power source better that matter-antimatter

[sunshine220]

what power source can you guys think of that is better than matter antimatter ? that would fit in star trek nemesis time line. dosnt matter if you make it up or anything , just trying to create a ship with a better power source than what the feds have ?

[Stofsk]

Some form of total conversion drive, which is what the M/AM reaction is anyway but just a more efficient version, perhaps with a different fuel source. Incidentally the Planetkiller used such a drive.

M/AM is already a pretty potent power source. Why would you change it?

[sunshine220]

from what i understand you need fusion reactors to produce the antimatter , i was thinking something that can bet found naturally to use as fuel.

[Stofsk]

You don't need fusion reactors to produce antimatter, unless you count the sun as a gigantic fusion reactor. Space-based solar power would do the job a lot better, because producing antimatter is IIRC a net energy loss, so if you use a renewable energy source that is constant then you don't really lose anything due to inefficiency.

There isn't anything that occurs in nature that would serve better as a fuel, unless you count 'everything' when you use a total conversion drive whose fuel source is literally anything you put into it (which is what the Planetkiller did when it destroyed planets).

[Batman]

What Stofsk said. As long as you want to use fuel to convert into energy, you can't beat e=mc^2. The best you can do over M/AM is find something that essentially turns anything into energy, hopefully with better efficiency than a Warp core-which even if it didn't have better efficiency would have the decided advantage of not having to worry about half your fuel going 'RAR! Explosion!' when the containment fails.
You could presumably use something like a hyperspace tap or a ZPM or something equally exotic, which don't actually burn fuel but instead siphon energy from another universe, but to my knowledge nothing like that ever turned up in Trek.

[Cesario]

Seems to me that such an energy source was involved with the soloton wave. Half the subspace anomolies investigated involved things pulling energy out of some other universe. If this could be refined into a useable technology, you could get some sort of subspace tap like Batman suggested.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Matter-Antimatter is an excellent system but with two specific issues.

One is the difficulty of creating antimatter, as has become apparent in recent years. Because of entropy, creating antimatter invariably requires more energy than it can ever generate. This does not necessarily rule antimatter out as a power source. For a given society, antimatter may simply be the best option available for the particular role it is required to play, namely powering a starship, where issues like space and mass requirements must be considered. In Hiroyuki Morioka's 'Crest of the Stars: Princess of the Empire', for example, it is mentioned that humanity did not use nuclear fusion for interstellar vessels because the necessary fuel took up too much space, necessitating the development of energy systems based on (fictional IIRC) Yuanon particles, and then antimatter. If antimatter is necessary, then the inefficiency ceases to be a deal-breaker. In the aforementioned novel, the Abh create their antimatter in space by collecting a star's radiation in solar batteries and using this energy to power linear accelerators. Since space stations aren't as limited in terms of size, shape, and mass as starships are, an antimatter production station can be as large as it needs to be, and the energy of a star is effectively infinite.

The other issue is safety. Star Trek is sometimes criticized for having ships that seem to blow up at the drop of a hat, and it has been suggested that as such it feeds into the old trope about breaching a nuclear reactor leading to a nuclear detonation, or of ships tending to explode violently generally (though Trek was never unique in that regard). But antimatter, in useful amounts, is probably the most dangerous substance in existence. If it interacts with anything physical, energy is released. In Star Trek itself, one of the most deadly things that can happen on a ship is a 'core breach', which is generally portrayed as the reactor core being breached and white gas leaking out, necessitating an evacuation of engineering. The 'core' is implied by its name to be the part of the reactor in which matter and antimatter meet and interact in a controlled manner. This in turn implies that breaching the core should not in itself cause a fatal explosion, and in at least one example I found a core breach preceded the destruction of the ship in question by several minutes. In the case of the Galaxy class, antimatter containment was handled by magnetic fields, and this is almost certainly the case with other designs. Thus a core breach, if it resulted in a loss of power, could doom the ship. The only way around this problem I can think of is to fit the containment system with its own separate backup supply, though there would be limitations based on its nature.

If you want to go better than antimatter, all I can think of is a black hole such as used by the Romulans.

[sunshine220]

ty for all the replies so far its really helpful btw it doesn't have to use fuel i just don't want it to be so advance as a ZPM that the feds cant make it in a 100 years or so

[Eternal_Freedom]

Well there is that Omega crap Voyager encountered. Apparently that held ridiculously energy levels (waay more than M/AM) and you could probably rationalise the Federation taming such a particle in a hundred years, with 7 of 9's help and the data Voyager recovered.

Or you could go with whatever powers the Borg ships. Since I seriously doubt that's a familiar technology, you could make it whatever you wanted.

[Azron_Stoma]

You could presumably use something like a hyperspace tap or a ZPM or something equally exotic, which don't actually burn fuel but instead siphon energy from another universe, but to my knowledge nothing like that ever turned up in Trek.

Aren't Tetryon reactors more or less that? since Tetryons are described as being particles native to Subspace that become highly energized when they enter realspace, and are most commonly used as weapons but the Caretaker's race is at at least one of the races known to use it as a power source. Maybe they're more like Subspace versions of Hypermatter reactors.

[Batman]

That'd be the 'to my knowledge' part of my comment. Whether or not I knew about that, as it is from VOY even if I did chances are I did my level best to forget about it.

[Baffalo]

I found this article and thought it relevant.

What would happen if humans could deliberately create a blackhole? Well, for starters we might just unlock the ultimate energy source to create the ultimate spacecraft engine — a potential “black hole-drive” – to propel ships to the stars.
It turns out black holes are not black at all; they give off “Hawking radiation” that causes them to lose energy (and therefore mass) over time. For large black holes, the amount of radiation produced is miniscule, but very small black holes rapidly turn their mass into a huge amount of energy.

This fact prompted Lois Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University to calculate what it would take to create a small black hole and harness the energy to propel a starship. They found that there is a “sweet spot” for black holes that are small enough to be artificially created and to produce enormous amounts of energy, but are large enough that they don’t immediately evaporate in a burst of particles. Their ideal black hole would have a mass of about a million metric tons and would be about one one-thousandth the size of a proton.

To create such a black hole, Crane and Westmoreland envision a massive spherical gamma-ray laser in space, powered by thousands of square kilometers of solar panels. After charging for a few years, this laser would release the pent-up energy equivalent to a million metric tons of mass in a converging spherical shell of photons. As the shell collapses in on itself, the energy becomes so dense that its own gravity focuses it down to a single point and a black hole is born.

The black hole would immediately begin to disgorge all the energy that was compressed to form it. To harness that energy and propel a starship, the black hole would be placed at the center of a parabolic electron-gas mirror that would reflect all the energy radiated from the black hole out the back of the ship, propelling the ship forward. Particle beams attached to the ship behind the black hole would be used to simultaneously feed the black hole and propel it along with the ship.

Such a black hole drive could easily accelerate to near the speed of light, opening up the cosmos to human travelers, but that’s just the beginning. The micro-black hole could also be used as a power generator capable of transforming any matter directly into energy. This energy could be used to create new black holes and new power generators. Obviously, creating and harnessing black holes is not an easy undertaking, but Crane and Westmoreland point out that the black hole drive has a significant advantage over more speculative technologies like warp drives and wormholes: it is physically possible. And, they believe, worth pursuing “because it allows a completely different and vastly wider destiny for the human race. We should not underestimate the ingenuity of the engineers of the future.”

[Jawawithagun]

Matter-Antimatter is an excellent system but with two specific issues.

Third issue: A significant percentage of the energy released in an M/AM annihilation is provided in form of neutrinos and thus unusable.

[Patrick Degan]

The aforementioned black hole power core, which is what the Romulans use in the TNG era, would be rather effective: all you need, once you've got the hypermass initiated, is to provide a matter feed sufficient to offset its Hawking decay rate and harvest the electromagnetic charge.

[Enola Straight]

The Feds have a super-missle called a Quantum Torpedo which, essentially, creates a mini-BigBang explosion...a rapid, 11-d expansion.

How well can Fed engineering turn the physics of the bomb into an engine?