frogcurry wrote:Because you are going to stand there in front of a hole in your ship unprotected for a few days? No. You would use the battery power to evacuate.
You are missing my point - the battery is for short term power to allow evacuation and NOT operation in the area. You would use main power for it if you wanted to stay in the area (and if you had any brains you would wear a suit for it in case of system failure for the period, given that your ship has just been in a battle). My whole point is that the assumption "forcefields won't work when power fails" is wrong, because you can keep them up long enough to get to another area of the ship and close off the exposed area with doors.
And what happens when you're still trying to evacuate and the forcefield goes down with a hatch to another compartment open? And it's you that's missing the point. It's relatively easy to produce 30MW with the main reactor but storing that much energy in a battery so that it will last long enough for anyone to evacuate is not the trivial matter that you seem to think that it is.
I agree. I am NOT suggesting getting rid of doors. I said in my first point they are a second choice, but not useless. And you pretty much agreed with me on that...
Nonsense. Doors are first choice because they can be closed prior to any hull breach without concern about any power loss causing them to fail. And if they are correctly designed a power loss will close the doors that are open and save the rest of the crew while the forcefields go down.
I think the problem here is my fault in that I was not clear - I am referring to more mechanically actuated systems when I say "non-power", I should have used the phrase "non-electrical". The type of set-up you described is known to me, but I class it as a electrical system as electrical surges (i.e. from ion cannons) could affect it (knocking out distribution and causing the door to close). A purely mechanical system would presumably be immune to this.
That's what we're saying. A mechanical system does not share the weakness of electrical systems(like forcefields). If I design a blast door, I set it up with hydraulics, pneumatics or some kind of spring system such that it stays open when power is applied to it. As such, IF it is still open when there is a breach even if power goes down the door shuts and protects the rest of the ship.
None. But a power system disruption will close the blast door but not activate the forcefield. The only way to avoid that is to make your door activate on a control signal and with a powered driver, not loss of current.
That's the point. We WANT the door to close when there's a loss of power. It's called a fail safe. If there's a loss of power with the forcefield, it turns off and you don't have any thing between you and vacuum.
I would hate to rely on a swinging blast door of all things. The driving force would need to push the door against air blasting down the corridor as well as physical impacts from the dying redshirts, and you can't assume the door is operating under gravity. And you need to support that weight securely against gravity as well during normal ship operations. You seem to want to use systems that don't need a motor to close, but I think you might find that hard in this design. Just do what everyone else does and have them come out the walls... I did say that the space taken up by the door would probably be small anyway.
Actually if you set your swinging style doors up right you can use the force of the air loss to help close the door and have the aformentioned mechanical systems in place to shut it if the air is working against you, which would also cancel the necessity of needing AG to be working.
Blast doors isolate sections with pre-defined boundaries. Forcefields can seal the damage at the point where it occurs, without the need to sacrifice all the items/personnel in the areas within the blast doors. That and an ability to restore the field after failing due to impacts/ blasts are the advantages over blast doors. I didn't say they were better than blast doors.
And if you use the forcefields to back up the blast doors you can still save everything in that section but if there's a power failure that causes the forcefield to go down, those blast doors had damn well better be shut because I am not sacrificing the rest of the crew to a hull breach that can be easily isolated.
Says me. The assumption of auxilary power doesn't necessarily hold. When the Defiant lost all power systems due to Breen weapons, are we to assume it had a back-up generator that wasn't shutdown? Batteries would be much less vulnerable to disruption, so I think it would make sense if they were using batteries to power the system (of course this is ST, so they probably did have a magically immune auxilary generator).
Batteries also wouldn't last as long. Batteries are not some magic fix-it. And they are VERY vulnerable to disruption. For example, a circuit overload from an Ion cannon. Don't believe me? Try overcharging a car battery, you'll get covered in hot battery acid before you even know what happened.
As is the energy requirements for a forcefield and the energy storage technology of a 2300 AD civilisation.
Which still doesn't address how the damn forcefields and AG are supposed to remain active if ALL power is lost. And don't tell me batteries, because to do that you still need to have all kinds of wires, controls and circuits running all over the ship that can be disrupted. And likely will if you have something that manages to kill the main power.
And learn to use the damn quote tags. I had to go back and read previous posts to figure out what it was that you were quoting and what it was you were saying.
. I'd almost prefer an independent fusion generator with its own fuel supply or something. Batteries (at least as we know them) just don't have that kind of output in any economy-sized package.
