tractorbeams and physics...

[Cmdr Sho]

in the book "the physics of star trek" they talk about how a tractor beam would work in space between a ship and an object would be like you pushing away from someone on ice... as a correction they said...

... i dont think such a brute force solution would be necessary. reminded of Geordi LaForge's need for a warp field to attempt to push back the moon at Bre'el IV, i think a careful, if presently unattainable, manipulation of space and time would do the trick equally well.

what do they mean by this and can anyone explain this a bit better?

 

[Christopher]

I think it's a rather meaningless statement, since a warp field is a careful, if presently unattainable, manipulation of space and time.

Also, the quote misrepresents the reason for the warp field at Bre'el IV. Its purpose wasn't to push the moon in and of itself, but to reduce the moon's mass so that it could be more easily tractored onto a new trajectory.

 

[JNG]

If I remember that book correctly, Kasdan never talks about subspace and does not once acknowledge its effect on relative mass in any of his writings about fuel concerns for impulse and such. I don't know if he gets (or, at least, had any interest in writing about) that warp fields are subspace fields or what that is supposed to mean.

 

[shipfisher]

I've always wondered why tractor beams, which weren't in earthship parts bins in the ENT era, lagged so far behind the deployment of nav deflectors, which must have been in use soon after the 2060's at the very least. One shabby little theory of mine involves vulcan help with the latter, with tractor beams being deemed less of a priority in terms of tech logically "donated" in the name of flight safety.

Shabby theory #2 has stator generated gravitons being of the "push me" flavour only (unlike the "pull me" ones buzzing towards massive objects in nature). These allow overhead grav grids, landing field generators and def dishes but no tractor beams without another tweek - perhaps some tachyon effect to "retrograde" the gravitons with some crazy wrinkle like the beams actually grabbing targets slightly before they leave the emitters. Silly perhaps, but this is trek tech.

As to the force between two objects on ice idea, which has the "tractoror" as likely to be displaced as the "tractoree", perhaps tractor beams (and maybe deflector dish beams as well) don't "force couple" the two together. In other words, the beam generates a local "tractor force" at the target object without trying to shear the emitter off its mounts.