The full version of Ares IV?
- Thread starter Mr. Laser Beam
- Start date
That's an urban legend, to be sure.
That is, there's no backstage tech book that would claim that full impulse = 0.25 c.
There's a passage in the TNG Tech Manual on p.78 that goes "At times when warp propulsion is not available, impulse flight may be unavoidable, but will require lengthy recalibration of onboard computer clock systems even if contact is maintained with Starfleet navigation beacons. It is for this reason that normal impulse operations are limited to a velocity of 0.25 c." However, full impulse is something completely different, as indicated by p. 75 where it is said "High impulse operations, specifically velocities above 0.75 c, may require added power from the saucer module engines."...
Indeed, nowhere is it established that "full impulse" would be a specific speed, or that "1/4 impulse" or anything else would. Those sound more like throttle settings: keep doing 0.005 impulse for long enough and eventually you are going at 0.99999 c. Or conversely, do 1/4 impulse for just a few seconds and you might not yet reach crawling speed.
If "impulse" is a throttle setting, it's likely to depend on the type of engine being throttled. Thus, different ship classes achieve different accelerations at 1/2 impulse, and ships with damaged engines will do worse than ships with undamaged ones at the same setting.
Which is probably what we have to assume in order to explain away all the inconsistencies between speeds and impulse settings mentioned onscreen.
Timo Saloniemi
That is, there's no backstage tech book that would claim that full impulse = 0.25 c.
There's a passage in the TNG Tech Manual on p.78 that goes "At times when warp propulsion is not available, impulse flight may be unavoidable, but will require lengthy recalibration of onboard computer clock systems even if contact is maintained with Starfleet navigation beacons. It is for this reason that normal impulse operations are limited to a velocity of 0.25 c." However, full impulse is something completely different, as indicated by p. 75 where it is said "High impulse operations, specifically velocities above 0.75 c, may require added power from the saucer module engines."...
Indeed, nowhere is it established that "full impulse" would be a specific speed, or that "1/4 impulse" or anything else would. Those sound more like throttle settings: keep doing 0.005 impulse for long enough and eventually you are going at 0.99999 c. Or conversely, do 1/4 impulse for just a few seconds and you might not yet reach crawling speed.
If "impulse" is a throttle setting, it's likely to depend on the type of engine being throttled. Thus, different ship classes achieve different accelerations at 1/2 impulse, and ships with damaged engines will do worse than ships with undamaged ones at the same setting.
Which is probably what we have to assume in order to explain away all the inconsistencies between speeds and impulse settings mentioned onscreen.
Timo Saloniemi
Rick: Do you expect that the ISA designers would have allowed for the possibility of re-provisioning and re-usage of what was left had Ares IV returned to Earth in the manner originally planned?
(Granted that I'm asking for speculation outside the bounds of what you got from the script and writers' notes here.)
(Granted that I'm asking for speculation outside the bounds of what you got from the script and writers' notes here.)
I can get at mine...
...and...
Section 6.2 on Relativistic Considerations on page 78. If you go too much faster than .25 C for too long, you start running up against the universe aging faster than you perceive yourself to be.
Now that's interesting and changes the dynamic just slightly. Earth-to-Mars rescue shot in less than 15 min!
Hmm... Something to ponder. I'll write the story both ways and see which one I like better.
There's a slight chance that the TEI stage might be able to brake into some kind of an Earth orbit on return, but more likely a recovery vehicle with a heck of a lot more fuel would have gone up to meet the returning crew and brought them back, along with surface samples and experiment data. The TEI stage might then have gone into solar orbit.
Rick
Thought the people in this thread might find this interesting. The latest spaceship "porn" from NASA:
http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Holderman-Henderson_1-26-11/
http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Holderman-Henderson_1-26-11/
But it would take a certain amount of time to accelerate to that velocity and a certain amount of time to decelerate. Impulse power is depicted as being fast enough for that in TV shows because... well, it's a TV show, you have to fit all the action into a 52 minute screenplay. The slightly harder sci-fi approach would have the ship accelerating in a brachistochrone trajectory that would transfer from Earth to Mars in about 10 days (assuming Mars is at its closest point).I'm seeing that at "full impulse" which is claimed by a technical source to be 1/4th lightspeed it would take 88 min to reach Mars on a direct shot.
Sound reasonable?
That's plenty fast enough for dramatic purpose.
Anyway: for a 1900 ton Enterprise, accelerating at 14Gs, would be able to reach .25C in 140 hours (just under six days). This assumes some fairly impressive propulsion figures; for one, a specific impulse of around 30,000 seconds and a thrust level of about 500MN (more than fifty times the thrust generated by the space shuttle at liftoff). A smaller craft--something the size of the space shuttle itself--would be able to reach the same velocity in the same amount of time with about 1MN of thrust: about what you would get from a pair of Merlin rocket engines.
If the difference between impulse engines and ordinary rockets is the ability to expel propellant at relativistic velocities (hence the absurdly high ISP) then the limiting factor for how fast you can go is how much propellant your ship is carrying. Going slower takes less propellant since you can coast part of the way but you still need to have enough to slow down when you get there.
Well I plan to explore these "differences" including the absurd notion that the ship coasts to a stop when the engines quit. The acceleration curve will be explained as well.
Notice I never said it would make SENSE. Alot of Star Trek technology is "out there" and doesn't make sense in context. I plan to deal with that and make a technology that matches what we see... via technobabble if i have to.
Notice I never said it would make SENSE. Alot of Star Trek technology is "out there" and doesn't make sense in context. I plan to deal with that and make a technology that matches what we see... via technobabble if i have to.
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