Warp Core Cooling---what do we know?

[Plecostomus]

How's that song go... 'cause we "make s*it up!'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJSUAJDNsLI&feature=related

Indeed, this is an interesting direction to ponder.

 

[Christopher]

Plecostomus said:
I'm going by the tech manual I have. It implies that the antimatter is hydrogen while the matter is deuterium.

You seem to be right about what the TM says. But frankly I still don't get why they used deuterium as a reactant at all, when 1H is so much more abundant. Maybe it was just for convenience's sake, powering the warp engines from the same fuel source used for the impulse engines, but it still seems odd. It makes more sense to me if you use antideuterium as well, because that way you get twice as much energy per annihilation event.

 

[Plecostomus]

Unless you need that free-floating neutron for some reason. That too could factor into it.

Of course the REAL reason is "Deuterium" sounds WAY cooler on screen than "hydrogen.

 

[Christopher]

No, the real reason they proposed deuterium is because it's the fuel that's used in nuclear fusion, such as that which powers the impulse engines. Apparently they chose to share the fuel supply between warp and impulse engines. But then Berman and Braga had to go and interpret "deuterium" as some kind of rare liquid found in underground deposits on superhot planets, which is wrong in every possible way.

And I think I once saw a Trek comic book story that called it "deutronium," which was the name of the fictional substance that powered the Jupiter 2 in Lost in Space.

 

[Unicron]

Obviously Trek-era humans have evolved greater resistance to temperature and some forms of radition, just as they've apparently evolved beyond bathrooms.

 

[Timo]

Why go to such convoluted lengths when it would be so much simpler, safer, and more efficient just to put the warp engine in a separate module from the crew section?

Because using a separate module would be a half-measure?

I mean, we aren't necessarily talking about protecting the crew from 500 degrees celsius. We could be talking about stopping the core from melting everything around it with a heat wave worth 12,000 degrees. When the engineers devise a technology to stop that (or, rather, to make use of that), the effort of protecting the crew becomes trivial in comparison: it would be folly to also use some sort of an insulating wall between the reactor and the shirtsleeves crew, when it would never truly suffice for the job and would merely add unwanted mass.

That aside, we could take TMP as showing us the rarely accessed inner sanctum of the Enterprise engine room. It would only be because of the ongoing tests that there would be any personnel in there at all: in normal operating conditions, Scotty would don pajamas and monitor the activities from a comfortably air-conditioned room not unlike the ones seen in TOS. The consoles in the radsuit-only area would be for periodic maintenance and testing only. We do get that "blast doors closing, everybody evacuate" scene when the ship first gets warp-underway in the movie.

ST2 would feature essentially the same: there would be personnel next to the core only when the darn thing breaks down once again. So it would only be the new, "better insulated" TNG-style core installed in the E-A that would allow for non-emergency proximity...

Of course, we could and perhaps should ignore Probert's original idea that the swirling blue-white mass we see is the active part of the reactor. For all we know, the heat-producing reactions take place somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship, in a separate armored chamber not unlike the TNG ones, and the vertical shaft merely carries the energies in some not particularly hot form.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ATimson]

Christopher said:
Okay, so Trek tries to pay lip service to this with references to "coolant." But that coolant would have to be incredibly, even impossibly efficient to do its job under the depicted circumstances. Plus it's always depicted as toxic.

Only in the movies; in TNG and Voyager, it seems to be as harmless as the liquid nitrogen they use on-set.

Overheating is a serious problem. You need large radiator surfaces, ideally fins extending perpendicular to the ship and able to radiate heat from both sides. The more surface area devoted to heat radiation, the better. Unfortunately, this is something that no fictional spacecraft design anywhere in film or television has ever acknowledged, as far as I'm aware.

Babylon 5's design for the station seems to acknowledge this.

 

[Christopher]

^^Hmm, I always thought those fins on B5 were meant to be solar collectors, but you may be on to something. Theoretically, the question would be whether they're facing into the sun's rays or parallel with them. Heat radiators would have to be parallel, edge-on to the sun, or else they'd take in more heat than they gave off. Of course, I doubt the effects artists would've remembered to keep this in mind.

Also, those fins wouldn't have worked well as heat radiators because their inner faces were directly opposite each other. They would've radiated at each other, partly cancelling each other out.