Granted, we all know it as a plot device, but if you take the on-screen evidence and the various safeguards mentioned in the TNGTM is a core breach even plausible? I thought maybe the Trek tech junkies might enjoy a new discussion since there�s not a lot of new subject matter available these days.
Sticking with the TNGTM info and the onscreen evidence as much as possible, here are a couple of things that bug me about the subject,
1. A coolant leak seems to signal the impending doom? Coolant leak from what? There�s no mention of the M/ARC requiring a coolant at all. The IDF/SIF and deflector systems have a liquid helium coolant loops but apparently the M/ARC components are passively cooled. 2. Although we can�t see internal damage from the BOP torp hits, we know casualties were light and the WPS system was still functioning as the blast door went down in Engineering, both facts tend to suggest there wasn�t a significant amount of internal damage to the E-D prior to breach 3. The TNGTM suggests the flight computer had atleast two other options rather than having a warp core breach�a WPS shutdown or a warp core ejection, either option would have robbed the core of its fuel supply and should have safed the system.
Based on the script the core was getting into a runaway reaction situation which would indicate maybe there was some damage to the injectors, but still seems like a total shutdown would have solved the problem. Anybody else have any thoughts?
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Sabotaged programming from one of the other times Geordi was brainwashed/taken prisoner/shown to be a hapless moron.
Posted by Dat (Member # 302) on :
Well Geordi did say he can't shut it down. Most likely if the injectors were damaged, it would have prevented a shutdown or ejection. However, he may have had the option of ejecting the core and the antimatter pods provided the clamps holding them in place didn't fuse.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Or mabye ther are restrictions against ejecting the soon-to-detonate warpcore in a poulated system? No telling hpw far that might have traveled before blowing up, and it's trajectory is not exavtly controlled if Voyager's is any indication.
We have, after all, seen a Galaxy class take far more (structural) damage and not blow up. The Odyssey for example.
I blame Moriarty - final payback for living in fantasy land -and to avenge all those holodeck eposodes we had to suffer through.
Posted by ChristopherT (Member # 1634) on :
I think this really proves that Matt Jefferies was correct when he put the all the warp drive engineering in the nacelles when he designed the Enterprise.
You never saw catastrophic damage to ships (with the exception of the USS Constellation), even after a prolonged battle. Even the USS Reliant kept itself in one piece after the Enterprise cut off one of it's warp nacelles. If anything should have prompted a warp core breach, that was it.
Q. "How much science fiction do you want?" A. "The less you use the better. We limit complex terminology as much as possible, use it where necessary to mantain the flavor of the show and encourage believablity. IMPORTANT: The writer must know what he means when he uses science or projected science terminology. A scatter-gun confusion of meaningless phrases only detracts from believability."
ST:PHASE II. J and G Reeves-Stevens.
Apparently there was a split forming even back then. From a technical point of view I think the warp core breaches in TNG are overused. It seems to me that Fleet technology has taken a leap backward in the eighty years since ST:VI. No one makes any sort of decision regarding the ship or it's crew without first running a "level 4 diagnostic"...
"Captain Piccad, there is an asteroid dead ahead, should I turn to avoid it?" "Run a level 4 diagnostic first then turn hard to port to evade the asteroid"
"Yoeman, should I wear the Blue uniform or the Yellow uniform?" "Run a level 4 diagnostic and ask me again with the results"
"Commander Data, would you like to join me in my cabin for an hour?" "One moment, I need to run a level 4 diagnostic before I can answer you!"
Is the ship that shoddy or are Fleet liability lawyers the scariest things since the Borg? I'd be headed to the nearest drydock! Maybe in that context we can understand not only warp core reaches but bridge stations that seem to have more plasma than the intermix chamber!
Christopher
Posted by Vice-Admiral Michael T. Colorge (Member # 144) on :
To be fair, the more complex a system you have, the more likely bad things will happen. But I still can't explain why bridge consoles explode as much as starship in the late 24th Century.
Posted by Shipbuilder (Member # 69) on :
Actually Geordi said "There's nothing I can do" which certainly covers not being able to shut it down, along with ANYTHING else...how convenient
I'm surprised we didn't hear the computer saying "ejection systems offline," that would have helped AND it's not like they've been scared to use that line in the past.
I thought about the warp core eject restrictions thing before too, but it appears that Riker makes the decision to separate the Battle Section without getting an indication that that was his last resort, granted, maybe it's standard operating procedure when in combat not to eject the core and he just relied on training to make the call.
Although we've seen a few instances, I'm still iffy about how a warp core can explode after being ejected and separated from its reactant supplies. If you don't have matter or antimatter flowing into the system, how do you keep the reaction going?
There is a line about magnetic interlocks being ruptured so perhaps there was some damage to the injectors that allowed a free flow of reactants into the core, resulting in a sort of runaway reaction? The MCS lights were moving alot faster just before the door came down.
I actually did a little digging into this to update my electronic version of the TNGTM (got tired of the sheets falling out of my paper copy). Everytime I come back to do alittle more on it I get stuck with the planetfall section update based on the Ent-D. I used Sternbach's deck plans and the visible impact locations shown on screen and there is some potential for EPS equpment damage based on the hits...I just always figured they ended up with power spikes that ended fried a brige screen out due to the damage, lucky shots I guess.
Posted by ChristopherT (Member # 1634) on :
quote:Originally posted by Vice-Admiral Michael T. Colorge: To be fair, the more complex a system you have, the more likely bad things will happen. But I still can't explain why bridge consoles explode as much as starship in the late 24th Century.
It's been 100 years since the horseless carriage became really popular, but cars still run out of gas, suffer blown tires and succumb from punctured radiators. If you ask me the technology curve of TNG was really flat, we saw a lot of Excelsiors,Oberths and Mirandas doing a yoeman's duty keep the bigger ships supplied with plots.
Excelsior was said to have taken 15 years to complete, so the tech level there wasn't that great a leap forward aside from the Transwarp drive. I think what changed was not the technology but how it was used.
Christopher
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
(yeoman)
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
A better comparison would be between diesel electric engines on submarines and nuclear powered vessels.
The older system is still in use in places, but is no where near as powerful or advanced as the new systems...though, as pointed out, less prone to catastrophic failures.
Besides, it's quite likely that those small, self-contained nacelles cant serve a larger vessel (thus leading to the reason the new tech was created in the first place as ships grew and so did their power requirements).
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
Canonically speaking, the nacelles of TOS were never quite self-contained. When things got tough in "That Which Survives", an antimatter thingamajig within the hull had to be either shut down or ejected. Jettisoning of nacelles was not an option, and probably would never be when the ship was at warp; but jettisoning of the reaction chamber sounded very much analogous to a TNG-style core jettison, and might have been a humble beginning for that ship-saving procedure.
Was the core of the NX-01 ever mentioned to be jettisonable, in part or as a whole? Its position didn't look conductive of such a thing, but in a real crisis it wouldn't be that much of a sacrifice to jettison half the saucer along with it.
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :
quote:1. A coolant leak seems to signal the impending doom? Coolant leak from what? There�s no mention of the M/ARC requiring a coolant at all. The IDF/SIF and deflector systems have a liquid helium coolant loops but apparently the M/ARC components are passively cooled.
The cooling system was mentioned quite a bit in the shows, actually... right when the coolant started leaking. The operating temperatures and pressures of the reactor are quite intense, but I cannot recall exactly how high the technical manual claimed (or if any episode has even mentioned a warp core operating temperature).
In "Cost of Living", we saw a sweat-soaked engineering crew spraying down the reaction chamber as the metal-eating parasites were slowly eating away at one of the particular metals. I don't recall the parasites damaging the cooling system in that episode -- just the core itself. It's probable in this case that the metal being consumed helped function as a thermal insulator.
quote:Based on the script the core was getting into a runaway reaction situation which would indicate maybe there was some damage to the injectors, but still seems like a total shutdown would have solved the problem. Anybody else have any thoughts?
All the instances of the warp core running out of control just don't make much sense to me. Unless dilithium crystals have some properties that allow it to slower start building up to a big kaboom, I don't seem how simply stopping the reactant flow would not solve the problem.
Okay, the injector controls could freeze or whatnot, but there aren't a series or valves, shunts, or the like along the fuel line from the reservoirs to the core that can be automatically or manually closed? Granted, it'd be harder to do with the antimatter, since the valve would have to magnetically kink the line instead of a physical barrier cutting off the flow. There was the line in Generations about magnetic interlocks being ruptured, but that sounds like it means the containment had already failed.
quote:Although we've seen a few instances, I'm still iffy about how a warp core can explode after being ejected and separated from its reactant supplies. If you don't have matter or antimatter flowing into the system, how do you keep the reaction going?
If the injectors contained an enclosed pre-injection reservoir for the reactants (perhaps to act normally as a buffer in case of a fuel supply problem), then maybe simply blocking the fuel lines in a crisis wouldn't help. It could also explain had the reaction keeps feeding itself and how the core can explode from the reaction after ejection. Of course, there's nothing about any such thing in either the manual or the shows, I believe.
Posted by Shipbuilder (Member # 69) on :
quote: The cooling system was mentioned quite a bit in the shows, actually... right when the coolant started leaking. The operating temperatures and pressures of the reactor are quite intense, but I cannot recall exactly how high the technical manual claimed (or if any episode has even mentioned a warp core operating temperature).
The coolant leak was mentioned, correct...but there's no mention of a cooling system required for the core. TNGTM says 72,000 kilopascals and 2 x 10^12 K normal operating temp at the reaction site (atleast for Warp 1 power). The ironic part is that all "energy carrying" portions of the WPS are designed to handle 10x the normal pressure load. That would suggest the reactants pretty much have to start pouring into the reaction area to kick off a core breach.
quote: In "Cost of Living", we saw a sweat-soaked engineering crew spraying down the reaction chamber as the metal-eating parasites were slowly eating away at one of the particular metals. I don't recall the parasites damaging the cooling system in that episode -- just the core itself. It's probable in this case that the metal being consumed helped function as a thermal insulator.
That would actually be consistant with a passively cooled system. I'll have to go back and watch that one again, thanks for the tip.
quote: If the injectors contained an enclosed pre-injection reservoir for the reactants (perhaps to act normally as a buffer in case of a fuel supply problem), then maybe simply blocking the fuel lines in a crisis wouldn't help. It could also explain had the reaction keeps feeding itself and how the core can explode from the reaction after ejection. Of course, there's nothing about any such thing in either the manual or the shows, I believe.
Just looking at schematics and info in the TNGTM the injectors ARE pretty much the valves that could close off flow to the core. On the matter side they are used to cool down the slush fuel even further, shape it into pellets, then feed it into the MCS flow path straight to the core. The antimatter side basically does the same thing but with antimatter. No doubt other valves would exist upstream at the deuterium tank exit and the animatter storage pod manifold exit that could have been closed also. Might review Insurrection and Cathexis and see what the deals were there.
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