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Air-conditioning is pretty power intensive and The Enterprise is a big ass ship. That’s not even counting the other things life support does (like heat and CO2 scrubbing), just the air circulation.
But even on the show, there’s been a couple times where they mention the power from life support is nearly negligible. 🤷♂️
Wouldn’t gravity generation and inertial dampners be part of life support? Going max impulse after turning those off is likely to end up with a lot of raspberry jam coating the walls.
Inertial dampeners probably not; that just stops the ship when not giving any thust because there’s nothing to slow the ship down in space once it has momentum. The fake gravity on board tho, may be part of it. Not sure how the gravity plating is supposed to work; but I would be willing to bet there is technical documentation about it somewhere. Unless they just, like… Constantly barrel roll to create “gravity” that way 🤔 (gravity in quotes as it would actually be centripital force).
Inertial dampers are how the crew can survive high-g maneuvers, they’d be pinned to the back wall and have their skulls crushed by their own faces if they suddenly went to full impulse or warp without them active.
Another good example on how bad the actual details of the science are in most of Star Trek.
Warp moves you by compressing the space in front of the ship and stretching it behind it.
Your frame of reference in the middle of it stays at rest.
So no stains on the wall.
Impulse power would be a completely different thing, though.
But even that the writers managed to get wrong most of the time, treating it like a kind of fixed absolute speed that you achieve, like the max speed of a car, instead of the steady acceleration capability it actually is, with no max speed besides relativistic limits.
Not watching Star Trek for the scientific accuracy.
And even the Expanse has some instances of bad and/or hard to believe space tech depictions, probably mainly due to production cost restrictions.
Take the whole bridge design of the Rosinante for example, with its gaming chairs or whatever acting as high-g-chairs. Sure…
So, you will always have almost always to engage that “I want to believe” mode.
For another more TNG contemporary show with mostly credible science, I can also strongly recommend Babylon 5 (which feels like a kind of predecessors to the Expanse).
I’m pretty well convinced that gravity plating has to be negligible power draw or possibly even passive technology, since they’ve boarded centuries-old derelict ships that still have artificial gravity. Maybe the gravity plating contains some exotic space-warping material that generates a gravity field. That could also explain the times when someone becomes intangible and can walk through walls, but don’t fall through the floor.
Even that should still be minuscle compared to getting rid of the waste heat from a huge antimatter reactor.
Feels like trying to get your Ferrari faster by switching of the cockpit instrument illumination. Not even worth giving the command.
How does transferring heat out of a ship work? On the one hand, it’s really cold in space, but on the other, there’s no substrate to absorb and transfer the heat.
IIRC, they use the plasma manifold for the warp nacells to heat the ship like a radiator. I know they use that plasma for more than just the engines, but not 100% on how.
It is, yes. A large fraction (about a quarter?) of what looks like solar panels on the ISS are actually dedicated radiator panels. The solar panels are angled to face the sun, and the radiators are angled at 90 degrees from the sun, to face empty space.
Inefficient is maybe the right word? If you have more stuff to absorb the radiation I believe you can transfer it faster. So maybe tethering and tossing asteroids or something could be viable?
Air-conditioning is pretty power intensive and The Enterprise is a big ass ship. That’s not even counting the other things life support does (like heat and CO2 scrubbing), just the air circulation.
But even on the show, there’s been a couple times where they mention the power from life support is nearly negligible. 🤷♂️
Wouldn’t gravity generation and inertial dampners be part of life support? Going max impulse after turning those off is likely to end up with a lot of raspberry jam coating the walls.
Inertial dampeners probably not; that just stops the ship when not giving any thust because there’s nothing to slow the ship down in space once it has momentum. The fake gravity on board tho, may be part of it. Not sure how the gravity plating is supposed to work; but I would be willing to bet there is technical documentation about it somewhere. Unless they just, like… Constantly barrel roll to create “gravity” that way 🤔 (gravity in quotes as it would actually be centripital force).
Inertial dampers are how the crew can survive high-g maneuvers, they’d be pinned to the back wall and have their skulls crushed by their own faces if they suddenly went to full impulse or warp without them active.
Another good example on how bad the actual details of the science are in most of Star Trek.
Warp moves you by compressing the space in front of the ship and stretching it behind it.
Your frame of reference in the middle of it stays at rest.
So no stains on the wall.
Impulse power would be a completely different thing, though.
But even that the writers managed to get wrong most of the time, treating it like a kind of fixed absolute speed that you achieve, like the max speed of a car, instead of the steady acceleration capability it actually is, with no max speed besides relativistic limits.
I loved how The Expanse handled high speed turn and burn in space.
Fuck Syfy.
Not watching Star Trek for the scientific accuracy.
And even the Expanse has some instances of bad and/or hard to believe space tech depictions, probably mainly due to production cost restrictions.
Take the whole bridge design of the Rosinante for example, with its gaming chairs or whatever acting as high-g-chairs. Sure…
So, you will always have almost always to engage that “I want to believe” mode.
For another more TNG contemporary show with mostly credible science, I can also strongly recommend Babylon 5 (which feels like a kind of predecessors to the Expanse).
I’m pretty well convinced that gravity plating has to be negligible power draw or possibly even passive technology, since they’ve boarded centuries-old derelict ships that still have artificial gravity. Maybe the gravity plating contains some exotic space-warping material that generates a gravity field. That could also explain the times when someone becomes intangible and can walk through walls, but don’t fall through the floor.
And then, when life support fails everybody freezes for some reason.
This guy treks
Even that should still be minuscle compared to getting rid of the waste heat from a huge antimatter reactor.
Feels like trying to get your Ferrari faster by switching of the cockpit instrument illumination. Not even worth giving the command.
How does transferring heat out of a ship work? On the one hand, it’s really cold in space, but on the other, there’s no substrate to absorb and transfer the heat.
From a thermodynamical standpoint, the whole Enterprise is something of a mess.
But, hey, if you already have a “Heisenberg-Compensator”, also having a “Boltzmann-Compensator” is probably not that implausible… ;-)
And you can always re-arrange the sensor arrays if you’re ever really in a pinch, but it’ll take some time.
I would consider reversing the polarity first!
But that could destabilize the tachyon field; is it worth risking a temporal anomaly?
Maybe if we invert the thingamajigger coils we could prevent that.
IIRC, they use the plasma manifold for the warp nacells to heat the ship like a radiator. I know they use that plasma for more than just the engines, but not 100% on how.
Thermal Radiation, you send it somewhere else. It’s how the sun heats our planet.
Isn’t thermal radiation kinda slow, though? It’s basically air cooling, but without air or fans.
It is, yes. A large fraction (about a quarter?) of what looks like solar panels on the ISS are actually dedicated radiator panels. The solar panels are angled to face the sun, and the radiators are angled at 90 degrees from the sun, to face empty space.
Inefficient is maybe the right word? If you have more stuff to absorb the radiation I believe you can transfer it faster. So maybe tethering and tossing asteroids or something could be viable?
They use AI everywhere. That’s power hungry stuff (and people will deny it is).
Do they ever say how big the computer is in the show?
the Enterprise-D computer? A computer core was the size of a seven-story apartment block, and there were three cores.