Realigning Plasma Conduits?

[T.D. Possum]

I was watching "TNG: Phantasms" recently and got myself all confused and curious about the warp plasma conduits. In that episode, Geordi talks about one of the conduits being out of alignment and then announces that his team has realigned it.

In a rare burst of interest in Treknology, I took it upon myself to read the entire Memory Alpha section on how the warp drive works and how it feeds a ship's power grid. I got the distinct impression that a power conduit is a tube that plasma flows through. Um, how does a big tube built into the wall get out of alignment? I mean, when the ship is just flying around and not shaking and/or being broken into bits?

Or have I sadly misunderstood what a plasma conduit actually is?

 

[T'Girl]

The charged plasma travel through a "big pipe" encased in a force field. Maybe the generators that produce the field needed alignment.

 

[T.D. Possum]

I can buy that. At least now I know I wasn't totally nuts to picture them as tubes.

 

[Deks]

Well, they may not necessarily mean that the conduits themselves are out of alignment, but rather the frequency at which they operate perhaps?

 

[FordSVT]

I like T'Girl's explanation best, it's what I think too. The plasma would be contained and channelled by some kind of magnetic field, and it's that (not necessarily the physical tubing) that needs to be re-aligned. Like the magnets in a particle accelerator.

 

[BurntSynapse]

Well, they may not necessarily mean that the conduits themselves are out of alignment, but rather the frequency at which they operate perhaps?

I like T'Girl's explanation best, it's what I think too. The plasma would be contained and channelled by some kind of magnetic field, and it's that (not necessarily the physical tubing) that needs to be re-aligned. Like the magnets in a particle accelerator.

I think each of these proposals is compatible. We can assume the "alignment" of the plasma stream is to maintain whatever is an optimal flow for plumbing: including speed/accel, volume, size within the conduit, cross sectional / longitudinal geometry, flow resistance/and shape, density, any resonance effects, either internal to the stream or that might cause spillage. There's lots of mechanical flow physics and energy physics that could fill out the treknology.

Is there any canon that would prevent "plasma flow" from referring to a flow of charge via the contained plasma as a conduit, like in a flourescent lamp?

 

[T.D. Possum]

I think each of these proposals is compatible. We can assume the "alignment" of the plasma stream is to maintain whatever is an optimal flow for plumbing: including speed/accel, volume, size within the conduit, cross sectional / longitudinal geometry, flow resistance/and shape, density, any resonance effects, either internal to the stream or that might cause spillage.

Thinking about it this way makes sense given the attitude the characters have when realigning the conduits. That is, it's a repair job they take seriously but nothing to cause a major freak out. If the physical tube part of the conduit system was out of alignment, seems that there would be rather pronounced concern about it breaking and spewing out plasma.

 

[FormerLurker]

Or worse, the damage the spewing plasma would cause. Could potentially destroy the entire ship if enough gets out of containment. But that's only the latter problem, of course.