warp core power output ??

[sunshine220]

1)what amount of power does a federation warp core put out ?? just asking because their ships always seem to have power problems in combat.

2) how hard would it be for them to make some kinda battery/capacitor that stores hours or days worth of energy that they can use for weapons and shields when in combat ?

3) if they can make a torpedo that use zero point energy (quantum torpedo) , why not use zero point energy to power their ships ??

[CaiusWickersham]

1) Perhaps it has something to do with combat being a situation with a high demand on energy (shields, weapons, damage control, fast maneuvering in a vacuum, etc)

2) Why would they have batteries holding onto power for possibly weeks on end for rare occurrences and when would they have the resources to charge it?

3) Zero point energy doesn't work like that and quantum torpedoes don't use zero point energy to begin with.

[sunshine220]

I assume that the reactors don't run at max power output when the ship is just sitting there scanning space dust so why not run it at max output to charge that battery so u have all that power ondemand when in combat ?

[Purple]

2) how hard would it be for them to make some kinda battery/capacitor that stores hours or days worth of energy that they can use for weapons and shields when in combat ?

My guess is that they can but they don't on purpose. Simply put, it would be against the design philosophy of federation space craft. Federation ships as a rule are built to multitask a huge number of missions and combat is just one of many. And if we take the laws of physics as a limit such batteries could be made but installing them would mean a huge compromise in mass and storage space. In other words, they would take up half the ship and make it twice as heavy.* And while that is fine on a dedicated warship it is not acceptable on a ship that has to use up most of its internal space on non combat equipment.

*Random numbers chosen for the sake of simplification and not actual calculated numbers or estimates.

On that note, what about the other AQ powers? Do we ever see say Klingon ships or Romulan ships run out of power in the middle of combat?

[Timepest]

The Galaxy Class at least has Fusion Cells.

In the episode 'Hero Worship,' they're trying to strengthen the shields from a series of Graviton waves threatening to destroy the ship. In the dialogue Geordi specifically states diverting power from the fusion cells to add to the power it was already receiving from the warp core.

[Eternal_Freedom]

3) if they can make a torpedo that use zero point energy (quantum torpedo) , why not use zero point energy to power their ships ??

Being able to build a weapon and being able to build a power generator out of a process are two very different things. Take thermonuclear bombs, ones that derive most of their energy from fusion reactions. We built those in the '50's, and yet we do not have a practical fusion reactor yet.

Maybe the zero-point energy shit is just too chaotic to be used reliably as a power source.

[Darth Tanner]

if they can make a torpedo that use zero point energy (quantum torpedo) , why not use zero point energy to power their ships

The zero point business is not canon from the DS9 tech manual. The only evidence of how Q-torps work is the episode For the Uniform which says they have a 'plasma warhead' so they could just be a rip off of Romulan tech.

just asking because their ships always seem to have power problems in combat.

Really? I don't remember many examples of undamaged ships lacking power to run the engines/shields/weapons. There are examples of ships that have had the shit kicked out of it losing power or not having enough power to keep the shields up but that’s clearly because their damaged rather than lack of generation capacity so other than more redundancy I don’t see what you can do about that.

2) how hard would it be for them to make some kinda battery/capacitor that stores hours or days worth of energy that they can use for weapons and shields when in combat ?

Going by our own experience at storing energy it would be very hard, batteries are very weight inefficient at storing energy and unless ST tech has fixed that (which they might have, they have many small handheld yet powerful devices, mobile holo emitter/phasers/tricorders for example) but this does not necessarily translate into industrial or military scale energy storage. It might just not be feasible to store the energy for a full power phaser blast.

EDIT: Spelling of canon!

[Eternal_Freedom]

Really? I don't remember many examples of undamaged ships lacking power to run the engines/shields/weapons. There are examples of ships that have had the shit kicked out of it losing power or not having enough power to keep the shields up but that’s clearly because their damaged rather than lack of generation capacity so other than more redundancy I don’t see what you can do about that.

AFAIK the only example of undamaged ships not having enough power in combat would be the E-Nil from "A Taste of Armageddon" where Scotty states that the Enterprise can't fire "full pahsers" with her screens (shields) up.

[Ted C]

1)what amount of power does a federation warp core put out ?? just asking because their ships always seem to have power problems in combat.

Estimates are all over the place, but in TNG, they usually act like a few terawatts is pushing the limits of the reactor. Mind you, they've done some things that would require tens of thousands of terawatts (like the attempt to correct a moon's orbit in "Deja Q"), but even there the dialog suggests low terawatts (based on the stated mass and velocity of the moon).

More and more ridiculous numbers get thrown around as you move on into the Voyager years, of course.

2) how hard would it be for them to make some kinda battery/capacitor that stores hours or days worth of energy that they can use for weapons and shields when in combat ?

It almost seems like they do something like that already. It would explain why the shields degrade from successive hits instead of either succeeding or failing: blocking fire draws energy from the capacitor, and recharging the "shield capacitor" takes a relatively long time.

3) if they can make a torpedo that use zero point energy (quantum torpedo) , why not use zero point energy to power their ships ??

I'm not aware of any torpedo that uses zero point energy. In fact, I don't recall hearing anything about zero point energy from Star Trek.

[Batman]

The problem is TNG+ ships often do come across as not having sufficient power-or more accurately, less power than they could make use of. They absolutely can run their engines, use their weapons, and keep their shields up in combat. But apparently not all at once at peak efficiency. How often have we heard somebody say 'I'm rerouting power from system xyz' in such situations? Before serious damage to the ship happens. To me, that indicates that Fed power systems can indeed not power everything on full at the same time for some reason. That reason need not necessarily be Fed stupidity-their may be perfectly valid engineering considerations that prevent them from installing bigger Warp cores/more than one/more fusion reactors and so on.

[Baffalo]

2) how hard would it be for them to make some kinda battery/capacitor that stores hours or days worth of energy that they can use for weapons and shields when in combat ?

My guess is that they can but they don't on purpose. Simply put, it would be against the design philosophy of federation space craft. Federation ships as a rule are built to multitask a huge number of missions and combat is just one of many. And if we take the laws of physics as a limit such batteries could be made but installing them would mean a huge compromise in mass and storage space. In other words, they would take up half the ship and make it twice as heavy.* And while that is fine on a dedicated warship it is not acceptable on a ship that has to use up most of its internal space on non combat equipment.

*Random numbers chosen for the sake of simplification and not actual calculated numbers or estimates.

On that note, what about the other AQ powers? Do we ever see say Klingon ships or Romulan ships run out of power in the middle of combat?

When most sci-fi authors write about storing energy, they most likely talk about large capacitors that can store energy for a sudden release, such as for powerful lasers and the like. What most don't realize is that capacitors are perhaps one of the worst ways for long-term power storage, and batteries are the worst for high-energy storage mediums. I'll explain.

A capacitor, at it's heart, is a surface in parallel with a second surface that impedes the flow of current. Electrons flowing through a wire collect on the surface, creating a negative charge. Because there's a second surface nearby, the electrons have a tendency to want to cross the gap, but require a high enough electric field which is controlled by the voltage. When enough electrons bunch up on one surface, the electric field becomes high enough that they can all, simultaneously, bridge the gap and continue on their merry way. If you're using something such as phasers, this means you can store up a large charge and suddenly discharge it all at once. There's just one tiny problem... the higher the energy you want to discharge, the bigger your capacitor must be. And for the types of discharges we see in scifi, they're pretty damn big.

Now, someone is going to ask, why not use batteries? Because unfortunately, batteries aren't that efficient at storing large quantities of power that can be discharged instantly. They take time, which is often what you want them for. In Wrath of Khan, the Enterprise is hurt so bad by Khan's initial attack that Scotty says they're down to just the batteries. They have enough power to get off a few shots and limp away, and that's about it. From what I've seen on the movies and shows, there's main power (the warp core), auxiliary power (back-up generators) and lastly, batteries. If you're on a starship and are down to batteries, you're in deep shit.

And before someone asks why they don't just use capacitors as batteries, let me point out that while capacitors can act as batteries when placed in parallel with a voltage source, its discharge rate is determined by the size of the capacitor and the load placed upon it. Capacitors grow quite large around the 1 Farad range, and expensive. Plus, unlike the above example of using it to discharge all at once, a capacitor that is used to store energy like a battery discharges exponentially, meaning that it will quickly power down and you're left with nothing on. That's when you scribble on a piece of paper when they find your corpse later, "FUCK YOU STARSHIP DESIGN BUREAU!"