It's about fucking time!

[Uraniun235]

It's sci-fi, I couldn't care if ST has flimsy ships, they look cool.

If you're going for looks, fine. The E-E's a pretty lady, no doubt.[/quote]
Bah! E-D all the way!

...I'm serious. Well, for TNG+, anyways. Refit E-Nil still wins.

[Patrick Degan]

As for the quantum singularity, I've been thinking it might not be such a huge advantage over M/AM. In the TNG episode where Data explained the warbird's power source, Picard didn't seem like he felt particularly threatened by it. Romulan starships used to be weak in Kirk's era compared to their Klingon and Fed counterparts, so the QS might just be desperate overcompensation on the Roms' part.

There are advantages and disadvantages to the quantum singularity power source. One of the chief ones is that you can use just about any matter to dump into the mass to sustain it. This means a Romulan Warbird can essentially "refuel" itself off of anything anywhere; interstellar gas and dust, asteroids pulverised into dust, cometary debris, gasses skimmed off the top layers of Jovian-type planets, lunar dirt, anything that happens to be on hand wherever the ship is.

The biggest disadvantage to the quantum singularity power source is that quantum black holes don't last very long. Bodies which mass less than 2150 metric tons have lifetimes of less than a second, and ones massing only one metric ton lifetimes measured in only billionths of a billionth of a second. And the smaller a quantum black hole is, the more mass you have to dump into it to keep it sustained for any useable lifetime, because Hawking decay is constantly working to evaporate the thing. And when a quantum black hole expires, it does so with a massive burst of gamma radiation.

The smallest quantum black hole which could be sustained for any truly useable length of time would be one massing 670000 metric tons (measuring 9.9E-17cm. in radius), which would take a year to evaporate. A constant matter feed of 21.26 g/sec would be sufficent to counterbalance the decay rate and maintain the singularity's mass, and the Romulan Warbird could regularly collect matter to keep its feeder mass reserve up to stock.

Theoretically, a 670000 tonne quantum singularity should produce the equivalent power of a 52000TW nuclear reactor, assuming 100% efficency of course. But since Romulan warpdrives and weaponry do not appear to be any more powerful than their Federation and Klingon analogues, it can be reasonably surmised that the Romulans are getting horrible efficency from their system.

The only real advantage I can see from the Romulans adopting quantum singularity power sources for their starships is that it dispenses with the fuel processing and transport infrastructure which the other Alpha Quadrant powers must rely upon to sustain their fleets, and also that their ships can essentially "live off the land". Perhaps the Romulan Empire ran out of dilithium, which is essential to Federation and Klingon M/AM based power systems (and which they still seem to possess in sufficent supply) and this necessitated finding an alternate power source to sustain their fleet in the field.

[Tootootoo]

Part of the lack of efficiency could be due to a lot of the singularity's power having to be used just to keep itself stable. I'm sure harnessing something like that would require powerful systems just to keep it moving with the rest of the ship and counterballance the singularity's gravity well. I doubt a ship's artificial gravity would overpower the gravity of a black hole. That may explain why, even though they have a massive power source, they don't seem much stronger then anybody else.

[Patrick Degan]

From everything I've ever read on the subject, a black hole's hypergravity isn't really felt until an object crosses the event horizon, and in the above-mentioned singularity, that is extraordinarily tiny. Beyond the critical radius, the body should "feel" more or less like a 670000 tonne mass. And the problem of keeping it stable depends upon the ability to feed in enough matter to counterbalance the QS' decay rate.

My conjecture of a containment system for the quantum singularity is that it must be based around a reverse-tractor web designed to keep the body at rest with respect to the ship. This would enable the Romulan crew to tote the thing about in their starship. Of course, the next problem to be solved after that would be to counter the tidal stresses generated by the singularity's rotation, and of course after that protecting the crew from the very lethal X-ray output and magnetic flux emanating from the body.

If all that requires more than 95% of the energy yield, it would certainly account for the very poor efficency of the system overall. Which is why the only reason I can think for the Romulans to adopt it as their power source is connected with total independence from fuel processing and transport requirements, and/or the need to find an alternative to a power system design which seems to depend upon dilithium if they no longer have sufficent reserves to supply their fleet with.

[Captain Kruger]

Good points, Patrick. IIRC, the Romulan Star Empire is significantly smaller and has much less resources than either the UFP or Klingon Empire individually, let alone what the two represent as an allied force. This could explain a Romulan desire to minimize the crippling of their fleet's operations from UFP or Klingon strikes on their resources, hence the inefficient but long-lasting and independent quantum singularities.

[Ryoga]

I'm capable of looking past reality filters if and when it is suited. I even enjoyed "Treasure Planet", which throws reality to the winds. But Trek badgers us with its constant pretensions of technicality, which makes it difficult for me to shut down that filter. Every time they use a technical term, my engineering mentality kicks in: what does that mean? What the fuck are they talking about? How they fuck could they build something so goddamned stupid in the first place?

Hey, you liked 'Treasure Planet' too? Cool. I thought I was the only one.