Topic: Star Trek ships

[Don Karnage]

Or a well place torpedo that hit the ammunition room.

[Lieutenant_Q]

Yes, an episode of Voyager... the one where Seven is the only one awake on the ship.  Her hallucination states as one of the problems she has to overcome is that one of the Photon Torpedoes just armed itself in the bay.  She had only a couple of minutes before it detonated, destroying the bay and the surrounding sections.

I've thought about the different ways the Photon Torpedoes could be stored, and I can't really come up with one I completely like.

1) The Torpedoes are stored inert, with everything but the anti-matter already in the warhead.  Certainly the safest way to transport them, but having to fuel them prior to launch makes me wonder if Federation ships would want to have anti-matter transfer lines running from the storage bays to the launchers.  The storage bays are supposed to be deep in the ship, but then you have the lines running to the bays, and you've just made the ship much more vulnerable.  Also, any breach to this line that doesn't take out half your ship, takes your torpedo launcher out of commission.

2) The Torpedoes have the anti-matter already in the warhead and separated from the matter in the payload by a non-reactive divider that is removed from the warhead prior to launch, when the divider is removed a force field is erected to replace it.  When the force field fails, the torpedo detonates.  You can set the force field to detonate on impact, or in proximity to the target.  The issue with this is that a hit to the torpedo bay could destroy the bay, and the ship, if even one torpedo's divider is breached.


The Galaxy, its Warp Core exploded because it overheated.  Geordi was supposed to report to the Bridge about something being wrong with the Core, presumably the ejector assembly, right before the panel blew up and started spewing coolant all over Engineering.

[Don Karnage]

Yes, an episode of Voyager... the one where Seven is the only one awake on the ship.  Her hallucination states as one of the problems she has to overcome is that one of the Photon Torpedoes just armed itself in the bay.  She had only a couple of minutes before it detonated, destroying the bay and the surrounding sections.

I've thought about the different ways the Photon Torpedoes could be stored, and I can't really come up with one I completely like.

1) The Torpedoes are stored inert, with everything but the anti-matter already in the warhead.  Certainly the safest way to transport them, but having to fuel them prior to launch makes me wonder if Federation ships would want to have anti-matter transfer lines running from the storage bays to the launchers.  The storage bays are supposed to be deep in the ship, but then you have the lines running to the bays, and you've just made the ship much more vulnerable.  Also, any breach to this line that doesn't take out half your ship, takes your torpedo launcher out of commission.

2) The Torpedoes have the anti-matter already in the warhead and separated from the matter in the payload by a non-reactive divider that is removed from the warhead prior to launch, when the divider is removed a force field is erected to replace it.  When the force field fails, the torpedo detonates.  You can set the force field to detonate on impact, or in proximity to the target.  The issue with this is that a hit to the torpedo bay could destroy the bay, and the ship, if even one torpedo's divider is breached.


The Galaxy, its Warp Core exploded because it overheated.  Geordi was supposed to report to the Bridge about something being wrong with the Core, presumably the ejector assembly, right before the panel blew up and started spewing coolant all over Engineering.

What episode of Voyager is that? The only one I can think of is when the crew suffer from hallucination because of a space creature.

As for the matter antimatter casing, I don't know how it is. Does the torpedo have both ready ? Or does the ship have then apart somewhere?   Both way would be dangerous, if its antimatter and there a leak, it would explode in contact with matter if the force field collapse.

I don't know if they ever explain how the torpedo work? Like a MK IV is better that a MK III? That mean the the MK IV would have more matter antimatter ? What about the Quantum torpedo? What are they?

If all the torpedo have matter antimatter ready, they are dangerous, if the only have matter, then the antimatter would have to be somewhere and still that would be dangerous.

How do they "add" the antimatter into a torpedo?

[Corbomite]

What episode of Voyager is that?

It's called The Void.

Photons have several levels of blast ability (at least six by TNG: Redemption pt2) so there must be some kind of mechanism to quickly adjust the blast amount in the loading bay. I would assume they have a matter/antimatter supply handy in or near the bay (that might have its own ejection mechanism if needed) that loads the charge at the point before launch.

[Don Karnage]

In TNG season 5 episode 7 we can see at 28:30 2 Miranda class, a space station? and what seem to be the saucer of a ship. Does anyone know if its a saucer or a full ship? And at 25:50 you can see a Klingon ship, it look a bit like a D7, so what's a Klingon ship doing at a Federation junk yard?

[Lieutenant_Q]

Episode 93, Season 4 Episode 25. "One"

Torpedoes cannot be replicated, whether that is by design or just by difficulty was never determined.  So they would have to be intact somewhere on the ship (i maintain that it's by design so that no one person with a replicator and access to antimatter could just replicate 40 thousand Photon Torpedoes and single handedly become a menace to the entire Alpha Quadrant, if specs to replicate them don't exist anywhere, then the specs can't be stolen)  Since Antimatter is not pure antimatter in the way most people think of it, its probably not even Anti-hydrogen like scientists today think of, it won't just react if it gets out of its storage container.  The original specs behind the Photon Torpedo state that it is armed with packets of Matter and Antimatter separated by Magneto-Photonic Forcefields that are thrusted together violently on impact.  Beyond that and some vague references as to their yield, some canon, some not, there is no reference to how they work, nor is there any more than the zero point energy that Picard states in SFC 3 as to what the Quantum Torpedoes are.

Antimatter reacts with its matter counterpart, and nothing else, so it's not as dangerous as the name suggests.  Anti-hydrogen, for example, only reacts with hydrogen.  If you released anti-hydrogen in a room filled completely with helium, nothing would happen.  So transporting Antimatter, is as simple as creating a tube or tank out of whatever the antimatter is NOT.  If you did Anti-Carbon, then you'd make a tube completely out of Silicon.  Its a little more complicated than that, but that's the general idea.  The problem becomes if one of those specially designed tanks or tube breaches, you suddenly have anti-whatever floating freely inside a ship where the components were not so carefully screened.  If were to be breached in the torpedo bay, well, there's giant chunks of the whatever sitting waiting to be reacted with.

All Starships with a Matter/Antimatter reactor have Antimatter storage tanks, they need to be able to fuel their own reactors, and it would make sense if they used the same fuel in the reactors to arm their torpedoes.  Injectors can be made so that they do not react with the Antimatter and they can be pumped directly into the torpedo.  Or because that is an accident waiting to happen, they can come pre-armed, but that is also a danger.  So I still am undecided myself as to how the Torpedoes are stored, whether they are inert and need fuel from the tank, or whether they are pre-armed.  If they need fuel, what happens should a Starship run out of anti-matter or at least have its tanks cut off from the ship through damage?  Does this mean that non-warp powered ships can't even carry Photons?  I know there's not going to be many of those left, even in the 23rd Century, but what would they carry if they couldn't?

[TAnimaL]

Here's the tech manual specs on torpedoes. As a disclaimer, this is not canon but was written by those who wrote the tech in the episodes but this info may be contradicted by other episodes.

The "zero point" stuff Picard mentions probably comes from the DS9 tech manual, which I'll also dig up.

[TAnimaL]

Here's the relevant pages from the DS9 Tech Manual

[Tulwar]

First, we should mention that television writers have little respect for the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so the torpedoes can be charged with magical energy.  If you remember, in ST DS9, they laid a mine field at the mouth of the worm hole, and the mines simply replicated themselves when the Dominion attempted to clear the field.  Energy seems to come out of nowhere through most of the series.  Whenever the captain gives the order, the explosive fuel is magically infused into the torpedo.  The torpedo was empty, but there is no transfer of matter and/or anti-matter from anywhere.  The writers don't think like this, so it doesn't happen.  This is how the Klingon can put their Photon Torpedoes in the noses of their ships.

Having grown up with ST, I've come up with my alternate universe that picks up on the good stuff, and ignores the illogical BS.  TOS didn't have everything thought out, so it gets a pass on its many failings.  In ST, TMP, the refit Enterprise had the torpedo bays right on top of where you'd think the anti-matter storage units were.  This is consistent with charging the torpedo just prior to launch.  As far as the Klingon ship went, well, that just doesn't fit this line of logic.  Either they have to transfer the fuel from the back of the ship, store the torpedo pre-loaded, or simply apply the old Hollywood magic.  From there, every ST ship ranges somewhere between these extremes.  Only those closest to the refit Enterprise make sense to me.

There really shouldn't be any reason that torpedo cases can't be replicated.  Then, there could be some complication with warp coils or other, who knows?  I like the idea of ships being independent enough to manufacture their own.  Well, maybe not fighters or gunboats, but something designed for independent operations better be able to handle itself.  The explosive is a different matter.  I've always thought of Anti-matter as a storage medium in and of itself.  It takes a great deal of energy to create anti-matter, and starships considerable quantities.  Anti-matter has to be produced somewhere.

As far as Anti-Carbon being safe in a Silicone container, I wouldn't be so sure.  Nuclei might be safe, as the electron shells of matter would repel nuclei composed of anti-protons, but with electircally neutral atoms, there would be a problem: positrons would be ripped from their shells, and react with normal matter.

[TAnimaL]

I don't really remember ever hearing it mentioned that torpedoes couldn't be replicated; can anyone cite a reference to this?

At the risk of offending, but with all respect and humility, the show's not supposed to be about the tech. Never was, and shouldn't be. It's about the characters and plot, which is what the writers were going after. This sometimes might lead to awkward contradictions but you have to let some of that slide, just like how we "ignore" the dramatic pause every 7 - 10 minutes for a commercial break. I love trying to figure out how phasers and photons might "work" too, but they just do

[Tulwar]

At the risk of offending, but with all respect and humility, the show's not supposed to be about the tech. Never was, and shouldn't be. It's about the characters and plot, which is what the writers were going after.

Any audience needs to accept convention, but there is a point were the amount of convention the audience has to accept exceeds the capacity to suspend disbelief.  I have a problem with the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy.  Now, the plot device where Rom came up with self replicating mines could be excused for the sake of a good story, but all across the movies and series, the energy used by a starship comes from nowhere.  It's not that it is "unrealistic," but something the writers actually trip over themselves.  That is, if the writers had a clue as to what basic energy systems worked on a ship, their job would have been much easier.

For a franchise that has been lauded for its prescience, everything after TOS really falls on its face.  It became like Star Wars, but with really bad technobable.  The Star Gate series did what ST should have been doing.  The writers for SG1 and Atlantis were really on the ball with making their technology realistic.  There, the premise was hokey, but they stayed true to science.  Every line of dialog about technology was completely believable.  With all the ST "technical manuals," you wonder how another franchise beat ST at its own game.

[Don Karnage]

I don't know if thee any manual that explain how the torpedo work. I think I remember in a manual that they did use matter antimatter and destroyed something on a distance of like 9KM radius.

It was something about ship design, a manual that give you how much x tech cost to build. From FASA and from last century

But still the question is how the control the "blast" of the torpedo?

[Corbomite]

For a franchise that has been lauded for its prescience, everything after TOS really falls on its face.

IDK, personal data-pad/tablets connected to a central cloud computer network seems pretty on the mark right about now.

[Lieutenant_Q]

Honestly its more "real" than people think.  Yes, its entertainment, don't let the science get in the way of the story.  But for the most part, with exceptions given to things like using a Transporter to reverse the aging process, (again don't let the scientific theory of how it should work get in the way of the story), the science stays somewhat consistent.

The amount of power used by a Star Trek ship for example, it should be a lot, and a lot of times you only ever hear of the M/AM reactor as powering the whole ship, even in the episodes its said that that's the case.  Well it's not.  Everyone forgets that the Impulse Engines are powered by a separate system, a Fusion Plant, and I speculate that there would be one for each Engine (or more) so a ship like the Ent-D would have 3 to 6 Fusion Plants backing up the M/AM reactor.  They mention it in passing in several places, but its never focused on.  The one that comes to mind is Enterprise when they are tying in the new Phase Cannons, instead of tying their power connections to the M/AM reactor, they choose the Impulse Engines instead.  Phase Cannons and their successor the Phasers are powered by Impulse Engines for the next 120 years, until the TMP refit ties the Phasers into the M/AM reactor.

A lot of the base science stuff.  Tricorders, Sensors, Engines, and even shields, cloaks and transporters, are sound theories, they may not come to fruition as they were imagined to be 50 years ago, some may never come to fruition, but there's two generations of scientists and engineers that grew up on this stuff, and are testing those theories.  As Corbomite said, almost all the computer technology that was in Star Trek and its spinoffs, we already have it.  We have voice activated computers, we have Tablets, we have Cell Phones and Bluetooth devices to connect to the computers.  Heck we've even got holograms.

I think a lot times we focus on the exceptions, the self replicating minefield, because the exception was needed to advance the story.  But after the exception was used to advance the story, it was promptly forgotten about, because it really never could do that.

[Don Karnage]

I notice that the Rom and Klingon have the same "laptop" as the fed. The terminal they have on their desk to view stuff.

The device use by Barcley when he was connected to the ship computer was use in the klingon hall as a chandelier

[TAnimaL]

Well Tulwar, I think you're over simplifying the writers' work and using things like "Laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy" (in capital letters) just to say how they're wrong. Most of the time they tried and got close, and sometimes not. Look, the ship has energy. It flies because it does. Precisely how the antimatter gets into a torpedo is really less important than whether or not it stops the bad guy of the week. I can't cite an exact example but I'm sure "The Last Ship," a contemporary military series, fudged exactly how the Praire/Masker system (or something like it) actually works to keep things dramatic. I know real crime scene investigators laugh at how fast tech works in "CSI" and how they dress in street clothes and not safety gear, but I still like watching Elisabeth Shue solve crimes in under an hour and looking snazzy while she does

Way back in 1968 Roddenberry was quoted in the excellent "The Making of Star Trek" as saying something like, "Sgt Friday doesn't pick up his .38 special and explain how the firing pin triggers a chemical reaction in the cartridge and the expanding gas propels the bullet along the barrel before shooting it... Capt Kirk shouldn't do it either."

Again, I get how it's fun to speculate, and it's frustrating when they botch some things, but it's better than a lot. TOS suffers more I think  but more because they were using 1960s info.

Don Karnage, I don't know the FASA stuff well, but did you see my previous attachments with the tech manuals? Here's the page on the mailgned "self-replicating mines" from DS9. It's pretty fudgy; I dislike the overuse of the "zero point energy domain" that plagues quantum torpedoes too.

I'm fairly sure some Cardassian padds showed up as Starfleet ones in "First Contact" after a paint job....

[knightstorm]

I've always thought that the torpedoes were stored ready to fire, possibly using ships power for containment.  As for photon torpedoes not being replicated, I think its implied in the early episodes of Voyager where it was stated that the ship had a limited number of photons which couldn't be replaced. (during the course of the series, it surpassed them).  The only thing I can think of is that it has been established that some elements cannot be replicated, ie. latinum.  Torpedoes may require one of these elements making them non-replicatable.

[Don Karnage]

That would explain how the still have torpedo after 7 years. they must have found what ever they need to make more.

[knightstorm]

For a franchise that has been lauded for its prescience, everything after TOS really falls on its face.  It became like Star Wars, but with really bad technobable. 

No, Star Trek didn't fully make sense until after TOS.  That's when they started trying to establish rules for the universe and actually have some degree of consistency.  It didn't become like Star Wars until TROST destroyed the franchize in 2009.

[Corbomite]

I'm pretty sure that anti-matter can't be replicated. That leaves the detonator as the only other crucial element that needs that kind of trait. The rest is just common parts. It's like that last episode with Ro Laren when they were trying to convince the Maquis that the Cardassians were attempting to construct a bio-genic weapon; the components themselves weren't illegal or restricted, but put together the right way and you have a problem.