Why does the Phoenix have Bussard collectors?

[Saquist]

All a manifold is is a pipe with one inlet and multiple outlet, or the reverse.

If a fusion reactor is producing your charged plasma, you would need a manifold to divide and direct the plasma into two separate warp nacelles and then addition manifolds inside your nacelles to feed the incoming plasma to each individual warp coil.

Manifold is a word meaning "multiple or varied outlets. What you're describing is a Y-Junction. Only two splits. That's not a manifold.
The manifold wasn't part of the reactor it was for fuel. This is Automotive jargon.

That would depend on how many reactants were involved in the fusion process, it doesn't have to be only deuterium-deuterium. A deuterium-tritium fuel mix would release more energy than a single reactant, and is actually easier to achieve. A hydrogen and boron mix is harder to achieve, however results in much less neutron radiation and would require less shielding (and weight).

Deuterium-Tritium would be radioactive and that would fit the radiation issue only in passing in the Movie but not precisely. That radioactivity wouldn't be coming from the the Throttle assembly...Also Theta radiation is a by product of contaminated anti-matter (in Trek) so that sort of throws the whole Fusion idea out completely. So the ship is confirmed to be an Anti-matter design. (which makes no sense)

In the real world, radiation from a deactivated fusion reactor could come from the fuel supply (if tritium is used) or from stored by-products of the fusion reaction. However a more likely source of radiation would be the reactor itself, a fusion reactor's structure would become radioactive over time from the neutrons produced by the reactors operation.

Tritium has to be produced in a reactor, to me that implies somesort of Federal oversight and we see that there was none.

The Minuteman Three is what I believe Cochrane craft was made from (or a follow on), it's first stage can lift-off thirty-five metric tonnes, the first stage we saw was likely the missiles original first stage.

No ICB is going to have the lift capacity/thrust to get a cabin, Reactor, third stage chemical Rocket and a massive set of Nacelles into any sort of orbit. The Phoenix had to be just as long as the Orbter. The orbiter needs 4 million pounds of Thrust. The ICB's usually were never more than half a million pounds of thrust but all they had to lift was a small Nose cone Warhead.(14' x 8')

But you do know your stuff, T'Girl.
I just don't see enough play in the reality to allow the fiction. They should have made it a completely fictional rocket. But they wanted footage of an existing missile launch instead of producing it all from scratch in the FX house.

 

[Tiberius]

Saquist, geez, chill man. It's just a movie...

 

[Timo]

A couple of hipshots:

For one it doesn't have the lift ability.

We see that it (the fictional Titan V, with the futuristic-looking nozzle) does. So that part is taken care of, well and truly. Just another bit of evidence for the Trek 21st century being much superior to ours, and a logical continuation to all the evidence on ships that sail to Mars in a week, ships that manipulate gravity, and probes that fly to distant stars.

A completely fictional rocket in the shell of an old, real one makes plenty of sense, too. The later models of Atlas were still housed in the original shell, despite having absolutely nothing in common technologically with Atlas I (all-new engines with completely different staging system, steering, fuel arrangements etc.)... USAF could well fit one of their one-week-to-Mars drives into a Titan II shell and call it Titan V, giving the results we explicitly see.

Although why they'd need the Titan V is unclear. Its demonstrated performance is quite excessive for an ICBM. Perhaps it was intended for hitting targets in the Moon, or counter-punching the ECON orbital fortresses? Or perhaps it was supposed to deliver to orbit fifty-ton warhead clusters rather than teeny weeny individual RVs?

Could be a matter of nomenclature, the Phoenix might not have been considered "a ship."

Additionally, the Bonaventure in the TAS episode might have been the ship we see in those DS9 graphics, the old Greg Jein model from the Chronology. The next logical step from the Phoenix, only with a bigger crew cabin and bigger fuel tanks so that she could do interstellar trips and could be considered a "ship".

It just so happens that some other piece of Starfleet junk was floating on the viewscreen when the camera was pointed at it, so we mistook that junk for the Bonaventure.

I mean, the screen in "Time Trap" was filled with all sorts of spacecraft that had the classic Starfleet nacelle and pylon arrangement. The weird, seemingly 2260s-style "102 81 NCC" on the foreground would not have been unique by any means, and Scotty might have saved his words of amazement for another piece of hardware, one with more historical significance. He does start his exclamation before "102 81 NCC" enters the viewscreen, after all...

Alternately, the Bonaventure was said to be the first ship that had "warp drive installed". A weird way of putting it, unless Scotty is specifically speaking about installing a warp drive in place of some other drive on a preexisting spaceship. The Phoenix would not have been preexisting - she wouldn't be the first to have warp drive installed, but instead the first to be built with one!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Albertese]

A couple of hipshots:

For one it doesn't have the lift ability.

We see that it (the fictional Titan V, with the futuristic-looking nozzle) does. So that part is taken care of, well and truly. Just another bit of evidence for the Trek 21st century being much superior to ours, and a logical continuation to all the evidence on ships that sail to Mars in a week, ships that manipulate gravity, and probes that fly to distant stars.

A completely fictional rocket in the shell of an old, real one makes plenty of sense, too. The later models of Atlas were still housed in the original shell, despite having absolutely nothing in common technologically with Atlas I (all-new engines with completely different staging system, steering, fuel arrangements etc.)... USAF could well fit one of their one-week-to-Mars drives into a Titan II shell and call it Titan V, giving the results we explicitly see.

Although why they'd need the Titan V is unclear. Its demonstrated performance is quite excessive for an ICBM. Perhaps it was intended for hitting targets in the Moon, or counter-punching the ECON orbital fortresses? Or perhaps it was supposed to deliver to orbit fifty-ton warhead clusters rather than teeny weeny individual RVs?


...


Timo Saloniemi

Didn't McGivers claim in "Space Seed" that advances in impulse drives in the year 2018 made sleeper ships obsolete? Assuming I'm remembering that right, then it could well be that the engine on the Phoenix rocket was indeed an early form of impulse engine which would handily dismiss any concerns of whether it has lifting power. This would also dovetail nicely with the suggestions of regular Mars flights from that one ep of Voyager (which name eludes me at the moment) where they find the Ares IV or whatever it was.

--Alex

 

[Timo]

Even pre-2018 engines must have been impressive pieces of work: the Botany Bay had one dating back to at least 1996 (and it was probably several years older than that, because production of DY-100 ceased at that time). Yet Khan's ship apparently reached relativistic velocities and spanned significant interstellar distances in just a couple of centuries.

The rocket that launched the Phoenix may have represented grossly outdated technology by the 2060s, much like many USAF missiles today represent the best that the 1960s could offer... And nevertheless outperformed the best of real-world rocketry thousandfold.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

I hate to be annoying with this, but I again point out that this is a result of muddled dialog between the original script and the final version. Originally, the warp drive was powered by a plutonium core from an old nuclear warhead; damage to the ship cracked the radiation shielding, which caused the leak. At the same time, though, the attack did not at all damage the Phoenix's warp drive, only the throttle assembly for its booster rocket, without which Phoenix could not reach orbit to properly conduct the test.

Alpha, It's in the script and there fore apart of canon.
It's sloppy writing. Look at the title of the Tread. This was clearly something that wasn't properly thought, written or designed.

The WRITING on it was just fine, it seems to me. The resulting sloppiness appears to be the result of executive meddling and/or producer's prerogative. The changes were made early enough to affect the entire shooting script but late enough that part of the dialog had to be reconstructed using [tech] tags ala Voyager and Enterprise.

They already mentioned two devices that transfer plasma. When acknowledged the higher reasoning for plasma rather than the more traditional means of energy transfer...There is no way a Plutonium warhead from a TITAN nuclear missile of that size could generate that sort of power for plasma conduction.

Sure it could. Again, a NERVA-style reactor can and will produce a plasma if you use it to heat a working fluid hot enough. Assuming Phoenix only needs to be flown once, you might even configure the reactor to vaporize itself and operate as a gas-core setup.

Looks like it only has an impulse 2x that of chemical Rockets. At a hundred tons or more that is no where near enough Thrust to haul that much Mass on a TITAN II Rocket.

Technically it wouldn't need to. If it's using a solid rocket booster like most modern ICBMs, then the Nerva core that is Phoenix's upper engine would be enough to push the ship into a respectable orbit. Assuming a reasonably low mass for the entire craft--twenty tons or so--and that most of the body of the craft is propellant tankage.

Before you ask, twenty to thirty tons is an estimate based on the fact that the Phoenix appears to have about the overall length and diameter of a Centaur upper stage (empty mass about 5 tons, 25 tons propellant). Since the cockpit isn't much larger than a Gemini capsule (3.5 tons) and the warp nacelles are about the size of a cruise missile (1.3 tons) then even making allowances for either to be heavier then the cockpit and nacelle combination would weigh around 7 tons. Add 7 tons for the reactor and powerplant assembly, then 20 tons of propellant, then Phoenix as an upper stage would weigh about 35 tons.

If that nuclear thermal engine has specific impulse in the 1200 to 1500 second range, then Phoenix would be able to enter a sub-orbital trajectory with a short burn. That would give them enough time (an hour or so) to bring the warp engines online and run the rest before their orbit decayed and they reentered the atmosphere.

And the risk of explosion...only 9 years after the worse nuclear disaster in history...I think Cochrane would be a hunted man if they knew he was doing this.

I suppose you mean the risk of the ROCKET exploding if something goes wrong. With a plutonium core, there's no risk of explosion at all; even if you run it supercritical so the fuel elements completely melt down, it won't explode (disintegrate, maybe, but not explode). Rather unlike an antimatter reactor, which WILL explode if something goes wrong with it.

 

[Timo]

If that nuclear thermal engine has specific impulse in the 1200 to 1500 second range, then Phoenix would be able to enter a sub-orbital trajectory with a short burn. That would give them enough time (an hour or so) to bring the warp engines online and run the rest before their orbit decayed and they reentered the atmosphere.

I think we have to insert a fair amount of pixie dust here, though, because this isn't a suborbital hop...

http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/firstcontacthd/firstcontacthd1789.jpg

We're basically witnessing first-stage performance far in excess of all three stages of Saturn V here. Not to mention a near-vertical ascent path, considering the background... If that's a parabolic hop, the return leg will take a week at least!

The jury will remain in deliberation about the antimatter issue until some episode or movie provides more data. But the rocketry must be accepted as featuring at least some of the advances that Trek associates with the 1990s and 2000s, in drastic departure from the real world.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Saquist]

The WRITING on it was just fine, it seems to me. The resulting sloppiness appears to be the result of executive meddling and/or producer's prerogative. The changes were made early enough to affect the entire shooting script but late enough that part of the dialog had to be reconstructed using [tech] tags ala Voyager and Enterprise.

Whether it's tech tags or writing it's the same issue.
It's how it comes out that matters and the people responsible for cleaning it up is the writers. The responsibility I'm sure can be spread around other places but it's not an out for the writers.

Sure it could. Again, a NERVA-style reactor can and will produce a plasma if you use it to heat a working fluid hot enough. Assuming Phoenix only needs to be flown once, you might even configure the reactor to vaporize itself and operate as a gas-core setup.

No....
Don't be silly. We don't just want any sort of plasma. Plasma isn't a proper conductor anyway. This sort of energy produced by Nerva has given me no indication that is can sufficiently ionize gas for the kind of current that would run properly through plasma and be sufficient to label "high energy plasma like you would get at least from a Nuclear Plant.

Technically it wouldn't need to. If it's using a solid rocket booster like most modern ICBMs, then the Nerva core that is Phoenix's upper engine would be enough to push the ship into a respectable orbit. Assuming a reasonably low mass for the entire craft--twenty tons or so--and that most of the body of the craft is propellant tankage.

There is no Solid Rocket Booster seen. Only the ICB itself.
The TITAN is 33 meters long.
The Space Shuttle Orbiter is 37 meters long
The Shuttle Weighs 75 Tons
The Phoenix is 22.28 meters long.
The Phoenix is sporting 2 pairs of Dense Dark Matter Coils.
The Orbiter is cermics, Titanium and aluminum.

Phoenix is definitely as heavy as the orbiter.

The Phoenix is 80 percent the length of the TITAN ICB which was only designed to lift a 14 x 8 missle warhead into orbit and even with 2x the thrust of a chemical Rocket its still not going to lift 75 tons of anything very far especially since the Phoenix doesn't have the fuel capacity for that kind of lift, I don't even have to do the math to figure that out.

and the warp nacelles are about the size of a cruise missile (1.3 tons)

The Tommahawk is only 5 meters longs.
The Nacelles on the Phoenix are 10 meters long.

then even making allowances for either to be heavier then the cockpit and nacelle combination would weigh around 7 tons.

I suppose you mean the risk of the ROCKET exploding if something goes wrong. With a plutonium core, there's no risk of explosion at all; even if you run it supercritical so the fuel elements completely melt down, it won't explode (disintegrate, maybe, but not explode). Rather unlike an antimatter reactor, which WILL explode if something goes wrong with it.

You're the one that proposed solid rocket boosters, they can still explode as well as the final stage chemical propellant can explode to and if you're talking about the same nuclear Rocket style T'Girl was...even the fuel is radioactive....

 

[Vance]

We're explicitly told that FC had a nuclear war (in direct opposition to TOS, which explicitly said we didn't get one after all).

The third world war referred to in FC killed 600 million per Riker, the third world war referred to in Bread And Circuses killed 600 million per Spock

"They fought the war your Earth avoided," Spock to Kirk, directly after McCoy was discussing the chemical and nuclear warfare agents that devastated the Coms/Yangs. There are actually quite a few TOS discussions on WWIII, as well as thankful statements that it wasn't nuclear.

First Contact explicitly made the war nuclear. An oversight, yes, but if we're going to argue how the Phoenix really really could go to TOS, we should point out that the writer's ignored TOS and saw FC as the prequel to TNG... much like ENT would be later on. Remember, we've got staffers who outright hated TOS and wasn't shy about saying so.

 

[sojourner]

So glad I came up with a topic that stimulated conversation.

 

[Saquist]

We're explicitly told that FC had a nuclear war (in direct opposition to TOS, which explicitly said we didn't get one after all).

The third world war referred to in FC killed 600 million per Riker, the third world war referred to in Bread And Circuses killed 600 million per Spock

"They fought the war your Earth avoided," Spock to Kirk, directly after McCoy was discussing the chemical and nuclear warfare agents that devastated the Coms/Yangs. There are actually quite a few TOS discussions on WWIII, as well as thankful statements that it wasn't nuclear.

First Contact explicitly made the war nuclear. An oversight, yes, but if we're going to argue how the Phoenix really really could go to TOS, we should point out that the writer's ignored TOS and saw FC as the prequel to TNG... much like ENT would be later on. Remember, we've got staffers who outright hated TOS and wasn't shy about saying so.

Which means the TNG statements in FarPoint were way off from TOS. Fascinating.

 

[T'Girl]

and the warp nacelles are about the size of a cruise missile (1.3 tons)

The Tommahawk is only 5 meters longs.
The Nacelles on the Phoenix are 10 meters long.

The old Russian P-35 (SS-N-3B) Sepel cruise missile was exactly ten meters in length.

Plasma isn't a proper conductor anyway.

The opposite really. Plasma is composed of ionized gas and electrically charged particles, it's an excellent conductor.

If it's using a solid rocket booster like most modern ICBMs

There is no Solid Rocket Booster seen. Only the ICB itself.

The various stages of current ICBM's are referred to as "solid propellant rocket boosters."

"They fought the war your Earth avoided," Spock to Kirk, directly after McCoy was discussing the chemical and nuclear warfare agents that devastated the Coms/Yangs.

"They fought the war your Earth avoided," was Spock referring a war between the communist and the Yankees, and not specifically to any method of war fighting, not to either a nuclear of biological war.

Spock also said: "Nuclear devastation or a bacteriological holocaust."
Subsequently McCoy said: "I'm convinced that once there was a frightening biological war that existed here. McCoy never mentions nuclear warfare.

Separately in First Contact, Data reported: "From the radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere I would estimate we have arrived approximately ten years after the Third World War."

The war on Omega Four was biological, the war on Earth was nuclear, or at least some nuclear weapons were used.

There are actually quite a few TOS discussions on WWIII, as well as thankful statements that it wasn't nuclear.

In which episode were the said "thankful statements" please?

So glad I came up with a topic that stimulated conversation.

Damn you and your interesting threads.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If that nuclear thermal engine has specific impulse in the 1200 to 1500 second range, then Phoenix would be able to enter a sub-orbital trajectory with a short burn. That would give them enough time (an hour or so) to bring the warp engines online and run the rest before their orbit decayed and they reentered the atmosphere.

I think we have to insert a fair amount of pixie dust here, though, because this isn't a suborbital hop...

You honestly expect me to believe that, after seven motion pictures, twenty seasons of live action TV and one animated series, that Star Trek finally managed to depict an ACCURATE exterior view of a spacecraft in orbit? Something they have never done before or since?

I for one do not.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Don't be silly. We don't just want any sort of plasma.

Why?

Plasma isn't a proper conductor anyway.

Yes it is.

This sort of energy produced by Nerva has given me no indication that is can sufficiently ionize gas for the kind of current that would run properly through plasma and be sufficient to label "high energy plasma like you would get at least from a Nuclear Plant.

Nuclear plants do not produce high energy plasma, and ionizing a gas to be used AS a plasma is something we can already do with existing technology (VASIMR uses a Helicon array to do exactly this, with considerably less power than would be produced by a nuclear reactor). The issue here is "high energy," which implies either extremely high temperature and pressure or extremely high voltage. Since it is not clear which of these is being produced in a more modern warp core (nor is it explained how a matter/antimatter reaction is supposed to produce anything but gamma rays and neutrinos, dilithium or not) then there isn't much grounds to claim that a NERVA-style engine couldn't do the same thing a warp core could do at one-fiftieth the output.

There is no Solid Rocket Booster seen. Only the ICB itself.

And you know that the first stage of the missile was not a solid motor... how?

The TITAN is 33 meters long.

Which one? The Titan-IV was 44 meters long. More modern rockets like the Falcon-9 or the Delta-IV are closer to 50 meters.

The Space Shuttle Orbiter is 37 meters long
The Shuttle Weighs 75 Tons

The shuttle has a pair of double-delta wings and structural loading sufficient to withstand hypersonic velocities and atmospheric flight, where phoenix is a space craft that cannot and does not operate anywhere but in space. Apples and oranges.

The Phoenix is 22.28 meters long.
The Phoenix is sporting 2 pairs of Dense Dark Matter Coils.

Are you sure? I thought it had two barrels of Starbuck's premium roast coffee?

OTOH, the Shenzhou spacecraft, which is 9.5 meters long, weighs 7.8 tons fully loaded. Stack three of these one after another tinker-toy style, you have a spacecraft 28.5 meters long with a mass of about 22 tons.

So the only way Phoenix weighs as much as the orbiter is if EACH of its warp nacelles weighs over twenty five tons. This is the part where I ask you if you have any source whatsoever for what the warp coils are made of.

The Phoenix is 80 percent the length of the TITAN ICB

So what? It's LARGER than any modern ICBM, so obviously he didn't simply convert an old missile into a space ship. He probably mounted the Phoenix on the top of a much smaller missile and used Phoenix's own engines to complete the boost phase.

You're the one that proposed solid rocket boosters

I wasn't, the WRITERS did in the original script.

they can still explode as well as the final stage chemical propellant can explode to and if you're talking about the same nuclear Rocket style T'Girl was...even the fuel is radioactive....

But "radioactive" and "explosion hazard" are not the same thing. An exploding SRB will scatter radioactive material across a wide area, IF Cochrane hasn't included some means of jettisoning the booster in the event of a problem. OTOH, an exploding antimatter plant is going to create an explosion in the neighborhood of 400MT.

 

[Saquist]

The old Russian P-35 (SS-N-3B) Sepel cruise missile was exactly ten meters in length.

Most cruise missiles are sized for fighter deployment at and around 6 meters long.

The opposite really. Plasma is composed of ionized gas and electrically charged particles, it's an excellent conductor.

Like I said,
You know your stuff. I stand corrected.

The various stages of current ICBM's are referred to as "solid propellant rocket boosters."

But the Titan wasn't.

Nuclear plants do not produce high energy plasma,

I wasn't talking plasma production rather, energy output.

The issue here is "high energy," which implies either extremely high temperature and pressure or extremely high voltage. Since it is not clear which of these is being produced in a more modern warp core (nor is it explained how a matter/antimatter reaction is supposed to produce anything but gamma rays and neutrinos, dilithium or not) then there isn't much grounds to claim that a NERVA-style engine couldn't do the same thing a warp core could do at one-fiftieth the output.

They don't need to explain.
Data says in one episode that the Enterprise was currently generating 12.75 Billion Gigawatts.

The Best Single Plant Out put I could find is Slovenia's at 666 MegaWatts. We're way past 1/15.

And you know that the first stage of the missile was not a solid motor... how?

TITAN II did not have Solid Rockets and that is what the visuals were based off. The Titans used strap on Solid Rockets. These are period pieces not new tech. Anything else is pure conjecture.

Which one? The Titan-IV was 44 meters long. More modern rockets like the Falcon-9 or the Delta-IV are closer to 50 meters.

You have to ask? (shocking)
TITAN II

The shuttle has a pair of double-delta wings and structural loading sufficient to withstand hypersonic velocities and atmospheric flight, where phoenix is a space craft that cannot and does not operate anywhere but in space. Apples and oranges.

What is that supposed to mean? Because you've isolated their flight purposes you've deduced their structural density?

Are you sure? I thought it had two barrels of Starbuck's premium roast coffee?

OTOH, the Shenzhou spacecraft, which is 9.5 meters long, weighs 7.8 tons fully loaded. Stack three of these one after another tinker-toy style, you have a spacecraft 28.5 meters long with a mass of about 22 tons.

So the only way Phoenix weighs as much as the orbiter is if EACH of its warp nacelles weighs over twenty five tons. This is the part where I ask you if you have any source whatsoever for what the warp coils are made of.

Oh I don't care how much you think the nacelles weigh, NewType Alpha. I just make comparisons, size vs mass ratio between the Orbiter and the Pheonix. I don't know the inner workings of the Phoenix or any Idea of the tech necessities for containment. I figure the Pheonix is around a tolerance of 10-15 Tons than the 75 ton or 100 ton estimate for the Orbiter. The shuttle is pretty Dense too. The 737 weighs less but is longer and wider empty but the Phoenix is packed tight with not one type of fuel but at least 3 types. The TITAN II itself was a total of 170 Tons... The Phoenix was around 80% of the TITAN's Total length. 80% of it's Weight would be 136 Tons and I'm betting a pair of Dark matter Nacelles And Reactor is a heck of alot heavier than a frame full of simple Rocket fuel.

Warp Coils:
Verterium cortenide is a densified composite material used to construct the inner layer of Federation starship.

I'm going with Sternbach as another source. He said they are indeed in the Dark Matter category.

So what? It's LARGER than any modern ICBM, so obviously he didn't simply convert an old missile into a space ship. He probably mounted the Phoenix on the top of a much smaller missile and used Phoenix's own engines to complete the boost phase.

What are you talking about?

But "radioactive" and "explosion hazard" are not the same thing. An exploding SRB will scatter radioactive material across a wide area, IF Cochrane hasn't included some means of jettisoning the booster in the event of a problem. OTOH, an exploding antimatter plant is going to create an explosion in the neighborhood of 400MT.

I don't know about 400 MT but...It's not me you have to convince. The problem is that the Movie makes it clear through at least Trek Technobable that it was indeed a matter and anti-matter reactor. You can't ignore it...it's a DeLorean Time Machine sitting in 1800 Buckingham palace. It doesn't belong....

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Whoa, hold on a sec? Who said it was made with Verterium Cortenide?

We can't go around assuming that warp drive design is static over the course of a few centuries. The Phoenix's warp coils could have been with totally different. They could be a number of different materials. Which I would buy more easily, considering how long it took to build the cockpit out of (by comparison) mundane materials.

The more exotic material used to construct the Phoenix, the more my suspension of disbelief becomes a Tacoma Narrows of disbelief.

 

[Saquist]

Whoa, hold on a sec? Who said it was made with Verterium Cortenide?

We can't go around assuming that warp drive design is static over the course of a few centuries. The Phoenix's warp coils could have been with totally different. They could be a number of different materials. Which I would buy more easily, considering how long it took to build the cockpit out of (by comparison) mundane materials.

Give me a canon reason to believe otherwise and I'll go along with it.

The more exotic material used to construct the Phoenix, the more my suspension of disbelief becomes a Tacoma Narrows of disbelief.

...we were there a long time ago.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

But the Titan wasn't.

The Titan ICBM hasn't been in service in over thirty years. By the time Cochrane gets his hands on it, they'll be well over a hundred years old.

Which means he either converted an old museum piece into a spacecraft (in which case he simply cannibalized the casing and parts to rebuild a modern booster) or Cochrane's Titan is a completely new ICBM that has nothing whatsoever to do with the 1960s era Titan family. Probably the latter, considering that the original Titan has TWO engines in its first stage while Cochrane's has only one.

I wasn't talking plasma production rather, energy output.

NERVA produces about 450MW thermal.

They don't need to explain.
Data says in one episode that the Enterprise was currently generating 12.75 Billion Gigawatts.

Of WHAT? Heat? Electric? Mechanical energy? Some combination of the three?

TITAN II did not have Solid Rockets and that is what the visuals were based off.

Irrelevent, since no Titan-II rocket currently exists in anything resembling a flyable condition. Whatever Cochrane used for the Phoenix, it wasn't an ACTUAL Titan-II.

What is that supposed to mean? Because you've isolated their flight purposes you've deduced their structural density?

Because a hypersonic glider and an orbital spacecraft are not built the same way, have never been built the same way, and will never be built the same way. Because in the real world, space craft that need to return from orbit are always heavier than those that do not.

I just make comparisons, size vs mass ratio between the Orbiter and the Pheonix.

And because the Phoenix is not a space shuttle, I made a comparison with OTHER space craft that, like the Phoenix, launch as the upper stage of a booster vehicle and aren't designed to return to Earth. Of the shuttle's 75 tons, close to 30 of that is the weight of the wings, structural bracing for the fuselage and thermal protection system, control surfaces, airbrakes, etc. Trying to compare the Phoenix to anything else other than a SPACECRAFT (not a jumbo jet, not a reusable spaceplane) is going to be apples and oranges.

Warp Coils:
Verterium cortenide is a densified composite material used to construct the inner layer of Federation starship.

Which Cochrane would have obtained WHERE?

I'm going with Sternbach as another source. He said they are indeed in the Dark Matter category.

Weren't you just complaining about "sloppy writing" in Phoenix's tech specs? In which case, do you really need me to explain to you why dark matter cannot be used as a building material?

Anyway, Phoenix isn't a Federation vessel. It isn't even an Earth Starship vessel. Handwavized unobtanium is obviously necessary for a very efficient and powerful warp drive, but Phoenix is neither, and need not require anything more sophisticated than a z-machine and a particle accelerator.

I don't know about 400 MT but...It's not me you have to convince. The problem is that the Movie makes it clear through at least Trek Technobable that it was indeed a matter and anti-matter reactor.

The movie makes clear nothing of the kind, since there is no mention of antimatter anywhere in the film. There are a million different ways you can get plasma, and a million different ways you can process it for use in a warp drive. Antimatter is unlikely to be one of them, since matter and antimatter do not actually "mix" as much as "annihilate on contact."

You can't ignore it...it's a DeLorean Time Machine sitting in 1800 Buckingham palace. It doesn't belong....

So, retcon it towards something closer to its original purpose. The "intermix chamber" is just a manifold where ionized plasma is combined with another energetic reactant prior to consumption by the warp nacelles. For example, ionized hydrogen superheated to 6000K combined with a specific vanadium isomer that emits gravitons in the presence of high electric potentials.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The other problem is the Phoenix's first stage almost certainly DOES have a solid rocket motor and not a hypergolic one as on the Titan rockets. Even LOX/LH2 engines have a smokeless exhaust plume, while LOX/RP-1 leave a thin trail. Only solid propellants leave a thick cloudy trail behind them as Phoenix did during the launch. Incidentally, hypergolic propellants are unbelievably toxic, which makes them both incredibly difficult to handle and extremely unpleasant to use for launch vehicles; a hypergolic rocket launching from an enclosed missile silo is pretty much the nastiest thing you would ever want to do with a civilian population nearby.

 

[Saquist]

But the Titan wasn't.

The Titan ICBM hasn't been in service in over thirty years. By the time Cochrane gets his hands on it, they'll be well over a hundred years old.

Which means he either converted an old museum piece into a spacecraft (in which case he simply cannibalized the casing and parts to rebuild a modern booster) or Cochrane's Titan is a completely new ICBM that has nothing whatsoever to do with the 1960s era Titan family. Probably the latter, considering that the original Titan has TWO engines in its first stage while Cochrane's has only one.

I don't really care about the logistics Alpha.
I know they didn't put as much thought into this as we did. I'm not necessarily saying they should but at least...make it believable. I'm not desperate to make their haphazard FX work in real life.

NERVA produces about 450MW thermal.

Gotta source for that? (just curious)

Of WHAT? Heat? Electric? Mechanical energy? Some combination of the three?

Irrelevent, since no Titan-II rocket currently exists in anything resembling a flyable condition. Whatever Cochrane used for the Phoenix, it wasn't an ACTUAL Titan-II.

Sorry, Alpha it's not irrelevant, at least not logically.

Because a hypersonic glider and an orbital spacecraft are not built the same way, have never been built the same way, and will never be built the same way. Because in the real world, space craft that need to return from orbit are always heavier than those that do not.

That's wonderfully obvious but I'm looking for the deduction from that to density.

And because the Phoenix is not a space shuttle, I made a comparison with OTHER space craft that, like the Phoenix, launch as the upper stage of a booster vehicle and aren't designed to return to Earth. Of the shuttle's 75 tons, close to 30 of that is the weight of the wings, structural bracing for the fuselage and thermal protection system, control surfaces, airbrakes, etc. Trying to compare the Phoenix to anything else other than a SPACECRAFT (not a jumbo jet, not a reusable spaceplane) is going to be apples and oranges.

Well like I said size to weight ratio.
I appreciate the thought but the internal power systems of the Phoenix could eaily account for that mass. Like i said 136 tons just for the portion of the TITAN II the Phoenix would take up. Rockets and Payloads have to built to survive the rigors of launch. No matter how you slice it that Rocket does not have the ability of anywhere near 4 million lbs of thrust and neither does a Nerva.

Which Cochrane would have obtained WHERE?

Does it matter?
He's got anti matter. Where did he get that from?

Weren't you just complaining about "sloppy writing" in Phoenix's tech specs? In which case, do you really need me to explain to you why dark matter cannot be used as a building material?

(sigh)
warp cannot be achieved any other way.
That's the special part that the writers have always left out. They pretend that the M/AR is the big deal but it's really the subspace field that's special. No conventional terrestrial material is ever going to warp space. You need Exotic matter of some kind. Whether created in a laboratory or found in interplanetary space....

The movie makes clear nothing of the kind, since there is no mention of antimatter anywhere in the film. There are a million different ways you can get plasma, and a million different ways you can process it for use in a warp drive. Antimatter is unlikely to be one of them, since matter and antimatter do not actually "mix" as much as "annihilate on contact."

LOL...no.
I'm talking about the theta radiation reference which is well established in Trek to come from antimatter. Anti matter waste or contaminated anti matter.

So, retcon it towards something closer to its original purpose. The "intermix chamber" is just a manifold where ionized plasma is combined with another energetic reactant prior to consumption by the warp nacelles. For example, ionized hydrogen superheated to 6000K combined with a specific vanadium isomer that emits gravitons in the presence of high electric potentials.

OMG...a intermix chanber is not a manifold.