Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[wierd]

For evocative fiction, it is important not to depict a reality that is too far dissociated from what the reader/viewer considers normal.  This is VERY stifling for an earnest futurist, but is also necessary if you want your work to be well received and proliferated by more than just a small following.

Personally, if I found myself in the startrek universe, I would say "Fuck you and your backward notions about what's proper; with one breath you assert that the goal is to better and improve yourself and in the other you assert "But no hanky panky with science and technology! No no, that's bad juju! Screw that. I'm stealing some nanoprobes and a I am hacking the fuck out of this replicator. I'll see you in a few months after I have fabricated and extended my consciousness into a few million bioneural gelpacks and installed myself in a starship I built by doing the fucking obvious thing to do with replicator tech; Von-Neumann probe assisted astro-engineering. Bye now." just before activating the transporter and shimmering out of the scene.


Sadly, that's totally a marty-stu-- But it's also basically what the Minds in The Culture did.  And you gotta admit, watching the federation shit itself over it would be hilariously funny.

Back on point though, it would only be hilariously funny, BECAUSE the federation is so tight-assed about such things.  In the setting you describe, it would just be "Oh, that thing that bob did last week."

[Trekkin]

Back on point though, it would only be hilariously funny, BECAUSE the federation is so tight-assed about such things.  In the setting you describe, it would just be "Oh, that thing that bob did last week."

Well, the Culture doesn't like standard von Neumann probes either just because they're boring: once you've met one probe, you've met them all, modulo any errors in replication. Arguably GSVs are big, slow, ideologically diverse von Neumann probes in waiting, although anything that could drive them into high-fidelity replication would be even more boring than that.

TNG was less "current cold war events recast" and more of a forward looking "how things could be" at least in presentation, last time I checked.

Science fiction is always a commentary on the present, though. Pessimistic science fiction, like most post-apocalyptica, is a warning: "Keep on as we've been going and look what terrible things await us!" Optimistic science fiction, of which TNG is a prime example, is an implicit claim that whatever character traits the heroes exemplify will drive us towards some wonderful enlightened future; it's an attempt to say that the arc of the moral universe is long, but eventually it will bend toward these type of people. Being notionally about the future is just a way to magnify the apparent curve of the arc.

There are also just techno-thrillers that speak to power fantasies like the one wierd has outlined for us, but anything beyond that tends to be rooted in the views of the present. Dune's about peak oil and the hazards of over-specializing people, the Culture's a claim that utopia lies in aiocracy because people suck, 1984 and Brave New World are commentaries on how easily we can be controlled by hatred and love respectively, most cyberpunk is either a critique of capitalism or a tsundere love letter to it (Shadowrun) and even most of Verne's work, ur-example of painstakingly researched sci-fi through it may be, uses the technology to give Nemo and Robur and Ardan and so forth a big impressive soapbox from which to expound upon their pessimistic views of humanity.

It's like those "En L'An 2000" postcard things, where everyone's in submarines or airplanes or whatever but they're still in contemporary clothes and doing normal things for all that. TNG is like that; it's the 80s in a starship.

[Egan_BW]

Cyberpunk: "capitalism is super bad and bad things are cool."

[Starver]

Case in point-- how exactly does dilithium crystal somehow manage to survive direct exposure to antimatter?  (the technobabble suggests that it somehow is able to redirect all the enormous quantities of photons and hard neutrons produced by the reaction so that the energy can be harnessed, but really does not explain how. Considering that it would just be a pretty innocuous looking metallic prism, (and a highly reactive one at that, keep away from water and oxygen kids!) with a pretty low melting point.. this just does not make much sense at all.)

Noting that dilithium isn't Li₂, but something else.

Lithium has atomic number 3 (and mass typically of 7, sometimes 6) but Dt reportedly has Z=87. In our table, that's Francium, with estimated melting point of 'warm to the touch', though the most stable ²²³Fr has a half-life of slightly over 20 minutes. The difference between the "lithium"ness and "francium"ness was always explained by a natural component of the atomic structure being displaced beyond the normal three dimensions of space (and, in certain circumstances, the four of space-time!). It seems to be the only (or most stable) element in this complex-plane "island of stability" so there aren't other di'unobtanium' elements, though given its inability to be directly replicated or atomically fabricated into existence by the tech of the time is shared with Latinum, maybe it's not so alone after all.

A dilithium crystal  is famously indistinguishable to pre-warp civs from quartz, SiO₂, so that mineral museums of Earth were 'raided' for it once the truth of its existence was determined. Crystaline dilithium is a mix of Dt with Si and Fe (IIRC, though 'technobabbly', presumably representing the extradimensional component of the 4D matrix) and this presumably creates the compound solid that acts quartzlike enough for normal operation.

When subjected to a certain field frequency (EM?), though, the resonances are such that in delivering a matter/anti-matter mix the crystalline structure is kept 'out of the way' of the streams that it otherwise moderates (without the crystal it'd just be too much instantaneous undirected energy from the annihilation, so it must regulate and disyribute the ±deuterium gases' introduction like a pachinko machine) and allows the energy produced by the mutual annihilation of equal parts of the ²H, only, to create the plasma (from the carefully tuned over-ratio component of introduced positive-deuterium) that is tapped out to be sent off directly to the warp nacelles, or slightly less directly (via the GNDN ducts) to power the ship's other systems (transporters, replicators, lights/doors, the famously exploding command-consoles, etc; but sometimes not the holodeck, because Plot!).

This all requires a carefully (re)configured crystaline structure, obviously, for optimal power, and extended/excessive use can distort the structure beyond usability, so it's not a trivial thing to fire a _-1D stream into a (DtSiFe...) matrix. We've barely produced enough _-1H for research purposes. No wonder contemporary science hasn't yet quite yet confirmed the undoubted technical accuracy of the currently most forward-looking descriptions of the process, trapped as we all currently are beneath the transparent alum(in)ium ceiling in this field.

[Egan_BW]

See? Star Trec is totally internally consistant!

[Trekkin]

it's not a trivial thing to fire a _-1D stream into a (DtSiFe...) matrix.

This is what has always bugged me most about dilithium: it's totally unnecessary, because you can totally fire a beam of antiprotons into a big thin-walled tank of deuterium and get antimatter-catalyzed fusion. That's how most seriously proposed pion rockets work in low-speed mode, of which the most familiar is probably Project Valkyrie. You don't need to moderate the reaction with magic rocks any more than you need to moderate the explosions in the cylinders of your car; the reactants effectively handle that for you.

[smjjames]

Yeah, but that's why I mentioned the Culture, where it's taken for granted that everyone has full rights over their existence, so if they want glands which release drugs for various purposes grown in their body they get them (say you're in a sudden ambush you would "gland Focus" for a slowed down movement sensitive mindstate, or release some Chill if you're on a long trip and trying to kill time) plus things that happen without prompting like painkillers/blood clotting agents/antivenom, if they get bored being a human and want a spin on the wild side they might grow an entirely alien body and move their mindstate into it, which is helped because it's normal to have a Neural Lace woven into your brain to access information and shit like having a backup if you get killed.

These are things that might seem kinda over the top for a baseline background character, but any human in setting is basically just a pet for the Minds which wear the various Ships in setting as bodies.

Is the Enterprise smarter than a typical home assistant these days? Why not? Because the weird overarching shape the series inherited from Roddenberry in the 60's meant posthuman or transhuman were taboo subjects to be afraid of and shunned, with perhaps a token curiosity like Data or Seven here and there.

Yeah, I think that was a large part of it, The Original Series didn't delve into it, so, later stuff got constrained by it. Wouldn't be surprised if novels and fanfiction dabbled in transhumanism as they're much less constrained by canon as the movies and shows are.

[Starver]

because you can totally fire a beam of antiprotons into a big thin-walled tank of deuterium and get antimatter-catalyzed fusion.

Can you get both sufficient and sustained power out of that?

At Starship magnitudes of energy needs (the amount of plasma needed to use the warp coil(s), especially) can you scale up the antiproton beam magnitude and available annihillatable feed-matter against the force of the initially produced energy that you need to sufficiently energise the remaining feed-matter to energise it?

Maybe you can do a pulsejet-like method of generating plasma pulses like the exhaust gas of a V1 doodlebug, a stocatto variation upon the impulse drive (include Project Orion level of shock absorption?), but warp coils are explicitly known to need to bd kept charged with the plasma for their operation, and can you sufficiently buffer the variable source of plasma as it's piped through the pylons to eventually smooth out the supply to prevent a charge/deplete//vent/charge/deplete/vent cycle?

I can't answer that, even if my accent sometimes sounds vaguely like somebody who could do. And I need to wear optical aids. And I married an east-Asian exobotanist. And I've got a slightly ridged forehead. No, wait. Those last two aren't me. Yet.

[Trekkin]

because you can totally fire a beam of antiprotons into a big thin-walled tank of deuterium and get antimatter-catalyzed fusion.

Can you get both sufficient and sustained power out of that?

At Starship magnitudes of energy needs (the amount of plasma needed to use the warp coil(s), especially) can you scale up the antiproton beam magnitude and available annihillatable feed-matter against the force of the initially produced energy that you need to sufficiently energise the remaining feed-matter to energise it?

We can't say how much power a pile of aphysical nonsense requires to do something impossible, so "starship magnitudes of energy needs" isn't a meaningful metric here, and "sufficient" is likewise not answerable without a specific case. In Valkyrie's case, it's enough to keep the tether taut and accelerate the whole ship to 0.92c -- although, again, it's a pion rocket. If you want to use plasma, you need magnetic bottles to contain it instead of just a field to deflect the reaction products as they exit the reactor. The reaction is, however, sustained as long as you keep firing antiprotons into the reactor, and can be throttled by the same means; there's no need for pulses. That's kind of the whole point of the design.

This incidentally gets us to the crux of the problem with dilithium again: it's solving the wrong problem. The limiting factor in nuclear energy has always been the maximum operating temperature of the reactor rather than the power output of the core; annihilating matter and antimatter inside magic rocks to generate plasma doesn't help at all with routing that plasma through the ship (which is kind of like piping already-burning gasoline through your car's fuel lines anyway) or extracting power from it once it's where you want to use it, let alone with storing the antimatter -- or, a larger engineering problem still, generating that antimatter in the first place.

In other words, you can take the magic rocks out of the warp core and everything's still going to work just the same.

[Kagus]

In other words, you can take the magic rocks out of the warp core and everything's still going to work just the same.

No! I cannae do that, cap'n! She can't take it!

[Starver]

We can't say how much power a pile of aphysical nonsense requires to do something impossible, so "starship magnitudes of energy needs" isn't a meaningful metric here, and "sufficient" is likewise not answerable without a specific case. In Valkyrie's case, it's enough to keep the tether taut and accelerate the whole ship to 0.92c

It's likely to be sufficiently dissimilar, by orders of magnitude, from this design. If not very trivial (because you arrange a cleber  Alcubierre-type effect of warping with minimal positive and negative mass/energy densities) it's probably a vastly more energy-intensive process. The knowledge we lack is more the nature of the warp-coil operation (if we take as read that they take plasma as 'fuel' to the process, but allowing for a staged conversion within the coils themselves from the raw plasma to the warp field effect).

And operating temperature is probably the core (NPI) of the mixing chamber crystal's problems. By being side-shifted out of the (3D) plane of stream-mixing prevents annihilation of matrix by half* of the fuel (and chemical interaction with the other injected half?), conceptually it certainly acts as a guide to the introduced gasses, to channel them (I'm imagining something like an Alexander Horned Sphere meeting interface, to best approximation, or other dendrally sub-branching wave-guide to optimise the meeting-point of the two fuel-types) and equal force (Pauli? Dipole? London?) must press back upon the crystal, imparting heat-like vibrational modes, including in the given extra-dimensional direction.

(In order not to defelect 'normal matter' out of our plane towards/opposite the shifted off-planeness of the dilithium, it seems to me if must have presence on both sides of reality, to even out the 'sideways' forces. Maybe approx 43.5 nucleonic units (and half of its electrons) of the dilithium are located one side of normal space and the remainder on the other, with an apparent standard influence approximating that of two in-plane lithiums, the same as 'leaky gravity' into higher dimensions has been blamed for various galactic halo inconsistencies. Obviously they'd drag the non-dilithium elements out with them, in both directions, in the 'activated' crystal, but the the two half-amounts of dilithium would be the prime superstructure to the phasing-away process.)

The refinement and shaping of 'raw' dilithium crystal to reinforce the mixing capacity and resilience/heat-sinkedness of the matrix would be an obvious thing to do beyond the proper tuning of the required resonant field and other futuretech 'crystal maintenance' methods demonstrated as necessary (at least occasionally) in canon. Maybe a relatively low energy attempt to generate can operate without such a bespoke crystal by applying tighter control fields over a lower-rate of feeding, but when you start to get it so that "the engines cannae tak' it anymoor" [ninjaed by Kagus!] the heat-like oscillations are overcoming the natural resilience of the crystal at the heart of the process, despite assisted in-situ healing effects (sub-space equivalent of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope imaging/manipulation process?), and the matrix degrades. Either forcing throttling back or risking catastrophic failure through uncontrollably uneven mixing and energy channelling. But transport the crystal out of there and you have no control over the mixing (apart from "how much you intend to just blndly shove mutually destroying gas into a small space"), and you can't harvest the energy properly and things will go bad for you (either way) far quicker than you can say "Code Zero Zero Zero Destruct Zero".

* Even though it's not half, if you include the plasmaised 'throughstock' of matter.



BTW, surprised nobody has mentioned the Dragon 2, here or on the Space thread perhaps, so I'm happy to discuss this subject in lieu.

[Trekkin]

I think we're operating under very different definitions of "control" here. If you're firing antiprotons into a hydrogen tank, you really don't care which proton you're annihilating; it's enough to know approximately where most of the annihilation is going to happen, which you know anyway because it's governed by the geometry of the tank (or rather, the gas contained by the tank) relative to your accelerators. Furthermore, if you're trying to heat up your fuel by doing that (and you are, if you want plasma), you don't need to stuff pop sci buzzwords into magic rocks so they can sit in the middle of the chamber, because your fuel's going to moderate the reaction products anyway and you're running the fusion equivalent to a fast reactor.

See, instead of injecting the fuel into a matrix of applied phlebotinium, we can inject it into a matrix of more fuel and get exactly the results we want anyway -- and once we get the plasma out of the phlebotinium/reactor vessel, it's still got all the usual problems with handling plasma, which are way harder than generating it in the first place.

[Starver]

I'm still wary of the shockwave. Every proton/anti-proton interaction releases energy enough to cavitate the pro-matter medium away from the beam of introduced anti-protons. You don't know or care which ones meet, but it seems to be over-regulating given the effort you took to get the bits to initially meet.

Every matter/anti-matter deuterium interaction 'in the open' maybe contains a better rest-mass 'density', with two nucleons (it is undefined whether it'd be a 'useless' neutron/neutron meeting that just effectively produces fast-neutrons perhaps used as energy carriers, or if it's a neutron vs anti-neutron' element, the latter of which requires us to be specific about the quarks involved in the creation of additional pion reaction products) but might be assumed to be a higher-power equivalent of a hypergollic fuel rocket chamber, but with a mixing chamber formed of material that also not unlike one of the counterpart mixtures.

'Hands-off' channelling of the reagents towards a spread mixing interface, with solid-based (not gaseous) atomic pressures maintaining the hyper-perpendicular guideplane forces in a consistent manner (and away from any surrounding chamber walls) would seem to be a better corralling effect if you need steady energy flow. Perhaps the process is driven by something like a capillary-effect from both sides as well as injection pressure, momentum and whatever other handwavery exists to funnel it all.

Compare a pile of gunpowder lit to fizzle away in the open or a similar amount ignited within an open-ended tube, in the usefulness and intensity of the extracted energy.


For today's world, I could imagine the 'lit pile of gunpowder' method to be useful enough for all energy-purposes we can envisage, including putting the pile in the middle of a room so that the smoke pouring out of a window does useful work without the central flame risking burning the room itself down. If we want to truly harness the power in there, make it a small, tough, flameproof room and the more immediate combustion products can be tapped more explicitly in the manner we need.  The (in canon) suggestion is that's what you need in warp-capable spacecraft (and maybe a miniature setup can do useful CH&P duty even in static installations) and nothing less will work quite so well. When it comes to a technobabble explanation, it's not exactly an illogical projection compared with some of the other stuff ("inverse tachyon pulse", anybody?). And plasma containment isn't so difficult, we imagine, the only surprising thing that they don't fit quite enough "plasma buffers/dampners/fuses" into the power supplies leading to key redshirt-manned bridge consoles!

[Folly]

Google warns of dangerous vulnerability in Chrome; advises updating browser immediately.

[Kagus]

How do we stop global warming? 

Acid rain, of course.