Sorry about that, hit the wrong button.
WARNING!!: FANBOY TREKKER TECHNO-BABBLE AHEAD!!
QUOTE: Originally posted by thevinman
Anyone ever read the book “The Physics of Star Trek”? I’m a big fan of ST but this book is a real downer for the “realist” – One example:
The enterprise doesn’t use “warp” technology for its “impulse” engines. These starships us some sort of energy reaction to propel the ship.
Now, one of the laws of physics state (don’t ask me any more detail…I’m not a physicist) that the most powerful and efficient energy reaction is the matter/anti-matter reaction. When matter and anti-matter collide, they destroy themselves and transform 100% of their matter into energy.
Assume that the “impulse” drives use this matter-anti matter reaction (the most efficient and powerful form of energy creation) to “push” the starship…
BUT, given the assumed mass of the enterprise – it would take (now don’t quote me because I don’t have the book on hand…) somewhere around 100 times the mass of the enterprise in matter/anti-matter “fuel” to push the ship some relatively small measure of distance….and then don’t forget about stopping it.
Damn that inertia!
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Okay, referring to "Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise..."
The warp drive produces no thrust. It creates a field, similar to gravity combined with electromagnetism, that effectively "shrinks" ( warps ) the space immediately around the ship so that in its local space the ship is traveling at sublight speed, but an observer outside the field would clock it at several times the speed of light. This system, as well as the weapons and shields is powered by the warp core, the shimmering vertical shaft in the engine room. Matter comes down the upper part and antimatter comes up from the lower part of the column. The center is the intermix chamber where the two meet and create energy.
From there, some of the energy is routed to the weapons and other systems while the majority of the power is routed to the warp engines. If you look at almost any post-Original-Series ( starting with the first movie ) engine room you'll see a horizontal shaft running to the aft of the ship that splits into 2 upward-slanting shafts, or just the two shafts going directly from the intermix chamber. Those continue out to the engines and the excess plasma/energy venting from the warp engine is what causes the glow ( blue on Fed ships, green on the Romulans', etc. )
The Impuse drive is a fusion reactor that also acts as a backup power source for critical systems. This is the only source of thrust for a ship aside from the RCS (Maneuvering thrusters ). The fusion reactor superheats reaction mass well beyond what you have in a conventional rocket and routes it out the back to provide thrust, producing more power with less fuel. Though the ship carries a reserve of matter for this and the warp system, most of the matter used while the ship is moving is collected by the Bussard Ramscoops ( the front part of the warp engines where you usually see the red glow ). These use a magnetic field to draw in intertellar gas and dust that is stored for later use.
As for the potential power of antimatter, the only rough figure I've heard of from scientists is that it has several hundred times the energy potential of an equal amount of nuclear fuel. The prequel to the novel "The DaVinci Code" quoted it as 25 kilotons of explosive force per gram of antimatter. Given the amount of plutonium needed to get the same power and the fact that the author had a long list of consultants, I'd say that should be about right. The ships in Star Trek usually have several tons of the stuff so I don't think inertia would be too much of an obstacle.