Because the producers thought it looked cool.
Why do torpedo casing glow when fired?
- Thread starter Photon
- Start date
Closing your eyes is a kind of squinting.So you see, it's still possible with a little imagination. (And squinting)
No, I suppose tremendously expensive antimatter would explain it, but I wonder whether it would be better to have a few pho-torp armed ships than ten times as many thermonuclear missile ships. (And heck, they had photonic torpedo armed ships. I hesitate to distinguish. I have to presume it's the same principle as regular photon torpedoes, because other than applied to a total rest mass conversion, the name could be anything, since ANY explosion is going to be "photonic.")
One good thing is that antimatter production being very expensive, and perhaps requiring special stellar conditions to perform, helps explain the Romulan predilection for alternative fuels.
No, I suppose tremendously expensive antimatter would explain it, but I wonder whether it would be better to have a few pho-torp armed ships than ten times as many thermonuclear missile ships. (And heck, they had photonic torpedo armed ships. I hesitate to distinguish. I have to presume it's the same principle as regular photon torpedoes, because other than applied to a total rest mass conversion, the name could be anything, since ANY explosion is going to be "photonic.")
One good thing is that antimatter production being very expensive, and perhaps requiring special stellar conditions to perform, helps explain the Romulan predilection for alternative fuels.
See, we're making progress all the time.
As to having a few photonic-armed ships versus a bunch of nuke-armed ships, I say why not both? Having only a few ships versus a potentially large Romulan fleet makes for a possible sitting duck scenario for Earth, so why not balance the odds with some poorly armed ships?
And the Romulan people will not tolerate this resource hoarding for long, human.
^I also wonder where they get the matter to create those artificial singularities.
I've always thought they have some sort of supercollider style device that they use to create them, and then probably spin in plain ole deuterium to collect the radiation offput.
Although frankly my 21st century brain is foggy how any of that, including the singularity itself, would really work.
Although frankly my 21st century brain is foggy how any of that, including the singularity itself, would really work.
A micro black hole would probably evaporate into Hawking radiation rapidly. Perhaps they can prevent this, given that Trek civilizations are masters of gravity, and use them as time-released sources of power for warp field creation (presumably complete conversion of gamma-ray photons-->gravitons, but that's a different topic). Of course, I don't know how much energy would be released from any given black hole evaporating. I expect it to be large, but is it quite the same as a complete rest mass conversion?
Alternatively, I think it'd have to be pretty massive to use a particle acceleration method to generate gamma rays competitive with a far more compact matter/antimatter core. Like stellar masses big. I don't know how much volume such a core would take up, although clearly they're meant to be rather small.
I always kind of presumed the latter, although it seems this would be a lot of work (maybe there are plenty of black holes in Romulan space, but then why not utilize them as fuel refineries to produce antimatter, which is far easier to store and move). In that respect, the former possibility makes more sense.
Luckily, Romulan ships have habitually been portrayed as inferior in warp performance to Federation vessels.
Yup - in "Demons"/"Terra Prime", we get a broadside of technobabble that establishes that NX-01 works almost exactly the same way as NCC-1701-D does. Which sort of makes one suspect that NCC-1701 worked that way, too, despite appearances.
Such as saying that photon torpedoes or phasers are atomic weapons. Kirk's ship would then have "advanced atomic weapons" while the ships a century prior had "primitive atomic weapons". Certainly the dialogue never categorically establishes that atomic weapons would have gone out of fashion - it merely states that the older ones from the 22nd century were primitive by 23rd century standards.
After all, there is no competing definition for "atomic weapon" in existence today. It most certainly does not refer to fission or fusion warheads, which are "nuclear weapons" in today's parlance. To call a thermonuclear weapon an "atomic" one is akin to calling an automatic rifle a "gun"; this just plain isn't acceptable in the military.
In modern science and technology, the word "nuclear" is basically synonymous with "subatomic", leaving "atomic" somewhere between this and "molecular". Essentially, by strict modern usage, the things closest to atomic weapons today are the fuel-air explosives (FAEs) that involve reactions between atom-fine mixtures of chemicals... Whereas antimatter weapons might best be considered "nucleonic", as they involve reactions not just within nuclei, but within their component nucleons.
Timo Saloniemi
I think we have to either (1) conceive a reason why they would revolve back to old-style weapons or (2) just call them all atomic weapons, and frankly, calling them all atomic weapons seems like the easier thing to do.
I hate to admit it, because I feel that the original line was meant to imply that more primitive weapons were used in the war than those aboard the 1701, but based on the evidence we've seen it seems like the most logical thing.
I hate to admit it, because I feel that the original line was meant to imply that more primitive weapons were used in the war than those aboard the 1701, but based on the evidence we've seen it seems like the most logical thing.
Truly, neither term is particularly attractive, because read literally, they refer to any kind of physical event. An antimatter device is "atomic," because it involves smashing atoms (of adverse charge) into each other to release pions that decay rapidly into very energetic gamma rays. A stick of dynamite is photonic, because when TNT releases the energy stored in its chemical bonds, it does so perforce through the electromangetic force carrying particle called a photon. Conversely, dynamite is "atomic" and an antimatter device "photonic"--as are all explosives in between.
In the same fashion, a bullet is a neutral particle beam. And a photonic weapon. And an atomic one.
This is a bit of an argument ad absurdum, but the simplest interpretation of a term is to be preferred, and that described as "photonic" probably involves the ultimate conversion of its entire rest mass to photons (theoretically, being that it's unlikely the process is totally efficient).
At the same time, I agree that "atomic" is an archaic term. However, I'll point out that in Star Trek it does seem synonymous with nuclear (fusion) weapons. I don't think we want to say that the Post-Atomic Horror was caused by antimatter weapons (although the availability of antimatter would resolve one facet of the fusion/antimatter warp drive debate, specifically the power source of the Phoenix). Of course, the PAH is a popularized phrase. Spock by contrast is a scientist, who does not, as a matter of course, speak extemporaneously, and it remains possible, if infeasible, for "atomic" to refer to particle-on-antiparticle action.
Ultimately, it sucks that they had to go and say the NX-01 was powered by antimatter.
In the same fashion, a bullet is a neutral particle beam. And a photonic weapon. And an atomic one.
This is a bit of an argument ad absurdum, but the simplest interpretation of a term is to be preferred, and that described as "photonic" probably involves the ultimate conversion of its entire rest mass to photons (theoretically, being that it's unlikely the process is totally efficient).
At the same time, I agree that "atomic" is an archaic term. However, I'll point out that in Star Trek it does seem synonymous with nuclear (fusion) weapons. I don't think we want to say that the Post-Atomic Horror was caused by antimatter weapons (although the availability of antimatter would resolve one facet of the fusion/antimatter warp drive debate, specifically the power source of the Phoenix). Of course, the PAH is a popularized phrase. Spock by contrast is a scientist, who does not, as a matter of course, speak extemporaneously, and it remains possible, if infeasible, for "atomic" to refer to particle-on-antiparticle action.
Ultimately, it sucks that they had to go and say the NX-01 was powered by antimatter.
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