Tritanium decay

[Ted C]

A comment found in the Canon Database:

VOY Season 4, Ep# 74: "The Raven"

TUVOK: There are no lifesigns. Tritanium decay suggests it has been here for nearly 20 years.

Misc: Tritanium decay? This means tritanium is radioactive, with such a short half-life that it can be accurately dated to within a few years!

I believe the possibility that tritanium is an isotope of titanium (one extra neutron, perhaps?) has long been suggested. It follows with the theory that "duranium" is actually "depleted uranium".

I would suggest, however, that these are both alloys and that Federation naming standards for materials have long since diverged from anything modern.

Assuming that it's not a radioactive isotope, I would suppose that tritanium tends to slowly break down in an atmosphere. Since there are apparently microscopic life forms in space that "feed" on materials like tritanium, it's probably an exothermic reaction. With the right chemicals, it might be possible to rapidly corrode the hull of a Federation vessel.

Is there any precedent for such a material?

[Uraniun235]

There was that weird stuff that slowly ate away at the hull of the Enterprise and a Klingon starship in... uh, Code of Honor was the episode I think.

[Patrick Degan]

A comment found in the Canon Database:

VOY Season 4, Ep# 74: "The Raven"

TUVOK: There are no lifesigns. Tritanium decay suggests it has been here for nearly 20 years.

Misc: Tritanium decay? This means tritanium is radioactive, with such a short half-life that it can be accurately dated to within a few years!

I believe the possibility that tritanium is an isotope of titanium (one extra neutron, perhaps?) has long been suggested. It follows with the theory that "duranium" is actually "depleted uranium".

I would suggest, however, that these are both alloys and that Federation naming standards for materials have long since diverged from anything modern.

Assuming that it's not a radioactive isotope, I would suppose that tritanium tends to slowly break down in an atmosphere. Since there are apparently microscopic life forms in space that "feed" on materials like tritanium, it's probably an exothermic reaction. With the right chemicals, it might be possible to rapidly corrode the hull of a Federation vessel.

Is there any precedent for such a material?

Sorta undermines the entire point of the writers ever having invented "tritanium" in the first place; as a futuristic material supposedly stronger and more durable yet lighter than contemporary metals. The wonder that is BragaTrek™.

If anything like chemical decay is the source for this, I think whichever hack penned the script for "Raven" may have at one point read about the decay of the hull of the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic, due to the action of the iron-eating microbes which live in that environment, and simply decided to tack that into his teleplay. Naturally, the idiot didn't bother to actually think it out. It sounded "cool", so in it went.

And if the explanation does not devolve from that, then yes, it is suggesting that tritanium is atomically unstable. But then, these are the same writers who think you can have a crack in a black hole's event horizon and deuterium ore. So why not an atomically unstable metal which you'd use for starship hull construction? It's not as if any of this is rocket science.