Trek ships that could stand up to Wars ships.

[Starglider]

I recalled some additional 'evidence' (if you can call it that) on this. In the Voyager episode 'Hunters', the Hirogen comm stations are described as being powered by artificial singularities a centimeter in diameter, with a power output of four terawatts. For comparison, an earth-mass black hole has an event horizon diameter of 1.7 cm and a Hawking radiation output of half a picowatt (lifetime about 10^46 years). WTF was supposed to be going on here I have no idea, I can only assume it was spin-based energy storage rather than annihilation.

[Jark]

I recalled some additional 'evidence' (if you can call it that) on this. In the Voyager episode 'Hunters', the Hirogen comm stations are described as being powered by artificial singularities a centimeter in diameter, with a power output of four terawatts. For comparison, an earth-mass black hole has an event horizon diameter of 1.7 cm and a Hawking radiation output of half a picowatt (lifetime about 10^46 years). WTF was supposed to be going on here I have no idea, I can only assume it was spin-based energy storage rather than annihilation.

I took a look at the transcript of this episode since I remembered another number that was said. Here's several snippets

JANEWAY: Report.
KIM: We're encountering some kind of gravimetric forces.
CHAKOTAY: Source?
KIM: Looks like it's coming from the relay station we're heading for.
JANEWAY: That station is still two light years away. How could it project a gravimetric field this far?
CHAKOTAY: It would have to have an incredibly powerful energy source.

TUVOK: The gravimetric field.
KIM: Commander, if my sensors are right, that station is using a quantum singularity as it's power source.
PARIS: A black hole?
KIM: It's a tiny one, probably about a centimetre in diameter, but it's putting out almost four terawatts of energy.
CHAKOTAY: Someone's managed to contain a singularity and construct a space station around it and tap it's power. That's fascinating.

JANEWAY: I've learned a few interesting things about that relay station. It's generating as much energy every minute as a typical star puts out in a year.


I'm not sure how to rationalize the massive difference in power levels here. If we use the sun as an example and if Wiki is correct on this matter, the total energy output of the sun is 3.86×10^26 watts. That would be 1.21x10^34 joules in a year, meaning the station outputs 2.03x10^32 watts going by that last quote from Janeway assuming our star is what they'd call typical.

[Starglider]

If we use the sun as an example and if Wiki is correct on this matter, the total energy output of the sun is 3.86×10^26 watts. That would be 1.21x10^34 joules in a year, meaning the station outputs 2.03x10^32 watts going by that last quote from Janeway assuming our star is what they'd call typical.

Clearly Janeway thinks 'tera' means 10^32 rather than 10^12. It would hardly be her most serious delusion, although it handily tops Data's Ent-D power output quote for idiocy.

[Jark]

Clearly Janeway thinks 'tera' means 10^32 rather than 10^12. It would hardly be her most serious delusion, although it handily tops Data's Ent-D power output quote for idiocy.

Barring any way to rationally explain both power figures wouldn't Janeways statement carry more weight? Kims statement came as they just approached the station and took some preliminary scans of it. Janeways statement comes much later in the episode after they'd had a lot more time to study it in greater detail.


When you refer to Datas power output quote, is that the one from the episode with the female Q? I'd read somewhere that Kim gave a corroborating statement in an episode of Voyager, or is that questionable as well? I'm not sure which episode it was so I can't find the quote.

[Jark]

Edit of the above.

I guess Kims statement also has some validity since he gives an actual power figure, whereas Janeway doesn't.

[Starglider]

Barring any way to rationally explain both power figures wouldn't Janeways statement carry more weight?

Where the hell is all that energy going to go? A continuous power output equivalent to ~525,000 Sol-type stars? That's the same luminosity as a fair-sized globular cluster! Assuming you're radiating that all away into subspace somehow, the efficiency required to not instantly vaporise the array is insane, something like fifteen orders of magnitude better than the death star. Even a neutrino flux of that magnitude would instantly vaporise anything within thousands of kilometres around. You'd have to use some kind of technobabble subspace radiation - yet somehow Voyager's systems are completely unaffected by close proximity. Then there's the fact that there are tens of these relay stations scattered across the delta quadrant, and Janeway's figure would make them incredibly strong point sources for /something/, easily noticable from across the galaxy.

Incidentally the stellar power output figure of 3.83×10^26 W implies a mass loss of 1.3 x 10^17 kg a year, for the sun. The stations are supposedly 100,000 years old (how they estimated this isn't stated as far as I recall). That's a total fuel requirement of 6.8 x 10^27 kg over the lifespan of the stations, a little under four times the mass of Jupiter. There's just no way to store the necessary amount of fuel inside the station as anything less than large chunks of neutronium - but not anywhere near large enough to be stable, so you'd have to have an incredible gravitic confinement system as well (I've already pointed out why storing all the mass in black holes is impossible). The tidal forces alone should've ripped Voyager, not to mention the station, apart.

So no, the simplest answer is definitely that Kim is reasonably competent and Janeway is on crack. She just has her crew too terrorised to point it out to her (just look what happens to Chakotay every time he tries ).

[Jark]

The station was projecting that gravimetric field out to a distance of 2 lightyears which they said would require an enormous power source.

From what I recall, Voyager and the Hirogen ships weren't in any serious danger until the singularity was exposed at the end of the episode. Even with the station somehow containing it, Voyager couldn't safely approach it.

[Jark]

Sorry, forgot to mention that they did mention how they determined the stations age

Captain's log, Stardate 51501.4. After two days at high warp we're close enough to the relay station to see it on long-range visual sensors.

[Bridge]

PARIS: Not exactly what I expected. It looks ancient.
KIM: Radiometric decay rations indicate it's at least one hundred thousand years old.
CHAKOTAY: Scan for life forms.
KIM: Negative, sir. Looks like there's nobody home.
CHAKOTAY: Oh, that's good news. Here we go again.
TUVOK: The gravimetric field.
KIM: Commander, if my sensors are right, that station is using a quantum singularity as it's power source.
PARIS: A black hole?
KIM: It's a tiny one, probably about a centimetre in diameter, but it's putting out almost four terawatts of energy.
CHAKOTAY: Someone's managed to contain a singularity and construct a space station around it and tap it's power. That's fascinating.
PARIS: Can we take the ship any closer?
KIM: I wouldn't recommend it. Voyager will take a beating from the gravimetric eddies
CHAKOTAY: All right, Tom, back us off.

[Starglider]

The station was projecting that gravimetric field out to a distance of 2 lightyears which they said would require an enormous power source.

What exactly is this gravimetric field then? Standard gravity fields require exactly zero power to generate; in fact AFAIK it isn't actually possible to carry away energy with a static gravity field, any more than a permenant magnet constantly loses energy, so any energy used in an artificial means of creating one would have to turn into waste heat. It is possible to radiate energy with an oscillating gravity field, but any stellar magnitudes of that should easily have torn apart voyager at multiple AU range.

Sorry, forgot to mention that they did mention how they determined the stations age

Clearly time had dulled my memory of just how bad Voyager technobabble is. Adding a meaningless 'metric' to everything is nearly as common as the meaningless 'iso'.

[Darth Wong]

You shouldn't be surprised at the "static forcefield must require huge power output" meme.

The lay public has very poor comprehension of the concept of work and energy. I still remember getting into an argument with Bob Brown where he became furious at me and accused me of being a close-minded asshole for outright rejecting his claim that automobile tires require constant power in order to hold the car off the ground. He still has many friends who think very highly of him in the SW fan community, but my respect for the man flat-lined that day. What a fucking moron.

[Connor MacLeod]

Its actually a common brain bug in all sci fi I've noticed, not just ST or even SW (Its especially prevalent as a holdover from the X-wing and TIE fighter games there.)

I run across it often in 40K, but I often in the past dealt with morons who were stargate, Halo, Starcraft, or a few other series (like the Weberverse novels) who constantly argued that a shield MUST invariably consume large quantties of power without doing any noticable work (I won't even the "release large amounts of energy as waste heat" possibility, since that would not only be ridicuolously inefficient and pointless, it would delibertely create a massive detectable sensor signature.)

A fact I admit from personal experience untl I learned better - people don't bother to consider where energy goes or where it comes from very often (or the consquenencees tied to those facts) when doing analysis. They generally think that if they come up with a number it must automatically be valid.

[Connor MacLeod]

Anyhow, are there really any circumstances under which a shield WOULD neccesarily consume energy?

The only ones I can think of is if it somehow acted against physical projectiles to slow or turn them (and had to do work on the projectile, rather than acting as a static wall/barrier and thus erquire no energy.) but even then it would only consume energy when the "work" was done (and I'm not totally convinced I am envisioning the concept right.)

Second would be when the shields actively "Destroy" an object (or destroy parrt of it to deflect it via reaction forces.) - but again there it only cosumes energy when it "does" work, its not constantly sucking it up. And again, its also something a static wall/barrier type shield could do too.

The last way I can see is if the shield had to move or circulate matter in some way (spinning or accelerating it to create some sort of field effect, perhaps.. or maybe circulating it like some form of "coolant" where it moves in and out of the shield generator constantly.) Or even just overlapping segments that need to be "moved" to achieve maximum effect. either could be a constant or near-constant power draw, but its not neccesarily a "large" one.

[(name here)]

Depending on how your shield works, it could also be losing segments at a constant rate, meaning you had to regenerate it constantly. By the way, wouldn't it take huge amounts of power to move your shield?

[NecronLord]

To be entirely fair to Vejur, it's not as if it was trying to attack the planet Earth, home of the Creator. It only wanted to remove 'the watery carbon units infesting the surface' and not harm 'true life forms' on it. It would definately be a circumstance where it would be firing at absolute minimal necessary power.

According to Rodenberry's (supposedly not ghostwritten, which surprised me) novellisation, when Vejur was younger, it had been attacked, and later 'returned to the planet of the attacker and patterned it completely. This information would replace what had been lost in the attack and would make it possible for Vejur to continue the journey and its task of collecting knowledge along the way. Vejur omitted not a fragment of what had composed that world, except for a kind of carbon-unit which existed there, but these had ceased functioning by the time Vejur noticed their existance.' (p.186)

I tend to take that as implying that it could, over a period of time (given that the inhabitants died) dematerialise an entire planet in the way it did the Klingon ships. It's not a Death Star, but it seems pretty bloody formidable. Of course, there's no clue to how long that took. Vejur presumably travelled back in time when it 'fell through a black hole' and it might have taken years or longer to 'pattern' an entire planet.

[NecronLord]

Depending on how your shield works, it could also be losing segments at a constant rate, meaning you had to regenerate it constantly. By the way, wouldn't it take huge amounts of power to move your shield?

Only if you're Vejur, and pushing huge amounts of space dust out of the way.

[(name here)]

So the shield has the exact same velocity as the ship, and it takes no energy to change it's velocity when you fire the engines?

[Darth Servo]

You shouldn't be surprised at the "static forcefield must require huge power output" meme.

The lay public has very poor comprehension of the concept of work and energy. I still remember getting into an argument with Bob Brown where he became furious at me and accused me of being a close-minded asshole for outright rejecting his claim that automobile tires require constant power in order to hold the car off the ground. He still has many friends who think very highly of him in the SW fan community, but my respect for the man flat-lined that day. What a fucking moron.

Does he say the same for my bicycls tires? Do I need a battery to keep them inflated?

[NecronLord]

So the shield has the exact same velocity as the ship, and it takes no energy to change it's velocity when you fire the engines?

That depends. If the shield somehow has mass, then accellerating that mass should consume energy. Most of them are just described as an energy bubble, and thus have no mass to move.

[Darth Wong]

You shouldn't be surprised at the "static forcefield must require huge power output" meme.

The lay public has very poor comprehension of the concept of work and energy. I still remember getting into an argument with Bob Brown where he became furious at me and accused me of being a close-minded asshole for outright rejecting his claim that automobile tires require constant power in order to hold the car off the ground. He still has many friends who think very highly of him in the SW fan community, but my respect for the man flat-lined that day. What a fucking moron.

Does he say the same for my bicycls tires? Do I need a battery to keep them inflated?

He was actually arguing that the maintenance of any static force requires constant consumption of energy unless there's a solid object in the way. The fact that I was actually qualified to discuss this subject while he was not was a mere annoyance for him, easily brushed off as an "ad hominem". When I gave him the example of automobile tires, which exert constant force using air pressure, he replied that they must also consume energy constantly, and that "this is one of the great mysteries of physics". As I said, a raving moron. It was at that moment that I realized that all of his meticulous SW analyses were exemplary not for intelligence but for diligence: a valuable characteristic to be sure, but not a substitute for clarity of thought.

[brianeyci]

Was this before Google?

If he was a Google scholar, this shows why learning on your own is no substitute for actual training. The layperson easily confuses displacement and distance, and that's about the only reason I can think of why he wouldn't accept the definition of Work or Power. Even a Grade Ten physics student wouldn't say something like that, but I can imagine a self-learner boggled by the equations not understanding what a high school science student learns in Grade Nine.

And of course useful formal training, especially at college level, instills a healthy dose of modesty, important because at any time an expert opinion can come and destroy you (which you cannot anticipate no matter how intelligent you are because there's gaps in your knowledge.) Even humanities majors respect science majors in their own fields, and science majors themselves view their own professors as intellectual gods. I can't imagine anybody brushing aside qualifications who has even a hint of the work such qualifications entails.

[NecronLord]

Was this before Google?

We had search engines before Google, whippersnapper.

[Jark]

What exactly is this gravimetric field then? Standard gravity fields require exactly zero power to generate; in fact AFAIK it isn't actually possible to carry away energy with a static gravity field, any more than a permenant magnet constantly loses energy, so any energy used in an artificial means of creating one would have to turn into waste heat. It is possible to radiate energy with an oscillating gravity field, but any stellar magnitudes of that should easily have torn apart voyager at multiple AU range.

Voyager did have to keep its distance from the station otherwise it would've been in danger from this gravimetric field. Here is some dialogue from the end of the episode

CHAKOTAY: The other three ships are closing. They're within six thousand kilometres.
PARIS: Captain, those ships have massive weapons. They've definitely got us outgunned.
JANEWAY: Harry, let me see those ships in relation to the relay station.
KIM: Yes ma'am.
JANEWAY: Maybe we can use that quantum singularity to our advantage.
KIM: How?
JANEWAY: If we can boost the effect of the singularity, increase the gravitational pull, we might be able to stop them.
KIM: The pull would increase if we could weaken the station's containment field. An anti thoron burst might do it.
PARIS: If we're not careful we might be pulled in as well.
JANEWAY: Don't worry, we're going to be ready for it. Harry, create a low level warp field around Voyager. Sub-light energy level. That should help counteract the gravitational pull.
CHAKOTAY: If the field is too strong we won't be able to beam Tuvok and Seven aboard.


So it looks like the containment field, however it works, was dampening the full effect of singularity.

[drachefly]

So the shield has the exact same velocity as the ship, and it takes no energy to change it's velocity when you fire the engines?

That depends. If the shield somehow has mass, then accellerating that mass should consume energy. Most of them are just described as an energy bubble, and thus have no mass to move.

E = mcc applies here. If you want to accelerate an 'energy bubble', whatever that is, you're going to have to accelerate its E/cc of mass.

[Darth Wong]

Unless the word "energy" is being grossly misused, which it usually is in Star Trek. Most forcefields are called "energy fields" in Star Trek, which implies to the average viewer that it's an actual structured object made of energy. In reality, a typical forcefield is projected by an object with its own mass/energy, and it is only the mass/energy of that object which you must take into account.

"(name here)"'s question is like asking how much the magnetic field of an electromagnet weighs.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I would think that Arronax's timeship from 'Year of Hell' mightt do it, if only because it was immune to conventional weapons with its temporal shielding.

I didn't read the whole thread, so I'm sory if it was brought up already.