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mlooney

Story Monday, Jun 1, 2020

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2 hours ago, ijuin said:

An engine’s “rated” power output is not the maximum that it is capable of—it is the maximum “safe” output. Whereas civilian engines are designed to be unable to exceed their rated output as a safety measure, military engines in real life have no such limits—they can be over-driven, though at the risk of excessive strain causing a breakdown. It is analogous to afterburners on a turbojet engine—A lot of extra energy/fuel is thrown into the engine in order to get extra thrust, but at far lower efficiency than normal operation, granting diminishing returns.

On a rocket, which is what impulse power is, even assuming it tosses ions out as reaction mass, you have 2 unrelated items.  You have the fuel that gets the reaction mass up to speed and you have the reaction mass.  Modern rockets just happen to combine the two, this is not a requirement.  If a rocket is rated to x number of newtons, that is what it's rated to.  Adding more power to the part that makes the reaction mass moving should not do any thing.  Assuming that the "normal" power supply of the impulse drive is can run it at full power, there isn't any thing you can do by adding more power from the warp coils.   Of course, Star Trek impulse drives might be a type of reaction-less drive, like some form of gravity drive, in which case my point isn't true.  Given that the "science" of Star Trek propulsion is flaky at best, I'm willing to take it as given that both the super light speed and sub light speed drives on ships are both "magic" in that they can't exist given our current understanding of physics.

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2 hours ago, mlooney said:

On a rocket, which is what impulse power is, even assuming it tosses ions out as reaction mass, you have 2 unrelated items.  You have the fuel that gets the reaction mass up to speed and you have the reaction mass.  Modern rockets just happen to combine the two, this is not a requirement.  If a rocket is rated to x number of newtons, that is what it's rated to.  Adding more power to the part that makes the reaction mass moving should not do any thing.  Assuming that the "normal" power supply of the impulse drive is can run it at full power, there isn't any thing you can do by adding more power from the warp coils.   Of course, Star Trek impulse drives might be a type of reaction-less drive, like some form of gravity drive, in which case my point isn't true.  Given that the "science" of Star Trek propulsion is flaky at best, I'm willing to take it as given that both the super light speed and sub light speed drives on ships are both "magic" in that they can't exist given our current understanding of physics.

That is, honest to God, the most sensible comment yet.

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1 minute ago, Darth Fluffy said:

That is, honest to God, the most sensible comment yet.

I try, but often fail, to be sensible much of the time.

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19 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:
1 hour ago, mlooney said:

I try, but often fail, to be sensible much of the time.

Preachin' to the choir, man.

Of course there is the fact that when I'm not sesible, I'm completely a lunatic.

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11 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Where are the robots? We have one android character, his failed brother prototype, his failed daughter, ... did I miss any? They should be all over the place. Star Wars get that.

If by "robots", you mean sapient ones like Data, it's pretty well established that Dr. Soong made breakthroughs that nobody has yet been able to duplicate, with Data's creation of Lal being the closest to success that anybody has gotten. In the episode, "The Measure of a Man", Cmdr. Maddox had wanted to reverse-engineer Data in order to attempt to duplicate him, and the plot of the episode revolved around establishing that Data had the right to refuse to be taken apart. Other sapient Artificial Intelligences have also mostly been stumbled upon "by accident", such as the holographic Moriarty or Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram Mk. I. It seems that Federation technology is not yet up to the challenge of reliably creating sapient AI on demand.

If, however, you mean non-sapient automated drones, we have seen those being used, especially in areas hazardous to organic life--e.g. exterior work on starships in space dock, or the Exocomps.

9 hours ago, mlooney said:

On a rocket, which is what impulse power is, even assuming it tosses ions out as reaction mass, you have 2 unrelated items.  You have the fuel that gets the reaction mass up to speed and you have the reaction mass.  Modern rockets just happen to combine the two, this is not a requirement.  If a rocket is rated to x number of newtons, that is what it's rated to.  Adding more power to the part that makes the reaction mass moving should not do any thing.  Assuming that the "normal" power supply of the impulse drive is can run it at full power, there isn't any thing you can do by adding more power from the warp coils.   Of course, Star Trek impulse drives might be a type of reaction-less drive, like some form of gravity drive, in which case my point isn't true.  Given that the "science" of Star Trek propulsion is flaky at best, I'm willing to take it as given that both the super light speed and sub light speed drives on ships are both "magic" in that they can't exist given our current understanding of physics.

Actually, an ion rocket is a good example here. Any engine that accelerates its reaction mass using an electromagnetic field will accelerate it more strongly in proportion to the strength of the field. In other words, increasing the power to the electromagnets will increase the specific impulse of the engine. This, in fact, is how the VAriable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) engine achieves the "variable specific impulse" in its name.

5 hours ago, mlooney said:

Of course there is the fact that when I'm not sesible, I'm completely a lunatic.

Of course you're a Looney--it's even in your name! :D

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11 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:
On 6/8/2020 at 5:02 AM, hkmaly said:

Not speaking about "what could have been" if the Crusade wasn't sabotaged by TNT and then abandoned.

I never saw that. I had high hopes for Space: Above and Beyond. Fox's track record of trashing successful shows truly sucks.

You need to stop letting TV stations limit what you see. Use the internet.

Or, maybe, don't. It's debatable if the show get far enough to be worth it. It showed lot of promise but ...

16 hours ago, mlooney said:
22 hours ago, hkmaly said:

... oh. Right. THAT kind of figures. And strings.

Doing vector math "digitally", either with a calculator/computer or by hand would be way harder that moving a figurine and 2 counters about.  The string makes it fairly easy to plot your future location, just put one end on the past location, one on the current location and extend the vector the same length as it is from past to current.  Put counter down.  Move counter to reflect this turn's movement, then move past to current.

Yeah I got it. I got distracted by figures being used for numbers.

16 hours ago, mlooney said:
18 hours ago, ijuin said:

For example, in "Star Trek Beyond" (the third JJ movie), when the Enterprise loses her warp nacelles, Scotty rerouted the warp core's power output to the impulse engines.

In the real world, adding more power wouldn't make that much difference in the output of the impulse engines.  I assume that that are designed to take as much power as is reasonable for what ever it is that they use for sub-light movement.

I suppose the point of that move were not about how fast they will be flying.

11 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

OTOH, without f=ma, you are not moving at all.

That's technically true, however note that gravitation is going to move you without any thrust being involved, AND by affecting every atom separately.

12 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:
On 6/8/2020 at 5:02 AM, hkmaly said:

Compared to Romulan or Klingon ships, they are optimized differently. First federation ships optimized for war as Defiant.

Meh, they were all designed to look impressive but people who where more artist than scientist. 2001 got space travel right, and at times it is boring; I could not get my kids to sit still to watch it. Star Wars does better that Star Trek in the 'ships look functional' department.

The original Romulan war bird, which I believe was only used in one early episode, had a broad flat back so it could display a war bird emblem (because, as we all know, evolution is always parallel down to the nth detail, so of course Romulans had raptors (original meaning; hawks, eagles, falcons, and such)). And so it goes. Every thing about TOS is 'because it looks cool', not 'because we thought it out and this makes the most sense'. Trying to fit a rational scientific framework is after the fact.

These ships all bend a bit of space time around them. Wouldn't a compact shape, something like an egg, make the most sense? Presumably, this is the most energy costly thing they do, and would be the thing they need to most optimize. Where would you stick the engine? Maybe dead center, because "Hell, if it fails, we're screwed anyway" and "Might as well give it as much shielding as possible".

What you wouldn't do is stick a long spar on the front of your ship that needed would be contained in that warp field, unless for some reason, your entire engine section was lethal and needed to be separate, in which case, what's up with the broad, thick wings? The Discovery in 2020 was long for that reason, but the living section was a ball, and the spar was just that, a long structure for transferring force from the engines way in the back. (basically a tower, if you view thrust as 'down', and it does indeed look like a utility tower)

So, I ask you, which of these two scenarios makes more sense:

A. The federation thinks that dragging along a bunch of extraneous whatever is good ship design.

B. "Hey, you know what would look cool? A saucer. Space ships are saucers, right?" "Nah, it's been done. The Jupiter II was a saucer." "Well, maybe we could have a saucer that's part of a ship." "That could work." "I'll stick it on top."

I might design a ship that looked like the Enterprise. It would be much smaller, and you'd drive it from the bottom section. The removable saucer section would be for delivering the pizzas.

I'm not saying that the ships they are using are optimal. There is just ONE faction with optimal ships: Borg.

I'm saying two things:

1) Even in-universe, it makes sense to include artists in ship design, because they DO have some reserve and all ships being spheres would be bad for psychology. Granted, they SHOULDN'T give them free hand - they should give them strict limits so they don't overdo it ... which I suspect happened in multiple cases in Star Trek, including USS Enterprise A (constitution class). Although frankly even THAT can happen in-universe, it would be unlikely to happen THAT much - or for a flag ship.

2) The compact shape of warp field is not ONLY thing they need to put into consideration. Also, the shape of warp field is not sphere - it's SUPPOSED to be ellipsoid, with the short axis being perpendicular to the warp nacelles, which NEEDS to be somewhat apart to generate the field correctly.

The other considerations would include that for combat, it IS useful to have some "small" side you can point to the enemy, but not too small as you need weapons on it. Some ships also ARE supposed to be able to fly in atmosphere, for which the "wing" shape makes sense. And, of course, Romulan ships have a gravitation singularity (black hole) somewhere, presumably OUTSIDE the hull - that's where the D'Deridex shape comes from.

I'm quite sure the "fat wing" shape with warp engines near the left and right ends IS the optimal ship shape for ships which ARE supposed to visit atmosphere at least sometimes, while the optimal shape for ships which don't would be, well, saucer - ellipsoid roughly matching the shape of warp field, possibly with "cuts" and warp engines being on SHORT and LONG pylons so they are not INSIDE the ships and are therefore easier to get rid of.

Of course, only federation ship which would be at least close to pass would then be the Defiant. And, well, the original Romulan raptor seems to be most logical ship they have.

BTW, regarding the raptors ... there IS a thing called parallel evolution. It makes MUCH more sense that Romulans have birds resembling ours than that THEY themselves are looking as humans with pointy ears.

12 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Consider, in Star Trek, the fields are able to hold an atmosphere against the vacuum of space, yet a shuttle can arrive and depart though it. Orly? And this makes more sense than, oh, an airlock? Or better yet, what we currently do, dock on the outside and come in through a sealed passageway?

The shuttle has field on it's own. What you see is interaction between the fields, like how big stuff is able to get through the cell membrane despite the cell membrane staying water-tight.

12 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

The inertial dampers of Star Trek implies anti-gravity technology, and indeed we briefly see that in use in one movie. It should be ubiquitous. Star Wars gets that.

We see their artificial gravity technology all the time when they are walking in the ship instead of floating. That said, they seem to be VERY bad at changing parameters of that field - it would be much more useful if they would be doing that. Except, of course, in one episode of DS9 where ensign Melora Pazlar turns off gravity in JUST HER ROOM.

12 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Where are the robots? We have one android character, his failed brother prototype, his failed daughter, ... did I miss any? They should be all over the place. Star Wars get that.

They were on much more places in ST:Picard, until they were banned. Data was a prototype and Noonian Soong deliberately didn't mass-produced it ; generally, federation didn't have THAT good technology for artificial intelligence, and seems that they didn't liked humanoid robots who don't behave like humans ...

... but you are right that we should see MUCH more NOT-sapient robots around, even if it would be just for keeping the corridors clean.

12 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Extra engines, generally dedicated to a specific purpose, and power is not generally reroutable. Reroutablity of power is costly on a mobile platform. It works fine on the ground on our non movable electric grid. It works well in a large facility, like the pneumatic distribution systems that used to be in vogue, or the huge stream plant that powered the archaic steel mill I once worked in. An airplane or ship may have extra engines, and be somewhat functional if they are not all working, but they don't swap power between them. And they are hampered in their mission.

Reroutable power makes enough sense for ships to be worth it, because stuff can break and you then will be far away from any help if you don't have way to fix it temporarily. Remember that those ships are BIG - bigger than your steam plant, probably.

Also, speaking about ships ... consider an aircraft carrier with nuclear reactor. Propulsion: 2 × Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactors, 4 × steam turbines, 4 × shafts. I find very unlikely that if one of the reactor is shut off, the ship starts turning left because one of the reactors powered screws on left side and other on right. No, they can reroute the power. AND they probably can run even with the reactors off, on batteries or diesel generators, still using the some screws.

12 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Also, the things that are missing in Star Trek, like robots? Cost.

The stuff we don't see due to cost are likely the ones missing most.

12 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Gene Roddenberry created a vehicle too tell stories. He had an agenda, but it was not about creating great science fiction, it was about social narrative. That is was enjoyable space opera as well, eh, that's kind of gravy.

For having an agenda about social narrative he was quite good in designing technology. Like, not hard sci-fi good, but if you compare it to Star Wars ... of course, I'm speaking about the established technology, not the particle-of-the-week stuff.

12 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:
On 6/8/2020 at 5:02 AM, hkmaly said:

I like TOS. I read all of it. (Granted, that was translation of books which were published in 1991 so it was definitely later than the TV.)

And, well, when TOS first aired it wasn't on our TV's. We actually saw TOS after TNG, so TNG was my introduction to Star Trek.

If you ever see the episodes, you will probably cringe, and wonder how anyone ever watched them. The production values were not up to current standards, and William Shatner's portrayal of Capt. Kirk is notoriously over the top. Mostly, the stories are pretty good, and Early NG is a recap of a few.

I did. I'm not sure if all of them, but yes I did cringle and that's why I'm saying it's better to read the books, where I can enjoy the stories without the "production values" stuff.

However, I don't think I agree with your opinion on Shatner. Granted, I was able to enjoy Andromeda despite the Hercules in main role. I mean, seriously, he mostly acted the same as in Hercules.

 

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11 hours ago, mlooney said:
13 hours ago, ijuin said:

An engine’s “rated” power output is not the maximum that it is capable of—it is the maximum “safe” output. Whereas civilian engines are designed to be unable to exceed their rated output as a safety measure, military engines in real life have no such limits—they can be over-driven, though at the risk of excessive strain causing a breakdown. It is analogous to afterburners on a turbojet engine—A lot of extra energy/fuel is thrown into the engine in order to get extra thrust, but at far lower efficiency than normal operation, granting diminishing returns.

On a rocket, which is what impulse power is, even assuming it tosses ions out as reaction mass, you have 2 unrelated items.  You have the fuel that gets the reaction mass up to speed and you have the reaction mass.  Modern rockets just happen to combine the two, this is not a requirement.  If a rocket is rated to x number of newtons, that is what it's rated to.  Adding more power to the part that makes the reaction mass moving should not do any thing.  Assuming that the "normal" power supply of the impulse drive is can run it at full power, there isn't any thing you can do by adding more power from the warp coils.   Of course, Star Trek impulse drives might be a type of reaction-less drive, like some form of gravity drive, in which case my point isn't true.  Given that the "science" of Star Trek propulsion is flaky at best, I'm willing to take it as given that both the super light speed and sub light speed drives on ships are both "magic" in that they can't exist given our current understanding of physics.

As I said, I don't really "get" that rerouting power can make the engines stronger. Maybe little for short time as the afterburn if the default power source doesn't already have capacity for that, but not much. However, I do get that rerouting power could be solution when the default power source for them is damaged.

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

If by "robots", you mean sapient ones like Data, it's pretty well established that Dr. Soong made breakthroughs that nobody has yet been able to duplicate, with Data's creation of Lal being the closest to success that anybody has gotten. In the episode, "The Measure of a Man", Cmdr. Maddox had wanted to reverse-engineer Data in order to attempt to duplicate him, and the plot of the episode revolved around establishing that Data had the right to refuse to be taken apart. Other sapient Artificial Intelligences have also mostly been stumbled upon "by accident", such as the holographic Moriarty or Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram Mk. I. It seems that Federation technology is not yet up to the challenge of reliably creating sapient AI on demand.

It didn't used to be. Seems they solved it in Picard.

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

If, however, you mean non-sapient automated drones, we have seen those being used, especially in areas hazardous to organic life--e.g. exterior work on starships in space dock, or the Exocomps.

We did saw them, but MUCH less than we should.

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

Actually, an ion rocket is a good example here. Any engine that accelerates its reaction mass using an electromagnetic field will accelerate it more strongly in proportion to the strength of the field. In other words, increasing the power to the electromagnets will increase the specific impulse of the engine. This, in fact, is how the VAriable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) engine achieves the "variable specific impulse" in its name.

There is limit how much power you could route to the electromagnets before you fry them. But yes, the impulse engines seem to be something like that and it explains how you can route power to them at all.

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8 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

As I said, I don't really "get" that rerouting power can make the engines stronger. Maybe little for short time as the afterburn if the default power source doesn't already have capacity for that, but not much. However, I do get that rerouting power could be solution when the default power source for them is damaged.

There is limit how much power you could route to the electromagnets before you fry them. But yes, the impulse engines seem to be something like that and it explains how you can route power to them at all.

Sure there's a limit, but there's some distance in between "normal operating power" and "about to burn out", where the extra power is putting strain on the engines, but it is expected to take minutes/hours/days before it actually breaks. See War Emergency Power for a real life example--the P-51 Mustang's engine could be over-driven for short periods to get up to 60% above its rated power level, but five hours at this level was enough to require a full rebuild of the engine, and even five minutes of it was enough to require a full visual inspection of the engine's internals for damage.

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1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

You need to stop letting TV stations limit what you see. Use the internet.

Yes, why indeed did I not use the Internet, to watch Space, Above and Beyond in 1995? Could there be any possible reason?

 

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

;)

 

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Of course, only federation ship which would be at least close to pass would then be the Defiant. And, well, the original Romulan raptor seems to be most logical ship they have.

In other words, one of the most advanced Federation ships in the series looks like you'd expect such a ship to look, not like someone had a fun afternoon gluing parts together, and 'the best Romulan design' was an early one, yet they abandoned that and produced a bazillion of the later D'Deridex model; and this all makes sense to you?

 

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

BTW, regarding the raptors ... there IS a thing called parallel evolution. It makes MUCH more sense that Romulans have birds resembling ours than that THEY themselves are looking as humans with pointy ears.

You are citing one of the weaker features of the series as evidence of parallel evolution. The reason Romulans look like humans with pointy ears is that human actors and makeup are available on our world. It really is that simple.

Actual parallel evolution exists, we've already discussed it.

You seemed to have missed ' down to the nth detail'. It matters.

 

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

... but you are right that we should see MUCH more NOT-sapient robots around, even if it would be just for keeping the corridors clean.

;)

 

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Reroutable power makes enough sense for ships to be worth it, because stuff can break and you then will be far away from any help if you don't have way to fix it temporarily. Remember that those ships are BIG - bigger than your steam plant, probably.

Also, speaking about ships ... consider an aircraft carrier with nuclear reactor. Propulsion: 2 × Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactors, 4 × steam turbines, 4 × shafts. I find very unlikely that if one of the reactor is shut off, the ship starts turning left because one of the reactors powered screws on left side and other on right. No, they can reroute the power. AND they probably can run even with the reactors off, on batteries or diesel generators, still using the some screws.

You are comparing the entire ship containing the engines with one individual steam plant; setting aside that you know nothing of the steam plant, it seems like comparing the ship to the steel mill would be a better comparison. The entire plant was more than five miles long. There were three steam powered rolling mills, with three stages of rollers each; a fourth had been steam, but was converted to electric drive ( which must not have been cost effective, because they only did the one). The individual steam engines that powered the rolling mills were each on the order of one hundred feet long; we had to change a piston ring once, and a man could (and did) stand up in the low pressure cylinder. The crank shafts, which ran perpendicular, were similarly sized, and there was significant separation between engines. So, roughly 600 feet by maybe 800 feet for just the rolling mill area. If you add where the ingots were loaded and where the finished beams were unloaded, a quarter of a mile long.

The Nimitz aircraft carrier can probably share steam form either or both reactors to any of the four turbines, as you say; I don't know. It is direct steam turbine drive, so no steam, no movement. You may be thinking subs, which use electric drive. They wouldn't have to, but you want to be able to run silent, hence electric and batteries.

 

2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

For having an agenda about social narrative he was quite good in designing technology.

Some of the ideas were prescient, or even a bit backward in hindsight. The communicators looked like magic, but my cell phone does much more, more like the tricorder.

 

2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

However, I don't think I agree with your opinion on Shatner.

You. May. Be. Unaware. Of. Some of. His. Quirks.

OTOH, if you are a true fan, you may enjoy T. J. Hooker. It's Captain Kirk as a cop. It also features Heather Locklear looking good.

 

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3 hours ago, ijuin said:

If, however, you mean non-sapient automated drones, we have seen those being used, ...

Not extensively. Data is cheap, human actor. Star Wars style ubiquitous robots requires a bigger budget.

 

4 hours ago, ijuin said:

Actually, an ion rocket is a good example here. Any engine that accelerates its reaction mass using an electromagnetic field will accelerate it more strongly in proportion to the strength of the field. In other words, increasing the power to the electromagnets will increase the specific impulse of the engine. This, in fact, is how the VAriable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) engine achieves the "variable specific impulse" in its name.

Very efficient, but so far, not much thrust. Promising for the future.

Sails as well.

 

 

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7 hours ago, ijuin said:

Actually, an ion rocket is a good example here. Any engine that accelerates its reaction mass using an electromagnetic field will accelerate it more strongly in proportion to the strength of the field. In other words, increasing the power to the electromagnets will increase the specific impulse of the engine. This, in fact, is how the VAriable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) engine achieves the "variable specific impulse" in its name.

If you massively overload the electronics / electrical circuit that create an electromagnetic field it's going to melt.  I assume, but could be wrong, that the power level the impulse power supply is capable of putting out is close to the burn out point of the circuit.   As I understand it the warp coils put out several orders of magnitude more power than what ever normally powers the impulse drive.  Dumping that much power into the the thing is a good way to just melt the circuit.

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18 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:
13 hours ago, mlooney said:

when I'm not sesible, I'm completely a lunatic.

The dangerous people of history were those who were utterly insane and yet convinced others that they were sensible

The fact that I have a degree of self awareness about my bipolar disorder is why I'm not normally a danger to self and others.  Mainly others.

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