Mike DiCenso wrote:Mr. Oragahn wrote:Mike DiCenso wrote:Rather the idea that the E-D warp core is generating 12.75 billion gigawatts per some other unit, such as reactants and efficiency makes much better sense. Anything else is convoluted and unnecessary.
-Mike
The thing being that this millions of gigawatts don't seem to fit well with all estimations I've heard about power generation and beam weapons in Trek.
What do you think of this btw:
http://st-v-sw.net/STSWgigaper.html
Estimates? From
who exactly?
From the time spent reading SB.com. I've never heard of figures that could say a Trek ship could generate gigatons of energy, even for a brief period.
You can say SB.com already had some bias against Trek, or that Trekkies didn't push it hard enough, or were badly represented... or maybe I missed the relevant threads.
Besides, Robert had numbers which seemed correct and indicated minimal levels in the terawatt range, up to thousands of terawatts. The use of thousands of terawatts as an unit of power measurement largely shows that the terawatt range is the usual range, with petawatt range being when reactors are pushed to their limits.
The majority of reliable canon power quotes from across Trek put the average Federation ship power generation in the thousands of terawatts.
Really? More info please.
Robert found several of them which refer to terawatts (
1,
2).
He also raises a good point about the amount of deuterium AND antideuterium you'd have to feed through that reactor
per second.
"12.75 billion gigawatts per 140 kilograms of reactants"... is roughly seven seconds - more the time Data and the chick were in the tunnel - 1 ton of matter and 1 ton of antimatter would have been dumped into the core.
The Hathaway case is interesting.
They used that decomissioned 8 decades old ship for some battle simulation, but they had limited dilithium crystals (initially worth one minute only, but found chips of it to extend that period) and no anti-matter.
Wesley Crusher knew he had "some" he used for, if we believe him, some study to close his final degree in plasma physics.
Here's the antimatter, contained inside some transparent device, generating a magnetic field:
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 46&pos=116
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 46&pos=117
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 46&pos=118
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 46&pos=120
That "block" of antimatter is of a generous eyeballed width of 15 cm. It appears to have a faceted spherical shape, and is a bit flattened in fact, thus it can only have, at best, a volume of 1,767.15 cm³, and that's if it really was a near perfect sphere.
As a liquid, deuterium has a density of 162.4 kg/m3.
That's 0.0001624 kg/cm³.
You have 0.28698516 kg of antimatter here.
More than 12.3 megatons of energy - total.
Say the anti-deuterium was ten times denser, you're still going with 2.8698516 kg of antimatter, for a total of 123 megatons here, for weapons, shields and warp drive (warp 1, less than just two seconds).
Bits of the script, from Trekcore:
GEORDI
(grinning)
The hard part's gonna be
calibrating the thermal curve
required to start a controlled
reaction.
RIKER
Assuming you can -- can you
regulate the reaction?
Wesley steps over to --
45 INSERT - DILITHIUM CRYSTAL CLAMPS
Just barely visible -- wedged into the fingers of the
clamps -- are MINUTE CHIPS of the valuable mineral.
WESLEY (O.S.)
There's just enough crystal to
do it.
So apparently, small new chips (shards?) of dilithium can be enough to handle the energies.
WORF
Counter with Talupian stratagem
on instrument sighting.
RIKER
Agreed. Three-quarters impulse,
full on my command. Ensign Nagel,
maximum shields.
(to Worf)
Mister Worf, prepare your little
surprise.
They were also enabled a simulation of
maximum shielding, which is based on real parameters. All the battle simulation systems are, in fact. It's everything for real, computers and systems switching off as the ships are hit, but with no real damage. They're emulating real life conditions and effects.
So you have it. That amount of energy was enough to have a 80 years old ship use shields at max, and apparently quite capable of seriously damaging the Enterprise, when her shields may have been at low or totally lowered (
1,
2).
Considering that it was a simulation, it's hard to know if raising the shields for real was a necessity, especially since the Enterprise crew had shields raised to maximum when they thought they'd have to deal with a
Romulan warbird.
In that instant, we hear the incessant SQUEAL of
electronic "hit" after electronic "hit."
59 EXT. SPACE (OPTICAL) - CONTINUOUS
The Hathaway (spatially "behind" Enterprise) is firing
beam after beam at the bigger ship.
60 INT. ENTERPRISE - MAIN BRIDGE - CONTINUOUS
Picard realizes he's been had! Picard presses a button
and Red Alert is cancelled.
PICARD
Warp three, evasive!
(the "scores" stop)
Disengage weapons, re-engage
modified beam.
KOLRAMI
He is quite good.
PICARD
He is the best!
DATA
Computer reports simulated damage
to several aft decks. Repair time
three-point-six days.
With repeated beam assaults in a short time, the Hathaway was capable of damaging several aft decks, up to the point it will require 3.6 days of repair.
Here's how long the thousands of terajoules have been used:
The whole simulated battle, plus the arrival of the Ferengi ship, plus the ten minutes ultimatum, and the remaining minutes, including the warp jump.
I don't have the episode at thand, but I suppose that's easily fifteen minutes, if not more.
Say 900 seconds.
With 123 megatons of total possible output, that's 32.664 terawatts. With 12.3 megatons, that's 3.2664 terawatts.
Enough for the Hathaway to get maximum shields on and dent the Enterprise, and allow a quick warp jump.
And the Hathaway doesn't seem particularily that small
in comparison to a galaxy-class.
Ten terawatts at the very least from 22nd century impulse engines to provide an overload of power to the NX-01's phase canons, which normally have maximum output of 500 GJ.
-Mike
I'm not going to dispute the low terawatt range.
EDIT: added the missing dot in "More than 123 megatons of energy total."