posted
Explain your reasoning as to why they WOULD provide a useful power source, Sol. As I have posted before, M + AM = BOOM! Uncontrolled release of massive amounts of energy. The closest thing we can get to fulfulling the equation E=MC2. Dilithium (or lithium crystals, whatever) REGULATE the M/AM reaction to provide controlled energy release. According to the TNG:TM, it actually SUSPENDS the reaction in its crystal lattice momentarily.
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------------------ "Although, from what I understand, having travelled around the Mid-west quite a bit, apparently Jesus is coming, so I guess the choice now is we should decide whether we should spit or swallow." -Maynard James Keenan
posted
What are you talking about? That's like saying no one can use coal as an energy source because, good lord, it burns! It burns all the way through!
You get energy from antimatter by smashing it into matter, and then you use that energy to do work. In the Real World (patent pending) that probably involves using the resulting explosion to drive a turbine of sorts.
Star Trek gives us dilithium as a way to mediate that reaction, but it's hardly the only way.
Curiously enough, CERN has a whole page devoted to Star Trek's use of antimatter. It doesn't exactly delve into the subject in any great detail. More of a passing mention, in fact. But it does go so far as to list a number of episodes and movies where the stuff played a part in the plot. Even an episode of the Animated Series. This shocked and amazed me for at least thirty seconds.
posted
Alrighty. Sure, you could mix matter and antimatter together and get power. But it is in a completely uncontrolled release. You'd have to get a REALLY strong container to hold the explosion, and then how are you going to get practical power out of it?
Dilithium/lithium controls the reaction, creating the stream of "energized plasma" neccessary to pass through the warp coils and create the warp fields. No plasma, no warp field, no warp drive. And when you mix matter and antimatter, there is NOTHING left. So it would not work without dilithium/lithium.
posted
Of course you have something left. Tremendous amounts of energy, capable of, as I said, spinning a turbine and generating electricity.
Beyond that, you'd have lots of particles left over as well, since the reaction wouldn't be perfect.
I don't see any reason to think antimatter is harder to get power out of than, say, plutonium. You're not going to just be chucking big snowballs of anti-hydrogen at a target. A large uncontrolled antimatter reaction is incredibly dangerous. So is a large uncontrolled fission reaction.
posted
Masao wrote: ----------------------- The fact that governments are now working on fusion suggests that at least some people think fusion power is within reach. -----------------------
There's a running joke among fusion researchers that goes something like this: In 1960, if you asked one of them, fusion power was 20 years away. In 1980, if you asked again, it was 20 years away. Guess what the current answer is?
Aban Rune wrote: ------------------------ Also, they accelerated to near "critical velocity" BEFORE engaging warp drive. They would have had to accelerate to almost the speed of light so as not to be crushed when making the jump. ------------------------
That would have been a neat trick with the rocket power he used. IIRC, because relativity increases effective mass, there isn't enough propellant in the entire universe to get a chemical rocket anywhere near lightspeed.
------------------ Never give up. Never surrender.
posted
May I remind you that electricity is not what makes warp propulsion feasible. As I said, it's "energized plasma" fed through the warp coils.
There is a difference between fission and M/AM reactions. We can control fission. We cannot control M/AM reactions. First of all, an unregulated M/AM reaction, as you pointed out, would be extremely inefficient. Not everything would be destroyed. Second, kinetic and thermal energy created would be extremely hard to convert into practical energy. What you want is not electricity, but plasma. Third, containing an explosion of such force would be incredibly difficult.
For all these reasons, an uncontrolled M/AM reaction is impractical for powering the warp drive of a starship. What they use to control those M/AM reactions in the Star Trek universe, and therefore make them more practical, is dilithium.
posted
Daniel, you're not making much sense, and I have the impression that you've not been paying much attention to what people have been saying. So I'll try myself.
First, about this massive explosion thing: you only get a large explosion if you bring large enough quantities of matter and anitimatter into contact. The annhilation of a single particle with a single antiparticle does not produce much energy, so by carefully regulating the amount of matter and antimatter that come into contact, you can get any desired amount of energy.
Second, proton-anti-proton reactions produce photons, neutrinos, and some charged particles. The charged particles will rapidly decay into more photons and neutrinos. You can contain these particles in the reaction chamber with a magnetic field. Most of the energy produced is in the form of electromagnetic energy, and bombarding matter with enough electromagnetic energy will turn it into plasma. Thus, producing plasma is a cinch: just fire a stream of antimatter into a chamber of matter-gas, and as some of the gas in consumed in the Matter/Antimatter reaction, the resulting energy turns the gas into a plasma. Use the usual magnetic coils to contain and direct the plasma. No big deal.
Third, I'm not sure what you're talking about when you talk about 'control'. You control fission and antimatter/matter reations in the same way: by controlling the amounts of reactants that come into contact. This is harder to do in fission because in fission, one of the reactants (neutrons) is produced as a by-product of the reaction (thus making nuclear chain-reactions possible). Your statement about uncontrolled matter/antimatter reactions being inefficient is a bit odd. The meaning of 'control' this implies (actually determining how the reaction takes place) cannot be applied to fission, since a fission reaction in a bomb and one in a reactor are the same. And as our everyday use of reactors demonstrates, you don't need to control the characteristics of a reaction, only the rate, to use it as a source of energy.
Question. If you were to fire a stream of antimatter into a chamber of matter in a gaseous state, wouldn't ALL of the matter be consumed if the stream were continuous? You'd have to let in a stream, close the chamber, let out the resulting plasma, and fill the chamber again.
Also, don't you think that to work the system that way is a lot more complex and energy intensive? Creating magnetic fields strong enough to contain plasma requires A LOT of energy. Would it be efficient on a small scale (i.e., within the space of a chopped down nuclear rocket?). And where would the power for the containment come from? Certainly not from the M/AM reactor, because that's dedicated to creating the plasma. You'd need a secondary fusion reactor or something.
posted
If the Enterprise-D M/ARA is in any way indicative of what came before, you're still coming at it the wrong way round. First, you had a massive uncontrolled explosion, now you're positing a 'trickle' theory.
On the Enterprise, and maybe the Phoenix, for however much it matters, a lot of matter and just enough antimatter to produce a lot of energetic plasma get pumped into the reaction chamber -- and keep getting pumped in until the power transfer conduits are up to peak operating pressure. Then the ratio and amount of reactants gets re-scaled to keep the system at pressure, and to keep generating however much power is needed. All the plasma is for is to carry the high levels of electromagnetic energy from the reaction chamber to the coils. The plasma itself is just ionized Deuterium.
--Jonah
------------------ "It's obvious I'm dealing with a moron..."
posted
Okay. Not to go off onto a completely different tangent, but what happens when the M:AM ratio gets to 1:1? Wouldn't there be no plasma left to carry the EM radiation?
P.S. The matter and antimatter are ALREADY energetic plasma by the time they leave the upper and lower injector nozzles. A M/AM reaction isn't needed to create that state. So, why do they bother with that? Do they just do it while they're waiting for the PTC's to reach operating pressure?
[This message has been edited by Daniel (edited April 29, 2001).]
posted
Yeah, that one-to-one ratio always bothered me, too. I can only guess that, once warp 8 is reached, the plasma that there stays around, rather than being depleted. So, all you have to do is keep it heated...
------------------ "Although, from what I understand, having travelled around the Mid-west quite a bit, apparently Jesus is coming, so I guess the choice now is we should decide whether we should spit or swallow." -Maynard James Keenan
posted
Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable solution. The plasma could simply serve as the best available conductor for these energy pulses the m/am reaction is sending. To fill the conduits, you could pre-create the plasma in whatever way you saw best. You could use m/am to create it, you could use big coal-burning furnaces to create it... Heck, even a simple candle flame is plasma! Then you would engage your main powerplant and start pumping power through the pre-existing plasma.
If we want to say that m/am is the only way to do warp, then we can say that the energy pulses sent through the plasma to the warp coils are "magical" - that is, there is some component to them that is unknown to today's science and can only be created by m/am reactions.
If we want to say that there are other ways to do warp, then we simply say that the energy pulses are nothing but EM excitations triggered by the annihilations and traveling along the conduits like soliton waves in a waveguide. Then you could have a fusion-powered or even coal-powered warpship; even if your powerplant couldn't generate enough continuous power to send out these EM excitation waves, you could rig up some sort of capacitor systems that would be charged by the coal boilers until they could release a pulse, then re-charged for the next pulse.
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