Warp Drive Fuel Source

[Deks]

That is the correct answer.

If that's the case, it is especially frustrating because they supposedly have a 'team' of writers who make an impressive amounts of mistakes for something they are supposedly 'tuned into' (or so they claim).

To be fair, nothing can be done about that (short of erasing Disco from canon), so its moot.
I would hope going forward, that the 4th season will retcon a few things, but this is unlikely... plus the anomaly that threatens all life... meh, it sounds a bit... repetitive (season 2).
Can't Disco s4 focus on rebuilding the UFP and showing us transition to new power sources for a change, exploration of other galaxies and maybe showcasing all those 350 member planets UFP had at its peak?

I don't object to a having a season long arc, but nothing says you cannot tell a good story with sub plots which connect to that.

 

[Timo]

I don't really see this "new power sources" or "new types of drive" thing as holding any importance. The story is one of infrastructure collapse. There has been little recovery in a century, which is understandable, since recovery supposedly would have carried the risk of renewed collapse. It would be quite implausible for recovery to happen in just the couple of months between our two future seasons here! And quite uninteresting to boot. Why undo a major thing?

We could just as well demand that since Klingons were a Problem until "Errand of Mercy", the Problem should have been solved because we fans know a zillion obvious ways to do so, and returning to the Klingons in any subsequent adventure should further be utterly forbidden.

Klingons are good. The Burn is good. For a value of "good" typically found in scifi, that is. It's what we are given. And it's not in contradiction with anything we would have been given, either. Nor is it something that would have been milked dry in mere fifty or sixty years of storytelling; dropping it after one season doesn't appear to be advantageous in any way.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dumbbell]

The UFP is NOT an empire.

Where is the in-universe politics thread? I can't beleive there isn't one!

 

[Albertese]

Nothing forces us to think that the power chain of a 32nd century starship would be the same as that of a 23rd, 22nd, or 2nd century starship. All we have to accept here is that every chain features dilithium as an absolutely vital link.
....

Timo Saloniemi

Second Century starship? What were Star Trek's Roman Empire up to that I don't know about?

--Alex

 

[Timo]

<T'Pol> Romulan. It's spelled Romulan. </T'Pol>

...I don't think we have gotten definite, explicit, unambiguous references to Vulcan ringships making use of dilithium in any era yet. But there's no evidence to the contrary, either. I wonder what Vulcan ships looked like back when they were founding their first interstellar colonies. (Perhaps this)?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

That needs a drawing!

The lander from First Contact was such an odd…drop ship…it took me awhile to warm to Vulcan ringships. I actually like that TAS design better.

Sorry for being repetitive, but the Declaration type ringship I would have used for Spock’s Brain…the tiny sphere detaching and moving to the larger Enterprise’s Bridge and displace-depositing the intruder directly on the bridge.

Only that elegant ring-ship was worthy of Scotty’s sense of wonder. The remastered version…a little too generic.

 

[LazyReader]

All energy development is history of replacing what achieves power in greater densities/volumes.
For civilizations, even space faring ones; solar collectors are sufficient, By 24th century radiometric and energy converters allow stellar, radioactive energy sources to power technology. A solar panel built orbiting the sun built with replicated or harnessed materials could power Earth. Sol Systems, sun produces a power output or luminosity of 3.8 x 10^26 Watts. So a solar collector panel the size of say a few square miles, barring efficiency improves and ability to convert radiation and non visible spectrums into power. A fusion reactor can reasonably be expected to produce 1Gigawatt per unit average; 10^9W, By comparison, the sun is a giant fusion reactor and outputs 3.8x10^26W worth of light. That’s 10^17 times more. So harnessing just even 1% of 1% of the suns luminous surface area or focused mirrors to a converter, catching plasma particles and solar wind which discharges thousands of tons per second. Terawatts of power could be harnessed and utilized in industrial replicators to produce simple starship fuel (Deuterium) and anti-matter. Civilization would be in habit of harvesting greater energy sources from scale of production energy increases exponentially by source of increasing density and decreasing volume……….

• Fossil fuels: 40–50 Megajoules per kilogram
• Fission: 82 Million Megajoules (82 Terajoules) per kg (1.6 million x)
• Fusion: 630 Million Megajoules (630 Terajoules) per kg (12.6 million x)
• Matter/anti-matter annihilation: 90 Billion Megajoules (90 Petajoules) per kg (1.8 billion x)
• Dark Matter: 10^69 Joules (10^61x)
  
• Vacuum Energy: Unquantifiable, 10^113 Joules per cubic meter

 

[publiusr]

Voyager ingested some fissile material that gave it a boost once. I wonder if tri-cobalt was a munition that started as a back-up fuel source...