Eh, I think it's a stretch to suddenly say "the missing 840,000 tons is realy super-dense fuel" when 1) the statement is hyperbolic to begin with, and 2) he says it's gross weight, which wouldn't include fuel. (And considering which batch of episodes the line comes from, and that lithium crystals actually power the ship, it's safer just to drop is as Scotty being Scotty... All that said, if they're going to use M/AM, then the most plentiful version of either would be Hydrogen ... and if you MUST need an isotope to make it work, then deuterium is again the most plentiful version. As for the bussards, where's it said that they provide the ENTIRE fuel supply? Why not just 'top off as you go' if you can? In other words, the ship USUALLY depletes (very slowly) from the stores in the nacelles, but when there is an opportunity to grab anti-deuterium (which would be the rarest bit to snag), the bussards go into action.
In your opinion. In my opinion it was histrionic. Suum cuique. Wrong. He says "gross tons" not gross weight. A "gross ton" is a British unit of weight equal to 2240 pounds. And besides, gross mass DOES include fuel when you are giving specifications for a rocket or spacecraft. I'm not sure what you mean here. The line in the episode is "The entire ship's power is feeding through one lithium crystal." It never says that the crystal is producing the power. It says it is feeding through the crystal. Given the fact that lithium can be used as a heat-transfer fluid for high power-density nuclear reactors, and that it has been studied for its potential as a primary coolant for nuclear reactors, I think it is being mentioned as a regulator of reactions without which the reactors cannot run, and not as a power source. Supersolid or metastable metallic hydrogen? Hydrogen can take the form of degenerate matter. Rick Sternbach is a very creative and imaginative man, that used his considerable knowledge of science to apply the idea of having magnetic Bussard funnels scooping antiprotons from gas giants to TNG. It nevertheless doesn't change the fact that the very existence of "Bussard collectors" on the domes of the nacelles was a misreading of Franz Joseph's blueprints. FJ called the domes "space/energy matter sinks" used for "acquisition". Geoff Mandel created a "thirteenth sheet" detailing the nacelle innards as an addenda to those FJ plans (here) on which he called the domes "matter intakes". He was misinterpreting what Franz Joseph intended -- according to interviews with FJ he meant them to be something to distort the fabric of the universe, not something to suck in matter. Rick Sternbach has confirmed that he was working from the "thirteenth sheet" when he came up with the idea of the domes as Bussards. Even if it was a misreading by Mandel, Bussards are an interesting idea, but wouldn't it make a lot more sense to have the Bussards associated with the deflector, which is already steering gas and dust around the ship? It makes a lot more sense for the nacelle -- something that is supposed to be warping space -- to actually be warping space rather than sucking in hydrogen or antihydrogen --particularly in a scheme where the antimatter is being stored in the ship itself! What happens? Does it get scooped up in the nacelle to be piped down to the secondary hull to be mixed with matter so that the energy can then be sent back up to the nacelle!? I think it makes more sense for it to be drawn in by the deflector, on the secondary hull, where it will be used. In any event, since Star Trek was made in the 1960s, when NASA was regularly firing manned rockets from Cape Kennedy to the moon, and given the fact that a Saturn V has a gross mass that is well beyond ten times its empty mass, then 190,000 : 1,000,000 works just fine for making sense of Star Trek's more advanced starship.
That is in reference to the warp drive. The Doomsday Machine, on the other hand, states that the Constitution Class' impulse engines are fusion energized until the TMP-Refit upgraded those aboard the NCC-1701 to M/AM rockets. Who is to say that the Enterprise even had a full tank of gas during the events depicted in Mudd's Women? But seriously, the proposal to employ degenerate matter as spacecraft reaction mass has an absolutely impeccable real-world engineering pedigree ranging from the speculations of Karl Hans Janke circa 1939 to those of Robert L. Forward circa 1997. TGT
So, let me see if I get this straight: 1: You guys are saying that the nacelles do not have Bussard collectors; the main dish could serve that function, and it collects some form of "supersolid" hydrogen (or anti-hydrogen)? From where? Is the dish collecting minute amounts of ordinary ambient hydrogen (or other cosmic rays) from deep space (or from inside a star system) and converting these particles into this exotic fuel once aboard ship? 2: The TOS Enterprise has a (loaded) mass of roughly 1 million tons, most of which is probably this storage of exotic "supersolid" fuel. The empty mass of the vehicle is about 190,000 tons. So the mass of the fuel is somewhere around 810,000 tons. Right? 3: Could this "supersolid" fuel be the basis for most spacecraft and weapons power? Scotty drained phaser pistols in "The Galileo Seven" and used "their energy" ("supersolid" hydrogen fuel cells???) to restart the shuttlecraft's engines. Could field items like hand phasers, phaser rifles, tricorders (remember the exploding tricorder on Cestus III?), communicators and even shuttlecraft be equipped with small "supersolid" mini-"fuel cells" of some sort? And could photon torpedoes use the same "supersolid" fuel in their propulsion and ordinance? 4: Could this "supersolid" fuel concept (and the dish-as-collector concept) also explain how a robot ship could be sent by the Federation to the Kelvan homeworld in the Andromeda galaxy, after spending generations in the intergalactic void at warp speed?
I don't think that the NCC-1701 had any self-fueling capability whatsoever. The Refit may have been able to refuel herself in extreme emergencies, but I don't want to derail this thread by invoking unproduced episodes of Phase II. Of course, I must stress that I am only speaking for myself and not for aridas (who undoubtedly has his own finely-wrought opinion on the subject ). As I noted above, we have absolutely no idea how much fuel had been expended during normal operation in the time elapsed between the ship's last refill (presumably at a starbase) and her limping into orbit around Rigel XII. The total mass of a fully-fueled starship could be substantially greater than a million gross tons. I prefer to think that he was using the phasers to recharge the "starter battery" for the engine ionizer (the shuttlecraft are propelled by "ion engines" as per The Menagerie), which may function by ionizing the super-dense reaction mass and subsequently ejecting it from the spacecraft via the Coulomb or Lorentz Forces to generate propulsive thrust. Unlikely, as the devices would then be far too heavy for humans to comfortably carry. Probably. After all, the more mass is annihilated the more energy is released. I prefer to think that the Kelvans' simply increased the power and efficiency of the NCC-1701's engines by several orders of magnitude with their gadget, so that inflight refueling would not be required for the intergalactic transit. TGT