Transporter as a fuel source?

[seekertwo]

I was watching a VOY episode ("The Cloud", IIRC) where they encounter a nebula-type creature while looking for omicron particles (as a fuel source). At one point, they talk about beaming the particles aboard....using the transporter to convert an energy source into energy for transport so that it can be reassembled into a particle to be converted into an energy source.... ...sounded pretty convoluted to me, too. Why not keep the particles in an energy state and store them in capacitors for use later? And why not use the transporter to convert any matter into energy for storage and use?....asteroids...debris....Neelix's leftovers....anything....

Am I overthinking this, or is there something to the idea?....

 

[Mr. B]

Without going to back to watch the episode, that does sound pretty convoluted since the transporter must be pretty taxing on power supplies.

 

[Captain Rob]

Any decent physics teacher will tell you that you would spend more energy on the process than you would gain.

 

[sojourner]

It's Voyager... 'nuff said.

 

[diankra]

Yep, the Vooyager writers really needed classes in basic physics, in this case the 2nd Law of Thermondynamics, mostly. If only someone had played them the Flanders and Swann song on the subject... followed up by some Tom Lehrer.

 

[T'Girl]

If you had say lots and lots of deuterium to power your reactor to power your transporter, but you needed a certain type of energy particle, okay go ahead and (literally) burn through kilotonnes of deuterium to obtain a few grams of this fancy pants particle.

No, it not economical, but look at how much hydrogen they threw away just to get all that original deuterium.

 

[shipfisher]

All the above fancy particle flummery aside, the fact that fed starships use M:AM cores as a power source infers that the transport process stops short of converting matter into freely releasable energy.

 

[diankra]

All the above fancy particle flummery aside, the fact that fed starships use M:AM cores as a power source infers that the transport process stops short of converting matter into freely releasable energy.

Not necessarily, as it could alternatively mean that it's energy inefficient - the matter-to-energy process uses more energy than it delivers.

 

[shipfisher]

All the above fancy particle flummery aside, the fact that fed starships use M:AM cores as a power source infers that the transport process stops short of converting matter into freely releasable energy.

Not necessarily, as it could alternatively mean that it's energy inefficient - the matter-to-energy process uses more energy than it delivers.

Hmm... Wouldn't that mean that the energy input to, say, transport two humpback whales into the back of a klingon Bop would exceed the energy released from all the matter in said whales? Makes shuttlecraft seem the greener option in the energy efficiency sweepstakes by a fair margin, especially considering the two humpback whales plus reservoir of mass you'd need to fuel the process. The energies involved would be getting into super nova territory...not very user friendly.

If the energy involved is less than the above scenario, then once again, we're looking at something short of the full conversion to energy of mass during any point in the transport cycle. Excited or partially dissociated in some way conducive to quantum relocation elsewhere, but not converted.

 

[diankra]

All the above fancy particle flummery aside, the fact that fed starships use M:AM cores as a power source infers that the transport process stops short of converting matter into freely releasable energy.

Not necessarily, as it could alternatively mean that it's energy inefficient - the matter-to-energy process uses more energy than it delivers.

Hmm... Wouldn't that mean that the energy input to, say, transport two humpback whales into the back of a klingon Bop would exceed the energy released from all the matter in said whales? Makes shuttlecraft seem the greener option in the energy efficiency sweepstakes by a fair margin, especially considering the two humpback whales plus reservoir of mass you'd need to fuel the process. The energies involved would be getting into super nova territory...not very user friendly.

If the energy involved is less than the above scenario, then once again, we're looking at something short of the full conversion to energy of mass during any point in the transport cycle. Excited or partially dissociated in some way conducive to quantum relocation elsewhere, but not converted.

You're right, some sort of quantum transfer does seem to work better (the transporter has always been a problem: I think it's in the World of Star Trek that David Gerrold comments that the transporter, as described, is in keeping with the rest of the Enterprise as an X-ray machine would be on a Roman warship).
Applying the energy inefficiency argument does meansthat if the transporter does convert matter to enrgy and back again, it's an immensely costly process.
But in the case of the two whales: benefit - 23rd century Earth not destroyed; deficit - one Bird of Prey effectively wrecked?

 

[shipfisher]

We reach brother.

Now I'm off to find eden...

 

[Pauln6]

The energy transfer has never been 1:1 since the conversion and transfer process itself uses energy, and presumably quite a lot of energy but if you could just siphon off the energy from the converted matter to storage units (which is essentially what replicators do when they recycle their crockery) then one has to wonder why the ships couldn't do this on a larger scale. If containment was a problem, they could always beam excess energy out into space as rematerialsied hydrogen.

I don't think the transporter/replication process can replicate anti-matter. It would make sense that Federation ships should have equipment on board to convert matter to anti-matter but I don't recall that ever being stated. Certainly, the TMP Enterprise had containment pods but no conversion equipment that I recall. Maybe conversion is energy/equipment intensive and so it only takes place on any sensible scale in specialist facilities. It doesn't matter how much matter you have if you have no anti-matter.

I also agree that transporting only really makes (relative) sense if the matter is not fully converted to energy but phased sufficiently so that the remaining/displaced energy in our dimension can be transported through subspace. If you siphon off the energy still exisiting in our dimension, how can you then re-convert the phased matter and if you don't re-convert what happens to the matter?

I'd assumed that it is the energy use from the transporter than maintains the phased state and without it, the matter will rematerialise automatically (although not necessarily in the same form if the process isn't carried out carefully so we have lumpy in TMP or possibly a spread of matter in space).

 

[Timo]

Any decent physics teacher will tell you that you would spend more energy on the process than you would gain.

Why? It's simple fueling. Of course you expend some energy when drilling for oil, or running a fuel pump, which is analogous to using a transporter to get some of those nebula particles aboard. But then you have gained the energy inherent in the fuel, and there's no law of thermodynamics that would say that the energy from that fuel would have to be less than the energy expended in obtaining it.

"The Cloud" made perfect sense in suggesting that a starship could bring aboard some fuel by using the transporter, instead of an old-fashioned hose or something. This quite regardless of how much energy it takes to run a transporter - but it should be pointed out that a transporter has never been stated to expend much energy. Nor should there be an inherent reason for it to expend much: even if it does a classic E=mcc type conversion of the transportee, the process would happen in reverse at the other end, so the bulk of the energy released would be recollected again.

As for storing fuel in the dematerialized state (which probably isn't "energy", because our heroes always talk about "phased matter" instead), that's probably not viable. The transporter has never been capable of holding the transportee in that state for long without something bad happening. The longest we got for people was probably the few hours in "Counterpoint" (even Scotty wasn't dematerialized for 75 years in "Relics"- he appeared to be in some sort of a mat/demat loop). Nothing in "The Cloud" suggests that the fuel they would have brought aboard with the transporters would have been stored in dematerialized form; they would probably just have put it in big tanks.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Transporters don't "convert matter to energy." That was the original concept in the '60s, but it's totally infeasible due to good old E=mc^2, as discussed above. In the Sternbach-Okuda formulation of the tech, transporters merely break down matter into its constituent particles and move those particles around through subspace. The only thing that's "converted into energy" is the pattern, the quantum information defining the object, which is evidently stored in an energy matrix within the transporter beam.

 

[MilleniumLance]

Transporters don't "convert matter to energy." That was the original concept in the '60s, but it's totally infeasible due to good old E=mc^2, as discussed above. In the Sternbach-Okuda formulation of the tech, transporters merely break down matter into its constituent particles and move those particles around through subspace. The only thing that's "converted into energy" is the pattern, the quantum information defining the object, which is evidently stored in an energy matrix within the transporter beam.

 

[publiusr]

If you had say lots and lots of deuterium to power your reactor to power your transporter, but you needed a certain type of energy particle, okay go ahead and (literally) burn through kilotonnes of deuterium to obtain a few grams of this fancy pants particle.

No, it not economical, but look at how much hydrogen they threw away just to get all that original deuterium.

Yes but the universe is full of hydrogen. So it is worth it to spend a bit in order to get a little return. Also, I would imagine that less energy went into mining uranium (at lest in terms of heavy equipment) than was spent on the first bomb. Add exotic particles to the mix, and perhaps hydrogen harvested later gets a boost.

It makes sense in that, with this viewpoint, all that is wasted is time, since the Universe is teeming with hydrogen. Now you want a dedicated cracking station so time is not wasted aboard a ship to harvest new and denser forms of mass/energy--its just that a ship of Voyager's size and location hasn't a choice.

 

[Pauln6]

If you had say lots and lots of deuterium to power your reactor to power your transporter, but you needed a certain type of energy particle, okay go ahead and (literally) burn through kilotonnes of deuterium to obtain a few grams of this fancy pants particle.

No, it not economical, but look at how much hydrogen they threw away just to get all that original deuterium.

Yes but the universe is full of hydrogen. So it is worth it to spend a bit in order to get a little return. Also, I would imagine that less energy went into mining uranium (at lest in terms of heavy equipment) than was spent on the first bomb. Add exotic particles to the mix, and perhaps hydrogen harvested later gets a boost.

It makes sense in that, with this viewpoint, all that is wasted is time, since the Universe is teeming with hydrogen. Now you want a dedicated cracking station so time is not wasted aboard a ship to harvest new and denser forms of mass/energy--its just that a ship of Voyager's size and location hasn't a choice.

Isn't deuterium just hydrogen with an extra proton or something? Surely standard replication technology could produce the stuff? Presumably the suggestion is that beaming stuff on board is more economic because you are re-forming matter brought in from elsewhere rather than performing a simple conversion using your own energy reserves? Once again that implies that transporters are not reforming matter by using energy generated by the ship, they are transporting in energy itself from elsewhere and the transportation process is less energy intensive.

 

[Christopher]

Isn't deuterium just hydrogen with an extra proton or something? Surely standard replication technology could produce the stuff?

I'm not sure replicators can actually do transmutation of elements (or in this case isotopes); I think they just take existing elemental stock and configure it into the desired molecules/compounds/proteins/crystals/etc.

But really, despite what "Demon" claimed, obtaining deuterium in space isn't hard at all. There's always going to be plenty of the stuff floating around. No need to devise convoluted ways of obtaining something that's all over the place.

 

[kkozoriz1]

Much like the stupidity of the TV series V where the visitors sailed through the Oort cloud, the Kuiper belt and past all the outer moons because they needed water....

 

[Timo]

But really, despite what "Demon" claimed, obtaining deuterium in space isn't hard at all. There's always going to be plenty of the stuff floating around. No need to devise convoluted ways of obtaining something that's all over the place.

...Until you get so low on deuterium that hunting for more deuterium is going to cost you all the deuterium you already have, and then some.

Which seems to be what happened in "Demon". Janeway was betting on getting highly concentrated deuterium, so she didn't hunt for the dilute stuff in interstellar space. But she got denied too many refueling opportunities in a row, and finally was flying on fumes, past the critical point where said fumes would allow her to gather more deuterium than she burned.

Transmuting elements is decidedly a capacity a starship possesses in normal conditions - in TNG "Night Terrors", loss of said capacity was considered an emergency. However, transmuting elements for fuel may well be futile, in the sense that no fuel one could hope to create that way would release enough energy to compensate for the effort of transmuting.

Now, creating anti-elements seems like it could be worth the effort. Backstage material claims that 24th century tech can do that pretty efficiently: by expending ten units of deuterium, one unit of antideuterium is gained. And that's pretty nifty magic, because annihilating that one unit of antideuterium will liberate more power than fusing of those ten units of deuterium would have liberated. (Although the TNG Tech Manual is fuzzy on the details, it's obvious that those ten deuterium units aren't expended in annihilation, because the whole purpose of the exercise is to create annihilation fuel where none existed before. Apparently, the ten units are expended in D-D fusion of some sort.)

Of course, that's just backstage talk, and never verified onscreen. But if it's true, then it's obvious that a starship could operate simply by gathering deuterium and never worrying about antideuterium. What Kirk says about "power regenerating" in "Mark of Gideon" might be quite true, then: the ship would in theory fly forever. Assuming she flew through dense enough deuterium clouds, that is.

Probably there just isn't enough deuterium in space to keep the process on black ink, though. So all starships rely on pit stops at reserves of concentrated deuterium, and those only exist at star systems, many of which are off limits.

Timo Saloniemi