Phase Cloak worked at least as well as the Mycelium Drive (with less requirements to modify the ship or have any genetically altered personnel), and the Federation (nor Section 31, or Starfleet Intelligence) is not using it during the Dominion War, either. Nor are the Romulans using it, despite having worked on something similar.
Actually Riker mentioned that the Pegasus was believed by Starfleet to have been destroyed the first time the cloak was activated.
The Romulan version had a side-effect of maybe not shifting the phase of your crew along with your ship, which is a pretty bad technical limitation.
Phase Cloak worked at least as well as the Mycelium Drive (with less requirements to modify the ship or have any genetically altered personnel), and the Federation (nor Section 31, or Starfleet Intelligence) is not using it during the Dominion War, either. Nor are the Romulans using it, despite having worked on something similar.
Actually Riker mentioned that the Pegasus was believed by Starfleet to have been destroyed the first time the cloak was activated.
But by the Dominion War, they know better. In fact, everyone can know that better, because Picard said they would inform the Romulan publically about this breach of the Treaty.
The Romulan version had a side-effect of maybe not shifting the phase of your crew along with your ship, which is a pretty bad technical limitation.
I am not sure that was the exact problem they had, but they definitely had a problem.
But there are basically two views on the future of the Spore Drive: Technical limitations (like a genetically modified navigator that might go insane/catatonic from too much jumping) can be fixed, or they might not be fixable and pose a permanent hindrance. If you are in the first camp, you would have to assume the same for phase cloak. If you're in the latter, you're not surprised that the Romulan phase cloak is not seen again.
And for examples on long problems can remain unifxed: The Omega Molecule was also discovered by the Federation in the 23rd century, and they have not found a way to make it safe, and instead decided to bury the tech and even see it as ultimate safety risk.
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Phase Cloak worked at least as well as the Mycelium Drive (with less requirements to modify the ship or have any genetically altered personnel), and the Federation (nor Section 31, or Starfleet Intelligence) is not using it during the Dominion War, either. Nor are the Romulans using it, despite having worked on something similar.
Actually Riker mentioned that the Pegasus was believed by Starfleet to have been destroyed the first time the cloak was activated.
But by the Dominion War, they know better. In fact, everyone can know that better, because Picard said they would inform the Romulan publically about this breach of the Treaty.
Maybe, but that was years after the research had been aborted.
The Romulan version had a side-effect of maybe not shifting the phase of your crew along with your ship, which is a pretty bad technical limitation.
I am not sure that was the exact problem they had, but they definitely had a problem.
But there are basically two views on the future of the Spore Drive: Technical limitations (like a genetically modified navigator that might go insane/catatonic from too much jumping) can be fixed, or they might not be fixable and pose a permanent hindrance. If you are in the first camp, you would have to assume the same for phase cloak. If you're in the latter, you're not surprised that the Romulan phase cloak is not seen again.
And for examples on long problems can remain unifxed: The Omega Molecule was also discovered by the Federation in the 23rd century, and they have not found a way to make it safe, and instead decided to bury the tech and even see it as ultimate safety risk.
Or maybe the guys chose to change research focus and research something else instead? I mean if they had a more promising tech they may have chosen to dump the one with issues and focus on one with more promise?
A warp drive can do that just as fine. The battle at Pavo was a special case, and strained the navigator extremely.
Warp drive can instantly take a ship from deep space into a cave, planetside, completely unnoticed?
Of course. Otherwise, collision with interstellar bodies would be part of canon. You need extremely precise navigation for it, which may be beyond DISC-era Starfleet, but I don't see how it would not be possible in principle.
All in all, the assessment that the spore drive would be so overwhelmingly better than the standard warp drive seems to lack a bit of evidence.
They hand wave it, but the official explanation is that you fly around all the planets ands stars in your way...
A warp drive can do that just as fine. The battle at Pavo was a special case, and strained the navigator extremely.
Warp drive can instantly take a ship from deep space into a cave, planetside, completely unnoticed?
Of course. Otherwise, collision with interstellar bodies would be part of canon. You need extremely precise navigation for it, which may be beyond DISC-era Starfleet, but I don't see how it would not be possible in principle.
All in all, the assessment that the spore drive would be so overwhelmingly better than the standard warp drive seems to lack a bit of evidence.
They hand wave it, but the official explanation is that you fly around all the planets ands stars in your way...
It should be also noted that space is mostly empty, You can easily plot a course from earth to outside the solar system and not hit anything.
There's a huge flaw with the Spore Drive - one that Lorca deliberately set out to use, but one which any ship using the drive would encounter fairly shortly. That's the fact that its jumps aren't limited to just the one universe. And any FTL drive that has a greater than 1% chance of dumping you in the wrong universe at the end of a jump is simply not a viable option for either reasonable exploration or military transport.
That's along with the fact that it requires genetically altering and then torturing a sapient being, of course.
Didn't Lt. Reed say in Enterprise that without the Deflector, the next grain of sand or whatever small particle they hit would leave a hole in the hull the size of his fist?
"But we have deflectors or that!" Sure, but if the deflector can do that, it can just as well deflect the sand and stones of the planetary body.
No deflector is powerful enough to protect against something that big and compacted. Otherwise the Enterprise-E would have either bounced or slid off the Scimitar rather than burying her nose into her.
As to the Spore Drive... The combination of the chance of jumping realities as well as the modified human Navigator is the problem. Until Starfleet can come up with a viable non-human interface, the tech is promising, but not viable. And based on the fact we never hear about it in "the future", its possible that Starfleet never solved that problem. MAYBE with 25th Century Bio-Neural Circuitry its possible, but 23rd Century Duotronics are just not powerful enough to manage anything more than tactical maneuver jumps with any accuracy.
But see, there is really no difference between a planet at speed 100,000 m/s and a particle close to light speed.
Hence my conclusion that warp drive itself makes the ship untouchable for a moment.
Countered by all the times things have been hit at warp, either by accident or by weapons fire of some kind.
First time we saw the Borg, they were able to knock the Enterprise out of Warp.
And if Warp Drive makes the ship "untouchable", then why didn't the Enterprise just Warp out of the asteroid after finding the Pegasus?
The argument was made that this wouldn't stop anyone else but the federation.
As I wrote earlier, another reason why they don't use the spore drive might be that some time later, a simple countermeasure was found. You know, "activate the sporejump jammers!"
By that same argument... what's to stop some alien in the Pegasus Galaxy from using it? Or how about someone in the Delta Quadrant? How are "jammers" supposed to protect the multiverse if they don't have that kind of range?
The tech isn't viable, and unless you REALLY didn't care about anything whatsoever, no one would want to risk losing an entire ship, let alone possibly a fleet, to another universe. There are just way too many risks if not handled properly.
The only thing stopping anyone right now is the fact they don't even know what it is, so they can't reverse engineer it. Seeing it in action is one thing. Recreating it when you have absolutely no idea what it is... is another.
You can't "close off the Network", you can't just destroy all traces of it in any capacity...
All you can do... is bury it so deep it never sees the light of day.
Which in the case of the Spore Drive is somewhat easy because it was supposed to be a secret project. Therefor the details can easily be suppressed. Officially... there is no such thing as a Spore Drive. It doesn't exist.
The way I see it... the Spore Drive is like Red October and her Caterpillar Drive. Only one exists. And for all intents and purposes the tech is interesting but not viable. The US couldn't get it to work. The Soviets did, but only ever made one. And as far as they know... that working Caterpillar Drive is in pieces in one of the deepest places in the Atlantic and unsalvageable.
There is one major difference, even at superluminal velocities, between a grain of sand and a planet. A grain of sand doesn't have a gravitational field worth worrying about. Planets tend to have that. (Part of the reason for the creation of the temporary wormhole in STTMP was that without the warp drive being properly balanced, it was too dangerous to use it so deep in the Sun's gravity well - they were supposed to wait until they were outside Saturn's orbit, but that would take hours even at high impulse.)
See, the problem is that gravity warps space. The curvature of the warp steepens as you get deeper into the gravity well. It's part of what tipped Einstein off about relativity - the orbit of Mercury didn't quite match what Newton and Kepler said it should be, and astrophysicists had spent years trying to explain that (including the idea of there being an Earth-sized planet even closer to the Sun, the original "Planet Vulcan"). Einstein came up with the concept of "frame drag" - that gravity warps space, and the gravity of a body as large as the Sun is so great it actually drags space around with it as it spins. That's been experimentally proven, and is in fact part of the series of calculations that makes GPS work (Earth's frame drag is less noticeable than Sol's, but quite measurable). Running your warp drive through space already tightly warped would be a very bad decision.
Picard would snitch on you if you violated the Treaty or arrest you if you blew up Cardassian treaty violation ships.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
[...]
It should be also noted that space is mostly empty, You can easily plot a course from earth to outside the solar system and not hit anything.
Uh, anything? No way. "Vacuum" in interstellar space is defined as about 0.001 particles per cubic centimeter.
"Ah, particles, they are easily bounced off!" No, they are not, We are moving at warp speeds, that is, speeds beyond the speed of light. The amount of energy from a single atom hitting a ship moving at just UNDER light speed would be enough to vaporize it. And you'll hit trillions of particles on your way to the next star, and I use that term inaccurately, because the actual number is much higher.
Well, the energy of an object moving faster than light is actually... weird.
The relativistic energy for an object of mass m with a speed of v is E = mc² / SQRT(1-v²c²).
if v > c, the term under the squareroot becomes negative, which means there is no solution in the real numbers for this formula. Instead, the energy would need to be imaginary (or rather, complex). What it means if you collide with that, I dunno. Probably leads to even more complex numbers everywhere, and what these mean in the real world, I don't know.
"But we have deflectors or that!" Sure, but if the deflector can do that, it can just as well deflect the sand and stones of the planetary body.
Probably. But maybe not at warp speed, since the density is considerably higher and the deflector is probably not designed to handle head on collisions with planets at warp. So you would most likely lack a considerable stealth aspect.
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Didn't Lt. Reed say in Enterprise that without the Deflector, the next grain of sand or whatever small particle they hit would leave a hole in the hull the size of his fist?
"But we have deflectors or that!" Sure, but if the deflector can do that, it can just as well deflect the sand and stones of the planetary body.
No deflector is powerful enough to protect against something that big and compacted. Otherwise the Enterprise-E would have either bounced or slid off the Scimitar rather than burying her nose into her.
But see, there is really no difference between a planet at speed 100,000 m/s and a particle close to light speed.
Hence my conclusion that warp drive itself makes the ship untouchable for a moment.
As to the Spore Drive... The combination of the chance of jumping realities as well as the modified human Navigator is the problem. Until Starfleet can come up with a viable non-human interface, the tech is promising, but not viable.[...]
The argument was made that this wouldn't stop anyone else but the federation.
Well, if you literally need a human navigator, that makes most other cultures in the galaxy unqualified. ANd they made a point that the Tardigrade DNA isn't compatible with everyone.
Now, maybe the Romulans and Klingons start capturing humans en masse so they can enslave them as navigators. But whether that works so well is unclear.
Also, the human navigator seems to undergo considerably changes that could make him unsuitable to do his job in the long run (a few hundred jumps or so?). And we don't know if the genes alone are enough - if you also need to be well versed on the theory of the Mycelium Network, it becomes hard to get or create qualified and yet trustworthy slaves for the job.
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Starfleet, however, may decide to shut it down. As of right now, there is only one known ship with a Spore Drive, and that is Discovery. I don't see her using it often now.
This isn't really a plausible explanation. Historically, no technology has ever been abandoned merely because its discoverer decided it was "unethical". Once something has been shown to be possible, people will work to replicate it even you refuse to share or use it anymore. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
Eh, while not abandoned, nuclear power plants were essentially shunned since the late 1970s due to anti-nuclear hysteria. The existing ones were more or less allowed to stay, which is even sillier since the older designs are more likely to have problems than constantly improved/modernized designs. And if nuclear power had been embraced, we wouldn't have a problem with greenhouse gases (or not nearly as much of one).
And as another example, Daisy, the BB gun maker, had a neat design for caseless ammo for its BB guns, the Daisy V/L. However the government banned it and it was abandoned.
Also, the human navigator seems to undergo considerably changes that could make him unsuitable to do his job in the long run (a few hundred jumps or so?). And we don't know if the genes alone are enough - if you also need to be well versed on the theory of the Mycelium Network, it becomes hard to get or create qualified and yet trustworthy slaves for the job.
When has human sacrifice ever stopped unethical organizations or races? The only reason why it would stop Section 31 is if the navigators became a threat to the Federation.
Also, the human navigator seems to undergo considerably changes that could make him unsuitable to do his job in the long run (a few hundred jumps or so?). And we don't know if the genes alone are enough - if you also need to be well versed on the theory of the Mycelium Network, it becomes hard to get or create qualified and yet trustworthy slaves for the job.
When has human sacrifice ever stopped unethical organizations or races? The only reason why it would stop Section 31 is if the navigators became a threat to the Federation.
These navigators might at the minimum become a threat to your mission, if they go "weird" at the wrong time. And it's not just about the unethical nature, but also the impractical nature of having to train people in an advanced theoretical field of science, only to throw them away every hundred or so jumps. This isn't like grabbing a bunch of untrained people and having them work to death as slaves. It's more like picking people with a university degree to send them on a life-threatening missions into irradiated territory. You might be far better off putting talented people like that on some actual research. Maybe they invent a spore drive navigation computer, or a genesis device, or quantum torpedoes, or a cure for Space Herpes.
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Also, the human navigator seems to undergo considerably changes that could make him unsuitable to do his job in the long run (a few hundred jumps or so?). And we don't know if the genes alone are enough - if you also need to be well versed on the theory of the Mycelium Network, it becomes hard to get or create qualified and yet trustworthy slaves for the job.
When has human sacrifice ever stopped unethical organizations or races? The only reason why it would stop Section 31 is if the navigators became a threat to the Federation.
These navigators might at the minimum become a threat to your mission, if they go "weird" at the wrong time. And it's not just about the unethical nature, but also the impractical nature of having to train people in an advanced theoretical field of science, only to throw them away every hundred or so jumps. This isn't like grabbing a bunch of untrained people and having them work to death as slaves. It's more like picking people with a university degree to send them on a life-threatening missions into irradiated territory. You might be far better off putting talented people like that on some actual research. Maybe they invent a spore drive navigation computer, or a genesis device, or quantum torpedoes, or a cure for Space Herpes.
Was thinking of something more easy like cloning Stamets with his all of his knowledge copied. It wouldn't be difficult for Section 31 to get a sample of his blood and his memories through a routine medical examination.
Comments
The Romulan version had a side-effect of maybe not shifting the phase of your crew along with your ship, which is a pretty bad technical limitation.
My character Tsin'xing
I am not sure that was the exact problem they had, but they definitely had a problem.
But there are basically two views on the future of the Spore Drive: Technical limitations (like a genetically modified navigator that might go insane/catatonic from too much jumping) can be fixed, or they might not be fixable and pose a permanent hindrance. If you are in the first camp, you would have to assume the same for phase cloak. If you're in the latter, you're not surprised that the Romulan phase cloak is not seen again.
And for examples on long problems can remain unifxed: The Omega Molecule was also discovered by the Federation in the 23rd century, and they have not found a way to make it safe, and instead decided to bury the tech and even see it as ultimate safety risk.
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
That's along with the fact that it requires genetically altering and then torturing a sapient being, of course.
No deflector is powerful enough to protect against something that big and compacted. Otherwise the Enterprise-E would have either bounced or slid off the Scimitar rather than burying her nose into her.
As to the Spore Drive... The combination of the chance of jumping realities as well as the modified human Navigator is the problem. Until Starfleet can come up with a viable non-human interface, the tech is promising, but not viable. And based on the fact we never hear about it in "the future", its possible that Starfleet never solved that problem. MAYBE with 25th Century Bio-Neural Circuitry its possible, but 23rd Century Duotronics are just not powerful enough to manage anything more than tactical maneuver jumps with any accuracy.
Countered by all the times things have been hit at warp, either by accident or by weapons fire of some kind.
First time we saw the Borg, they were able to knock the Enterprise out of Warp.
And if Warp Drive makes the ship "untouchable", then why didn't the Enterprise just Warp out of the asteroid after finding the Pegasus?
By that same argument... what's to stop some alien in the Pegasus Galaxy from using it? Or how about someone in the Delta Quadrant? How are "jammers" supposed to protect the multiverse if they don't have that kind of range?
The tech isn't viable, and unless you REALLY didn't care about anything whatsoever, no one would want to risk losing an entire ship, let alone possibly a fleet, to another universe. There are just way too many risks if not handled properly.
The only thing stopping anyone right now is the fact they don't even know what it is, so they can't reverse engineer it. Seeing it in action is one thing. Recreating it when you have absolutely no idea what it is... is another.
You can't "close off the Network", you can't just destroy all traces of it in any capacity...
All you can do... is bury it so deep it never sees the light of day.
Which in the case of the Spore Drive is somewhat easy because it was supposed to be a secret project. Therefor the details can easily be suppressed. Officially... there is no such thing as a Spore Drive. It doesn't exist.
The way I see it... the Spore Drive is like Red October and her Caterpillar Drive. Only one exists. And for all intents and purposes the tech is interesting but not viable. The US couldn't get it to work. The Soviets did, but only ever made one. And as far as they know... that working Caterpillar Drive is in pieces in one of the deepest places in the Atlantic and unsalvageable.
And I... was never here.
See, the problem is that gravity warps space. The curvature of the warp steepens as you get deeper into the gravity well. It's part of what tipped Einstein off about relativity - the orbit of Mercury didn't quite match what Newton and Kepler said it should be, and astrophysicists had spent years trying to explain that (including the idea of there being an Earth-sized planet even closer to the Sun, the original "Planet Vulcan"). Einstein came up with the concept of "frame drag" - that gravity warps space, and the gravity of a body as large as the Sun is so great it actually drags space around with it as it spins. That's been experimentally proven, and is in fact part of the series of calculations that makes GPS work (Earth's frame drag is less noticeable than Sol's, but quite measurable). Running your warp drive through space already tightly warped would be a very bad decision.
Treaty of Algeron on the cloak?
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
The relativistic energy for an object of mass m with a speed of v is E = mc² / SQRT(1-v²c²).
if v > c, the term under the squareroot becomes negative, which means there is no solution in the real numbers for this formula. Instead, the energy would need to be imaginary (or rather, complex). What it means if you collide with that, I dunno. Probably leads to even more complex numbers everywhere, and what these mean in the real world, I don't know.
Probably. But maybe not at warp speed, since the density is considerably higher and the deflector is probably not designed to handle head on collisions with planets at warp. So you would most likely lack a considerable stealth aspect.
Now, maybe the Romulans and Klingons start capturing humans en masse so they can enslave them as navigators. But whether that works so well is unclear.
Also, the human navigator seems to undergo considerably changes that could make him unsuitable to do his job in the long run (a few hundred jumps or so?). And we don't know if the genes alone are enough - if you also need to be well versed on the theory of the Mycelium Network, it becomes hard to get or create qualified and yet trustworthy slaves for the job.
Eh, while not abandoned, nuclear power plants were essentially shunned since the late 1970s due to anti-nuclear hysteria. The existing ones were more or less allowed to stay, which is even sillier since the older designs are more likely to have problems than constantly improved/modernized designs. And if nuclear power had been embraced, we wouldn't have a problem with greenhouse gases (or not nearly as much of one).
And as another example, Daisy, the BB gun maker, had a neat design for caseless ammo for its BB guns, the Daisy V/L. However the government banned it and it was abandoned.
When has human sacrifice ever stopped unethical organizations or races? The only reason why it would stop Section 31 is if the navigators became a threat to the Federation.
Was thinking of something more easy like cloning Stamets with his all of his knowledge copied. It wouldn't be difficult for Section 31 to get a sample of his blood and his memories through a routine medical examination.