posted
It chills my flux. I always prefer to have my flux chilled if possible. Unchilled flux just doesn't have the same draw for me as a nice, crispy, chilled flux.
Mmmm... I remember when my mom used to serve icy cold chilled flux for desert on Sundays. We'd just sit on the porch, watching the neighbor get drunk and run naked in his yard, and sip on our chilled flux. Those were the days.
posted
They didn't use the same name but it was intended to be an hommage AFAIR.
-------------------- "Never give up. And never, under any circumstances, no matter what - never face the facts." - Ruth Gordon
Registered: Mar 2000
| IP: Logged
posted
I don't think it could've been from Back to the Future, because if you listen to the background dialog in one of ST:TMP's engineering scenes (right before they leave dock IIRC) a crewmember is performing a checklist with the computer about the "Main Flux Chiller's port and starboard", far before Back to the Future.
-------------------- Bender: Well I don't have anything else planned for today, let's get drunk!
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
Spike, Back to the Future came out in 1985. Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out in 1979. The Enterprise's "main-stage flux chillers" have nothing to do with the DeLorean's "flux capacitor".
The Enterprise's engines contained some nifty tech from the descriptions in the first two movies. We know there are "power-stage", "main-stage", and "final-stage" elements that deal with some kind of flux. The "power-stage" bits are "flux constrictors". That may be an early version of the step-down into the ship's EPS that we have in more detail in TNG. The other two are "flux chillers", and may have something to do with keeping the subspace field flux from melting down the coils.
I don't know if any of the official or fandom stuff ever got around to defining these terms. Maybe the GEC... The other major components referred to seem a bit more straightforward. The "space-energy/matter sinks" are what we know later as the Bussard collectors. And the "space matrix restoration coils" have something to do with dissipating the subspace field to drop the ship back into normal space. Dr. Crusher sure could have used one of those in "Remember Me"...
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
| IP: Logged
posted
Well, no, because I imagine having a universe collapse on you wouldn't be good for your health.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
I've got one in my car (next to the overthruster) but it was there when I bought it. I think it's part of my air conditioner.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
Most likely, it's a temperature relation system related to the flux of a warp engine component. If flux is (as my science dictionary says) "the number of particles flowing per unit area in a cross section of a beam of particles", then a flux chiller would be something to reglate the beam -- maybe the way electricity superconducts the closer you get to absolute zero.
That's one possible explanation.
-------------------- "Well, I mean, it's generally understood that, of all of the people in the world, Mike Nelson is the best." -- ULTRA MAGNUS, steadfast in curmudgeon
Registered: Feb 2001
| IP: Logged
posted
By semantics alone, a "flux chiller" could be a device chilling X by using a flux. As opposed to a device chilling X by using something else. And would tell us nothing about the nature of X. Except that it needs some chilling.
(Never mind that any chilling is bound to involve a heat flux - let's say a flux chiller uses a particulate flux to create a heat flux, while a radiator chiller involves no other flux besides heat flux.)
As for "flux capacitor", there's a TNG episode where LaForge makes a slip of the tongue, using the name "flux capacitor" for something he originally called a "flux regulator" . This was probably scripted in deliberately, as a "BTTF" homage. What was the episode, though? "Nth Degree"? "Hollow Pursuits"? I think it was a Barclay piece.
And as for "space/matter sink", that piece of technobabble probably wasn't originally intended to indicate anything like a ramscoop. The FJ material also features a "space/matter SOURCE" at the other end of the nacelle, as if the nacelles were gigantic bipolar magnets or other bipolar field devices.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic
