Re: Transparent Dome under Constitution Class Saucer,what is
You're really missing a lot of proportionality... any sense of SCALE... in your discussion.
It is certainly possible to collect light over a large area and focus it into a smaller one. This is the basic concept behind extant designs for solar smelters (a necessity for proposed concepts for asteroid or lunar mining and related metalurgy).
But what you're missing is that these huge, mile-wide reflector arrays in the solar smelter concepts produce enough energy to MELT SMALL QUANTITIES OF ORE.
Focus one of them on the planetary surface... first off, your light will be dispersed by the atmosphere, so it won't ever be as perfectly focused as it might be in a vacuum. But you could still melt the pavement, destroy a building or two, kill a few hundred people, maybe. It COULD be ugly.
But c'mon... "it's how we destroy planets???"
Let's be blunt here... no matter how much Al Gore rants about "Global Warming(tm)" or for that matter about the incipient threat of ManBearPig... humanity is not capable of destroying the planet, or even of having a particularly significant impact on the ecosystem, short-term. We've made much more of an impact by replacing prairie grass with farmland than we ever could in any other way.
We've ALTERED it, in noticeable ways, certainly, over many centuries. But it's nothing more or less than uninformed egotism that leads some people to think we could actually "destroy the planet."
As for destroying the planet with solar radiation, focused into a single beam... you'd need a lense literally more than ten thousands miles in diameter to accomplish what you just described (burning through the mantle and destroying the core).
If someone manages to make a lens that big, THEN we can talk.
Um... you DO realize that we don't actually destroy planets in real life, don't you?Uptightgirl said:
Praetor said:
Seriously, though, wasn't it really the original design intention, when the Enterprise was smaller and the saucer was meant to make planetfall, that the ventral transparent dome really was a lift engine, and the upper one a window into the bridge... or am I just imagining that?
I was serious.Hold your hand out on a sunny day and you feel warmth.Now put a 3 inch magnifying glass over it and your hand will burn.
To destroy a planet instead of using a 50 metre wide beam you funnel a 100 megawatt into a 20 cm circle in 1 second and hey presto! the accumalation of so much energy so quickly in such a small space will blast a hole in the planets crust with resultant super heated mantle magma expanding suddenly and destroying the crust of the planet in an explosive outward force.Like a balloon pricked with a needle.
This is how we destroy planets,by generating energy in small confined spaces with a magnification effect.In other words it is actually a electronic lens which focuses phaser bursts to an extremely fine point of 20 cm as this is the diffraction limitation for an orbital beam with that particular lens diameter.
When the saucer lands the lens is jettisoned and the emergency impulse engines are used for vtol.
You're really missing a lot of proportionality... any sense of SCALE... in your discussion.
It is certainly possible to collect light over a large area and focus it into a smaller one. This is the basic concept behind extant designs for solar smelters (a necessity for proposed concepts for asteroid or lunar mining and related metalurgy).
But what you're missing is that these huge, mile-wide reflector arrays in the solar smelter concepts produce enough energy to MELT SMALL QUANTITIES OF ORE.
Focus one of them on the planetary surface... first off, your light will be dispersed by the atmosphere, so it won't ever be as perfectly focused as it might be in a vacuum. But you could still melt the pavement, destroy a building or two, kill a few hundred people, maybe. It COULD be ugly.
But c'mon... "it's how we destroy planets???"
Let's be blunt here... no matter how much Al Gore rants about "Global Warming(tm)" or for that matter about the incipient threat of ManBearPig... humanity is not capable of destroying the planet, or even of having a particularly significant impact on the ecosystem, short-term. We've made much more of an impact by replacing prairie grass with farmland than we ever could in any other way.
We've ALTERED it, in noticeable ways, certainly, over many centuries. But it's nothing more or less than uninformed egotism that leads some people to think we could actually "destroy the planet."
As for destroying the planet with solar radiation, focused into a single beam... you'd need a lense literally more than ten thousands miles in diameter to accomplish what you just described (burning through the mantle and destroying the core).
If someone manages to make a lens that big, THEN we can talk.
(yup, I know - "sick" doesn't begin to cover it 
)
