presumably do nothing against shields or even a navigational deflector.
I suppose you could potentially trick the holes in the nav deflector the bussard collector apparently uses into sucking up antihydrogen.
That last one would be hilarious, but even though neutral antimatter is visibly identical to matter, ionic antihydrogen would presumably be detectable magnetically due to its negative charge. A positron cloud could neutralize the stream, however, and the antihydrogen cloud might be totally indistinguishable from ordinary interstellar hydrogen, as gamma-producing collisions would be few and far between in open space.
This could make for an interesting weapon of inconvenience, forcing a ship to keep its shields up in a potentially antihydrogen-flooded area, and deplete its onboard stores of hydrogen since it could not tap the interstellar medium. Antihydrogen clouds on the perimeters of a solar system might also serve as a great passive cloaked ship detector.
That would undoubtedly have bad consequences for anything made of matter.
I don't know if anyone's floated that idea, though. Vance dismisses it, but I'm not sure it was ever on the table.
It has some real flaws--three that spring immediately to mind are 1)that antimatter that can be contained in a magnetic bottle can be deflected with a magnetic field, 2)almost all of the antimatter will be wasted during the blowback from the initial contact with a matter object, and 3)physical contact is required, and would presumably do nothing against shields or even a navigational deflector.
I suppose you could potentially trick the holes in the nav deflector the bussard collector apparently uses into sucking up antihydrogen.
That last one would be hilarious, but even though neutral antimatter is visibly identical to matter, ionic antihydrogen would presumably be detectable magnetically due to its negative charge. A positron cloud could neutralize the stream, however, and the antihydrogen cloud might be totally indistinguishable from ordinary interstellar hydrogen, as gamma-producing collisions would be few and far between in open space.
This could make for an interesting weapon of inconvenience, forcing a ship to keep its shields up in a potentially antihydrogen-flooded area, and deplete its onboard stores of hydrogen since it could not tap the interstellar medium. Antihydrogen clouds on the perimeters of a solar system might also serve as a great passive cloaked ship detector.
Your last point is the best. The writers wanted something to justify the telepathic contact and came up with an inferior solution. In the episode, the characters discussed why hydrogen fit the "two moons" dream and why the aliens would have mentioned it. They went through a list of chemicals and materials that would react with hydrogen and decided that the aliens wanted hydrogen for that purpose. Anything beyond a chemical reaction was never discussed. So, we've clearly got superior abilities to both the characters and the writers.
The "use the hydrogen as a reactant for antimatter" bit doesn't make a lot of sense because if the aliens have sufficent technology to have antimatter, they have sufficient technology to obtain the most common element in the universe from their own ship.
Any solution we come up with has to deal with the energy nullifying effects of the area. The deflector dish's energy was absorbed, the photon torpedoes on board wouldn't do the trick, so why would putting loads of hydrogen together in the field, in the alien ship, etc with anything else (chemicals, antimatter, bunnies) do anything at all? Unless the aliens are somehow able to extract more energy from a hydrogen + X reaction than Fed tech or manipulate it in a different way unknown to Fed tech, we are left with "it was just a dubious solution to an otherwise decent episode."
Perhaps this was just TNG's "crack in the event horizon" episode.
"Energy dampening" never makes any sense anyway. Waving away the physical mechanism by which it dampens or sucks out energy, why doesn't it dampen the energy in a human(oid) being too? We need quite a few joules to run.
See my bussard collector thread where I grapple with exactly that problem. The density of hydorgen in the galaxy is low enough that you'd have to cover an area several tens of trillions of kilometers square just to obtain one gram of it. If those aliens have been in the rift for a while, it's possible they were just running inconveniently low.
Sorry, I'm just being nitpicky. It was "1 moon circles." 2 moons would have been a helium atom.
On average, yes. But it doesn't take much looking to FIND hydrogren in the galaxy. Hell, we've mapped tons of sources while being Earthbound already. Still, it does seem odd to have such things as a prominant part of the warp engines, when 99.9999 percent of the time you're in deep nothing.
The benefit of it being the most common element is that to those with technology advanced enough to have interstellar flight, they really don't have to go looking for it. A significant portion of the items immeidately available would have hydrogen within them, and readily available. If they have any form of hydrochemical, water, or even the tissues of deceased crew members, then they have hydrogen.
You're right, it doesn't. Of course, immobilized and stationary in an energy-dampening rift is not an easy place to find massive amounts of hydrogen. If the alien ship had the ability to go cruising around collecting particles from the ISM, they wouldn't have needed Enterprise in the first place.
Gentlemen,
Check out my post in the "Bussard Collector" thread... I've done some calculations and I think that (unless I made some glaring error in my calculations... which I don't think is the case) this argument is largely based upon some false assumptions.
Here's the post:
http://www.trekbbs.com/showpost.php?p=3227242&postcount=29
Check out my post in the "Bussard Collector" thread... I've done some calculations and I think that (unless I made some glaring error in my calculations... which I don't think is the case) this argument is largely based upon some false assumptions.
Here's the post:
http://www.trekbbs.com/showpost.php?p=3227242&postcount=29
In a the early TOS novel Aurora, torpedos worked not by exploding, but by taking their target apart at the sub-atomic level after impact. Always thought that sounded cool. And it was in the book 'the making of Star Trek' that I first read that torpedos had no casings but that the matter and antimatter was held in a "magna-atomic field." The author got that from the shows bible written by Roddenberry, and remember, Roddenberry WAS the god thing.
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Photon Torpedoes never appear in any of the original television show's Bibles. (Until, of course, the second version of the TNG Bible.)
Saquist
Commodore
Energy is not what I was refering to.
The torpedo wasn't what was asked for and there for wouldn't do the job.
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