What would Jim Kirk & co do

[Reliant121]

Not that SF would take any notice

[mlsnoopy]

I can't think of a way to hold antimatter without an acticve system. So it is a necesery evil.

[Reliant121]

Do as the Romulans do. Micro-singularity.

[Jordanis]

Do as the Romulans do. Micro-singularity.

How you get power from a 'micro-singularity' is beyond me. I guess it's from Hawking radiation? And then you have to carefully balance feeding the thing mass to keep it from evaporating and feeding it too much so that it eats the ship.

That's interesting, you couldn't actually shut off the engines, because a singularity that small will evaporate very, very quickly. And the energy input required to start the singularity would be far beyond the capabilities of a ship without a working reactor.

Anyway, as far as dual or treble reactors go, you're starting to talk about some truly impressive gas guzzling. I have to wonder at the range of the ships and their combat endurance doing that. Of course, with three times the phaser power, I suppose combat wouldn't have to endure that long...

Also, the hotel room quarters is just a symptom of Starfleet trying to make everything an exploration ship (one has to suspect that this is a political consideration, or something). Since such can be expected to be the home of the crewmembers for years at a time, a volume investment in the crew quarters will pay off in morale. A triple-core, spartan-quartered vessel would really have to be attached to a starbase to keep the bunkerage topped off and the crew from going stir-crazy. It would probably be worth it for part of the fleet to be built like that, though.

[Thorin]

How you get power from a 'micro-singularity' is beyond me. I guess it's from Hawking radiation? And then you have to carefully balance feeding the thing mass to keep it from evaporating and feeding it too much so that it eats the ship.

Gravitational ripples/waves give off energy. The sun and the earth give off about 300 watts, but a black hole has infinite space time curvature, so you'd expect a whole lot more than that.

[Jordanis]

How you get power from a 'micro-singularity' is beyond me. I guess it's from Hawking radiation? And then you have to carefully balance feeding the thing mass to keep it from evaporating and feeding it too much so that it eats the ship.

Gravitational ripples/waves give off energy. The sun and the earth give off about 300 watts, but a black hole has infinite space time curvature, so you'd expect a whole lot more than that.

So wait, a singularity small enough to not eat the ship would give off that kind of power?

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

You can't take out science labs on a SF vessel. COnsidering the weird stuff they run into on an almost daily basis, you gotta have some way to analyze it.

[mwhittington]

You can't take out science labs on a SF vessel. COnsidering the weird stuff they run into on an almost daily basis, you gotta have some way to analyze it.

That's what science vessels like the Oberth and Nova classes are for. When you're in the heat of battle, you don't stop shooting your opponent to analyze gaseous anomalies.

[Jordanis]

You can't take out science labs on a SF vessel. COnsidering the weird stuff they run into on an almost daily basis, you gotta have some way to analyze it.

That's what science vessels like the Oberth and Nova classes are for. When you're in the heat of battle, you don't stop shooting your opponent to analyze gaseous anomalies.

But except in cases of actual war, which are rare (and they are. Off the top of my head, I can name the Dominion, Cardassian, and semi-ancient Romulan wars. That's an amazingly low instance), the only time armed conflict comes up is in the course of exploration. An Oberth or Nova is completely unsuited to anything but completely safe space, so what do you do? Escort every Nova with a battleship? I hope you have enough. And a lucky shot or a quick flank will still render the fleeing Nova just as vulnerable.

Perhaps you should build the battleship a little bigger, and incorporate the science facilities into it. Then they're protected by the battleship's stronger shield bubble. Perhaps while we're at it, we can do something clever, like making it so that the sciency areas of the ship can separate and retreat while the rest makes a rearguard action.

Hmmm.

In short, saying 'you don't stop shooting your opponent to analyze gaseous anomalies' is a spurious argument. I would call it a strawman.

[mlsnoopy]

Do as the Romulans do. Micro-singularity.

Active system fails ship eats itself.

[Jordanis]

Do as the Romulans do. Micro-singularity.

Active system fails ship eats itself.

No. A singularity small enough to not eat the ship in the first place would evaporate if unleashed. Of course, from afar, we would just call it a massive explosion.

In fact, looking at the math of this stuff, it becomes increasingly apparent how impractical the singularity drive is. Evaporation time is a function of the cube of the mass of the singularity. IE, it goes up proportional to the cube of the mass. A singularity of mass 100,000,000,000 kg evaporates in one second. Which means that all of its mass is converted into energy in one second.

The power outflow of a singularity is given by the equation P = (hc^6)/(15360*pi*G^2*M^2), where h is the reduced Planck constant (1.0545x10^-34), c is the speed of light(300,000,000 m/s), G is the gravitational constant (6.674x10^-11), M is the mass of the singularity, and P is the power flow in watts.

You can see that as the mass increases, the power outflow decreases. So let's solve this to match the 1,560,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts that Graham figured as the maximum output of a Galaxy Class Starship's warp core.

Uh... hm. My spreadsheet says it comes out to 478.82 kg. I was expecting something large enough to strain credibility of building a ship that wouldn't be crushed. Of course, that 478.82 kg evaporates every 0.00000000920798615703 seconds, so you'd have to be able to feed it that much mass in that much time to keep it from evaporating, which would probably not come out well.

All quite interesting, of course. What were we talking about again?

[mlsnoopy]

Do as the Romulans do. Micro-singularity.

Active system fails ship eats itself.

No. A singularity small enough to not eat the ship in the first place would evaporate if unleashed. Of course, from afar, we would just call it a massive explosion.

In fact, looking at the math of this stuff, it becomes increasingly apparent how impractical the singularity drive is. Evaporation time is a function of the cube of the mass of the singularity. IE, it goes up proportional to the cube of the mass. A singularity of mass 100,000,000,000 kg evaporates in one second. Which means that all of its mass is converted into energy in one second.

The power outflow of a singularity is given by the equation P = (hc^6)/(15360*pi*G^2*M^2), where h is the reduced Planck constant (1.0545x10^-34), c is the speed of light(300,000,000 m/s), G is the gravitational constant (6.674x10^-11), M is the mass of the singularity, and P is the power flow in watts.

You can see that as the mass increases, the power outflow decreases. So let's solve this to match the 1,560,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts that Graham figured as the maximum output of a Galaxy Class Starship's warp core.

Uh... hm. My spreadsheet says it comes out to 478.82 kg. I was expecting something large enough to strain credibility of building a ship that wouldn't be crushed. Of course, that 478.82 kg evaporates every 0.00000000920798615703 seconds, so you'd have to be able to feed it that much mass in that much time to keep it from evaporating, which would probably not come out well.

All quite interesting, of course. What were we talking about again?

We need grafs and curves and comparament to other forms of power let say coal.

[Mikey]

That's the answer! Let's make engineering rooms REAL old-school engineering rooms again, complete with stokers, furnaces, and shirtless guys with shovels. Put Pennsylvania back on the map! Instead of re-aligning dilithium matrices, we have to stop every six months to clean the coke out of the warp core!

Coal power for the UFP!

[Thorin]

You must of course remember that species have shown that they have pretty huge control over space-time (curvature) and gravitons/gravity. They have gravity plating that can act out a billion gs! They have warp engines that curve space time. It's possible that instead of crushing the ship, the Romulans use the singularity to bend space-time just as Federation warp engines do (to allow FTL travel). So instead of the singularity dissapating and giving off energy, they manage to not convert, but rather channel the singularity's space-time distortion to the warp engines and use that to for FTL travel.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

You can't take out science labs on a SF vessel. COnsidering the weird stuff they run into on an almost daily basis, you gotta have some way to analyze it.

That's what science vessels like the Oberth and Nova classes are for. When you're in the heat of battle, you don't stop shooting your opponent to analyze gaseous anomalies.

Not during battle, no, but every other time, even battleships are gonna need science labs. The amount of freaky shavit in ST space demands it, almost.