Space Vessel: Life Support Systems and Gravity
- Thread starter Wingsley
- Start date
Of course, the ZPE part of it all could have been the very thing retrofitted by the Kelvans.
Take an old paddle-wheeler steamboat. Observe its clumsy boiler hooked to gargantuan steam cylinders. Ignore the gigantic apparatus, bypass it by hooking up a diesel engine from your semi truck directly to the camshaft instead. Ignore the massive stores of onboard coal and just bring your semi's compact little tanker trailer full of diesel fuel aboard. Observe the near-magical turning of the shaft and the paddle wheels without any consumption of the regular onboard fuel. And forget all about complex and time-consuming efforts to remove the paddle wheels and replace them with something more efficient such as propellers or water jets - a simple partial powerplant swap will suffice.
The Kelvans might easily have had something as trivially banal as a diesel engine aboard their wrecked ship, only it happened to be a compact little ZPE tap. Hooking it up to an existing warp drive, bypassing most of its formerly vital but now unnecessary systems, might not be much of a trick. But it would give the warp drive massively extended range, without contradicting those episodes where the range has limits. A Kelvan black box allows for intergalactic travel; Starfleet doesn't have Kelvan black boxes; Starfleet can't go intergalactic unless the Kelvans cooperate. Continuity is served, please be seated...
Timo Saloniemi
^ Technically, Starfleet could go intergalactic in TOS but just not in someone's lifetime. Kirk and Co. never said fuel would be a problem (pre-mods) but time. When the Kelvans proudly stated they could speed it up to 300 years (only speed gains), again, no complaints about fuel from Kirk and Co. questioning the fuel problem.
Timo, I know you like to bridge the gap between TOS and TNG continuity... so after TOS/TOS Films, in TNG+ was there ever a mention of power regeneration or did the production of TNG drop that thinking entirely and went with strictly large but fixed quantities of AM for fuel?
Timo, I know you like to bridge the gap between TOS and TNG continuity... so after TOS/TOS Films, in TNG+ was there ever a mention of power regeneration or did the production of TNG drop that thinking entirely and went with strictly large but fixed quantities of AM for fuel?
Love it!
The connection between dilithium crystals and antimatter is all but spelled out in that episode, I can't think why this was never thought of before!
^^ Agreed, this makes perfect sense from both a trekverse and real-world POV. Physicists have actually speculated that there may be many parallel universes composed of A-M as well as matter like ours, and that they may alternate "side-by-side" as it were, with each other?
In any event, we can speculate perhaps that the space warp generated for warp drive is a wormhole or Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Bridge that sucks in matter from our universe and anti-matter from a parallel universe once this connection or "EPR bridge" is made?
The high voltage and/or graser beam energy discharge from Dilithium could be what "pokes a hole" in the space-time energy/matter matrix to initiate the wormhole, and then each time the warpdrive system cycles around, another timed pulse from the Dilithium circuit adds energy to expand the wormhole/bridge, thereby drawing in more "fuel" and increasing warp factors accordingly?
But there would definitely be a limit to this process, and as "The Alternative Factor" suggests, which could be detrimental to the space-time continuum(s)? Perhaps this is the subspace degradation mentioned in later trek, and was responsible for the lower warp velocities we see. Not only would mandating a speed limit slow this process, but the damage to sub/hyper space may mean that significant damage has already been done and the former high speeds we saw in TOS are simply no longer sustainable in the later TNG era?
In any event, we can speculate perhaps that the space warp generated for warp drive is a wormhole or Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen Bridge that sucks in matter from our universe and anti-matter from a parallel universe once this connection or "EPR bridge" is made?
The high voltage and/or graser beam energy discharge from Dilithium could be what "pokes a hole" in the space-time energy/matter matrix to initiate the wormhole, and then each time the warpdrive system cycles around, another timed pulse from the Dilithium circuit adds energy to expand the wormhole/bridge, thereby drawing in more "fuel" and increasing warp factors accordingly?
But there would definitely be a limit to this process, and as "The Alternative Factor" suggests, which could be detrimental to the space-time continuum(s)? Perhaps this is the subspace degradation mentioned in later trek, and was responsible for the lower warp velocities we see. Not only would mandating a speed limit slow this process, but the damage to sub/hyper space may mean that significant damage has already been done and the former high speeds we saw in TOS are simply no longer sustainable in the later TNG era?
Last edited:
^It's possible that over time it could degrade subspace. I don't necessarily think the two universe's warp speeds would correlate though, unless after recalibration in TNG, TOS Warp 2 is the new TNG Warp 9...
An interesting side project would be to work out the "rules" for this power regeneration and see if they match up for the TOS episodes
An interesting side project would be to work out the "rules" for this power regeneration and see if they match up for the TOS episodes
I love the idea of dilithium as an antimatter-universe tap - but I wonder why this doesn't appear to have weapons applications. Whenever our heroes need a powerful and dangerous explosive, they go for antimatter, fusion bombs, or chemical explosives. Dilithium isn't mentioned as a factor in creating the antimatter bombs that deal with the dikironium cloud or the space amoeba...
Possibly the limiting factor would be the speed by which dilithium can draw energy from other realms. There's enough power available for warp drive through the transdimensional connection, but a quick release of devastating energies is better accomplished by antimatter that's already in our universe.
Timo Saloniemi
Possibly the limiting factor would be the speed by which dilithium can draw energy from other realms. There's enough power available for warp drive through the transdimensional connection, but a quick release of devastating energies is better accomplished by antimatter that's already in our universe.
Timo Saloniemi
More things to ponder
Another possibility that dilithium isn't used as a bomb is because the amount of machinery and power required to charge it up to the point where it can tap antimatter is too prohibitive to be a bomb? You might as well just send the antimatter it generates in a much smaller package...
Another possibility that dilithium isn't used as a bomb is because the amount of machinery and power required to charge it up to the point where it can tap antimatter is too prohibitive to be a bomb? You might as well just send the antimatter it generates in a much smaller package...
^Doesn't it take 15 minutes for the engines to warm up (All our Yesterdays)? Maybe part of the slowdown is the dilithium crystals.
^ You are thinking of the Psi 2000 incident in "The Naked Time". Riley shut the warp engines off completely. Scotty said it would take 30 minutes to regenerate them. That's when Spock and Scott tried a highly unorthodox intermix formula that resulted in time travel.
^^30 minutes could be the time it takes to recharge the dilithium? Or it could be the minimum time required to build up a sufficiently strong warp field to move the ship?
In any case, it seems the anti-matter itself had to be "warmed up" which was the crux of the problem in this instance, so perhaps we can conjecture that the reserve anti-matter is stored in a super-cooled state whereby the resulting superconducting Miessner field suspends the A-M safely in the "pods"? This could then be the "magnetic shielding" we've heard tell about, in other esp. ("That Which Survives", "The Savage Curtain")?
Another possibility, which is more speculative, but by no means mutually exclusive, is that the A-M is in the form of "dark anti/matter" a.k.a negative time/energy/A-M? If this stuff was mixed with ordinary matter, it would indeed create an "implosion" rather than an explosion, and depending on the intermix formula -owing to the negative time factor in the equation- could plausibly explain why the Enterprise was sent back in time as we saw in "The Naked Time"?
This could also plausibly explain the "cold" anti-matter reference in this episode, since this negative time/energy/anti-matter would exhibit negative entropy and therefore be described as “cold”? Perhaps the neg. A-M must first be converted to pos. A-M before regular use is made of it, thereby explaining the “warming up” process mentioned by Scotty? And just maybe, this is what the dilithium converter converts?
And finally, all this might correlate to why flooding the engines with “positive energy” while in the “negative energy barrier” at the edge of the galaxy, as was planned in “By Any Other Name”, might result in the destruction of the ship?
Well anywho, that’s enough headaches for one post, carry on.
In any case, it seems the anti-matter itself had to be "warmed up" which was the crux of the problem in this instance, so perhaps we can conjecture that the reserve anti-matter is stored in a super-cooled state whereby the resulting superconducting Miessner field suspends the A-M safely in the "pods"? This could then be the "magnetic shielding" we've heard tell about, in other esp. ("That Which Survives", "The Savage Curtain")?
Another possibility, which is more speculative, but by no means mutually exclusive, is that the A-M is in the form of "dark anti/matter" a.k.a negative time/energy/A-M? If this stuff was mixed with ordinary matter, it would indeed create an "implosion" rather than an explosion, and depending on the intermix formula -owing to the negative time factor in the equation- could plausibly explain why the Enterprise was sent back in time as we saw in "The Naked Time"?
This could also plausibly explain the "cold" anti-matter reference in this episode, since this negative time/energy/anti-matter would exhibit negative entropy and therefore be described as “cold”? Perhaps the neg. A-M must first be converted to pos. A-M before regular use is made of it, thereby explaining the “warming up” process mentioned by Scotty? And just maybe, this is what the dilithium converter converts?
And finally, all this might correlate to why flooding the engines with “positive energy” while in the “negative energy barrier” at the edge of the galaxy, as was planned in “By Any Other Name”, might result in the destruction of the ship?
Well anywho, that’s enough headaches for one post, carry on.
More food for thought... it might not be the dilithium crystals needing a warm up time since they were used almost immediately upon fitting in "Elaan of Troyius".
Most likely was as Scotty said, need time to warm up the antimatter. Since he was worried about an uncontrollable explosion then the AM might be the key as you suggest, Tin_man. With the right formula they instead got a controlled implosion...
Most likely was as Scotty said, need time to warm up the antimatter. Since he was worried about an uncontrollable explosion then the AM might be the key as you suggest, Tin_man. With the right formula they instead got a controlled implosion...
For one thing, on a ship this size, breathable air isn't that much of a problem. Obviously the ship is going to have mechanisms that remove carbon dioxide, and obviously any smart engineer is going to install some sort of low-tech solution that will still work even if the main system fails (lithium hydroxide canisters, etc). But even if all else fails, C02 levels aren't going to become dangerous in anything less than a couple of DAYS, assuming the entire crew is alive.
The bigger problem is temperature control. A very large space craft with no power or no thermal control may become very very hot or very very cold, depending on where it is in space. If you loose power in the outer solar system or interstellar space, the crew turns into corpsicles in a matter of hours. If, on the other hand, you loose power inside the orbit of Venus, you've got 400 stacks of roast redshirt by the end of the day.
Low-tech thermal control is tricky because any sort of heating/cooling system is going to draw alot of power. OTOH, that may not be much by 23rd century standards; an electrical battery the size of a desk with, say, a few hundred kilowatt-hour capacity could probably regulate a heating/cooling system for an entire deck for a few hours or so.
I don't see gravity being part of what they would call the "life support." Again, it's a matter if timescale: microgravity doesn't become a health hazard except after several MONTHS of weightlessness, and even that probably won't kill you. As for lighting, same difference; emergency lighting is probably battery-operated like modern emergency lights and would be considered a standalone system.
Maybe. It depends on what the function of the life support system actually is. We don't know if that's simply a term for thermal control mechanisms or if it includes the water supply, the food slots, the toilets, and the ship's Netflix account. Otherwise, unless humans in the 24th century are some kind of cyborgs that have to be kept alive by mechanical implants built into their chest and powered wirelessly by the ship's power grid, there really isn't any reason for life support systems to matter all that much. For PLOT purposes "Oxygen and gravity" would suffice, even if everything else was shot to hell.
I thought it was implied that Defiant had somehow vented its atmosphere into space as a consequence of the interphase process. Part of the ship became immaterial and the air leaked out, killing anyone who was still left alive.
Common misconception. While, yes, if you were too close to the sun, you would likely be in for some bad news, it turns out that ship's aren't ever going to freeze in any of the passenger's lifetimes. It turns out that hard vacuum is a wonderful insulator and a vessel the size of a starship couldn't possibly hope to ever radiate enough heat for the crew to be uncomfortably cold. Emergency batteries would necessarily emit heat as would the metabolic activity of the crew. In fact, it's entirely conceivable that the ship would in fact get a bit too warm without some mechanical refrigeration or other form of heat redistribution. This may seem counter-intuitive given what happened to Apollo 13, but let's recall that that was a tiny volume of air which was only seriously insulated from one side (the re-entry shield) that was being heated by little more than the three astronaut's metabolic activity. With a starship having thousands of times the volume of room temperature air to start with and over a hundred times the people to digest their way to warmth, not to mention the more robust physical structure, I think we'll be pretty safe from freezing up.
--Alex
I didn't get that impression, but that is because Kirk and his environmental suit would suffer from the same fate if that was the case.
^ Albertese makes a very interesting supposition.
All of this thread's readers may also find interesting that there is a current building technology that backs this up. On 25 Sept. 2010, Tom Zeller wrote an article for THE NEW YORK TIMES entitled "In Passive-House Standards, A Brighter Shade of Green". The article covers a European building technique that favors super-insulated structures-- homes and other buildings with air-tight 17-inch-thick outer walls --as a superior means of keeping cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Zeller's piece revealed that these Euro-designed dwellings don't need a furnace in northern climes because the super-insualtion merely requires body heat to maintain comfort.
Maybe now we know what the chalky-white outer sheathing of the Enterprise, and all those beige walls within, were good for: layers of extremely advanced insulation. Starships may be a future form of animated "passive house"!
All of this thread's readers may also find interesting that there is a current building technology that backs this up. On 25 Sept. 2010, Tom Zeller wrote an article for THE NEW YORK TIMES entitled "In Passive-House Standards, A Brighter Shade of Green". The article covers a European building technique that favors super-insulated structures-- homes and other buildings with air-tight 17-inch-thick outer walls --as a superior means of keeping cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Zeller's piece revealed that these Euro-designed dwellings don't need a furnace in northern climes because the super-insualtion merely requires body heat to maintain comfort.
Maybe now we know what the chalky-white outer sheathing of the Enterprise, and all those beige walls within, were good for: layers of extremely advanced insulation. Starships may be a future form of animated "passive house"!
Despite what you may have read from the Atomic Rockets crew, space isn't an insulator at all. It is, in fact, a PERFECT medium for radiative heat transfer; and an object in space will tend to radiate most of its excess heat very quickly since there is no other matter (atmospheric gases, for example) to slow that transfer and bounce some of the heat back to it.
Ships in space reach a thermal equilibrium between the nearest radiative source (a star) and the interstellar medium, and this depends entirely on how much of that energy it absorbs or reflects. For example, when Skylab was first launched its solar heat shield and solar arrays both failed catastrophically and left the station adrift in space without power, baking in the sun. Returning temperatures in the station to safe levels was accomplished by way of a mylar sheet strapped to the side; IOW, simply moving part of the station out of direct sunlight was enough to considerably lower its internal temperature. If Skylab had been stranded in, say, the astroid belt, it would have frozen solid.
Again, it completely depends on where you are and what your spacecraft is doing, but in INTERSTELLAR space, or any part of a solar system beyond the orbit of Mars or so, extreme cold is going to be your most serious problem, while extreme heat is the more common hazard in the inner solar system.
And yet the drop in temperature was the most palpable consequence of power loss "The Last Outpost," demonstrating again that in deep space far from any bright suns, thermal control is a serious problem.
The real point here is that the human body in and of itself simply doesn't produce enough heat to keep a spacecraft warm. Most of the time, the ship is full of things that produce waste heat just by virtue of their BEING ON and electrical heaters and coolers simply regulate a comfortable temperature for crew and equipment. When most of that equipment is turned off, the main source of cabin heat is lost, and the dedicated heating/cooling systems have a much more difficult time keeping internal temperatures comfortable. Therefore, every instance of a dead starship being discovered but "Life support is still online" probably implies that a habitable temperature is still being maintained despite the failure of all other primary systems. To speak of the LOSS of life support in these situations probably implies that anyone and anything on the ship is about to be--or already has been--exposed to some violent extremes of high and low temperatures, either of which could be fatal for survivors OR away teams.
This is interesting. While we were looking at TOS examples of reserve power and life support it would appear that TNG's example is somewhat different. Whereas in "Mudd's Women" where Reserve Power is being drained to the last drop in trying to secure the crystals the ship suffered no ill temperature affects but in TNG's "The Last Outpost", temperate control becomes a pretty fast problem despite still having Reserve Power. (I haven't looked at other TNG examples to see how much they kept to this though...)
The Last Outpost said:
Similar threads
