The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
Friar Bijou wrote:
The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
gbaji wrote:
They don't go into details about where all the cheap, clean, and abundant energy comes from,
They have fusion tech, so I always assumed that was a big part of it.
While they don't indeed "go into detail"...what Poldaran said. How could you suss that out, gbaji? It's like you never watched it or something. Or read a "Star Fleet Tech Manual".
You need to surrender your Nerd Card, buddy.
I think we can give him a pass this once for being able to reference that Voyager episode. This once, at least.
Lol! I do have a "history of the Enterprise" Star Trek book. And the "Physics of Star Trek" book. But that's about it. Kinda fell out of that whole bit when I stopped actively collecting comic books (cause the same sources exist for both really). I do get that "fusion power" is the hand wave explanation, but that still leaves us with several question: What fuel do they use? How abundant is it? Where do they get it? The ships use antimatter as a fuel, because pound for pound (slug for slug?), it has the greatest energy potential. But that's fuel, not the source. It's an energy transfer medium, not the source of the energy itself. They have to make the antimatter somewhere. They have matter/energy conversion technology (which really makes "fusion" meaningless if you stop and think about it). Thus, recycling is very very efficient. Again, referencing Voyager (because that's the show that actually dealt with resource restrictions), they put every bit of waste back into the replicators and converted them back into energy for use later. Assuming this is relatively (very?) efficient, then the day to day stuff you'd need to provide for the crew (food, air, clothes, etc) would be extremely cheap. It's the energy spent actually moving the ship at FTL speeds that would eat up your reserves.
The ships also use a plasma power system to store and transfer energy around the ships, once generated via conversion from anti-matter (using the whole dilithium chamber magic of course!). When something blows up, or there's a power surge on a ship in Star Trek, it's usually some failure of the plasma conduits (which is, I assume, why random panels explode and not just because it's a cool effect to show us that something is happening). Presumably, the same plasma energy is funneled through some kind of coil system in the nacelles to allow for manipulation of a warp bubble to allow for travel (and changes in course) at warp speed. They also contrasted this form of energy to some other in a Voyager episode (where a society wiped themselves out by using an unstable form of energy). Again though, it's all basically techno-magic.
Ultimately though, I've never actually read anything about what they use to generate the power initially. Do they just mine high density elements and convert them either directly into usable energy or forms that can be used to create antimatter? What do they use? Gas giants? Do they siphon it from the stars in uninhabited systems (or inhabited ones. IIRC, the prequel to Star Trek 4 explained how the Whale species used tech to draw on the power from their own sun, but a half a million years ago a fleet of borg ships attacked them. They were able to destroy the fleet, but so weakened their own sun doing it that they made their own system uninhabitable, thus leading to them creating probes to seed life on other appropriate worlds, like Earth)? Do they operate massive zero point energy arrays? The problem IMO is that the creators and writers for Star Trek want very much to present this future as an environmentally friendly one. Telling folks that "yeah, we're still having to mine stuff to make power" deflates that balloon, so they seem to just avoid the topic. But it's not like there isn't a law in physics involved here. So unless they are tapping into some kind of extra dimensional power source, then they are eating up "non-renewable" sources to fuel their society (technically, they are in any case, just perhaps ones that we can't normally see or interact with). Such sources could still arguably be so vast as to make powering a fleet of ships easy, and providing for the day to day needs of any number of people even easier.
But yeah. Not really explained. At least not as far as I know. And no, "fusion power" isn't a real answer. To be fair the Culture books don't actually discuss this either, so I'm not knocking Star Trek for this. Just making an observation.
Quote:
Tom Paris references transporter credits at one point as well, though I had always assumed that they existed simply because there weren't enough facilities to meet unlimited demand and not enough skilled technicians to man the additional facilities that are needed.
Yeah. Voyager is a good starting point precisely because it's a small system, so scarcity is still possible. They're disconnected from the presumably vast power generating facilities of the Federation, and thus have to make due with whatever they can obtain with their one ship. Again though, given sufficiently efficient energy/matter conversion, then operating some kind of ram scoop and running through the outer layers of a gas giant or sun would be a way to harvest raw materials to convert to energy. Or they could presumably hang out in an asteroid field (hopefully one with lots of iron cores) and just transport them and transfer the energy into storage rather then rematerializing it. Depending on how you imagine such conversion tech working, there's a ton of ways to do this.
Quote:
Voyager itself used a system of replicator and holodeck credits due to their difficulty refueling. But I hadn't thought much about how society at large might use something similar. For holodecks, it would likely be due to the same facility problems I considered above, but with replicators it opens a whole new train of thought. As you said, abuses are likely common enough to justify rationing use. It makes sense. Our brains evolved over a large period of scarcity and were not made to function properly in a post-scarcity environment. ****, we see issues with that now.
Yup. Exactly where I was going. In the Culture novels, the society is very very old and the "humans" have evolved, both physically and sociologically. In Star Trek? Not even a little bit.
Edited, Feb 25th 2015 2:43pm by gbaji