Dev Streamlining

slifox

With the announcement of older mission streamlining, how about streamlining some older C-Store ships consoles? The one that comes to mind for me lately is the T3 Constellation’s Warp Burst Capacitor for the Picard Manuever. This can easily be a Pilot specialization skill. For cannon reference, there have been multiple instances in TNG when the Enterprise initiated warp for a second or two.

Thoughts on others?

rattler2

The Picard Maneuver itself puts a lot of strain on larger ships, at least its supposed to anyways. Hence why we never saw it performed by a galaxy class.

This was addressed in one of the Gateways books when Deanna Troi was given temporary command of a Sabre class when they needed a task force. She performed the Picard Maneuver in the Sabre knowing that larger ships like the Sovereign class Enterprise couldn't due to hull stress.

I mean... think about it. You're jumping to lightspeed for a second. The amount of stress on the hull would be huge, and the bigger the ship, the more surface area for stress caused from basically gunning the engine then hitting the breaks immediately.

Riker also gave her a crash helmet as a joke. Bit him in the butt later. Was funny.

annemarie30

novels are non canon, and ships in TNG era are far more sophisticated structurally, in construction and things like SIFs, to the point they don't even use windows anymore they use force fields. I think the reason why the picard manoever isn't used is that it's a desperation move, and a pretty specific one.

rattler2

Still... a large ship performing that kind of maneuver would put a lot of stress on the hull and SIF. It would be easier for a smaller ship, like the Constellation, to pull off.

And I don't think ALL windows are replaced with forcefields. Probably transparent aluminum. Otherwise if a ship loses power, there goes the crew sucked out into space. I think that one instance of a forcefield was because of the location of that spot in First Contact. Maybe a cargo loading bay or something.

meimeitoo

mattjohnsonva wrote: »

Ok going to put my physicist's hat on now for a minute. Firstly, with the distances involved in the Battle of Maxia the Picard manoeuvre (the correct spelling btw ) would not have worked anyway. For it to have worked would have required the original ship to be at such a distance that light had a reasonable travel time for the sensors to have picked it up.

The moon is 250,000 miles away roughly and light travel time is only about 1.5 sec, so if Picard's ship was, say, 250K away then not only would it have been outside visual range but it would also have been well outside weapons range. Any closer than that and it would only be detectable for a fraction of a second by sensors and certainly not by the Ferengi's eyes! So the whole idea of the Picard manoeuvre is ludicrous from a scientific point of view.

Now the bit about jumping to warp putting stress on the ship. This is also incorrect. Whilst at warp the ship doesn't feel any stress at all because it is not actually moving in relation to the space within its immediate vicinity, that space is such that is enclosed by the warp field. It is the bubble of space carrying the ship that is moving, not the ship itself. Going from stationary in respect to a nearby object to >c instantaneously applies zero acceleration effects relative to local space.

The SIF is necessary for normal high-speed accelerations within local space and is designed to strengthen the ship during these manoeuvres. The IDF is designed to protect the crew during sub-light accelerations and sudden turns, once again the fact it is mentioned in the wiki and elsewhere regarding accelerations to light speed shows how little the authors of TNG understood how an actual warp field would work. I suppose this can be forgiven because Alcubierre didn't introduce his warp field details until 1994, towards the end of the TNG run and after the TNG manual was written iirc.

It would be nice if CBS in future episodes of Trek can start to correct some of the misnomers, the Alcubierre warp field requires exotic matter to work, this exotic matter has yet to be discovered or even a name thought up for it, but here is where the ST writers could write themselves into the history books again. We know it requires a negative energy for the warp field to form, (it will also be needed to open and hold open an Einstein-Rosen bridge or wormhole), so let's assume we can either find it or create it, the stuff will need a name, over to ST writers for that one.

Wasn't there some guy, recently, who debunked the idea of an Alcubierre Drive? Some quantum-mechanic properties that would prevent travel like that? (Apart from the negative energy needed).

Speaking of negative energy, you could build a helluva Tractor Beam Repulsor out of it.

mustrumridcully0

Star Trek is often not consistent with its technology, but overall, the only thing about warp drive that really seems to match the Alcubierre Drive theory is the name "warp", because it "warps" space time. But Star Trek's warp drive is all about subspace stuff and weird subspace anomalies, beings that "live" in subspaces and what not, that just doesn't have any meaningful similarity to concepts of the Alcubierre Drive.

tacticoolfugga#9235 wrote: »

With the announcement of older mission streamlining, how about streamlining some older C-Store ships consoles? The one that comes to mind for me lately is the T3 Constellation’s Warp Burst Capacitor for the Picard Manuever. This can easily be a Pilot specialization skill. For cannon reference, there have been multiple instances in TNG when the Enterprise initiated warp for a second or two.

Thoughts on others?

So far, pretty much all console abilities present unique, new abilities that are not 1:1 copies of existing bridge officer powers. So I am not sure why it would be "streamlining" to turn old console abilities into bridge officer skills. It might be if all console abilities were bridge officer abilities, but limiting it specifically to old console abilities does not seem to help much in terms of streamlining.

mustrumridcully0

mattjohnsonva wrote: »

Well Warp drive and the Alcubierre drive are more or less one and the same, so saying the only thing consistent with it is like saying the only thing consistent about a Ford and a Honda is they are both cars.

Specifically,

1. the way the warp field is generated is similar, both will require antimatter, itself an exotic form of matter.

However, we still don't know that antimatter has a negative energy, and the predominant belief it that it hasn't.

3. they both require huge amounts of energy
4. they both distort the fabric of spacetime

Actually, it is not confirmed that the Star Trek warp drive distorts spacetime. The name might suggest it, but nothing in the description in show or depictions in the show actually show that it does so.

6. the ship travels inside an area of local spacetime (subspace), this is an area that is very sketchy in the TNG technical manual, but it is now clear to see that subspace is actually a domain of local spacetime within non-local space, it is not some other dimension or parallel spacetime that the ship drops into and out of as needed.
7. the pulses from the engines shown in TNG and others would be analogous to the pulses of energy needed to advance the local spacetime wave front, the higher the frequency the more pulses and the faster the advance would be relative to non-local spacetime.

I could go drawing similarities but to suggest they are far removed from each other is quite simply wrong.

With regard to entities living within subspace that is beyond the scope of my knowledge and I cannot at present understand how that could be the case, so I think that aspect of it is purely fictional with no basis within known science.

The Warp Drive was also never written with a basis in known science. (Other than that it was known that the current understanding of the laws of physics didn't allow FTL). And again, the similarity superficial.

Subspace, occasionally spelled sub-space, is an integral part of the universe, distinct, yet coexistent with normal space and its respective Space-time continuum. Subspace has an infinite number of domains. Geordi La Forge compared it with "... a huge honeycomb with an infinite number of cells." (TNG: "Schisms")

That has absolutely nothing to do with the Acubierre drive.

Also, the antimatter in the warp core is used to create electroplasma that can power everything aboard the Enteprise -shields, weapons, life support, structural integrity field, lights, computer, transporters, holodecks and finally the warp drive. Antimatter is basically used because it's one of the most effective forms of fuel, not because it has a negative energy or mass, and nothing in the way the warp drive is described in canon, licensed technical manuals or depictions suggest that the unique properties of antimatter itself are relevant for the warp drive.

And not to forget, Deep Space Nine was able to create a subspace field to travel from Bajor to the Denorios belt, and it doesn't have a matter/antimatter reactor, it merely has fusion reactors.
The purpose that field was to reduce the effective mass of the ship so the maneuvering/station-keeping thrusters would be enough to bring the station to the Denorios nebula.


LALAEDITMONSTER

jonsills

Antimatter does not generate negative energy density. If it did, creation of an Alcubierre-White warp bubble would be trivial, no thus far impossible. We can currently manufacture antimatter (admittedly, in small amounts); it's also found naturally. (Did you know that the radioactive decay of a banana floods your department store with positrons?) At present, the only way we have to get a negative energy density is to use the Casimir effect to exclude vacuum energy from a (very small) region; there's an experiment underway, not yet successful, to find Alcubierre-White warps in such a region. (The aiming of the laser has to be incredibly precise, to the point that things like continental drift and minor seismic activity have to be taken into account.)

Star Trek's warp drive is not an Alcubierre-White warp; in fact, Miguel Alcubierre was inspired by watching Trek, not the other way around. The Trek "warp bubble" is a bubble of "normal" space that's wrapped around the ship before it uses the warp drive to access a subspace domain with variant laws of physics that permit what we see as FTL travel. (It was experimenting with warp bubbles that led to Wesley Crusher almost accidentally killing his mother in TNG:"Remember Me".)

And no one has "debunked" Alcubierre's theory, nor White's refinement; quantum physicists did point out that the leading edge of an Alcubierre-White warp would accumulate Hawking radiation as it went along, and would release this in a wave of hard gamma radiation on the bubble being collapsed, potentially sterilizing the system you arrive in. It's assumed engineers will find some way to handle this if the device itself ever actually comes into existence.

mustrumridcully0

jonsills wrote: »

And no one has "debunked" Alcubierre's theory, nor White's refinement; quantum physicists did point out that the leading edge of an Alcubierre-White warp would accumulate Hawking radiation as it went along, and would release this in a wave of hard gamma radiation on the bubble being collapsed, potentially sterilizing the system you arrive in. It's assumed engineers will find some way to handle this if the device itself ever actually comes into existence.

Alternative, we have found the "Great Filter" - every sufficiently advanced species that we could potentially detect and contact us at some point has the desperate desire to see the rest of the universe itself, experiments with the drive believing it might have a way to avoid the consequences, and either kills itself or whoever it's trying to visit.


But we're veering far off topic here, that isn't very nice to the OP.

The one single non-streamlined thing about the whole universal console system to me is that the Tier 5 Ranger console cannot be used on the Tier 6 Ranger console, and I don't know why. The Tier 5 console might as well not exist, as the time you could potentially play the ship is so small as to practically not matter.

jonsills

Antimatter does NOT generate negative energy; it possesses a charge opposite to that of its normal-matter counterpart. That is, while an electron carries a negative electrical charge, a positron carries a positive charge (hence the name); an antiproton is negatively charged, while a proton is positively charged; and so on.

Please make a study of basic physics before making bald (and inaccurate) assertions regarding physics.

Article about antimatter

Article about negative energy

slifox

Love what this thread has turned into! =D

meimeitoo

jonsills wrote: »

Antimatter does not generate negative energy density. If it did, creation of an Alcubierre-White warp bubble would be trivial, no thus far impossible. We can currently manufacture antimatter (admittedly, in small amounts); it's also found naturally. (Did you know that the radioactive decay of a banana floods your department store with positrons?) At present, the only way we have to get a negative energy density is to use the Casimir effect to exclude vacuum energy from a (very small) region; there's an experiment underway, not yet successful, to find Alcubierre-White warps in such a region. (The aiming of the laser has to be incredibly precise, to the point that things like continental drift and minor seismic activity have to be taken into account.)

Star Trek's warp drive is not an Alcubierre-White warp; in fact, Miguel Alcubierre was inspired by watching Trek, not the other way around. The Trek "warp bubble" is a bubble of "normal" space that's wrapped around the ship before it uses the warp drive to access a subspace domain with variant laws of physics that permit what we see as FTL travel. (It was experimenting with warp bubbles that led to Wesley Crusher almost accidentally killing his mother in TNG:"Remember Me".)

And no one has "debunked" Alcubierre's theory, nor White's refinement; quantum physicists did point out that the leading edge of an Alcubierre-White warp would accumulate Hawking radiation as it went along, and would release this in a wave of hard gamma radiation on the bubble being collapsed, potentially sterilizing the system you arrive in. It's assumed engineers will find some way to handle this if the device itself ever actually comes into existence.

Thank you for this explanation. Good stuff in here!

mustrumridcully0

mattjohnsonva wrote: »

mustrumridcully0 wrote: »

mattjohnsonva wrote: »

Well Warp drive and the Alcubierre drive are more or less one and the same, so saying the only thing consistent with it is like saying the only thing consistent about a Ford and a Honda is they are both cars.

Specifically,

1. the way the warp field is generated is similar, both will require antimatter, itself an exotic form of matter.

However, we still don't know that antimatter has a negative energy, and the predominant belief it that it hasn't.

3. they both require huge amounts of energy
4. they both distort the fabric of spacetime

Actually, it is not confirmed that the Star Trek warp drive distorts spacetime. The name might suggest it, but nothing in the description in show or depictions in the show actually show that it does so.

6. the ship travels inside an area of local spacetime (subspace), this is an area that is very sketchy in the TNG technical manual, but it is now clear to see that subspace is actually a domain of local spacetime within non-local space, it is not some other dimension or parallel spacetime that the ship drops into and out of as needed.
7. the pulses from the engines shown in TNG and others would be analogous to the pulses of energy needed to advance the local spacetime wave front, the higher the frequency the more pulses and the faster the advance would be relative to non-local spacetime.

I could go drawing similarities but to suggest they are far removed from each other is quite simply wrong.

With regard to entities living within subspace that is beyond the scope of my knowledge and I cannot at present understand how that could be the case, so I think that aspect of it is purely fictional with no basis within known science.

The Warp Drive was also never written with a basis in known science. (Other than that it was known that the current understanding of the laws of physics didn't allow FTL). And again, the similarity superficial.

Subspace, occasionally spelled sub-space, is an integral part of the universe, distinct, yet coexistent with normal space and its respective Space-time continuum. Subspace has an infinite number of domains. Geordi La Forge compared it with "... a huge honeycomb with an infinite number of cells." (TNG: "Schisms")

That has absolutely nothing to do with the Acubierre drive.

Also, the antimatter in the warp core is used to create electroplasma that can power everything aboard the Enteprise -shields, weapons, life support, structural integrity field, lights, computer, transporters, holodecks and finally the warp drive. Antimatter is basically used because it's one of the most effective forms of fuel, not because it has a negative energy or mass, and nothing in the way the warp drive is described in canon, licensed technical manuals or depictions suggest that the unique properties of antimatter itself are relevant for the warp drive.

And not to forget, Deep Space Nine was able to create a subspace field to travel from Bajor to the Denorios belt, and it doesn't have a matter/antimatter reactor, it merely has fusion reactors.
The purpose that field was to reduce the effective mass of the ship so the maneuvering/station-keeping thrusters would be enough to bring the station to the Denorios nebula.


LALAEDITMONSTER

Why are you even arguing about this? I am presenting the fact as we know them now and how they may fit in with the Star Trek universe. Antimatter does have negatvie energy for starters so you're wrong there, it has a negative charge, that's why the anti-electron is called the positron.

Lastly, why are you quoting me for something I never said (last quote)?

Positive and Negative Charge are orthogonal principles to positive and negative matter. Protons have a positive charge, electrons have a negative charge, neutrons have no charge, but they are all examples of regular matter. They aren't antimatter, and they aren't negative matter. When an antiproton and a proton collide, they annihilate each other and their mass turns into energy. If one of them was negative matter, their masses would cancel each other out and they would not release energy. Same for positrons and electrons (I believe the latter happens a bit more often in nature, since positrons are part of the cosmic radiation.- It is also something we use in positron emission tomography.)

rattler2

mattjohnsonva wrote: »

Now the bit about jumping to warp putting stress on the ship. This is also incorrect. Whilst at warp the ship doesn't feel any stress at all because it is not actually moving in relation to the space within its immediate vicinity, that space is such that is enclosed by the warp field. It is the bubble of space carrying the ship that is moving, not the ship itself. Going from stationary in respect to a nearby object to >c instantaneously applies zero acceleration effects relative to local space.

The SIF is necessary for normal high-speed accelerations within local space and is designed to strengthen the ship during these manoeuvres. The IDF is designed to protect the crew during sub-light accelerations and sudden turns, once again the fact it is mentioned in the wiki and elsewhere regarding accelerations to light speed shows how little the authors of TNG understood how an actual warp field would work. I suppose this can be forgiven because Alcubierre didn't introduce his warp field details until 1994, towards the end of the TNG run and after the TNG manual was written iirc.

1. We're still talking about MASS though. A smaller ship like a Constellation will weigh less than a Galaxy class. While not "true" real world physics are involved with the Cochrane Warp Drive, they were not originally designed for a burst that short. They are meant to use long distance. It would be like going from cruise to mach 1 and back in two seconds. Stress on the hull + stress on the actual drive/engine. Naturally there would be less stress on a smaller frame from such a maneuver than there would a larger one. While that could be countered by the SIF, negating that much stress would require more power. Power that is probably getting eaten up by the Warp Drive being used in the first place. Hence why we hardly ever see battles at warp. And frankly I don't see how the Vengeance could have fired on Enterprise with phasers while at warp, as I'm pretty sure phasers don't travel faster than whatever warp factor they were at. Vengeance should have flown right into her own attacks at that speed.
   
   Don't forget that Star Trek ships are only Semi Neutonian in physics, banking as they turn. Which with Neutonian physics is unnecessary to act like you're in an atmosphere in deep space.
   
   
2. We've seen the IDF overloaded many times in the past. Usually in combat, but there are also instances where the ship is thrown violently, such as USS Voyager being shot across the galaxy or USS Enterprise-D being thrown around by Q. The SIF helps maintain structural integrity in more than just sublight travel. They shore it up to try and help during combat where the hull is compromised.

baddmoonrizin

This thread isn't even discussing the topic or the game, so I'm moving it to Ten Forward to continue there.

jonsills

Where did you say that? Well...

mattjohnsonva wrote: »

Antimatter does have negatvie energy for starters...

This statement is clearly incorrect. Also, antimatter is not particularly exotic - positrons are one of the outputs of beta decay, for example. Except in the broadest possible terms, antimatter is not exotic matter. It's completely unnecessary for an Alcubierre-White warp. And an Alcubierre-White warp is unrelated to a Star Trek warp drive.

meimeitoo

jonsills wrote: »

Where did you say that? Well...

mattjohnsonva wrote: »

Antimatter does have negatvie energy for starters...

This statement is clearly incorrect. Also, antimatter is not particularly exotic - positrons are one of the outputs of beta decay, for example. Except in the broadest possible terms, antimatter is not exotic matter. It's completely unnecessary for an Alcubierre-White warp. And an Alcubierre-White warp is unrelated to a Star Trek warp drive.

Well, which one of the 2 of you is right? Getting curious now -- all forum negative energy despite.

starkaos

meimeitoo wrote: »

jonsills wrote: »

Where did you say that? Well...

mattjohnsonva wrote: »

Antimatter does have negatvie energy for starters...

This statement is clearly incorrect. Also, antimatter is not particularly exotic - positrons are one of the outputs of beta decay, for example. Except in the broadest possible terms, antimatter is not exotic matter. It's completely unnecessary for an Alcubierre-White warp. And an Alcubierre-White warp is unrelated to a Star Trek warp drive.

Well, which one of the 2 of you is right? Getting curious now -- all forum negative energy despite.

If we could only utilize the vast amounts of negative energy from the internet, then we could power the entire world for as long as the internet exists. Since it is negative energy, then it should be able to power a warp drive with it.

mirrorchaos

tacticoolfugga#9235 wrote: »

With the announcement of older mission streamlining, how about streamlining some older C-Store ships consoles? The one that comes to mind for me lately is the T3 Constellation’s Warp Burst Capacitor for the Picard Manuever. This can easily be a Pilot specialization skill. For cannon reference, there have been multiple instances in TNG when the Enterprise initiated warp for a second or two.

Thoughts on others?

Everyone else has started arguing about the properties of warp drive instead of answering the point, i can't even decipher any of it. can't these things come with a simple answer about the console instead?

i suppose it is possible to put the warp burst capacitor module in with piloting spec and make it immune to tractor repulsors for the duration of the effect, it was primarily used in an act of desperation as the Stargazer had very little to work with after the attack from the Ferengi ship.

mustrumridcully0

mattjohnsonva wrote: »

jonsills wrote: »

Where did you say that? Well...

mattjohnsonva wrote: »

Antimatter does have negatvie energy for starters...

This statement is clearly incorrect. Also, antimatter is not particularly exotic - positrons are one of the outputs of beta decay, for example. Except in the broadest possible terms, antimatter is not exotic matter. It's completely unnecessary for an Alcubierre-White warp. And an Alcubierre-White warp is unrelated to a Star Trek warp drive.

You keep twisting words, you claimed I said it "generates negative energy" when in fact I said what you have now just quoted, it does have negative energy. You claim this is incorrect but the simplest breakdown of the statement will sho it is correct and you are just trying to argue for some reason.

Electrical energy is the flow of electrons from a negative source point to a positive, because electrons are negatively charged.
Positron energy would be the negative of this, the flow of positrons from a positive source point to a negative because positrons are positively charged. In this case the term negative means opposing or opposite charge.

Not once did I use the word generate.

If you don't want to call antimatter exotic then that's up to you, I find it the most exotic matter that we can encounter on this planet and we do not fully understand it yet. For example the anti-hypertritons display unique lambda particles made up of strange quarks that orbit the nucleus of atoms, these have been made on Earth and is a particularly exotic form of antimatter. Who knows what else we will discover when the power is ramped up further at the LHC and other accelerators worldwide.
Please, you don't have to keep quoting Wikipedia at me, I didn't use Wikipedia to get my degree and I won't start using it now, partly because it's not always correct, although it usually is, and secondly because I don't need to. It's worth bearing in mind that most forms of exotic matter are hypothetical and once discovered they are no longer that exotic because we know what physical properties they possess.

The exotic is a pseudonym for "unknown" in science, I still like to use this for AM as I'm old enough to remember when it was pretty much theoretical. It wasn't until the nineties that AM was actually captured although it was only a few years ago that we cooled it to a low enough energy to study. At current levels of production it would take billions of years to make a gram of the stuff, so yes whilst you can detect it from your bananas it still the rarest and most expensive substance on Earth and to my mind that makes it exotic even if it is no longer hypothetical.

I guess the important thing to keep mind that when talking about an Alubierre Drive, it is not about electrical energy or electrical charge. We're talking about matter that has a negative energy density, lower than that of the vacuum, and allows to configure the spacetime needed for the drive. This particular exotic matter is often referred to as having "negative mass".