Subspace bombs

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

After my last viewing of Star Trek (09) I thought about this.
What we saw as red matter creating a singularity that was expanding as long as you kept feeding normal matter while at the same time creating an enormous gravitational force that exceeded it's natural gravitational field by far, could be described as a subspace bomb.

Magic properties of subspace are the only workable explanation for the unpredictable and varying effects red matter had on supernova, planet and the Narada as seen in the movie.

Same reasoning can be applied to the supernova that destroyed Romulus while being possible lightyears away from the Romulan star system.

It might have been a normal nova, only an unfortunate large mass of red matter, that happened to be in he same system made it go all wonky.

Now what if these effects were utilzed and weaponized but ultimately outlawed and banned on a galactic scale because they could never be entirely predicted and a vessel using a red matter subspace bomb might fall victim to it's own weapon or even create much larger misdirected destruction.

Sound familiar?

I think we even saw one other event were a subspace bomb like this was used.

In Insurrection the weapon used by the S'ona behaves astonishingly similar to the the raw red matter reaction that destoyed Nero's ship.

Geordie even counteracts it's effect using the same method Scotty did by dumping a warp core into it.

Superficial similarities or in essence the same thing?

What do you think?

 

[Timo]

I'd argue Scotty's dumping of the warp core didn't stop any red matter weaponry: it merely prevented Scotty's bairns from blowing up on his face. Indeed, wasn't the ship targeted by rather conventional weaponry? The operation of extracting red matter from Spock's container seemed relatively elaborate. One would doubt Nero performed it every time he fired one of his cluster missiles. And said missiles were effective even before Nero captured Spock's red matter, now weren't they? At least it seemed that Nero offed that Klingon fleet before capturing Spock.

Whether the supernova that destroyed Romulus had FTL properties is debatable. The red matter might only have been effective if used before the explosion. When Spock missed that deadline, the destruction of Romulus was certain; Nero need not wait for those couple of years before the actual deaths would take place before launching on his rampage of grief.

Did the Vulcanivore black hole have "enormous" gravitational effects? I don't think we heard of any. The accident involving released red matter in the end did create some sort of a hole in space, with associated pulling effects, gravitic or otherwise - but the actual singularity created by red matter didn't seem to behave that anomaliously.

None of this is meant to say that red matter weaponry wouldn't count as a subspace bomb. I agree that it probably would...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JuanBolio]

Red matter may or may not have something to do with subspace. I don't think the new movie gave us enough data to draw a conclusion. I am of the opinion, though, that the Hobus star's supernova did not itself destroy Romulus with its blast wave, as that would have been impossible. Rather, I think the star had some kind of unusual nature that caused other stars nearby to go nova or supernova in a sort of chain reaction, and thus Romulus was destroyed by its own primary, not the Hobus star which was presumably several light-years away.

As for subspace weapons and Starfleet - the tricobalt devices used by Voyager that destroyed the Caretaker array had yields that were measured in teracochranes, as opposed to isotons or megatons. Cochranes as we know are used to measure subspace/warp fields, so I would guess that, legally or illegally, Voyager was armed with subspace warheads.

 

[Timo]

ST:INS says subspace weapons (of the type used by the Son'a at least) were outlawed by the Second Khitomer Accords. One might argue that those were the ones that were signed after Gowron denounced the First ones - thus, they'd come to being after "By Inferno's Light", after Voyager sailed out for her three-hour mission.

I wonder if tricobalts aren't sort of multifunctional: you could measure the yield of a fission bomb in sieverts if you wanted, or candelas, if your main purpose with nuking the enemy was to poison him with radiation or to blind him.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JuanBolio]

Perhaps Voyager, as a ship originally on a mission that might be construed as special ops, was simply authorized to carry subspace weapons by Starfleet in spite of the treaty. No reason to think that Starfleet and the Federation are completely 100% honorable in such dealings...

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I know this is going to annoy most of you, but I'm compelled to point out (for the purpose of this thread) that advanced trek weapons like photons and quantum torpedoes probably use either subspace fields or other types of forcefields to generate "explosive force" as a type of kinetic shock. Just reminded if this in "New Ground" where they used photon torpedoes to blow up a soliton wave; this implies that these types of weapons probably produce something that would react strongly with warp/subspace phenomena and might well qualify as "subspace bombs."

Then consider some of the more obscene technobabble from ENT, and you get the impression that the warp core is something a bit more than a simple atom smasher. It's possible the reactors of warp-driven starships actually produce some type of exotic energy particle, maybe virtual gravitons or something, that is then either conditioned or re-emitted by the warp drives as propulsive energy. "Detonating" the warp cores could be interpreted in this context as the sudden and uncontrolled blast of warp field energy. Or to put that another way: if a rocket engine is a "Controlled explosion," then a warp engine can be thought of as a "controlled big bang" in which space itself is expanded explosively. Detonating the warp core--or photon torpedoes, for that matter--would be miniature big-bang events, creating momentary splashes in the fabric of space time.


As for red matter... I'm pretty sure that's just a colloquial term (or perhaps a subclass of) protomatter, considering how unstable it is and how it manages to release massive amounts of energy in an unpredictable fashion.

 

[Timo]

It may indeed well be that an antimatter explosion of sufficient magnitude automatically has subspace effects. We just don't realize it today because we don't know about subspace "yet". That's a bit more satisfactory than suggesting that we have the properties of antimatter annihilation reactions wrong now, and will learn better later on...

For additional suggestive datapoints, remember that the spacetime rift in "Yesterday's Enterprise" was speculated to have been created by "a fierce volley" of photon torpedoes. The interaction of annihilation reactions and subspace could explain the surprising power of antimatter in Star Trek - and also the almost complete lack of photon torpedo action in the fleet battles of DS9. They just don't dare fire that many AM warheads in a limited volume of space where artificial subspace fields are already densely packed.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

The space-time rift in Yesterday's Enterprise. of course! It behaved in much the same way the rift in the movie did.
It all makes sense now! Even sending someone into an alternate universe that branched of the prime one worked.

Was that episode by any chance an inspiration for the movie writers?

 

[JuanBolio]

The Yesterday's Enterprise rift looked quote similar to the ones the Narada and Spock emerged from, too.

Gotta disagree about photon and quantum torpedoes being subspace weapons, though. While I admit there's a mild case in favor of this, I like them much better as straight-up antimatter/zero-point energy warheads. I think subspace weapons should be something... special.

 

[Timo]

Perhaps a subspace weapon, as defined in the treaties, is like a neutron bomb or a cobalt bomb is to a basic fission bomb: it blows stuff up just like all the other antimatter explosives out there, but it is tuned to do it in a "dirty" fashion that maximizes the subspace effects, perhaps even at the expense of the ordinary explosive ones.

It may well be that all energy releases that are sufficiently large also have a subspace effect. A minimal one might result from a hammer hitting an anvil. A massive one results from changes in the energy state of a star, though. Perhaps a supernova will smite starships at a distance of dozens of lightyears, explaining "By Inferno's Light" - and will destroy a subspace-dependent civilization in a distant star system such as Romulus in a matter of hours rather than decades?

Timo Saloniemi