Trek ships that could stand up to Wars ships.

[Starglider]

This would make it's planetary destruction operation somewhat similar to the described first-stage function of an Imperial World Devestator, only of course unlike one of those, the planet-killer is a basic destruction engine with no defensive or reprocessing/manufacturing capabilities.

The World Devestator is a lot more impressive in many respects. However the Doomsday Machine is impressive in one sense; it has a total conversion power system (it can't be fusion given that most of the mass of a rocky planet is iron). That's magic technology by Trek standards. Unfortunately AFAIK we don't know enough about hypermatter production to know whether SW has an effective total conversion process when you consider the whole hypermatter production+transport+consumption chain, but certainly nothing smaller than a World Devestator is known to manufacture its own fuel from rocky rubble (just how many tankers and refineries it took to refuel the death star is an interesting question). This isn't relevant to combat capability, it's just an interesting aside.

To touch on a point argued by Starglider, it does not follow automatically that the machine must have superior power generation and storage capability to a stardestroyer.

I don't see how it's possible to conduct an operation that requires several orders of magnitude more continuous power generation than a BDZ, however you slice it, without having vastly superior generation capability. Well actually I can think of one way; the planetkiller produces antiproton beams, which presumably react with the target to release energy. Theoretically if it had some sort of highly efficient matter -> antimatter convertor (without an intermediate energy state, which is implied as existing in the GCS by the TNG tech manual but with horrible efficiency), it could produce those antiproton beams from scavanged matter at little energy cost, and external anhiliation would liberate most of the energy required to shatter the target, which doesn't really count as internal generation capability (but does count as weapons yield, unless you can reliably shield against antiprotons, which SW particle shields may be able to).

Actually now that I think about it that hypothesis makes a lot of sense. The starship shielding in the episode may have been reacting to only the kinetic energy of the antiproton beam; this would be vastly lower than the effective yield against unshielded targets, but against shielded targets in a vaccuum there would be nothing to react with. Presumably the damage to the Constellation occured when small amounts of antiprotons leaked through the shields and reacted with the hull. That would cut down the generation requirements for the Doomsday Machine to its tractors, warp drives and the amount required to accelerate the antiprotons. Internally the high-efficiency M->AM conversion process provides an effective total conversion reactor as well as the basis of the main weapon. That even makes the 'it deactivated our antimatter' line almost plausible, since the tech required would be related.

That said,

The fact that it immediately had to start sucking in more debris to refuel itself after its combat with the Enteprise indicates its limitations in these areas when not performing this function.

Are you sure it /had/ to do this? Or was it merely resuming its earlier preprogrammed behaviour of consuming the whole planet before moving on, once the immediate threat was (apparently) neutralised.

[Starglider]

Are you sure it /had/ to do this? Or was it merely resuming its earlier preprogrammed behaviour of consuming the whole planet before moving on, once the immediate threat was (apparently) neutralised.

Reviewing the episode dialogue, this is most likely correct; Spock has several lines about the machine having a 'a programmed defensive sphere, and any energy source detected within that sphere will trigger an attack'. When it isn't doing that, it mechanically consumes each planet before moving on. I'd note that the KE requirements for tractoring the majority of the rubble into the maw are probably still competitive with a BDZ, though no longer vastly greater if external AP anhiliation is doing the heavy lifting. I'd forgotten about the DM's wide-area subspace jamming; again, a similar effect to the Whale Probe but not quite as powerful.

Again it's implied that if this technology was by competent designers (e.g. project matter and AM beams and have them intersect on or immediately before the target, feed only on planet core material not on possibly-mined space junk) it could produce quite a formidable weapon. But unfortuantely despite their impressive base tech the DM builders don't rise above the usual (abysmal) Trek standards of starship design.

[Patrick Degan]

The fact that it immediately had to start sucking in more debris to refuel itself after its combat with the Enteprise indicates its limitations in these areas when not performing this function.

Are you sure it /had/ to do this? Or was it merely resuming its earlier preprogrammed behaviour of consuming the whole planet before moving on, once the immediate threat was (apparently) neutralised.

If you recall, when Decker had the Enterprise make her attack run, the machine had already altered course to the next system on its path, the Rigel colonies.

[Alien-Carrot]

Pertaining to the Think Tank, it was run off by a group of about 10-12 of the mercenary aliens that were attacking Voyager.

IIRC it took 2-3 of these shipe to damage Voyager.

So if the think tank is 20-40 times as powerfull as Voyager, which is listed as a top of the line warship, it still makes the Think Tank, what, 1000 times less powerfull than Slave 1?


Forgive my assumption math here, but i really dont remember the exact numbers from that episode, as the entire episode sucked ass.

[Batman]

Since when is Voyager a top of the line warship?

[Ender]

The World Devestator is a lot more impressive in many respects. However the Doomsday Machine is impressive in one sense; it has a total conversion power system (it can't be fusion given that most of the mass of a rocky planet is iron). That's magic technology by Trek standards.

? Romulan Warbirds use singularities to power themselves. You can use any matter as fuel to extract energy from it. That would be more then sufficient for this.

[Starglider]

Romulan Warbirds use singularities to power themselves. You can use any matter as fuel to extract energy from it.

How exactly do you think that works?

Back when the 'Warbirds use singularities' decision was made, Hawking radiation wasn't well known or proven. I have a collection of short sci-fi stories about black holes from the 1980s on my shelf and they all fail to feature it. The only known way to extract energy from a black hole was to use the frame drag from its spin to accelerate matter. Spinning black holes can store a relatively high amount of energy for their mass, but nowhere near as much as their actual mass-energy equivalent. You also get a small amount of gravity waves out when you toss matter in, but not enough to do anything useful with even if you could somehow convert that into a useful form of energy (which no known mechanism could).

With Hawking radiation small black holes evaporate very quickly in a flash of energetic particles (mostly hard gamma). That's better for power generation in principle, but the problem here is that any singularity small enough to lug around in a ship has a rather short lifetime, and the power output over that lifetime is highly nonlinear. The Enterprise-D supposedly has a mass of 4.5 million tonnes. A one million tonne black hole has a lifetime of 19.6 days. Radiative power output will start in the exawatt range (easily enough to make the Warbird glow like a small sun) and creep up as the hole evaporates, reaching 7 × 10^23 watts by the time the hole is down to 500 tonnes of mass. Stabilising the black hole at the exawatt range will require half a million tonnes of fuel a week, and if it doesn't get that, it will explode and take the ship with it. Note that a million tonne power plant is extremely generous given the lack of heavy structural bracing and massive containment generators we saw around the Warbird's warp core (that million tonne mass would have to be accelerated at several hundred g whenever the warbird goes to full impulse).

For continuous black hole catalysed total annihilation to be practical it would have to be on a scale one to two orders of magnitude larger than a Warbird. This is ok for the Doomsday machine; it isn't physically that big, but given the likely mass of the neutronium-plated hull and the amount of fuel it consumes having a multi-million tonne black hole as the primary generator, fed by multi-billion tonne fuel reserves isn't a problem.

I can only think of two obvious ways to make it work at Warbird scales; technobabble time dilation fields (or outright magic technobabble) to slow down the evaporation rate by a couple of orders of magnitude (unfortunately two micro black holes orbiting extremely closely at relativistic velocities won't work due to gravitational radiation carrying the energy away), or using some kind of implosion mechanism to create a series of tiny black holes which annihilate small chunks of matter. I'm dubious about whether the later could be made energy positive in practice, but I suppose in Trek you can posit near-perfectly efficient energy recovery and gravitic compression mechanisms. This is rather more sane than the other approach, but it doesn't fit canon, since dialogue suggests that there is a single continuous singularity and 'Timescape' does indirectly suggest that time-manipulation technology is in use in the Warbird warp core.

So I'm forced to conclude that Warbirds use relatively small singularities (thousands of tons at most, since they don't create exaton explosions when destroyed in combat) and time dilations fields to bring down the evaporation rate from zettawatts to mere terawatts (and the fuel consumption rate to tonnes a day). That's ridiculously unsafe, an order of magnitude moreso than the already horribly unsafe Federation antimatter drives - one glitch in the temporal dilation system and the ship disappears in a burst of hard gamma. The tech would still seem like magic in Kirk's era, in application if not in theory. However it's true that by Janeway's era, it would be understood (at least in the sense of 'the Romulans have made this work somehow').

[lord Martiya]

Since when is Voyager a top of the line warship?

I think Alien-Carrot confused the fact that the Intrepid-class Voyager was the most modern Federation ship at its introduction with the power of weapons and shield, or that he was confused by the poor performances of most of Delta Quadrant ships (in the last battle against the Kazon, the Kazon used EIGHT of their most powerful ships, big as a Romulan warbird, and the Voyager managed to hold the line for long time and destroying one). Comparing with the war time Galaxy class (or even the standard Galaxy class), an Intrepid class is simply a light cruiser, that in war against Dominion or Romulans could be used only as scout (a very fast one, for Federation standard), as a flagship for destroyers and Defiant flottillas or as a destroyer-killer, like a WWII cruiser.

[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?