Hey, y'all. I'm sorry to do this to you but my brain is storming and I can't sleep; I'm at my girlfriend's and I don't have my computer, so I'm using hers. I don't have access to her email or mine. So, it seems the easiest way to get my thoughts back to my computer where I want them is to post them here and then collect them tomorrow. So y'all may ignore this post without hurting my feelings in the slightest.

The subject is that of powering warp.

But to discuss this I need to state two assumptions. First, in the power chart gleaned from the TNG tech manual, where it gives megawatts per cochrane, I assume that this power usage is true for ships of any mass, but that more massive ships need to spend that power for longer periods.

So, for example, a starship needs to expend about 14 gigawatt at the warp one threshold and then the power usage drops dramatically just past that threshold. So, under this assumption, while trying to pass the warp one threshold a 10 tonne ship might need to expend 14GW for only, say, 10 seconds before entering the warp one regime--where it can get away with only using megawatts to continue at 1wf. But a 100 tonne ship might need to expend 14GW for 100 seconds before entering the warp one regime.

Again, this is an assumption, neither backed up nor refuted by anything in trek literature, either cannon or non-cannon, as far as I know. I could make arguments both for and against this assumption, but I use it because it simplifies both my calculations and comparisons.

Next, I assume there's nothing special about warp plasma. So that if I had a powerplant that could supply the required power, I could take a gas--hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, whatever--turn that gas into a stream of plasma and then shove it into an accelerator until it could deliver 14GW of power to the nacelles, and this would work the same as though I had created a plasma out of a matter/antimatter reaction and shunted it to the nacelles. That is to say, the M/AM reaction is a convenience of power generation, not a necessity of warp physics, and any technology that can supply enough plasma of the right energy density will do.

Those are the assumptions. And, again, they are a convenience. I can argue them both either way. The truth is, we just dont have enough real information on how warp physics works to make good guesses... Thus, the assumptions.

So, again, according to the power chart in TNG tech manual, a ships powerplant must be able to supply the warp nacells with 14GW of power--via warp plasma--to get it over the warp one threshold. So the first question is, what kind of power plants can do it?

Well, I've done some study concerning fission and fusion. When it comes to modern fission powerplants, the simple answer is: NO. Not even close. The largest conventional nuclear power plants today run at about 1.5GW per core. You can string 10 cores together to get the power you want for 1wf, but each core needs it's underpinning technologies to make it work--steam turbines, containment pressure domes, heat exchangers, etc--and all that crap is HEAVY and bulky. Such a powerplant would be utterly useless for a warp starship. (Nuclear powerplants for naval vessels, for example, seem to top out at 500MW, about 28 times too little.) And, really, there's nothing you could do to current fission plants to make them work.

Indeed, even next-gen power plants couldn't do it. None of them have the power to mass ratio you need. Not LFTR, CANDU or any of the others. You would literally need to work with technology two or more generations from the generation of reactor we have now to make fission work: californium catalyzed fast plutonium fission with a liquid core and exceptionally efficient brayton cycle. (This would be a hideously dirty power plant, by the way.) And such a plant would not be able to get you into the warp 2 regime. Indeed, you would likely be stuck under 1.8wf. (That's a guess.)

The next choice, therefor is fusion. (This is, so many fans say, how the Romulans powered their warp reactors until at least the TOS era and probably afterward.) Humanity has yet to make a fusion power plant that releases more energy than it takes to run. There are several interesting proposals on the horizon, though. Before I get to them, let's get the modern TOKAMAK out of the way. It doesn't and can't work. Billions are being spent on ITER and you can forget it. To paraphrase Bussard, "It's great physics but you wont get any power out of it." The same thing goes for laser ignition, at least, in it's modern incarnation. Cool idea, bad implementation... Now, I admit, these are *my* *opinions*. And you may take them or leave them. But I'm moving on to other proposals.

First comes focus fusion. (I wont waste your time describing how it works, as you can find far better explanations on youtube than I could possibly whip up.) Three things are interesting about this method of fusion. The first is that it's simple, from a technological point of view. Any one of us could make a focus fusor of our very own if we were willing to put in the effort and money. Of course, making it work is something different. It's a finicky gizmo and this is exactly because it's simple: it has to be finessed and caressed just right to make it work. The second thing is that it's small: you can expect a working model to fit in the same volume your car engine does. Thirdly, it starts with un-ionized gas and spits out nucleons and electrons; the nucleons exit one way and the electrons exit in the opposite way. In all other proposals I know about, you start with a plasma and go from there.

Unfortunately, it's also a small capacity powerplant. A single powerplant can't be larger than about 1 megawatt, or so I'm to understand. Indeed, smaller is easier and more efficient. Well, 1MW is 14,000 times too small to get over the warp one threshold. One could imagine fourteen thousand (or more) reaction chambers all feeding off the same infrastructure--gas feeds, capacitors, timing circuitry, etc--each one aimed at a single segment of a warp coil, each segment receiving power from a bundle of several reaction chambers... It's perfectly possible. Perhaps, theoretically, practical. Not very elegant. (Though I gotta admit: The more I think of it, the more I kinda like it just for it's pure oddity. )

Next comes the polywell fusor, and its siblings. In the aspect of scaling, this is the opposite of focus fusion as it's difficult to make a smaller powerplant than about 1 megawatt. Bigger is more efficient. Indeed, supposedly power output increases logarithmically to diameter, so that a reaction chamber twice the diameter will have a seventh power output increase. Some literature I've read predicts 8GW power output from a 3 to 4 meter spherical reactor. WELL, HELL!! Two of those, and you're in business! Or just one that's only a little bigger! If the polywell hype is even 50% accurate, a TOS Romulan BOP could run off of a single 7 meter reactor and enough boron/hydrogen to fuel it. (I've not actually done this calculation--I don't have the data needed in front of me--but it feels about right.)

Third is accelerated plasma. If you have two streams of plasma traveling in opposing dirrections, you can make the two plasmas collide and fuse at places and exact energies. This gives you a great deal of control. And we know it's possible in that it's done on a regular basis. The unfortunate reality, though, is that it's hard to focus and accelerated plasma because of the Heisenberg Principal. And because it's hard to focus, it's hard to make the plasmas dense enough to get net power.

Lastly, there's the Plamak. This one I don't understand too well, I have to admit. You can think of it as a tokamak where the magnetic field to contain the plasma fuel is supplied by the spinning of the plasma itself. How this is implemented is where my understanding is fuzzy but, if what I've read is to be believed, it's been done. It's the one method of containing plasma I've read that might actually work as a plasma weapon. The principal is similar to an accelerated plasma in that you make two plasmaks--self-containing plasma balls--and then shoot them at eachother. When they collide, tier plasmas fuse and you can collect the released energy. I can't even speculate as to how big a plasmak reactor might be. It might need to be huge; it might only work small. It might scale in both directions. I just don't know. But I add it because it's cool.

What I've not addressed so far is the fusion fuels. Star Trek uses deuterium, seemingly exclusively. Deuterium has it's problems--not the least of which is that of neutron radiation--but if fusion reactors are possible, then deuterium reactors *definitely* possible. Deuterium is universally abundant so that if you have a ship running on deuterium, you can run it anywhere in the cosmos.

The fuel touted as most utopian, though, is boron/hydrogen. It's more difficult to fuse--the plasmas require 10 times the energies of deuterium--but it emits no neutrons or neutrinos and few gamma-rays. This is good: no energy lost on dangerous radiation. IE, efficient and clean. Boron is relatively abundant and can probably be found on most terrestrial planets and a large percentage of asteroids. Hydrogen is, of course, exceedingly abundant.

Of course, there's helium3. It burns at lower temperatures with more energy output then boron/hydrogen and is similarly clean. The reaction itself is less predictable but that's a problem that can be dealt with, though not solved. It's not an abundant fuel, though. Helium3 comes from a very narrow number of nuclear reactions--namely deuterium or lithium reactions.

One that isn't spoken of much is lithium/hydrogen. It's clean, easy and energetic, like helium3; and its reaction is pretty predictable, like boron. Unfortunately, lithium also loves to react with neutrons. And when it does, *watch out*: nuclear run-away. (Lithium7 plus a neutron makes tritium and helium4. Helium4 is mostly non-reactive. But tritium is highly reactive, and when it reacts it creates more neutrons to make more tritium. Bad mojo... Still, with proper controls, it should be possible to do.)

Lastly, there are the fusion cycles you find in stars. Main sequence stars convert hydrogen to helium in a series of steps. There's more than one path from hydrogen to helium, and when you study the paths you find them written down as a branching tree of reactions. There are two trees, labeled "p-p cycle" and "CNO cycle". The second is more complex than the first. But in both cases there are simpler branches and more complex branches. It seems to me the ultimate in fusion technologies would be a reactor that walked the plasmas through selected reaction branches, one chamber at a time. Such a multi-chamber reactor could, theoretically, release the potential difference in energy between 56 hydrogen atoms and one iron56 atom. That's quite alot of energy, let me tell you!

Even so, my preliminary research seems to indicate that such a construct would: 1) Be rather bulky and massive and 2) unable to power a warp ship past more than about warp 7 or 8 regime. (Remember: preliminary research.) Where as boron/hydrogen, helium3 or lithium/hydrogen by themselves could get you into 6wf and maybe 7wf.

So, it seems that fission *might* get you to 1wf. Single stage fusion will get you to 5wf and *might* get you to 7wf. Multi-stage will probably get you to 7wf and *might* get you to 8wf. But you need M/AM or an artificial singularity to get you to 9wf and above.


That brings me to the second thing my brain is storming on: other ways of FTL in the Trek Universe.
1) Borg transwarp conduit, a la TNG.
2) Borg transwarp coil, a la Voy.
3) Borg transwarp conduit, a la Voy; yes 1 & 3 may be different.
4) Slipstream, a la Voy.
5) Underspace, a la Voy.
6) That sling-shot thing in Voy.
7) Warp soliton, a la TNG.
8) Tacheon sailor, a la DS9.
9) Wormholes.

I'm getting sleepy at last, so I'll make one more short list.
Two ways to energize a warp coil that don't involve the standard plasma streams:
1) External nuclear explosions, similar to the Orion project of the 1960s. (This is my own thought.) It is my contention that such an instant shock as could be had with this method would not be able to get you over the warp hump but would, instead, increase you specific impulse beyond the "magic" million mark.
2) "Ion Cascades", where you bombard the warp coils with alternating positive and negative ions. According to the ENT book Daedalus, this is how the Sulaban cell ships energize their warp coils. According to the book, you have to be careful about how quickly you ramp up the power or you'll rip a hole in space-time, sling you across several sectors of space and destroy whatever you happened to be around--people, buildings, cities. But it has a maximum warp of ~7.5wf. Again, my reference material isn't with me, but I think that's right.

~~~
PS. Internet was out last night so I couldn't post this. But I still have to do a transfer somehow, so the main plan is still in effect... I'm sure I'm missing an obvious, easier way to do this. Oh well. Maybe someone will enjoy my rant.

Very interesting - It does answer one persistent question.
We did wonder what you do at your girlfriend's place. Now we know.

All of this thought over warp and energy production? I think maybe the 24th century has a few extra ways of pumping out power than we do. Or is this just cross-generational thought? It's all so very intriguing. Also, I think maybe the starships of the 24th century run on deuterium (hence the deuterium tank located on every starship). Deuterium is a very real compound, with enormous energy potential. Only problem: scientists can't produce enough to actually split into energy >.< therefore we must assume that our energy production methods are thrown away and new ones introduced by the time of FTL in the Trek Universe... and those are my thoughts on your ideas .

@ KOB -- LMFAO! Thank you! That's f-ing hilarious! And it's true... AFTER she's gone to sleep.

@ Andrew -- That the 24th century has better tech is nearly an absolute. But we can consider what tech is possible from our current understanding... And from trek cannon/non-cannon.

However, your knowledge of deuterium is quite wrong. As a stable isotope of hydrogen, deuterium is *everywhere*. Ubiquitous, if diffuse. Collecting it is simple, though not necessarily easy. It is not that it's difficult to collect but that its energy is bound up in its nucleus and releasing its energy is done via fusion, which we can not, as yet, do profitably... It occurs to me you might be thinking of tritium, another hydrogen isotope which is not normally found in nature and has to be created. Again, though, creating tritium isn't a huge problem. Profitably releasing its nuclear energy via fusion is as difficult as with deuterium.

Even so, trek uses deuterium for two things. First, it's the matter part of the matter/antimatter reaction. Really, anything could have been used in this role. But the creators chose deuterium so they could use it in the ships impulse engines as well, which are basically fusion rockets.

It is good to be reminded that our current understanding is rubbish compared to that of centuries to come and for that, I thank you. Still, if one wants to speculate about future tech, the only place you can start is what is known (it believed known) now.

WOW! Rereading this, I sound like a ponderous, prudish, pompous prick... Not my intent, just my style. (sigh)

Um... *scratches head* The headaches that are the technology of star trek. communicators that open a channel to who you want before you've even said their name, and then what about the part where there are bound to be people with the same first name or last name onboard.

"Captain to Lieutenant Jones."

"Yes captain?" < female voice.

"Um... Sorry. Wrong Jones. Captain to Lieutenant Jason Jones."

"Yes Captain?" < Still not the right voice, tho tis male this time."

"...Sorry. Wrong jones."

"3rd time this week, Captain."

"I know. Captain to Lieutenant Jason Jones who's assigned to engineering on the day shift and sleeps in quarters 47 on deck 19."

"That's awefully specific to call me, captain..."

"Yes well, this is what I get for having 42 Jason Jones on my ship, whom are mostly the same rank, and almost a hundred people with the same last name."

Well... I wouldn't worry. Moore's law is inviolate, after all. So by the time the Galaxy Class computer invented in 2245 or so, it'll be capable of something like 10^50 qops (quantum operations per second). Surely, with so many more operations per second than there are electrons in your body, it will be able to parse which Lt. Jones you want via context.

The upshot of all the above is that you can compare the fuel use of a starship to modern-day machines. For example, the second stage of the Saturn V used its liquid hydrogen fuel at the prodigious rate of 200 kg/sec = 2.8 cubic meters per second. This translate to consuming its entire stock of 73800 kg = 1020 m^3 of LH in 6 minutes.

Assuming 100% efficiency, a deuterium powered warp ship starts using fuel at about that rate to get over the warp 6 threshold. And then, again, while cruising somewhere between 6.7wf and 6.8wf.

If Helium-3 is the fuel, the ship hits that rate at 7.6wf, but it has to use its fuel at twice that rate to get over the warp 7 threshold.

Even in a 4-stage fusion generator that converts hydrogen to carbon-12 (the best fusion fuel cycle I've yet to find, as it converts 0.74% of the beginning mass to energy) reaches this consumption rate while cruising at 8.1wf. But to get over the warp 8 threshold it consumes fuel at *4* times this rate.

Adding likely collection losses innate to these fuels and likely limitations to materials, these speeds are drastically reduced.

And at 100% efficiency, a M/AM reactor doesn't reach this consumption rate until 9.9wf. This is the clear advantage Scotty was talking about in "Balance of Power" when he said that Enterprise could categorically out perform the Romulan vessel, which was "impulse" powered, ie fusion powered.

My studies are still incomplete. I've yet to complete calculations with accurate loss-rate models, nor have I completed analysis of the different fission reactions/reactors.

Why, you ask? Cause I'm learning *so much* about nuclear chemistry, it would take days just to give an overview... Oh, and by the way, if you ever get a chance to read "Sourcebook on Atomic Energy" 3rd edition by Glasstone, do it. It's big but worth it.

Of course, of course. Tritium. And yes, you're quite right. Fusion power hasn't quite reached the threshold of it's potential, has it? You mentioned a warp ship powered by isotopes obtainable in our century. It then occurred to me that the isotopes used to power a warp ship (Antimatter isotopes) would be unobtainable using methods of our century. It then further donned on me that 300 years from now, Fusion Power will likely be long forgotten, and a more complex means of energy production will be in effect. It then FURTHER donned on me that the vessels used 300 years from now will likely run on more stable wormhole-friendly energy principles (we've already created an artificial black hole, albeit a tiny one, why not aim high?). Of course, this is all theoretical, but I presume we won't be scavenging the Earth for mere hydrogen isotopes in the future . And you're also quite right, my understanding of deuterium (and nuclear chemistry for that matter) as a high school student are quite small compared to the knowledge of... say... a nuclear chemist . Well, that's all I have to add. Isn't it funny how one man's thoughts trigger such a discussion?

Hey, guys.

I learned something recently that, very likely, none of you will care about. But I figured I'd add it.

As background, in the past I've bagged on deuterium as a fusion fuel source (and therefor Star Trek's ubiquitous use of it) because the mass fraction of this fuel (what percentage of fuel mass is turned into energy) is only 0.0973%. This is comparable to that of fission (~0.0832%) and the resultant includes a high-energy neutron, representing about 33% of the total energy released. This means both hard neutron radiation (dangerous) and a difficulty in collecting energy therein.

However, I learned there's a deuterium fusion cycle called "catalyzed D-D", where both the Helium3 and tritium that resulted from the original d-d reaction are fused with two more deuterium nuclei. With these secondary reactions, the total mass-to-energy conversion-ratio increases to 0.384%, nearly 4 times the energy of the usual, single stage d-d reaction. This is up there with the most energetic of the single-stage fusions fuels, and only 11% of the total energy is released into neutrons. (Wikipedia says 4.6%, but my calcs don't concur. Don't know who's right, but...) This is quite promising... Of course, these neutrons are the same as those released in the original d-d reaction, so they're still a radiation hazard. And added to this original neutron flux is that of the D+T reaction. But the extra, extractable energy still seems to make this fuel cycle attractive.

And, apparently, the extra step (D+He3 & D+T) can be accomplished in the same reaction chamber as it has approximately the same thermal requirements.

The whole equation looks like this:
6D -> 2He4 + 2p + 2n (43.22 MeV)

Coming from:
1a) D+D -> He3+n (3.268 Mev) {50%}
1b) D+D -> T+p (4.032 MeV) {50%}
2) D+He3 -> He4+p (18.35 MeV)
3) D+T -> He4+n (17.57 Mev)

Unfortunately, there are side reactions (T+T, T+He3) that change this equation somewhat, but there's been some suggestion that spin polarizing the deuterium can mitigate this, though I'm not certain this turned out to be true.

Anyway, I just wanted to take back my earlier objections to Star Trek's use of deuterium as its main fusion fuel.

Edit: DAMN!! Double-checked the neutron equations.
The amount of energy given out to neutrons is 38.5%.
Oh well. That wont stop 22nd century engineers with gravity gens.

First the I-phone antenna and now this. That is this world coming to?

Excellent...soon my awesomely evil mega death-ray of doom will have a generator capable of meeting the power requirements.

Your posts are always a good read mate, even if the words "maths" makes me run a mile.

Hey you realize you all sound like Nuclear Chemists right? I mean, we may as well invent the warp drive right here on the forum . I would just be careful. Some government agency will be after us soon enough. We know too much .

Who says WE aren't the Government?

I...I....I....


Am I stupid if i don´t understand what he is talking about?

Not at all. It is difficult for me to grasp the concepts discussed here. And I'm TRYING. So if you don't get it, sit back and watch the amazing people work out the formula for warp plasma. It just dawned on me that Cochrane didn't invent warp drive, he stole it from our forums . Oh well. If we end up inventing warp drive, I'm sure the government will build it, saying that they actually invented it despite stealing it from us. However, I love the amount of research put into this. Is anyone here actually a Nuclear Chemist? Now I'm curious...

Cochrane made his Warp flight in 2063.

...So that means the forums will still be around in 53 years. Woah.

Well wasn´t that the date mstrobel was planing for the Alpha 7 Version?

Ssh! It's supposed to be a secret!

1) I'm not a nuclear chemist. Just learning the basics so I can write accurate stories.
2) Yes. I'm working on understanding warp drive so I can make one. Doubt it will happen, but I want to try.

Actually, I've been wondering if it's possible to correlate mass, volume & max-wf of the different vessels in such a way as to derive power usage.

What I mean is, we know the warp to power curves of the Galaxy Class as well as its total density and the densities of several of its parts --including, I think but am unsure, its warp coils. (That is, assuming we can take the tech manuals at face value.) Well, if we assume most of the TNG/DS9/Voy ships use close to the same materials, wouldn't it be possible to cross reference the written data so as to deduce what warp power varies as?

I mean, obviously, if the Defiant can travel at 9.9wf--the DS9 tech manual says she can travel faster--she can't be using up antimatter at the same rate Galaxy would because Defiant doesn't have the storage space for all that fuel. According to the chart in the TNG Manual Galaxy would require on the order of 380kg/sec of M/AM at 9.9wf. Well at 152 kg per cubic meter, that's just too much damned liquid deuterium for Defiant to carry!

But is her power usage reduced in accordance to her mass? Her volume? Her density? What? I think we may have enough data--in the non-cannon manuals--to hazard a guess.... But.... I haven't figured out how yet.

Any thoughts?