We've been at this automobile thing since Carl Benz in 1886. How many ways are there to power an automobile?
- Alcohol doesn't burn as efficiently, mostly useful for steam rather than internal combustion
- Electricity must be generated and stored, and batteries can't hold the same amount of power
- Hydrogen is unstable, difficult to store, and expensive
Why can't we come up with anything as energy-dense as gasoline? Bad writing?
Well, it's not really the same situation. Alternative ways of FTL travel exist in the 24th/25th century, both biological and technological. Starfleet still only using one single form of FTL travel centuries later is.. at least hard to believe.
Well, it's not really the same situation. Alternative ways of FTL travel exist in the 24th/25th century, both biological and technological. Starfleet still only using one single form of FTL travel centuries later is.. at least hard to believe.
Any harder to believe than the Dominion using it for 2000 years?
There is a lot of stuff in Star Trek not rooted in reality either. Again, we have characters regularly traveling through time, creating wormholes, replicating just about everything out of thin air, preventing earthquakes, encountering aliens who can wipe out entire species everywhere with a single thought etc etc... but no one can come up with a substitute for dilithium or an alternative means of FTL that does not require dilithium... which we know exists.
The alternate methods encountered so far may be less efficient or whatever, but they do exist and the galaxy is a very big place.
I'm not disputing that the galaxy is big, or that there were alternate methods encountered, mostly by Voyager, however we have to look at the practicality of these methods. Ignoring all the one off instances of time travel, wormholes, ect, we have to look at the technology base behind a lot of these alternatives.
Warp Drive is obviously the most common form, developed by literally every space faring species in existance in Star Trek. Some faster than others. There are some variations on the same theme, but functionally they are all the same.
Subspace Corridors and Underspace are a thing, but the problem is they do not spread across the whole galaxy, and also required knowledge of their existance.
Soliton Wave Riders did prove to be more effecient, but then we had the problem of not only needing a planet bound facility at both the point of origin and destination, but the fact that the Soliton Wave could actually gain more and more energy to the point the destination facility cannot dissipate the Wave and the planet would be destroyed.
Solar Sails are slow.
Transwarp Conduits... ships in them are "subject to extreme gravimetric shear. To compensate for this, the Borg projected a structural integrity field ahead of the ship. Additionally, there were extreme temporal stresses placed upon the vessel, necessitating a chroniton field be projected throughout the ship in order to keep the different sections of the ship in temporal sync." While this seemed to be mostly a Borg problem due to the sheer size of their ships, as Voyager herself didn't seem to need to do this, that's still a rather big issue.
Graviton Catapults could work, but the distance is dependant on the strength of the Graviton Field, which in theory could cause systems to overload if not adjusted properly.
Coaxial Warp Drive works by folding space, and Starfleet had been dreaming of perfecting the tech for years. First encountered by Voyager, they figured out how to deal with particle instabilities that overload the engines... in a small craft. Since Voyager never adapted it for use aboard an Intrepid class... clearly at the time the tech was not viable for large starships at the time. It is possible that the Ent-J may have had a Coaxial Warp Drive, but we don't know.
Quantum Slipstream has been known since Voyager, and is even usable in the 32nd Century, however the major flaw is the need for a rare crystal called Benamite, which could have been what was needed to make the Slipstream Drive far more stable than when Voyager messed around with it.
Wormholes for the most part are natural, unpredictable anomalies. Starfleet managed to figure out how to make micro wormholes, which enabled them to contact Voyager on a more regular basis after learning that Voyager was still active in Delta. However only beings like the Prophets have been able to actually create a fully stable artificial wormhole.
Temporal Displacement Drives may have been extremely regulated by the Temporal Accords to prevent tampering with the timeline.
Now... lets look at the one method not mentioned here. The Spore Drive. It relies on a resource that is renewable, mycelial spores, and, at least using 23rd Century Duotronics, is somewhat reliable. One of the main limiting factors for Spore Jump range was the need for a pilot. Without a Tartegrade or a human with Tartegrade DNA, the Spore Drive was only able to jump a few thousand kilometers. With this pilot... the range was dang near infinite. Another issue with the drive is the potential to jump into an alternate reality as the Mycelial Network is actually a multiversal one. With an incomplete set of coordinates, or deliberate alteration of a set of coordinates being accessed at the right time, a ship can be catapulted into another reality, with some rather nasty side effects for the pilot. There was at least one instance of unintended Time Travel as well, when USS Discovery used her Spore Drive to jump back to the Prime Universe while surfing the blast wave from the destruction of ISS Charon and her toxic Mycelial Power Core.
Normal operation of the Spore Drive is pretty much comparable to skipping a stone across a lake. Minimal impact on the Network as you basically just skim across the surface. Its only when you use it as a power source like on ISS Charon that you threaten all life in all realities.
Its entirely possible that 32nd Century technology could actually make the Spore Drive far more viable than it was with 23rd Century technology.
Temporal Displacement Drives may have been extremely regulated by the Temporal Accords to prevent tampering with the timeline.
They would have had to have been. Recall Niven's First Law of Time Travel, borne out by the "Year of Hell" episodes of VOY: In any plenum that permits both time travel and alteration of the past, time travel will never be invented.
Reasoning: If someone invents a method of time travel and fails to keep anyone else from learning how it's done, various people and organizations will fiddle with past events because they didn't like the outcome - some diehard Confederate will toss a crate of AK-47s and ammo to Lee's troops at Gettysburg, or somebody will show Hannibal how to build temporary roads for his war elephants, or a Romulan will assassinate Surak as a child, or something. Then someone else will try to undo the change. Eventually, the past will get so tangled up that somebody will decide the only way to fix it would be to stop the inventor of the damned machine from ever succeeding in the first place. Thus, no time machine. (Come to think of it, isn't that what happened to Annorax's original designs?)
For the bodies that signed the Temporal Accords to even pretend to succeed, and for the Temporal Cold War to be stopped, all such technology would have to have been highly regulated in the first place. (You don't imagine the Envoy wanted the 23rd-century Romulan Star Empire to figure out how to transit time, do you? After Galorndon Core, they'd have taken his head!) Therefore, when Timefleet folded and the Accords called for it, all the knowledge of how to mess with history was destroyed. Sure, people know the technology once existed - but we know that Greek fire once existed, and we still don't know for sure how they made it (my money's on discovering some method of creating napalm some 3000 years ago, but if they had that they sure kept it secret!). There's no reason to think that anyone's just going to accidentally stumble upon it again.
On the third hand, it's also possible that resurrecting temporal-transit capability might be the focus of this season. From the previews at the end of Ep 2, it sure sounds like Burnham wants to prevent the Burn from having happened...
We've been at this automobile thing since Carl Benz in 1886. How many ways are there to power an automobile?
- Alcohol doesn't burn as efficiently, mostly useful for steam rather than internal combustion
- Electricity must be generated and stored, and batteries can't hold the same amount of power
- Hydrogen is unstable, difficult to store, and expensive
Why can't we come up with anything as energy-dense as gasoline? Bad writing?
Or big oil pimps not wanting us to find better. Not like they are honorable and honest.....
Stan Meyer, had he not been killed, will vouch on that.
IF you think big oil will simply stand down, proudly, and allow something better to come along....Suuuuuuuuuuuuure.
I've never understood this logic. If big oil is greedy and profit driven, why would they not want to diversify and get onboard the next big energy thing? There is nothing stopping BP from making solar panels, wind turbines, or nuclear plants, or is there?
We've been at this automobile thing since Carl Benz in 1886. How many ways are there to power an automobile?
- Alcohol doesn't burn as efficiently, mostly useful for steam rather than internal combustion
- Electricity must be generated and stored, and batteries can't hold the same amount of power
- Hydrogen is unstable, difficult to store, and expensive
Why can't we come up with anything as energy-dense as gasoline? Bad writing?
Aside from the issues of reality vs fiction, lets ask the same question for nuclear power plants vs hydrocarbon power plants. Why are we supposed to be concerned about CO2 when the great alternative is already here, yet completely overregulated and actively resisted in favor of horribly unreliable and inefficient sources?
But on the subject of gasoline engines, we've seen major efficiency and power improvements over the years. Your modern V6 is more powerful than V8s of a few decades ago. The Wright Flyer had a terrible 12 HP engine, where today people mow their lawns riding on engines nearly twice as powerful. Sure the fuel is the same, but the power and efficiency from the same amount of fuel is dramatically better.
Now I know this may come as a shocker, automobiles are real and Star Trek is not.
And yet there are some things in Trek that are rooted in reality. The fact that very few species have come up with alternatives to the Cochrane style warp drive mirrors a few things in reality. Why do we all use similar designs for aircraft? Why do all our guns work the same way despite being built in different countries? Why did swords develop along similar lines between nations that never had any contact with each other?
...
This isn't true, though. Swords are quite varied and differed significantly, definitely in part due to the availability of higher quality steels in Europe as opposed to Japan, for example, but obviously they also had a myriad of designs for different purposes. Guns are also extremely varied both in the mechanism and the projectile, as well as the furniture for many reasons, whether we are looking at broadly the difference between firing and reloading mechanisms, or between two gas operated rifles. Aircraft as well are wildly different, designed for different purposes and operating regimes, from helicopters to the Concorde, but even a 747 is not just a scaled up 737. Yes to the layman they may look similar enough, but they really aren't.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,579Community Moderator
Pretty much all swords have the same layout of blade, guard, and hilt. Shape may be different, but every sword has the same parts. Doesn't matter if its a single edge, double edge, made for slashing, made for thrusting... they all have the same general layout. In which case one could say a sword is a sword.
Except for the oddballs that have no guard. But those are made to be hidden and that's a can of worms I'd rather not try to explain as an analogy.
That is why I used swords as an example. Because just like warp drives in Star Trek, pretty much everyone has a version of it. It may not look the same, but it for all intents and purposes is the same thing in function.
Basically... the Federation has a European Longsword, the Klingons have a Japanese Katana, and the Romulans have a falchion. All different designs, but all are still considered swords.
And again with the guns, they may come from different directions, but ultimately an AK-47 and an M-16 performs the same function. Fire a bullet at the enemy using a chemical reaction. How its harnessed really doesn't matter because the result is the same. You have a bullet flying at the enemy because you set off a tiny explosion to propel a projectile down a barrel, imparting a spin for accuracy, and some of that reaction follows said projectile out the barrel for a flash and bang.
Ultimately what I was trying to say was that while designs are different, the end result is the same.
Just because the Romulans used a Singularity rather than a M/AM Reactor doesn't mean they don't have warp drive. They still have something that generates the power that goes to the warp coils to generate a warp field. Just like Nuclear vs Wind power. Different source, same output.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
You mean like a scimitar, a falchion, or a shamshir? (A flambard has a wavy straight blade, like a kris on Viagra.)
And let's not forget the so-called "war clubs" of Polynesia - carved of wood, to be sure, but often with shark's teeth embedded to make a lethal blade, and shaped more like a sword than a club. Much like warp drives, the various "sword" designs are methods of delivering deadly force within arm's reach, intended to slice into opponents (or to slice bits off of opponents, dealer's choice on the exact methodology). And when your arm is twitching on the sand next to your bleeding body, it matters little whether the slicing was done by ironwood or Toledo steel, the net effect is the same.
It's reasonable, then, to suppose that Romulan warp drives work pretty much the same way as everybody else's warp drives - there are only so many ways to skin this particular cat - and require dilithium to focus the energies in the warp reactor. Maybe they don't, but there's no canon support either way, so all we can do is rely on analogy (a tricky guide, but the only one we have).
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,579Community Moderator
Its relatively straight, but looks single edged with the tip actually curved back.
The amount of curve probably depends on type of sword, and may refer more to the blade itself, not the entire body of the blade. So its possible that a falchion can be said to be a curved blade in comparison to the traditional European Longsword without going into full katana or scimitar style.
Well, the clip for Episode 3 suggests they DID try when they realised Dil was not sustainable - as Som said, apparently 700 years after Discovery left (around 2958), dilithum supplies began to dry up. The Federation trialed several alternate warp drive designs, but none proved entirely reliable. And then the Burn happened.
Yes I know, and will re-iterate I find it very, very, very difficult to believe the Federation - or anyone for that matter - could not come up with an alternative that worked as well as FTL requiring dilithium.
Well, I do get where you are coming from and I do wonder why the Federation apparently waited until dilitium supplies started to dry up before they began to explore alternatives.
I am not sure one can really say they "waited", considering that even in the 24th century, they were working on alternate technologies (like Soliton Waves or artificial Wormholes). I think it's more a matter of how much they focused their research on this one single topic.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Pretty much all swords have the same layout of blade, guard, and hilt. Shape may be different, but every sword has the same parts. Doesn't matter if its a single edge, double edge, made for slashing, made for thrusting... they all have the same general layout. In which case one could say a sword is a sword.
Except for the oddballs that have no guard. But those are made to be hidden and that's a can of worms I'd rather not try to explain as an analogy.
That is why I used swords as an example. Because just like warp drives in Star Trek, pretty much everyone has a version of it. It may not look the same, but it for all intents and purposes is the same thing in function.
Basically... the Federation has a European Longsword, the Klingons have a Japanese Katana, and the Romulans have a falchion. All different designs, but all are still considered swords.
And again with the guns, they may come from different directions, but ultimately an AK-47 and an M-16 performs the same function. Fire a bullet at the enemy using a chemical reaction. How its harnessed really doesn't matter because the result is the same. You have a bullet flying at the enemy because you set off a tiny explosion to propel a projectile down a barrel, imparting a spin for accuracy, and some of that reaction follows said projectile out the barrel for a flash and bang.
Ultimately what I was trying to say was that while designs are different, the end result is the same.
Just because the Romulans used a Singularity rather than a M/AM Reactor doesn't mean they don't have warp drive. They still have something that generates the power that goes to the warp coils to generate a warp field. Just like Nuclear vs Wind power. Different source, same output.
That is horrifically oversimplifying things. Yes Roms have some kind of FTL drive. Yes swords cut people. The specifics matter greatly though.
If a sword comes up on some armor that it can't penetrate but another can, the design difference matters. The sword might lack reach, it might lack the ability to be swung properly due to how close quarters the fight or room is, it might be too short to get enough force behind it. The difference matters greatly.
Same with guns. Does it have the range you need or the concealibility? Contrary to some beliefs, you can't realistically conceal carry an AR-15 which is why it is almost never used by criminals. Does it have a round appropriate for what you need? The differences matter greatly.
So to bring it back to FTL drives, we have one issue in this new future of Trek, which is whether it uses dilithium or not. That makes the only difference after the Burn. It is the critical design issue. In the way nuclear power is far superior to a field full of wind turbines when the wind isn't blowing, an FTL drive that doesn't need dilithium is what matters most post Burn. And finding and refining a way to do FTL without dilithium also becomes the critical advancement to make.
It's a lot easier to come up with that while dil still works reliably, though. And while dil still works, there's very little incentive to develop anything else. Again, analogize to cars - some of the very first cars were electric, and the Stanley company specialized in steam-driven cars, but since gasoline was so cheap and plentiful, other design concepts fell by the wayside. Now that we're starting to run low on cheap oil (oil's still there, but it's getting expensive to reach it), electric cars are catching on again. (The attempt to revive steam cars didn't last long, though, because wood pellets are still more expensive per mile driven than gasoline.)
Basically, we humans innovate mostly when we have no other choice - necessity is the mother of invention, and all that. As long as the way we've been doing things works, we tend to stick with that. And in Trek, we can see that other races are even more averse to change - the Klingon Empire has been spacefaring since at least the 1700s, yet is at pretty much exactly the same state of development as the UFP (or at least the Klingon Defense Force is equal to Starfleet; we don't really see that much about civilian life in either the UFP or the Empire in the shows). As long as there's no real reason to develop a warp drive that doesn't rely on the easiest useful material to locate (it's rare, but apparently not as rare as benamite, and easier to handle than trilithium), why would anyone bother?
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,579Community Moderator
Jonsills is right.
Why bring up all these rather specific things for specific situations? Why bring up armor vs swords to try and argue about change when up until The Burn there was no need for it? The frakkin' thing worked! If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Now it broke, and the galaxy is now pretty much Fallout.
As for the "horrifically oversimplified" analogies... I don't get what makes it horrifying. Simple can be easier to understand. How many people are going to care if one AR uses 5.56 NATO and another uses some oddball size like say 5.88 or something? Functionally they work off the same principles. You have a round with gunpowder, gunpowder gets ignighted, bullet is pushed out the business end by a controlled explosive reaction, bullet hits target.
Its the same with warp drive across the galaxy. Most M/AM reactors need Dilithium to regulate the reaction. As we don't know how a singularity works we can only speculate that maybe Dilithium helps to make it usable by warp coils or something.
I don't think it was the Dilithium exploding that caused everything to blow up. I think it might have been that the crystals being destroyed led to unregulated reactions in M/AM Cores, which, as we know... is a BAD thing. Warp Core Breach. In theory, losing the Dilithium in a M/AM reactor would lead to Matter and Antimatter coming into DIRECT contact, rather than contact through Dilithium, which is basically acting like a filter in a coffee maker or something.
Take that out... BOOM.
It's a lot easier to come up with that while dil still works reliably, though. And while dil still works, there's very little incentive to develop anything else. Again, analogize to cars - some of the very first cars were electric, and the Stanley company specialized in steam-driven cars, but since gasoline was so cheap and plentiful, other design concepts fell by the wayside. Now that we're starting to run low on cheap oil (oil's still there, but it's getting expensive to reach it), electric cars are catching on again. (The attempt to revive steam cars didn't last long, though, because wood pellets are still more expensive per mile driven than gasoline.)
Basically, we humans innovate mostly when we have no other choice - necessity is the mother of invention, and all that. As long as the way we've been doing things works, we tend to stick with that. And in Trek, we can see that other races are even more averse to change - the Klingon Empire has been spacefaring since at least the 1700s, yet is at pretty much exactly the same state of development as the UFP (or at least the Klingon Defense Force is equal to Starfleet; we don't really see that much about civilian life in either the UFP or the Empire in the shows). As long as there's no real reason to develop a warp drive that doesn't rely on the easiest useful material to locate (it's rare, but apparently not as rare as benamite, and easier to handle than trilithium), why would anyone bother?
Very true, however, Star Trek is full of people trying to do stuff just because. I'd say for things like Data, Genesis, spying on pre-warp cultures why do any of that?
And, at least with FTL travel, there may not be a need to reinvent the wheel, but they kept working on faster and faster warp drives, looked into transwarp tech, and so on. Someone is going to want to get from A to B faster and if they think warp is limited, they are going to be looking for an alternative.
Of course the need is pressing post-Burn, so what did they do about that, what have they done since then?
Why bring up all these rather specific things for specific situations? Why bring up armor vs swords to try and argue about change when up until The Burn there was no need for it? The frakkin' thing worked! If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Now it broke, and the galaxy is now pretty much Fallout.
As for the "horrifically oversimplified" analogies... I don't get what makes it horrifying. Simple can be easier to understand. How many people are going to care if one AR uses 5.56 NATO and another uses some oddball size like say 5.88 or something? Functionally they work off the same principles. You have a round with gunpowder, gunpowder gets ignighted, bullet is pushed out the business end by a controlled explosive reaction, bullet hits target.
Its the same with warp drive across the galaxy. Most M/AM reactors need Dilithium to regulate the reaction. As we don't know how a singularity works we can only speculate that maybe Dilithium helps to make it usable by warp coils or something.
I don't think it was the Dilithium exploding that caused everything to blow up. I think it might have been that the crystals being destroyed led to unregulated reactions in M/AM Cores, which, as we know... is a BAD thing. Warp Core Breach. In theory, losing the Dilithium in a M/AM reactor would lead to Matter and Antimatter coming into DIRECT contact, rather than contact through Dilithium, which is basically acting like a filter in a coffee maker or something.
Take that out... BOOM.
Its overly simplistic because it isn't that FTL travel is broken because of the Burn, but that dilithium is gone, so the way they did it before doesn't work. That doesn't prevent them from using other methods.
If crazy lawmakers ban semi-automatics, for example, that doesn't mean you can't have guns. Revolvers, gatling guns, lever actions, pump actions, and so forth would not be banned. Semi automatic just happens to be the most common type of action in citizen hands, and even there semi-automatic-ness can be achieved through a number of different mechanisms that work differently to harness energy of the exiting bullet to load the next one.
If instead chemical propellants were banned, well we might go back to crossbows for mechanical propulsion, or we could try electromagnetic propulsion, pneumatic propulsion, or even hydraulic propulsion.
The point is the specifics matter. The dilithium is gone, so what else can we do? That doesn't stop FTL travel, maybe it makes it harder, slower, or whatever, but people are going to start working on alternatives, if they didn't already exist.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,579Community Moderator
I think you're also misunderstanding what I was trying to say in the first place. I wasn't saying FTL is impossible after The Burn. I was trying to explain why everyone and their grandmother has Warp Drive to begin with.
Warp drives without dilithium were used early on in Star Fleet history; the Phoenix is the ur-example, but as I recall the trading ships used by Earth-allied colonies before the advent of the NX-class and its Warp 5 engine could also operate without dil. The problem there is that they were limited to about Warp 2, which while superliminal is still pretty doggone slow (eight times the speed of light still means it's going to take six months to get from here to Proxima Centauri - hard to run a centralized government at those speeds, just ask the Romans).
Without some centralization, it seems unlikely that reasonable alternatives can be found - I mean, Book does list three other ways to ignore Einstein, but all of them either require materials he can't get or take way too long to get anywhere.
The Fallout mention above might be apropos; I'd actually written a comparison myself, but removed it as irrelevant to the point I was making. In the Fallout history, when the oil crunch began, rather than seeking alternatives everyone just doubled down on seizing and exploiting existing oil fields, resulting in the Resource Wars of the mid-21st century. These culminated in US forces driving Chinese occupation forces out of the Alaskan oil fields in early 2077; it's one of the possible reasons for the Chinese first strike in the Great War, on the morning of October 23, 2077. (Records in an old DIA bunker under Boston show that there were no US forces on alert until after Chinese attack craft were spotted approaching Alaska and the East Coast; on the other hand, records in the Enclave bunker under the Whitespring Resort in West Virginia show that Thomas Eckhart, former Secretary of Agriculture, had been exchanging messages with someone who believed the Enclave leadership was in fact trapped in a VR simulation, which could only be escaped by destroying what they perceived to be a small town in southern China. Enclave leadership had denied Eckhart's petition to launch a strike against that city, but given his behavior after the War, it's entirely possible he managed to order one anyway - he certainly had no compunctions about eliminating anyone who might threaten his mastery of the bunker later, including his superiors and remaining officers of the US Army.)
The effect of the Resource Wars on the US populace included a drive to produce cars powered by small fission or fusion plants; these did not supplant gasoline cars entirely, as their price tag started in the millions of dollars (inflation was terrible during the Wars), but there were enough of them that many of the vehicles in West Virginia are still capable of exploding into radioactive fireballs when damaged further. (But we can't drive them. How fair is that?) Nobody in that world ever bothered developing electric cars; the closest they had to a solar power plant was the Helios-One station in Nevada, that required banks of mirrors focusing solar radiation on a central tower (and it was all intended to power the ARCHIMEDES weapon system anyway - when you repair the station two hundred years later, you can send the power to New Vegas, you can distribute it around the Mojave, or you can power up ARCHIMEDES and use its orbital-strike capability once every 24 hours). Other than that electricity was made by fission and fusion power plants, by hydroelectric dams like Hoover, or by burning oil (the problems with that last become pretty obvious, in light of the Resource Wars). Since there's no centralized government (yet - the NCR on the West Coast and the Minutemen in Massachusetts are both trying their best), nobody's got the spare resources to try to solve the issue now. (It's hard to worry about long-range travel while you're trying to coax food out of an irradiated landscape.)
I've never understood this logic. If big oil is greedy and profit driven, why would they not want to diversify and get onboard the next big energy thing? There is nothing stopping BP from making solar panels, wind turbines, or nuclear plants, or is there?
Big business don't want competitors. Poor Stan Meyer,who made a car that ran on water, was killed. He died in his brother's arm , when he was invited to the un to speak with some folks...his last words were "they poisoned me!". It's about profit and power. Why ya think JP Morgan, and that other tribble - hole, Thomas Edison went out of their way to stop Telsa? IF Telsa, like some folks here, said he was fully of baloney, than WHY stop him in the first place? And why, right after Tesla died, Federal agents raided his apartment (like right after he died, like someone was watching him) and took his notes and research.....his decedents are STILL trying to get his papers back. It's all about power.
15 years ago, Detroit Edison gave a cease and desist on wind turbines near where I live. And nuclear...a nuclear reactor is just an 1800's steamboiler, using a radioactive source to heat water, which makes steam and turns the turbines....and it leave tons of toxic waste that will remain here for at least 50,000 years. Anyone who thinks nuclear is an advanced, better method to energy needs their head examined. Solar only goes so far, as well.
This is for the oil pimps and public utility and energy cartels. *bends over and drops her skirt while giving the one digit salute*
So STO was right but off by a few centuries...dilithium does become a valuable commodity used as cash
Your pain runs deep.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
I've never understood this logic. If big oil is greedy and profit driven, why would they not want to diversify and get onboard the next big energy thing? There is nothing stopping BP from making solar panels, wind turbines, or nuclear plants, or is there?
Big business don't want competitors. Poor Stan Meyer,who made a car that ran on water, was killed. He died in his brother's arm , when he was invited to the un to speak with some folks...his last words were "they poisoned me!". It's about profit and power. Why ya think JP Morgan, and that other tribble - hole, Thomas Edison went out of their way to stop Telsa? IF Telsa, like some folks here, said he was fully of baloney, than WHY stop him in the first place? And why, right after Tesla died, Federal agents raided his apartment (like right after he died, like someone was watching him) and took his notes and research.....his decedents are STILL trying to get his papers back. It's all about power.
15 years ago, Detroit Edison gave a cease and desist on wind turbines near where I live. And nuclear...a nuclear reactor is just an 1800's steamboiler, using a radioactive source to heat water, which makes steam and turns the turbines....and it leave tons of toxic waste that will remain here for at least 50,000 years. Anyone who thinks nuclear is an advanced, better method to energy needs their head examined. Solar only goes so far, as well.
This is for the oil pimps and public utility and energy cartels. *bends over and drops her skirt while giving the one digit salute*
Of course businesses don't like competition, but cornering the energy market by being the best in every category is a lot easier than trying to shut down competitors. It is always a subject of wonder when someone dies with supposedly great ideas, but as I said earlier, fundamental truths about the universe are always there waiting to be discovered. If those ideas are real, they will be rediscovered.
As for nuclear, the problem of nuclear waste is grossly overstated, given that we've been handling it with no issues for the better part of a century, and there are new ideas that produce no nuclear waste. Its certainly far cleaner than the mess of toxic chemicals and slave labor used to make solar and wind work at the same level, and isn't likely to be destroyed by a passing storm.
radioactive waste is only toxic if stored improperly or the shelters they're stored in aren't properly maintained, which it generally isn't and they generally are - and newer reactor designs that use thorium produce waste that can be recycled - of course, we can't actually BUILD any of these new improved reactors because of all the insane psycho environmentalists constantly sabotaging their own cause
and even waste resulting from accidents is only a problem for HUMANS - take a trip up to chernobyl some day and see what's left of the city inside the exclusion zone...nature has pretty much reclaimed all of it and there are few if any mutations to be seen - it's all lush greenery with healthy animals aplenty
oh,a nd don't even get me STARTED on wind...not only are those towers ugly as hell, they make people sick just by OPERATING because of the frequency of the noise they generate
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
I've never understood this logic. If big oil is greedy and profit driven, why would they not want to diversify and get onboard the next big energy thing? There is nothing stopping BP from making solar panels, wind turbines, or nuclear plants, or is there?
Big business don't want competitors. Poor Stan Meyer,who made a car that ran on water, was killed. He died in his brother's arm , when he was invited to the un to speak with some folks...his last words were "they poisoned me!". It's about profit and power. Why ya think JP Morgan, and that other tribble - hole, Thomas Edison went out of their way to stop Telsa? IF Telsa, like some folks here, said he was fully of baloney, than WHY stop him in the first place? And why, right after Tesla died, Federal agents raided his apartment (like right after he died, like someone was watching him) and took his notes and research.....his decedents are STILL trying to get his papers back. It's all about power.
15 years ago, Detroit Edison gave a cease and desist on wind turbines near where I live. And nuclear...a nuclear reactor is just an 1800's steamboiler, using a radioactive source to heat water, which makes steam and turns the turbines....and it leave tons of toxic waste that will remain here for at least 50,000 years. Anyone who thinks nuclear is an advanced, better method to energy needs their head examined. Solar only goes so far, as well.
This is for the oil pimps and public utility and energy cartels. *bends over and drops her skirt while giving the one digit salute*
Wow, the "facts" here are just amazing.
Nothing "runs on water". The only form in which water stores energy is gravitationally, and using that releases the potential energy stored, so you can't run a car on some sort of internal water wheel. Basic physics, kid.
Edison didn't "go out of his way to stop Telsa<sic>". Nikola Tesla was an employee of Edison's, until he made an improvement to Edison's lightbulb design and then asked for the bonus that Edison had promised. Edison refused to pay, so Tesla walked out. Their argument came over electric-power transmission (AC vs DC), and happened only because Edison couldn't buy or steal Tesla's designs and he was a greedy TRIBBLE who didn't want anyone else to make more money than him off this electricity thing.
Your estimate of the danger of nuclear waste is vastly exaggerated, and fails to take into account new technologies that either produce little if any high-level waste (thorium or molten-salt designs, for example) or utilize those old wastes in new ways. (Pournelle predicted such technologies would come one day, based on the fact that gasoline was once a waste byproduct of kerosene refining, and he turned out to be correct - old fuel can be recycled into new fuel for thorium reactors.)
It's fascinating, however, to see how much of your worldview is colored by your "progressive" agenda (which if followed would in fact result in regression, as no single power source currently available will be sufficient to power our future at anything like the level we enjoy now) rather than by the unrelenting facts of physics. Sadly, to steal a phrase from our mutual foes, reality cares little about our feelings.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,579Community Moderator
Ya mean they can't make those crystals artificially?
Entirely possible. I mean why is Latinum so valuable? Because it can't be replicated. If the same can be said of Dilithium... there must be something in its structure or composition that just can't be replicated artificially.
However the need to have a constant fresh supply was probably mitigated by the 24th Century due to recrystalization technologies. BUT... you still do need fresh crystals for new ships or maybe even for existing ones every once in a while.
Well, I do get where you are coming from and I do wonder why the Federation apparently waited until dilitium supplies started to dry up before they began to explore alternatives.
Bad writing?
What does TOS Season 3, TNG Seasons 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 DS9 Seasons 1 & 2, VOY Seasons 1-7, and ENT Seasons 1 & 2 have to do with ST: D?
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Ya mean they can't make those crystals artificially?
Entirely possible. I mean why is Latinum so valuable? Because it can't be replicated. If the same can be said of Dilithium... there must be something in its structure or composition that just can't be replicated artificially.
However the need to have a constant fresh supply was probably mitigated by the 24th Century due to recrystalization technologies. BUT... you still do need fresh crystals for new ships or maybe even for existing ones every once in a while.
Book needed new because Burnham broke his recrystallizer. He can't buy parts, nor a replacement, implying that the Mercantile keeps such things off the market (after all, the hook they have in their Couriers is that each one has to get dilithium crystals from the Mercantile, and they're given just enough to make a given run - Book was cheating by running some living cargoes to other worlds than the intended destinations, presumably because he could recrystallize his dilithium).
The clear inference is that the Mercantile has locked down the supply in order to keep their Couriers under control. Dilithium can't be replicated, or else the Ent-D wouldn't have needed recrystallizers in the first place, and the Burn would have been more annoyance than disaster. (Also, those little crumbs, barely bigger than my dice - those don't seem to be the sort of thing a Galaxy-class starship would use.)
It might be possible to create dilithium crystals since they appear naturally on alien planets. It is also possible that the Mercantile figured out how to create dilithium crystals, but is keeping the process secret to stay in power. Just provide a limited amount of synthesized dilithium to its Couriers to keep them under control.
As far as Latinum not being replicatable, it is the 32nd Century so what is impossible in the 24th Century might be in the 32nd Century.
I think you're also misunderstanding what I was trying to say in the first place. I wasn't saying FTL is impossible after The Burn. I was trying to explain why everyone and their grandmother has Warp Drive to begin with.
Yes, I did lose track of the point I was trying to make. My point was that calling it a warp drive doesn't mean much, because just like guns, swords and engines, they are very different on some level. Unfortunately we don't know much at all about warp drives and their differences.
The Federation has no reason to look at alternatives to dilithium crystals because they were plentiful enough and could be recrystalized, thus their warp cores would rely on them.
Romulan D'deridexs have a singularity core not a warp core. What does that mean, especially w/respect to dilithium? We have no idea. Given that Roms used warp cores in the past, it seems like the singularity core is an advancement over the warp core, but it allows them to achieve warp travel.
But even for other species, we don't know the specifics of their warp designs. We already know warp can be achieved without dilithium, so perhaps other species that also lacked dilithium crystals have developed other methods for faster warp drives. We just don't know.
Comments
Well, it's not really the same situation. Alternative ways of FTL travel exist in the 24th/25th century, both biological and technological. Starfleet still only using one single form of FTL travel centuries later is.. at least hard to believe.
Any harder to believe than the Dominion using it for 2000 years?
I'm not disputing that the galaxy is big, or that there were alternate methods encountered, mostly by Voyager, however we have to look at the practicality of these methods. Ignoring all the one off instances of time travel, wormholes, ect, we have to look at the technology base behind a lot of these alternatives.
Warp Drive is obviously the most common form, developed by literally every space faring species in existance in Star Trek. Some faster than others. There are some variations on the same theme, but functionally they are all the same.
Subspace Corridors and Underspace are a thing, but the problem is they do not spread across the whole galaxy, and also required knowledge of their existance.
Soliton Wave Riders did prove to be more effecient, but then we had the problem of not only needing a planet bound facility at both the point of origin and destination, but the fact that the Soliton Wave could actually gain more and more energy to the point the destination facility cannot dissipate the Wave and the planet would be destroyed.
Solar Sails are slow.
Transwarp Conduits... ships in them are "subject to extreme gravimetric shear. To compensate for this, the Borg projected a structural integrity field ahead of the ship. Additionally, there were extreme temporal stresses placed upon the vessel, necessitating a chroniton field be projected throughout the ship in order to keep the different sections of the ship in temporal sync." While this seemed to be mostly a Borg problem due to the sheer size of their ships, as Voyager herself didn't seem to need to do this, that's still a rather big issue.
Graviton Catapults could work, but the distance is dependant on the strength of the Graviton Field, which in theory could cause systems to overload if not adjusted properly.
Coaxial Warp Drive works by folding space, and Starfleet had been dreaming of perfecting the tech for years. First encountered by Voyager, they figured out how to deal with particle instabilities that overload the engines... in a small craft. Since Voyager never adapted it for use aboard an Intrepid class... clearly at the time the tech was not viable for large starships at the time. It is possible that the Ent-J may have had a Coaxial Warp Drive, but we don't know.
Quantum Slipstream has been known since Voyager, and is even usable in the 32nd Century, however the major flaw is the need for a rare crystal called Benamite, which could have been what was needed to make the Slipstream Drive far more stable than when Voyager messed around with it.
Wormholes for the most part are natural, unpredictable anomalies. Starfleet managed to figure out how to make micro wormholes, which enabled them to contact Voyager on a more regular basis after learning that Voyager was still active in Delta. However only beings like the Prophets have been able to actually create a fully stable artificial wormhole.
Temporal Displacement Drives may have been extremely regulated by the Temporal Accords to prevent tampering with the timeline.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Propulsion
Now... lets look at the one method not mentioned here. The Spore Drive. It relies on a resource that is renewable, mycelial spores, and, at least using 23rd Century Duotronics, is somewhat reliable. One of the main limiting factors for Spore Jump range was the need for a pilot. Without a Tartegrade or a human with Tartegrade DNA, the Spore Drive was only able to jump a few thousand kilometers. With this pilot... the range was dang near infinite. Another issue with the drive is the potential to jump into an alternate reality as the Mycelial Network is actually a multiversal one. With an incomplete set of coordinates, or deliberate alteration of a set of coordinates being accessed at the right time, a ship can be catapulted into another reality, with some rather nasty side effects for the pilot. There was at least one instance of unintended Time Travel as well, when USS Discovery used her Spore Drive to jump back to the Prime Universe while surfing the blast wave from the destruction of ISS Charon and her toxic Mycelial Power Core.
Normal operation of the Spore Drive is pretty much comparable to skipping a stone across a lake. Minimal impact on the Network as you basically just skim across the surface. Its only when you use it as a power source like on ISS Charon that you threaten all life in all realities.
Its entirely possible that 32nd Century technology could actually make the Spore Drive far more viable than it was with 23rd Century technology.
Reasoning: If someone invents a method of time travel and fails to keep anyone else from learning how it's done, various people and organizations will fiddle with past events because they didn't like the outcome - some diehard Confederate will toss a crate of AK-47s and ammo to Lee's troops at Gettysburg, or somebody will show Hannibal how to build temporary roads for his war elephants, or a Romulan will assassinate Surak as a child, or something. Then someone else will try to undo the change. Eventually, the past will get so tangled up that somebody will decide the only way to fix it would be to stop the inventor of the damned machine from ever succeeding in the first place. Thus, no time machine. (Come to think of it, isn't that what happened to Annorax's original designs?)
For the bodies that signed the Temporal Accords to even pretend to succeed, and for the Temporal Cold War to be stopped, all such technology would have to have been highly regulated in the first place. (You don't imagine the Envoy wanted the 23rd-century Romulan Star Empire to figure out how to transit time, do you? After Galorndon Core, they'd have taken his head!) Therefore, when Timefleet folded and the Accords called for it, all the knowledge of how to mess with history was destroyed. Sure, people know the technology once existed - but we know that Greek fire once existed, and we still don't know for sure how they made it (my money's on discovering some method of creating napalm some 3000 years ago, but if they had that they sure kept it secret!). There's no reason to think that anyone's just going to accidentally stumble upon it again.
On the third hand, it's also possible that resurrecting temporal-transit capability might be the focus of this season. From the previews at the end of Ep 2, it sure sounds like Burnham wants to prevent the Burn from having happened...
I've never understood this logic. If big oil is greedy and profit driven, why would they not want to diversify and get onboard the next big energy thing? There is nothing stopping BP from making solar panels, wind turbines, or nuclear plants, or is there?
Aside from the issues of reality vs fiction, lets ask the same question for nuclear power plants vs hydrocarbon power plants. Why are we supposed to be concerned about CO2 when the great alternative is already here, yet completely overregulated and actively resisted in favor of horribly unreliable and inefficient sources?
But on the subject of gasoline engines, we've seen major efficiency and power improvements over the years. Your modern V6 is more powerful than V8s of a few decades ago. The Wright Flyer had a terrible 12 HP engine, where today people mow their lawns riding on engines nearly twice as powerful. Sure the fuel is the same, but the power and efficiency from the same amount of fuel is dramatically better.
This isn't true, though. Swords are quite varied and differed significantly, definitely in part due to the availability of higher quality steels in Europe as opposed to Japan, for example, but obviously they also had a myriad of designs for different purposes. Guns are also extremely varied both in the mechanism and the projectile, as well as the furniture for many reasons, whether we are looking at broadly the difference between firing and reloading mechanisms, or between two gas operated rifles. Aircraft as well are wildly different, designed for different purposes and operating regimes, from helicopters to the Concorde, but even a 747 is not just a scaled up 737. Yes to the layman they may look similar enough, but they really aren't.
Except for the oddballs that have no guard. But those are made to be hidden and that's a can of worms I'd rather not try to explain as an analogy.
That is why I used swords as an example. Because just like warp drives in Star Trek, pretty much everyone has a version of it. It may not look the same, but it for all intents and purposes is the same thing in function.
Basically... the Federation has a European Longsword, the Klingons have a Japanese Katana, and the Romulans have a falchion. All different designs, but all are still considered swords.
And again with the guns, they may come from different directions, but ultimately an AK-47 and an M-16 performs the same function. Fire a bullet at the enemy using a chemical reaction. How its harnessed really doesn't matter because the result is the same. You have a bullet flying at the enemy because you set off a tiny explosion to propel a projectile down a barrel, imparting a spin for accuracy, and some of that reaction follows said projectile out the barrel for a flash and bang.
Ultimately what I was trying to say was that while designs are different, the end result is the same.
Just because the Romulans used a Singularity rather than a M/AM Reactor doesn't mean they don't have warp drive. They still have something that generates the power that goes to the warp coils to generate a warp field. Just like Nuclear vs Wind power. Different source, same output.
curved
swords
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
And let's not forget the so-called "war clubs" of Polynesia - carved of wood, to be sure, but often with shark's teeth embedded to make a lethal blade, and shaped more like a sword than a club. Much like warp drives, the various "sword" designs are methods of delivering deadly force within arm's reach, intended to slice into opponents (or to slice bits off of opponents, dealer's choice on the exact methodology). And when your arm is twitching on the sand next to your bleeding body, it matters little whether the slicing was done by ironwood or Toledo steel, the net effect is the same.
It's reasonable, then, to suppose that Romulan warp drives work pretty much the same way as everybody else's warp drives - there are only so many ways to skin this particular cat - and require dilithium to focus the energies in the warp reactor. Maybe they don't, but there's no canon support either way, so all we can do is rely on analogy (a tricky guide, but the only one we have).
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
The amount of curve probably depends on type of sword, and may refer more to the blade itself, not the entire body of the blade. So its possible that a falchion can be said to be a curved blade in comparison to the traditional European Longsword without going into full katana or scimitar style.
That is horrifically oversimplifying things. Yes Roms have some kind of FTL drive. Yes swords cut people. The specifics matter greatly though.
If a sword comes up on some armor that it can't penetrate but another can, the design difference matters. The sword might lack reach, it might lack the ability to be swung properly due to how close quarters the fight or room is, it might be too short to get enough force behind it. The difference matters greatly.
Same with guns. Does it have the range you need or the concealibility? Contrary to some beliefs, you can't realistically conceal carry an AR-15 which is why it is almost never used by criminals. Does it have a round appropriate for what you need? The differences matter greatly.
So to bring it back to FTL drives, we have one issue in this new future of Trek, which is whether it uses dilithium or not. That makes the only difference after the Burn. It is the critical design issue. In the way nuclear power is far superior to a field full of wind turbines when the wind isn't blowing, an FTL drive that doesn't need dilithium is what matters most post Burn. And finding and refining a way to do FTL without dilithium also becomes the critical advancement to make.
Basically, we humans innovate mostly when we have no other choice - necessity is the mother of invention, and all that. As long as the way we've been doing things works, we tend to stick with that. And in Trek, we can see that other races are even more averse to change - the Klingon Empire has been spacefaring since at least the 1700s, yet is at pretty much exactly the same state of development as the UFP (or at least the Klingon Defense Force is equal to Starfleet; we don't really see that much about civilian life in either the UFP or the Empire in the shows). As long as there's no real reason to develop a warp drive that doesn't rely on the easiest useful material to locate (it's rare, but apparently not as rare as benamite, and easier to handle than trilithium), why would anyone bother?
Why bring up all these rather specific things for specific situations? Why bring up armor vs swords to try and argue about change when up until The Burn there was no need for it? The frakkin' thing worked! If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Now it broke, and the galaxy is now pretty much Fallout.
As for the "horrifically oversimplified" analogies... I don't get what makes it horrifying. Simple can be easier to understand. How many people are going to care if one AR uses 5.56 NATO and another uses some oddball size like say 5.88 or something? Functionally they work off the same principles. You have a round with gunpowder, gunpowder gets ignighted, bullet is pushed out the business end by a controlled explosive reaction, bullet hits target.
Its the same with warp drive across the galaxy. Most M/AM reactors need Dilithium to regulate the reaction. As we don't know how a singularity works we can only speculate that maybe Dilithium helps to make it usable by warp coils or something.
I don't think it was the Dilithium exploding that caused everything to blow up. I think it might have been that the crystals being destroyed led to unregulated reactions in M/AM Cores, which, as we know... is a BAD thing. Warp Core Breach. In theory, losing the Dilithium in a M/AM reactor would lead to Matter and Antimatter coming into DIRECT contact, rather than contact through Dilithium, which is basically acting like a filter in a coffee maker or something.
Take that out... BOOM.
Very true, however, Star Trek is full of people trying to do stuff just because. I'd say for things like Data, Genesis, spying on pre-warp cultures why do any of that?
And, at least with FTL travel, there may not be a need to reinvent the wheel, but they kept working on faster and faster warp drives, looked into transwarp tech, and so on. Someone is going to want to get from A to B faster and if they think warp is limited, they are going to be looking for an alternative.
Of course the need is pressing post-Burn, so what did they do about that, what have they done since then?
Its overly simplistic because it isn't that FTL travel is broken because of the Burn, but that dilithium is gone, so the way they did it before doesn't work. That doesn't prevent them from using other methods.
If crazy lawmakers ban semi-automatics, for example, that doesn't mean you can't have guns. Revolvers, gatling guns, lever actions, pump actions, and so forth would not be banned. Semi automatic just happens to be the most common type of action in citizen hands, and even there semi-automatic-ness can be achieved through a number of different mechanisms that work differently to harness energy of the exiting bullet to load the next one.
If instead chemical propellants were banned, well we might go back to crossbows for mechanical propulsion, or we could try electromagnetic propulsion, pneumatic propulsion, or even hydraulic propulsion.
The point is the specifics matter. The dilithium is gone, so what else can we do? That doesn't stop FTL travel, maybe it makes it harder, slower, or whatever, but people are going to start working on alternatives, if they didn't already exist.
Without some centralization, it seems unlikely that reasonable alternatives can be found - I mean, Book does list three other ways to ignore Einstein, but all of them either require materials he can't get or take way too long to get anywhere.
The Fallout mention above might be apropos; I'd actually written a comparison myself, but removed it as irrelevant to the point I was making. In the Fallout history, when the oil crunch began, rather than seeking alternatives everyone just doubled down on seizing and exploiting existing oil fields, resulting in the Resource Wars of the mid-21st century. These culminated in US forces driving Chinese occupation forces out of the Alaskan oil fields in early 2077; it's one of the possible reasons for the Chinese first strike in the Great War, on the morning of October 23, 2077. (Records in an old DIA bunker under Boston show that there were no US forces on alert until after Chinese attack craft were spotted approaching Alaska and the East Coast; on the other hand, records in the Enclave bunker under the Whitespring Resort in West Virginia show that Thomas Eckhart, former Secretary of Agriculture, had been exchanging messages with someone who believed the Enclave leadership was in fact trapped in a VR simulation, which could only be escaped by destroying what they perceived to be a small town in southern China. Enclave leadership had denied Eckhart's petition to launch a strike against that city, but given his behavior after the War, it's entirely possible he managed to order one anyway - he certainly had no compunctions about eliminating anyone who might threaten his mastery of the bunker later, including his superiors and remaining officers of the US Army.)
The effect of the Resource Wars on the US populace included a drive to produce cars powered by small fission or fusion plants; these did not supplant gasoline cars entirely, as their price tag started in the millions of dollars (inflation was terrible during the Wars), but there were enough of them that many of the vehicles in West Virginia are still capable of exploding into radioactive fireballs when damaged further. (But we can't drive them. How fair is that?) Nobody in that world ever bothered developing electric cars; the closest they had to a solar power plant was the Helios-One station in Nevada, that required banks of mirrors focusing solar radiation on a central tower (and it was all intended to power the ARCHIMEDES weapon system anyway - when you repair the station two hundred years later, you can send the power to New Vegas, you can distribute it around the Mojave, or you can power up ARCHIMEDES and use its orbital-strike capability once every 24 hours). Other than that electricity was made by fission and fusion power plants, by hydroelectric dams like Hoover, or by burning oil (the problems with that last become pretty obvious, in light of the Resource Wars). Since there's no centralized government (yet - the NCR on the West Coast and the Minutemen in Massachusetts are both trying their best), nobody's got the spare resources to try to solve the issue now. (It's hard to worry about long-range travel while you're trying to coax food out of an irradiated landscape.)
Big business don't want competitors. Poor Stan Meyer,who made a car that ran on water, was killed. He died in his brother's arm , when he was invited to the un to speak with some folks...his last words were "they poisoned me!". It's about profit and power. Why ya think JP Morgan, and that other tribble - hole, Thomas Edison went out of their way to stop Telsa? IF Telsa, like some folks here, said he was fully of baloney, than WHY stop him in the first place? And why, right after Tesla died, Federal agents raided his apartment (like right after he died, like someone was watching him) and took his notes and research.....his decedents are STILL trying to get his papers back. It's all about power.
15 years ago, Detroit Edison gave a cease and desist on wind turbines near where I live. And nuclear...a nuclear reactor is just an 1800's steamboiler, using a radioactive source to heat water, which makes steam and turns the turbines....and it leave tons of toxic waste that will remain here for at least 50,000 years. Anyone who thinks nuclear is an advanced, better method to energy needs their head examined. Solar only goes so far, as well.
This is for the oil pimps and public utility and energy cartels. *bends over and drops her skirt while giving the one digit salute*
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
Of course businesses don't like competition, but cornering the energy market by being the best in every category is a lot easier than trying to shut down competitors. It is always a subject of wonder when someone dies with supposedly great ideas, but as I said earlier, fundamental truths about the universe are always there waiting to be discovered. If those ideas are real, they will be rediscovered.
As for nuclear, the problem of nuclear waste is grossly overstated, given that we've been handling it with no issues for the better part of a century, and there are new ideas that produce no nuclear waste. Its certainly far cleaner than the mess of toxic chemicals and slave labor used to make solar and wind work at the same level, and isn't likely to be destroyed by a passing storm.
and even waste resulting from accidents is only a problem for HUMANS - take a trip up to chernobyl some day and see what's left of the city inside the exclusion zone...nature has pretty much reclaimed all of it and there are few if any mutations to be seen - it's all lush greenery with healthy animals aplenty
oh,a nd don't even get me STARTED on wind...not only are those towers ugly as hell, they make people sick just by OPERATING because of the frequency of the noise they generate
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Nothing "runs on water". The only form in which water stores energy is gravitationally, and using that releases the potential energy stored, so you can't run a car on some sort of internal water wheel. Basic physics, kid.
Edison didn't "go out of his way to stop Telsa<sic>". Nikola Tesla was an employee of Edison's, until he made an improvement to Edison's lightbulb design and then asked for the bonus that Edison had promised. Edison refused to pay, so Tesla walked out. Their argument came over electric-power transmission (AC vs DC), and happened only because Edison couldn't buy or steal Tesla's designs and he was a greedy TRIBBLE who didn't want anyone else to make more money than him off this electricity thing.
Your estimate of the danger of nuclear waste is vastly exaggerated, and fails to take into account new technologies that either produce little if any high-level waste (thorium or molten-salt designs, for example) or utilize those old wastes in new ways. (Pournelle predicted such technologies would come one day, based on the fact that gasoline was once a waste byproduct of kerosene refining, and he turned out to be correct - old fuel can be recycled into new fuel for thorium reactors.)
It's fascinating, however, to see how much of your worldview is colored by your "progressive" agenda (which if followed would in fact result in regression, as no single power source currently available will be sufficient to power our future at anything like the level we enjoy now) rather than by the unrelenting facts of physics. Sadly, to steal a phrase from our mutual foes, reality cares little about our feelings.
Entirely possible. I mean why is Latinum so valuable? Because it can't be replicated. If the same can be said of Dilithium... there must be something in its structure or composition that just can't be replicated artificially.
However the need to have a constant fresh supply was probably mitigated by the 24th Century due to recrystalization technologies. BUT... you still do need fresh crystals for new ships or maybe even for existing ones every once in a while.
What does TOS Season 3, TNG Seasons 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 DS9 Seasons 1 & 2, VOY Seasons 1-7, and ENT Seasons 1 & 2 have to do with ST: D?
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
The clear inference is that the Mercantile has locked down the supply in order to keep their Couriers under control. Dilithium can't be replicated, or else the Ent-D wouldn't have needed recrystallizers in the first place, and the Burn would have been more annoyance than disaster. (Also, those little crumbs, barely bigger than my dice - those don't seem to be the sort of thing a Galaxy-class starship would use.)
As far as Latinum not being replicatable, it is the 32nd Century so what is impossible in the 24th Century might be in the 32nd Century.
Yes, I did lose track of the point I was trying to make. My point was that calling it a warp drive doesn't mean much, because just like guns, swords and engines, they are very different on some level. Unfortunately we don't know much at all about warp drives and their differences.
The Federation has no reason to look at alternatives to dilithium crystals because they were plentiful enough and could be recrystalized, thus their warp cores would rely on them.
Romulan D'deridexs have a singularity core not a warp core. What does that mean, especially w/respect to dilithium? We have no idea. Given that Roms used warp cores in the past, it seems like the singularity core is an advancement over the warp core, but it allows them to achieve warp travel.
But even for other species, we don't know the specifics of their warp designs. We already know warp can be achieved without dilithium, so perhaps other species that also lacked dilithium crystals have developed other methods for faster warp drives. We just don't know.