Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

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Lucky
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Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by Lucky » Fri Jun 14, 2013 4:56 am

Title: Star Trek The Next Generation Technical Manual ISBN: 978-0-6717-0427-8 Page: 123 wrote: As installed in the Galaxy class, the main ship's phasers are rated as Type X, the largest emitters available for starship use. Individual emitter segments are capable of directing 5.1 megawatts. By comparison, the small personal phasers issued to Starfleet crew members are Type I and II, the latter being limited to 0.01 MW.

-=-=-=-=-=-

A typical large phaser array aboard the USS Enterprise, such as the upper dorsal array on the Saucer Module, consists of two hundred emitter segments in a dense linear arrangement for optimal control of firing order, thermal effects, field halos, and target impact.
Title: Star Trek The Next Generation Technical Manual ISBN: 978-0-6717-0427-8 Page: 125 wrote: Energy from all discharged segments passes directionally over neighboring segments due to force coupling, converging on the release point, where the beam will emerge and travel at c to the target.
One emitter segment has an output of 5.1 megawatts, and there are 200 of them that combined their output into a single beam.

5.1*200=1.02

The STTNGTM would seem to be claiming that the Enterprise-D's largest phaser array had an output of 1.02 gigawatts.



Let's see how the STTNGTM compares to the actual Star Trek The Next Generation television series.
Series: Star Trek Franchise: The Next Generation Season: 03 Episode: 04 Title: Who Watches The Watchers wrote: LAFORGE: We've finished replicating the parts they'll need, but what I don't understand is why a three man station would need a reactor capable of producing four point two gigawatts. 


RIKER: Enough to power a small phaser bank, a subspace relay station, or 

Small Phaser Bank uses a gigawatt reactor?
The fusion reactor in question is at most only 4 feet high, and about 6 feet long. You could literally fit hundreds of them on a Galaxy class, and no one would notice! Why bother with a complex array when you could just mount a bleep load of guns all oner the hull with their own personal powersource
Series: Star Trek Franchise: The Next Generation Season: 04 Episode: 24 Title: The Mind's Eye wrote: (Data and Geordi are doing test firings of the phaser rifle) 

DATA: Energy flow is within normal parameters, from the pre-fire chamber to the emission aperture. 


LAFORGE: Rapid nadion pulse, right on target. Beam control assembly, safety interlock, both checked out. Beam width intensity controls also responding correctly. 


DATA: Energy cell usage remains constant at one point oh five megajoules per second. Curious. The efficiency reading on the discharge crystal is well above Starfleet specifications.
Series: Star Trek Franchise: The Next Generation Season: 05 Episode: 09 Title: A Matter Of Time wrote: DATA: There were no errors, Geordi. The variance must be no more than point zero six terawatts.
.06 terawatts=60 gigawatts
Terawatts are talked of as relatively small percentages of the total output for the phasers.


But it gets worse when you look at Deep Space Nine
Series: Star Trek Franchise: Deep Space Nine Season: 04 Episode: 14 Title: Return to Grace wrote: KIRA: This is a standard issue, Cardassian phase-disruptor rifle. It has a four point seven megajoule power capacity, three millisecond recharge two beam settings.
-=-=-=-=-=-
KIRA: We captured a lot of them during the occupation. It's a good weapon, solid, simple. You can drag it through the mud and it'll still fire. Now this. (Federation phaser rifle.) This is an entirely different animal. Federation standard issue. It's a little less powerful, but it's got a more options. Sixteen beam settings. Fully autonomous recharge, multiple target acquisition, gyro stabilised, the works. It's a little more complicated, so it's not as good a field weapon. Too many things can go wrong with it.
A Cardassian Phase-Disruptor has an output of 4.7 mega joules fired every 0.003, or about 1.6 gigawatts., and its Federation equivalent is only slightly less powerful!
The STTNGTM is claiming that phaser rifles are possibly more powerful then the huge phasers on a Galaxy class.

It gets worse for the STTNGTM in Voyager
Series: Star Trek Franchise: Voyager Season: 04 Episode: 17 Title: Retrospect wrote: KOVIN: Terrawatt powered particle beam rifle, four microsecond recharge cycle, ten kilometer range.
That's a rifle that is an entire order of magnitude more powerful then the STTNGTM says the huge phasers on a Galaxy class starship are.

It gets absurdly bad for the STTNGTM when we look at Star Trek Enterprise
Series: Star Trek Franchise: Enterprise Season: 01 Episode: 12 Title: Silent Enemy wrote: REED: This, ladies and gentlemen is a phase-modulated energy weapon. It's rated for a maximum power output of five hundred gigajoules. Enterprise was designed to carry three of them. We have one, and it's only a prototype.
-=-=-=-=-=-
REED: Check the cannons. Be careful down there. The blast yield was ten times what we expected. 


ARCHER [OC]: What happened? 


REED: Something overloaded the phase modulators.
-=-=-=-=-=-
REED: Even if these cannons had been installed at Jupiter Station, they wouldn't be any more effective than they are now. 


ARCHER: What about yesterday? I saw you blow something up the size of Mount McKinley. 


REED: Yes sir, but that was due to an overload.

[Bridge]

ARCHER: Can you overload them again?

[Armoury]

REED: Sir, after the damage from the first time the plasma recoil would probably knock out two decks.

[Bridge]

ARCHER: Can you overload them again?

[Armoury]

REED: I believe so.

[Bridge]

ARCHER: I'd rather knock out two decks than surrender this ship.
That's right, the anemic phase cannons on the NX-01 fad a far higher output then the STTNGTM says the huge phasers on a Galaxy class starship, and the Galaxy class is suppose to be far more powerful then the NX-01! We don't know the exact wattage of the NX-01's phase cannons, but it has a high enough refire rate to look like a solid beam.

Series: Star Trek Franchise: Enterprise Season: 02 Episode: 23 Title: Regeneration wrote: (Malcolm and Crewman Foster are test firing a phase rifle) 

REED: Increase power another five megajoules. Fire. Keep it going. Increase to seven megajoules. Try eight. Nine. The density's holding. Bring it up to ten. (it finally blasts a hole in the target) That should do it. We'll reach that transport in less than an hour. Let's modify as many of these as we can.
Star Trek beam weapons fire pulses so quickly they look like beams, and this means the wattage is far higher then the stated output.

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by 2046 » Fri Jun 21, 2013 4:24 am

Two notes:

1. Nice roundup.

2. Having a bunch of little reactors and phaser emitters would seem to be a good idea sometimes. Evidently they'd be too weak to count for much, though.

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by Mith » Sun Jul 21, 2013 7:28 pm

One thing to never trust with the TNG TM is never, ever trust their orders of magnitude. You know, the ones written as 7x10(6) or something like that. Funny part--it goes on to state the explosive yield of all the antimatter in the warpcore as a self-destruct mechanism and states that it's equal to 1,000 photon torpedoes. It then goes on to declare that the fusion engine's self-destruct is equal to 500 photon torpedoes.

However, instead of cutting the actual figure down by about half--he cuts the order of magnitude in half. He also gives phasers absurd power packing abilities--as in those batteries are small kiloton nukes. Overloading one would be...well, not good for the town's health to put it mildly. And better yet, he rates the energy of setting 16 at 1.55 megajoules for .28 seconds...but then later says that the Type IIs are limited to .01 MWs.

Drove me nuts when I realized how bad he was with that. This said, I find that the TM is generally reliable as far as how the base technology works. People can argue about numbers, but I think as far as technobabble is concerned, it's serviceable. I find that the main phaser array is somewhat underpowered (I basically scaled from the .01 MW to the 5.1 MW figure per element...then added in the more accurate count of 900+ as opposed to the 200 figure they give...apparently he's bad at counting past two hundred...or someone is) and you actually get like, 350ish kilotons a second. That's fairly low, but consider that as far as the TM is concerned, the ship is firing the phasers continuously, none of that fire one shot for a brief second and fire another one.

For me, I've just sort of come to accept that the TM is as a rule of thumb, accurate about how the technology generally works and that the writers took liberties for certain story purposes. Mind you, that's not to say I don't or won't take anything from the series, but the TM is a bit more...consistent. Mostly. By Trek standards it is at least.

EDIT

As for the actual statement about the gigawatt phaser bank? I'm thinking that it's a Type X+. Basically, it's a small planetary phaser bank, which makes sense given they're taking it to a planet. The extra energy would help counter the issue with bloom and ensure that you deliver a heavy hit to someone who you didn't want snooping around.

Of course, the TM's numbers are one of the least consistent thing with the show--though to be honest, the show isn't always consistent itself. See Voyager's use of isotons or TNG's use of anything with watt or joule. Enterprise did a better job though.

Personally, I just take the low-power as simply just how phasers work; they're very powerful even with low energy, but you're limited by how much energy you can channel through one element. Similar to how their shields would work then; that megawatt shield generator can counter a shit load of energy on only one megawatt.

Granted, just taking the reasoning behind the book's tech and ignoring the numbers is also fair game, since they're not supposed to be technically accurate by the book's own admission.

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by 359 » Tue Jul 23, 2013 3:47 pm

Of course the technical manual would appear more consistent than all of Star Trek. It is one piece, written by at most a handful of people, in a short period of time, and has no need to maintain a good (or any) plot. In contrast, Star Trek series have been written as multiple episodes, by many different people, and across about forty years plus technical stuff is flexible dependent on the required plot.

Using a technical manual is the same as taking one point of data, you will never find an inconsistency as there is nothing else to contradict it. The issue of that is you don't know whether or not your point is representative of the actual "reality" of the situation.

Then, on top of that, there is the questionable status of the technical manuals and their pertinence to Star Trek in general.

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Jul 23, 2013 5:08 pm

Well, the inconsistencies come from the comparison of the technical manuals with the source material it is supposed to be based on. There are internal inconsistencies within the TNG and DS9 TMs themselves are a lot more than you might think. For example, the 400 gigawatt shield rating for a Galaxy-class starship in the TNG TM is woefully inadequate for defending against the point-blank detonation of a single photon torpedo set on one-thousandth of it's maximum 64 megaton (267,776 TJ) yield. Even one-tenth thousandths of that yield would blow right though the shields. No one in starship combat would ever use anything but a single, modest yield torpedo.

In the DS9 TM, the D'Deridex warbird is given a pathetic mass of around 4.5 million metric tons, and yet this is a starship that it's total enclosed structural volume is nearly 5 times greater than a Galaxy-class starship, and yet according to this material weighs virtually the same? Are the Romulans taking construction advice from the Galactic Empire and building their ships from lightweight foam? Or are they large hollow interior spaces, or what?
-Mike

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by 359 » Tue Jul 23, 2013 8:55 pm

I wouldn't know much about their internal inconsistency as I do not have any of them to read. Although based on your description they are rather inconsistent, but with less total inconsistencies than Star Trek as a whole by sheer volume. Which may make them appear more consistent to some.

You'd think they would catch something like the mass similarity if they are in the same book, it is fairly obvious. They call it a technical manual so they sould give it some sort of technical overview to catch at least simple things like that.

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by Lucky » Fri Jul 26, 2013 8:25 am

359 wrote: I wouldn't know much about their internal inconsistency as I do not have any of them to read. Although based on your description they are rather inconsistent, but with less total inconsistencies than Star Trek as a whole by sheer volume. Which may make them appear more consistent to some.
Keep in mind that simply because a technical manual is written that does not make it accurate when describing the setting as the Star Wars Episode 2 and 3 ICS show.

I'm curious as to why you think Star Trek is inconsistent? I hear this a lot, but never see evidence to back it up.
359 wrote: You'd think they would catch something like the mass similarity if they are in the same book, it is fairly obvious. They call it a technical manual so they sould give it some sort of technical overview to catch at least simple things like that.
If StarTrek.com is to be believed Rick Sternback and Michael Okuda are artists.
http://www.startrek.com/database_article/michael-okuda
http://www.startrek.com/database_article/sternbach

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by Lucky » Fri Jul 26, 2013 8:30 am

Mith wrote: However, instead of cutting the actual figure down by about half--he cuts the order of magnitude in half. He also gives phasers absurd power packing abilities--as in those batteries are small kiloton nukes. Overloading one would be...well, not good for the town's health to put it mildly. And better yet, he rates the energy of setting 16 at 1.55 megajoules for .28 seconds...but then later says that the Type IIs are limited to .01 MWs.
1)The power packs storing about a kiloton actually makes sense with what is stated and shown in the shows. A Federation phaser rifle has an output of about 1 gigawatt according to Major Kira.

1 kiloton = 4184 joules

Watt = joule per-second

60 seconds = 1 minute

60 minutes = 1 hour

24 hours = 1 day

4184/60= 69.7333333333

69.7333333333/60= 1.16222222222

So if a phaser was able to fire a 1 gigawatt beam at its maximum setting it would be able to fire that beam for about 1 hour with a kiloton stored in its power supply.

2) You do realize that some forms of energy storage are more volatile then others?
Mith wrote: Drove me nuts when I realized how bad he was with that. This said, I find that the TM is generally reliable as far as how the base technology works. People can argue about numbers, but I think as far as technobabble is concerned, it's serviceable. I find that the main phaser array is somewhat underpowered (I basically scaled from the .01 MW to the 5.1 MW figure per element...then added in the more accurate count of 900+ as opposed to the 200 figure they give...apparently he's bad at counting past two hundred...or someone is) and you actually get like, 350ish kilotons a second. That's fairly low, but consider that as far as the TM is concerned, the ship is firing the phasers continuously, none of that fire one shot for a brief second and fire another one.
You really need to look more closely as to what is stated in the shows as to how the technology works if you think that the tech manuals resembles the shows in any way. >_<

For Example:
Show VS Tech Manual: Phasers
Series: Star Trek Title: Star Trek The Next Generation Technical Manual ISBN: Page: 135 wrote: At triggering, the charge barrier field breaks down in 0.02 picoseconds Through the rapid nadion effect the LiCu 521 segmented emitter converts the pumped energy into a tuned phaser discharge. As with the ship's main phasers, the greater the energy pumped from the pre-fire chamber, the higher will be the percentage of nuclear disruption force (NDF) created. At low to moderate settings, the nuclear disruption threshold will not be crossed, limiting the phaser discharge to stun and thermal impact resulting from simple electromagnetic (SEM) effects.
Franchise: Star Trek Series: The Original Series Season: 03 Episode: 14 Title: That Which Survives wrote: SULU: That's the same red rock. 


KIRK: My phaser didn't cut through it. 


MCCOY: Whatever it is, it has a mighty high melting point. 


KIRK: Eight thousand degrees centigrade. It looks like igneous rock, but infinitely denser. 

(Adjusts his phaser and tries again.) 

MCCOY: This whole planet must be made up of this substance, covered over by top soil.
Franchise: Star Trek Series: The Next Generation Season: 03 Episode: 09 Title: The Vengeance Factor wrote: RIKER: Data, tell me about noranium. It vaporises at? 


DATA: Two thousand three hundred fourteen degrees. Of course, noranium carbide 


RIKER: Thank you, Data.


LAFORGE: Setting seven ought to do it. 


RIKER: Three, two, one, now! 

(They fire at some of the metal junk, which creates a smoke screen.) 

RIKER: Enterprise, four to beam up.
Franchise: Star Trek Series: The Next Generation Season: 05 Episode: 09 Title: A Matter of Time wrote: PICARD: The good news. 


DATA: The motion of the dust has created a great deal of electrostatic energy in the upper atmosphere. With a modified phaser blast, we could create a shock front that would encircle the planet and ionise the particles. 


PICARD: That would be like striking a spark in a gas-filled room. 


DATA: With one exception, sir. The particles would be converted into a high energy plasma which our shields could absorb and then re-direct harmlessly into space. 


PICARD: Turn the Enterprise into a lightning rod? 


DATA: Precisely, sir. 


PICARD: And the bad news? 


DATA: If our phaser discharge is off by as little as point zero six terawatts, it would cause a cascading exothermal inversion. 


PICARD: Meaning? 


DATA: We would completely burn off the planet's atmosphere.
Franchise: Star Trek Series: Voyager Season: 05 Episode: 03 Title: Extreme Risk wrote: TORRES: Harry, I need those secondary systems back online. 


KIM: I can't. They're fried. 


SEVEN: Lieutenant, what are you doing? 


TORRES: Patching the hole before it opens. 


KIM: That'll never hold. 


TORRES: It'll hold a minute or two, and with any luck that's all we need. Seven, take over here. I need an EPS relay. 


KIM: Er, there's one in the transporter control circuitry. 


SEVEN: The panel is sealed. 


TORRES: Good. Get away from it. I need a phaser. Watch out. I don't know if this is going to work. 


KIM: Glad you decided to come along.
The phaser described in the TNG Technical manual doesn't describe the phaser in the shows.

Most "inconsistencies" are simply people not bothering to look at the evidence as to how the technologies work, and what is being dealt with I find.
Mith wrote: For me, I've just sort of come to accept that the TM is as a rule of thumb, accurate about how the technology generally works and that the writers took liberties for certain story purposes. Mind you, that's not to say I don't or won't take anything from the series, but the TM is a bit more...consistent. Mostly. By Trek standards it is at least.
The shows are actually very consistent with each other with the technical manuals being the outlier much like the Incredible Cross-sections books are for Star Wars.

For as often as I hear people say Star Trek is inconsistent I have never seen examples of what they are talking about.
Mith wrote: As for the actual statement about the gigawatt phaser bank? I'm thinking that it's a Type X+. Basically, it's a small planetary phaser bank, which makes sense given they're taking it to a planet. The extra energy would help counter the issue with bloom and ensure that you deliver a heavy hit to someone who you didn't want snooping around.

Of course, the TM's numbers are one of the least consistent thing with the show--though to be honest, the show isn't always consistent itself. See Voyager's use of isotons or TNG's use of anything with watt or joule. Enterprise did a better job though.
You do realize that the tiny phase cannons on the NX-01 were intended to be at least terawatt weapons, and that low gigawatt weapons are consistently stated to be things like phaser rifles correct? Heck, Season 1 Episode 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation requires far higher outputs from the Phasers then the Technical Manual says is possible, and the Technical manual seems to have not been printed until season 3 or 4.

To make matters worse, the Fusion reactor is about 4 feet high, 6 feet long, and about 3 feet wide
Mith wrote: Personally, I just take the low-power as simply just how phasers work; they're very powerful even with low energy, but you're limited by how much energy you can channel through one element. Similar to how their shields would work then; that megawatt shield generator can counter a shit load of energy on only one megawatt.
But that is not how Kirk or any other character describes phasers. It makes you no better then Sci-Fi Fan.

Kirk describes phasers as DET weapons that somehow do things to safely dissipate the energy.
Mith wrote: Granted, just taking the reasoning behind the book's tech and ignoring the numbers is also fair game, since they're not supposed to be technically accurate by the book's own admission.
If the information was not intended to be accurate then it would not have been put in a book calling itself a technical manual, but then the Star Trek The Next Generation writer's Technical Manual which the book we are talking about is based on was not written until the series was several years into production, but seems to disregard what had happened in those early seasons.

As for their reasoning, it is badly flawed.
.
Series: Star Trek Title: Star Trek The Next Generation Technical Manual ISBN: 978-0-6717-0427-8 Page: 55 wrote: Figuring out how "fast" various warp speeds are was pretty complicated, but not just from a "scientific" viewpoint. First we had to satisfy the general fan expectation that the new ship was significantly faster then the original. Second, we had to work with Gene's recalibration, which put warp 10 at the absolute top of the scale. These first two constraints are fairly simple, but we quickly discovered that it was easy to make warp speeds TOO fast. Beyond a certain speed, we found that the ship would be able to cross the entire Galaxy within a matter of months. (Having the ship too fast would make the galaxy too small for the Star Trek format.) Finally, we had to provide some loophole for various powerful aliens like Q, who have a knack for tossing the ship millions of light years in the time of a commercial break. Our solution was to redraw the warp curve so that the exponent of the warp factor increases gradually, then sharply as as you reach warp 10. At Warp 10, the exponent (and the speed) would be infinite, so you could never reach this value. (Mike used an excel spreadsheet to calculate the speeds and times.) This lets Q and his friends have fun in the 9.9999+ range, but also lets our ship travel slowly enough to keep the galaxy a big place, and meets the other criteria. (By the way, we estimate that in " Where No One Has Gone Before" the Traveler was probably propelling the Enterprise at about Warp 9.9999999996. Good thing they were in the carpool lane.)
The authors having less of a sense of scale then the script writers. Federation ships need to be able to have speeds that would enable them to cross the galaxy in a few months to a few years for the series to make sense because space is big. Even if you have 100,000 ships that can travel at 100,000c, you will only be able to visit a tiny fraction of the Milkyway galaxy in the time that Star Trek humans have been in space.

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by Lucky » Fri Jul 26, 2013 8:34 am

2046 wrote: 1. Nice roundup.
I was tired of people claiming the Tech manuals reflect what is written in the series, and I had found most of the quotes for other topics before.
2046 wrote: 2. Having a bunch of little reactors and phaser emitters would seem to be a good idea sometimes. Evidently they'd be too weak to count for much, though.
That can only be true if the STTNGTM is wrong. The STTNGTM says the largest and most powerful phaser array has a maximum output of 1.2 gigawatt.

"Who Watches The Watchers" has a 4.2 gigawatt fusion reactor
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ers008.jpg
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ers020.jpg
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... ers029.jpg
This tiny reactor is more then powerful enough to power the entire large phaser array according to the STTNGTM.

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by 359 » Fri Jul 26, 2013 4:50 pm

Lucky wrote:
359 wrote:I wouldn't know much about their internal inconsistency as I do not have any of them to read. Although based on your description they are rather inconsistent, but with less total inconsistencies than Star Trek as a whole by sheer volume. Which may make them appear more consistent to some.
Keep in mind that simply because a technical manual is written that does not make it accurate when describing the setting as the Star Wars Episode 2 and 3 ICS show.
It is definitely far from what is portrayed in the show.

Lucky wrote:I'm curious as to why you think Star Trek is inconsistent? I hear this a lot, but never see evidence to back it up.
I'll give a couple examples:

1) Phasers
Two episodes state shipboard phasers have outputs in the gigajoule range. The rest of the time they range from kilotons to gigatons, and much more in some instances.

Sometimes a starship can devastate a planet, othe times they hardly can destroy one structure.

2)Warp Speed
Maximum warp is portrayed from anywhere between 900c to 14,000,000 c throughout all of the series.

Lucky wrote:If StarTrek.com is to be believed Rick Sternback and Michael Okuda are artists.
Still, you would think they would catch several of the glaring errors, or have someone who would check it over. Hense the name technical manual.

Lucky wrote:2) You do realize that some forms of energy storage are more volatile then others?
Some storage methods are more stable and less prone to detonation. However if in any method the entire cell is destroyed, as in the event of a phaser overload, all of the stored potential energy must be dissipated. Generally this is accomplished through heat, and with this level of heat an explosion; similar to that of the Little Boy bomb. Unless they have some exotic method of dissipating the energy.

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by Lucky » Thu Aug 01, 2013 8:44 am

359 wrote: 1) Phasers
Two episodes state shipboard phasers have outputs in the gigajoule range. The rest of the time they range from kilotons to gigatons, and much more in some instances.

Sometimes a starship can devastate a planet, othe times they hardly can destroy one structure.
Could you please be a touch more specific with your examples? I've often found that inconsistencies end up being explained away in the episode, or are actually unquantifiable.

Still, a few outliers don't make something notably inconsistent.

359 wrote: 2)Warp Speed
Maximum warp is portrayed from anywhere between 900c to 14,000,000 c throughout all of the series.
We are repeatedly told and shown that there are things that determine travel time beyond speed and dispense when it comes to warp. Traveling at warp is like flying an airplane or sailing on the ocean.

359 wrote: Still, you would think they would catch several of the glaring errors, or have someone who would check it over. Hense the name technical manual.
Some people honestly can't proof read my own work, it depends on what background the editor had, and some people don't really care.

359 wrote: Some storage methods are more stable and less prone to detonation. However if in any method the entire cell is destroyed, as in the event of a phaser overload, all of the stored potential energy must be dissipated. Generally this is accomplished through heat, and with this level of heat an explosion; similar to that of the Little Boy bomb. Unless they have some exotic method of dissipating the energy.
A car battery is not likely to suddenly release all the energy stored in it even if you blow it up.
Franchise: Star Trek Series: The Original Series Season: 03 Episode: 14 Title: That Which Survives wrote: SULU: That's the same red rock. 


KIRK: My phaser didn't cut through it. 


MCCOY: Whatever it is, it has a mighty high melting point. 


KIRK: Eight thousand degrees centigrade. It looks like igneous rock, but infinitely denser. 

(Adjusts his phaser and tries again.) 

MCCOY: This whole planet must be made up of this substance, covered over by top soil.
Franchise: Star Trek Series: The Next Generation Season: 03 Episode: Title: Best of Both Worlds Part 1 wrote: SHELBY: I think we should look at modifying the plasma phaser design.
Franchise: Star Trek Series: The Next Generation Season: 06 Episode: Title: Descent Part 1 wrote: WORF: These wounds were caused by a forced plasma beam, similar to a Ferengi hand phaser.
Franchise: Star Trek Series: The Next Generation Season: 03 Episode: 09 Title: The Vengeance Factor wrote: RIKER: Data, tell me about noranium. It vaporises at? 


DATA: Two thousand three hundred fourteen degrees. Of course, noranium carbide 


RIKER: Thank you, Data.


LAFORGE: Setting seven ought to do it. 


RIKER: Three, two, one, now! 

(They fire at some of the metal junk, which creates a smoke screen.) 

RIKER: Enterprise, four to beam up.
Franchise: Star Trek Series: The Next Generation Season: 05 Episode: 09 Title: A Matter Of Time wrote: PICARD: The good news. 


DATA: The motion of the dust has created a great deal of electrostatic energy in the upper atmosphere. With a modified phaser blast, we could create a shock front that would encircle the planet and ionise the particles. 


PICARD: That would be like striking a spark in a gas-filled room. 


DATA: With one exception, sir. The particles would be converted into a high energy plasma which our shields could absorb and then re-direct harmlessly into space. 


PICARD: Turn the Enterprise into a lightning rod? 


DATA: Precisely, sir. 


PICARD: And the bad news? 


DATA: If our phaser discharge is off by as little as point zero six terawatts, it would cause a cascading exothermal inversion. 


PICARD: Meaning? 


DATA: We would completely burn off the planet's atmosphere.
And then you have Voy: Extreme Risk where a phaser is used as a force field generator with only minor modifications.

Phasers seem to have technologies built into them that limit collateral damage, and these technologies may even account for the seeming disappearance of matter because the only known example of NDF(Cost of Living) was extremely violent.

sonofccn
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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by sonofccn » Thu Aug 01, 2013 12:49 pm

Lucky wrote:The authors having less of a sense of scale then the script writers. Federation ships need to be able to have speeds that would enable them to cross the galaxy in a few months to a few years for the series to make sense because space is big.
I'd argue the "script writers" equally have no "sense of scale":
The Price season three {TNG} wrote:LAFORGE: I can see it now and I'm telling you that you don't have time to wait. Not even forty seconds.
ARRIDOR [OC]: Ferengi pod out.
LAFORGE: Damn it, Arridor, we're seventy thousand light years away from our ships. Come on, now. Follow us in. We'll lead you.
(no reply)
LAFORGE: Idiots. It's getting worse. I'm taking us in, Data. With or without them.
DATA: Thrusters at half power. Three quarters.
LAFORGE: Entering outer event horizon.

[Ferengi pod]

ARRIDOR: They panic quickly under pressure. There, precisely as scheduled. Right where I expected it to be.
(Then the end of the wormhole whizzes away from them)
.
.
.
WORF: Captain, DaiMon Goss is demanding to know where his men are.
PICARD: Advise him to set his coordinates for the Delta Quadrant. He may run into them in eighty years or so
Now there are far faster examples from TNG and I am not saying it should be used as the end all be all of warp velocities but it is a clear cut case of needing far more than a "few months to a few years" and as a season three episode should predate the tech manual.

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by 359 » Thu Aug 01, 2013 7:00 pm

Lucky wrote:Could you please be a touch more specific with your examples? I've often found that inconsistencies end up being explained away in the episode, or are actually unquantifiable.
In DS9: "Battle Lines" a shot specified as being around one gigajoule downed the shields of a denube-class runabout. Than there is DS9: "The Die is Cast", which needs no explanation. And then another common one is VOY: "Rise" where a lone photon torpedo yields >=30 megatons.
Lucky wrote:Still, a few outliers don't make something notably inconsistent.
By definition outliers are inconsistencies.

Lucky wrote:We are repeatedly told and shown that there are things that determine travel time beyond speed and dispense when it comes to warp. Traveling at warp is like flying an airplane or sailing on the ocean.
The idea of having other factors affect warp speed is made because of the inconsistencies as a way to explain them. I am not aware of anywhere in the series where that idea is hinted at, so by itself the series is inconsistent.

Lucky wrote:
359 wrote:Some storage methods are more stable and less prone to detonation. However if in any method the entire cell is destroyed, as in the event of a phaser overload, all of the stored potential energy must be dissipated. Generally this is accomplished through heat, and with this level of heat an explosion; similar to that of the Little Boy bomb. Unless they have some exotic method of dissipating the energy.
A car battery is not likely to suddenly release all the energy stored in it even if you blow it up.
As I had said, some are less prone to detonation. And in any case, destroying the battery will cause a release of it's started potential energy in some way or another. Also that is a different situation than completely destroying all of the battery (no debris) as phasers do when they detonate. Then there is nothing to contain its stored energy and it must be released in some manner.
Lucky wrote:And then you have Voy: Extreme Risk where a phaser is used as a force field generator with only minor modifications.

Phasers seem to have technologies built into them that limit collateral damage, and these technologies may even account for the seeming disappearance of matter because the only known example of NDF(Cost of Living) was extremely violent.
Yes, they do appear to have limited collateral damage for some reason or another, and one could argue that the same thing occurs when they detonate.

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by Mith » Fri Aug 02, 2013 12:15 am

359 wrote:Of course the technical manual would appear more consistent than all of Star Trek. It is one piece, written by at most a handful of people, in a short period of time, and has no need to maintain a good (or any) plot. In contrast, Star Trek series have been written as multiple episodes, by many different people, and across about forty years plus technical stuff is flexible dependent on the required plot.

Actually, the TM is based upon the writer's manual/bible, which is what the show as supposed to work off, within reason. If a writer wrote about a tank crew and their abrams, but occasionally made errors to how powerful the tank was, how fast it was, and how durable it was over two decades...is said tank different from an actual Abrams tank?

No. Those are just inconsistencies with the story.
Using a technical manual is the same as taking one point of data, you will never find an inconsistency as there is nothing else to contradict it.
Not unless you read that same manual. :p
Then, on top of that, there is the questionable status of the technical manuals and their pertinence to Star Trek in general.
Look, I'm not saying that we take only what happens in the manuals as gospel. In fact, I'd suggest we be wary where numbers come in because the book his horribly inconsistent. The book is all over the place in terms of orders of magnitude that it can't even keep consistent from one paragraph to the next, possibly not even within the same paragraph.

However, that doesn't make the manual useless and for looking at the basis of how their technology works, it's reliable and supported by the show (mostly). However, one thing the show does that the TM doesn't is evolve. TNG for example, gives hard limits on transporter use. And yet, by the time of Voyager, they're able to beam off an entire crew of a D7 Cruiser by adjusting their transporters to do so. That's not even taking in smaller and smaller transporters, one the size of a pin that can not only beam you, but itself as well (I guess the EMH wasn't the only thing the crew dug out of One).
Lucky wrote:I'm curious as to why you think Star Trek is inconsistent? I hear this a lot, but never see evidence to back it up.
Star Trek is inconsistent--sort of.

The problem is that Star Trek's inconsistencies are both an issue of growth over several decades and just plain bad writing at times. For example, the issue that Enterprise brought up when compared to TNG and TOS. A more constant example however, is FTL speeds. They are almost never consistent. Hardly ever with the TMs. While the numbers however, are almost never consistent, they're treated mostly the same in the stories; you can't cross the galaxy in more than several decades with UFP tech.

And of course, it depends upon the series too. TOS was mostly consistent--silly, but consistent. TNG was less consistent, but retained a fair amount of consistency, especially as it grew out. DS9 was perhaps by far, the most consistent of all the series, but this was also required with its massive storylines. Voyager was perhaps one of the worst, competing with Enterprise for that honor.
Lucky wrote:1)The power packs storing about a kiloton actually makes sense with what is stated and shown in the shows. A Federation phaser rifle has an output of about 1 gigawatt according to Major Kira.
Uh, actually no. Kira was talking about the Cardassian phase-disruptor when she gave the output and it was stated to have a 4.7 megajoule power capacity--she also noted that it was slightly more powerful than a Federation phaser and much more durable, as well as (in her opinion), more reliable, but not nearly as advanced as its Starfleet counterpart.

And if The Mind's Eye is to be believed, they were testing a phaser out at 1.05 MWs. And actually this all aligns closely with what the TM says about discharges, which at the maximum level, is 1.55 Megajoules for .28 seconds.

So if a phaser was able to fire a 1 gigawatt beam at its maximum setting it would be able to fire that beam for about 1 hour with a kiloton stored in its power supply.
But it isn't and it makes no sense when we look at it from a megajoule point of view. However, to be fair, we might assume that the author made a mistake in how he wrote it. Similar to how a writer might write gigawatt per second, I think the author just meant to indicate that they hold, say for Phaser II, 45 megajoules of energy when he wrote 4.5x10(7) MJ. It makes a great deal more sense than suggesting otherwise. It would also allow you to basically maintain fire for a straight 7.917 seconds on setting 16. Now, that may sound bad, but considering that it basically releases the equal of .2 tons per .28 seconds, that's a shit-load of firepower. And of course, the Phaser III could hold that for much longer.
You really need to look more closely as to what is stated in the shows as to how the technology works if you think that the tech manuals resembles the shows in any way. >_<
Not that I still use what you quoted...but so what? I've already said that the show is often portrayed differently. How does this at all bring up anything new?
The shows are actually very consistent with each other with the technical manuals being the outlier much like the Incredible Cross-sections books are for Star Wars.
Okay, now you're just acting silly.
For as often as I hear people say Star Trek is inconsistent I have never seen examples of what they are talking about.
Warp speeds. I really don't even need to say anymore than that; warp speeds.
You do realize that the tiny phase cannons on the NX-01 were intended to be at least terawatt weapons,
No they weren't. They were rated at 500 GJs. The 5 terawatt thing came about because they accidentally overloaded them and later they managed to do so again, but doing so caused damage to Enterprise. Given that the NX didn't consistently knock itself out firing its own cannons, I'm going to go ahead and dismiss that right now.
and that low gigawatt weapons are consistently stated to be things like phaser rifles correct?
Again, no they weren't. We have things like the CRM 114 Breen weapon which was stated to penetrate shields rated at 4.7 gigajoules, but phasers have always remained in the megajoule region.
Heck, Season 1 Episode 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation requires far higher outputs from the Phasers then the Technical Manual says is possible, and the Technical manual seems to have not been printed until season 3 or 4.
Again, so what?
To make matters worse, the Fusion reactor is about 4 feet high, 6 feet long, and about 3 feet wide
...Okay?
But that is not how Kirk or any other character describes phasers. It makes you no better then Sci-Fi Fan.
Sir, if you were standing before me, I'd put my foot through your face. When I start making absurd calculations based upon accelerations to get Trek weapon yields, then you can compare me to Sci Fi Fan. And fuck, when you can finally properly cite power outputs of a phaser and a phase cannon, maybe you might even crawl up high enough to level that accusation at me.
Kirk describes phasers as DET weapons that somehow do things to safely dissipate the energy.
Again, so what? TOS was made in the late 60s.
The authors having less of a sense of scale then the script writers. Federation ships need to be able to have speeds that would enable them to cross the galaxy in a few months to a few years for the series to make sense because space is big. Even if you have 100,000 ships that can travel at 100,000c, you will only be able to visit a tiny fraction of the Milkyway galaxy in the time that Star Trek humans have been in space.
The Federation is only 8,000 LY wide. While it would take them years to cross it at lower warp velocities, the TM suggests that there are areas of space where FTL is faster. Hence why you can reach the center of the galaxy in one episode and visit the edge of it in another and yet still have a starship that takes decades to find its way back.

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Re: Reliability Issues With The Star Trek Technical Manuals

Post by sonofccn » Fri Aug 02, 2013 1:43 am

Mith wrote:Again, no they weren't. We have things like the CRM 114 Breen weapon which was stated to penetrate shields rated at 4.7 gigajoules, but phasers have always remained in the megajoule region.
Well we do have this:
Return to Grace {DS9-4} wrote:KIRA: This is a standard issue, Cardassian phase-disruptor rifle. It has a four point seven megajoule power capacity, three millisecond recharge two beam settings.
ZIYAL: How do you know so much about Cardassian weapons?
KIRA: We captured a lot of them during the occupation. It's a good weapon, solid, simple. You can drag it through the mud and it'll still fire. Now this. (Federation phaser rifle.) This is an entirely different animal. Federation standard issue. It's a little less powerful, but it's got a more options. Sixteen beam settings. Fully autonomous recharge, multiple target acquisition, gyro stabilised, the works. It's a little more complicated, so it's not as good a field weapon. Too many things can go wrong with it.
A common interpetation is 4.7 megajoules per three milliseconds which should be in the gigajoule range for a full second discharge.

We also have an example or two where hand phasers'/phaser rifles' effects that would likely tickle the gigajoule range, such as when Worf takes out the deflector dish in the movie First Contact, through obvious that depends on if your interpret that the energy comes from the phaser or some form of reaction on target.

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