I do appreciate how the further back in the timeline we go, the more hard sci fi it is. Like, it has to make sense because it is closer to contemporary technology. Based episode, Venom!
@@venomgeekmedia9886 It is purely my opinion. But I actually do think that Archer Drives were phased out from 2164 (Franklin Incident). It is because they were notorious for causing Temporal Accidents. What was most likely because they were crude, but capable. As Archer find a hack way to reach higher warp speeds despite high instability of the drive. As result it was common when they breach to subspace. After Ceres class cancellation (due to few missing ships, most notably SS Bonaventure) and because Vulcans allowed Federation members to use they carefully tuned Warp 7 cores (and I'm sure they were aware what was the problem). Archer Drive was only delegated to smaller slower ships, but even there it was gradually replaced. What is interesting, is that Ares/Constitution class could possibly reuse old NX hulls due to they sturdy design (Bonaventure derivative ships of Kelvin Era were notoriously flimsy, despite being larger). And so it is possible that some components of Archer Drive were reused, what could explain why Enterprise become again center of Temporal Anomalies. But that is my theory at least.
@@venomgeekmedia9886 Continuing previous topic. Not many people know but TOS enterprise have actually smaller saucer, or exact same size as NX. It was 2/5 of the length instead later 1/2 (they basically use up armored saucer of Federation class). And if we look on the plans Archer Drive would be located in the same section as Impuls Engines. Those in fact also used Plasma, just as direct means to push ship, instead powering warp coils. So they usually house smaller less powerful reactor, so ship could stay in move even if main drive fails. If my theory that Constitution use same hulls as Loknar class, what basically was late 22'th century NX refit. Is true. It is entirely possible that they basically reuse Archer Drives as Impulse Drives. That ironically would also explain why there was no Enterprise for so long... Maybe it is even the same ship? I'm fairly sure one in Picard is just replica. BTW in books scene watch by Riker in Enterprise finale was faked by S31. I'm fairly sure that what actually what happen was initializing temporal incident, what was reason for Archer presence in temporal cold war. It is BTW why he was present during launch of the Pike's ship, even if he should be long dead. Some people even speculate that he is the Future Guy.
@@TheRezro Wait... Can a Warp Engine be used as a Impulse Drive? Can TOS battery power energize the plasma section in an Archer Engine? Do Impulse Drives use plasma in the same way as a Warp Drive?
A better nerd than me once likened dilithium crystals with antimatter to what a prism is to light. I was 11 years old at the time, and the year was 1998 so take that with a grain of dilithium.
I love the TNG vertical reactor because you can see what's happening. Visually I always liked seeing behind the red fence in TOS. I wish i could have seen a red fence on ENT.
@@venomgeekmedia9886 What is quite interesting is that he use real scientific ideas to describe fantastical concepts (look magnetic dipoles), so fantastical tech could be understand by analogy, even if it was made up.
4:49 VGM: "I'm not a Science Man! I'm not a Science Man!" Well we knew that with all the mispronunciations of Toe-Kah-Mack (Tokamak) reactors, but we still love ya. 😋
Also - antimatter is completely real and exists, and it doesn’t “like to explode”. It undergoes annihilation when it comes into contact with normal matter, but in isolation it’s no more or less unstable than regular matter is.
well, yes, but it can't be contained easily because you have to contain it in a container made of Regular matter --> annihilation --> Energy release --> Kaboom
The TNG episode relics explains that dilithium crystals can be recrystallized, Scotty was unaware that the Enterprise D could do it without removing the crystals from the engine.
Specifically Scotty was pointing out that they were running their engines so hard that the crystals were going to shatter, which tells you just how hot and fast the Enterprise-D's engines run compared to a late 23rd Century reactor. There was also the problem with the Bird of Prey in Voyage Home, with them having run the Klingon reactor too hard during their time warp and the Crystals were breaking down.
A Trek series exploring the first 10 years after First Contact would be fascinating. Like who were the 2nd alien race to make contact with Humanity after the Vulcans? Did the Vulcans help rebuild Earth? Was there hostilities towards them by certain factions still remaining on Earth? A ton to mine there story wise.
First of all, what many people forget is that there was massive exodus from Earth in first half of century. Like all those eugenic, communist and fascists colonies didn't come from nowhere. I'm fairly sure one of main reason why Ferengi and Cardasians weren't discovered for so long, despite close proximity to Earth, was that until 24'th century, whole region was minefield of semi-independent Earth colonies. Literal Wild West in space. As side note. Earth itself was probably on edge of Vulcan controlled domain. But with few exceptions (Rigelian Pirates?). Earth didn't really have contact with other races, until NX Enterprise mission. It is why they appearance catch Romulans of guard.
I remember one of the old TOS novels (Memory Prime, the one where the Enterprise ferries a whole bunch of scientists to IIRC the future Nobel awards) where it was explained how matter/antimatter engines work better with dilithium, but do not need it as long as you’re content going slow (around warp 4 at best). As the Enterprise was in the heart of Federation space, they didn’t need speed and Mr. Scott took the crystals out for routine maintenance and let the engines run without. It ended up sparing the Enterprise from the worst of a sabotage attempt (a minor inconvenience as opposed to the total destruction had the crystals still been in the reactor). I always head-canoned the Archer-style Warp 5 engine as being Starfleet’s first use of dilithium because of how neatly it lined up with that book, even if only incidentally.
Trip gets little love. History forgets about him. The sheer fact he did get a Warp 5 Core to go Warp 6, if I recall. Or I am making it up. But, then again, sounds like a very Trip thing. Or I am selling him short and he could take it to Warp 7.
@@Qardo getting warp 6 out of isnt as bad as it sound is any of the trek tech books are to be taken for cannon as the you just have get of the hump once your there maintaining it takes only about 50% more power then last warp factor
I know I'm a little late to the party but I just re watched this video and suddenly it hit me about the the TOS Constitution class warp core. Basically the Engineering room(set) of the Constitution is sitting on TOP of the main dilithium reaction chamber of the ships warp core. I just had a mind blown realization at the sheer size of the Enterprises(NCC-1701) warp core compared to the core of the Enterprise (NX-01) That's probably why they switched to the vertical collision cores. They likely hit the line of diminishing returns on the Archer style engine.(They couldn't increase the power output faster than the downsides of the design increased)
The issue with inertial confinement fusion isn't even the high upfront material cost of it. The primary problem is the gross inefficiency of the lasers required to make it work: The recent "breakthrough" announced by the national ignition facility (NIF) at Livermore laboratories was interesting, but despite what anyone says, was NOT a significant step towards building a self-sustaining fusion reactor. Yes, they got more energy out of the fusion fuel pellet than the energy contained in the laser pulses shot at it. But the underlying problem which they never mentioned publicly was that generating those laser pulses required at minimum 20 times more energy than that, since the efficiency of the conversion between electrical energy input and laser energy output is about 5% at best, on a very good day - often it is worse than that, as little as 2%, meaning you need 50 times the electrical energy input to generate the laser pulses. Which is before you even think about how to go about taking a portion of that fusion energy output and using it to power the lasers to keep the whole thing running. That is unlikely to happen directly, it's going to need at least 1 energy conversion step (realistically more like 2 or maybe even 3), all with their own inefficiencies. So with the current state of laser technology, allowing for those inefficiencies and energy conversion steps, each fuel pellet used would need to generate hundreds of times more energy from fusion than the lasers used to ignite it - and that's just to make the reactor self-sustaining, to say nothing of making it produce a net energy surplus to allow it to be used as an actual power station. So I'm not surprised that Chief O'Brien hates the inertial confinement method - it is an almost ludicrously convoluted and hilariously inefficient way of building a fusion reactor. Tokamaks, stellarators or magnetic bottle systems are always going to be easier to build and maintain - and almost certainly more efficient too.
Free electron lasers can be exceedingly efficient at creating light, between 80% and 99%, depending on specifics. If it were just a problem with efficiency --energy transmuted to photons for confinement-- then eventually free electron lasers would get small enough and/or powerful enough to make the whole thing practical. The real difficulty is confinement control: you want the inward force created by the light to be as close to spherical as possible so that the compressed fusion fuel does not escape out of the irregularities in the field. You can't hold water in a wiffle ball; you can't hold plasma in an irregular field of force. To that point, the NIF's ability to achieve fusion ignition via the implosion of a fusion fuel pellet using points of force from lasers is an astonishing achievement, akin to momentarily containing water within a wiffle ball. People keep down-playing it but it was a major step. We now KNOW it's laser confinement fusion is possible, not just on paper but in measurable reality. More, the achievement can be replicated and understood. This is huge, even if NIF can never be a power supply. Downplaying it is like looking at a diode and saying, "What good is that? I want a laser!" I suspect there are going to be several kinds of fusion reactors for all manner of needs. That inertial confinement will work along side with elctro-magnetica confinement in different work cases. I'm too ignorant to be able to predict what will be used for what but I definitely expect the uses and solutions to be wide ranging.
@@bmobert NIF used indirect drive to achieve their latest ignition. The laser heats up a metallic chamber (called a hohlraum) that surrounds the fuel capsule. The hohlraum gets hot enough to emit x-rays which then implode the fuel
@@bmobert If you could ignite the fusion pellet with laser light directly, then it would be a great deal simpler and more efficient. But this isn't the way it works: The laser radiation needs to be converted to X-rays, since these are what actually achieve the fusion ignition - and the conversion between laser and X-rays is horribly inefficient. So whichever way you look at it, the inefficiencies of energy conversion are what make the inertial confinement method impractical for making a fusion reactor.
@@lloydevans2900 Ok. I have several points here. One of the accomplishments of the NIF is that the shot that achieved ignition used a halraum that was not as perfectly cylindrical as they were previously requiring. They achieved this by pulse-shaping the laser light in order to pulse-shape the x-ray field that compressed the fusion fuel. Which is to say, they were able to overcome the imperfections in the halraum by changing the time-wise shape of the laser pulse. By reducing the manufacturing accuracy needed for the halraum, they've also reduced the expense of making the halraum. Admittedly, not by nearly enough to make it anywhere near being a viable fusion fuel for a power plant, but it's an important step nonetheless. It is just as important a step for any future facility that uses direct laser drive, as the fuel for such a facility will also not be perfectly spherical and learning to compensate for those imperfections will be a requirement there, too. As to the efficiency of turning electrical energy into x-ray laser light, I again point you in the direction of free electron lasers (FELs). The conversion efficiency of energy to light is 80% to 99% depending on specifics. Electron accelerators that can fit on a microchip have already been been demonstrated and they output electron energies that are already in the correct realm to make the needed x-rays. And the same architecture can be used to design FELs on a chip. (Electron accelerators can be considered inverse FELs, after all.) The current generation of chip based accelerators are underpowered by many orders of magnitude compared to what is needed for laser-based inertial confinement fusion, but I predict that will change rapidly. Chip based accelerator/FEL combos are just too useful. So, honestly, it's not as bad as you think, it's just needs about a decade worth of solid research. Not that it's going to happen that way; simply that it could.
An interesting look into the different hypothetical reactions between various early warp drives. As for your saying two deuterium atoms colliding together. Perhaps the inverse, but at a greater frequency, is why there is more matter than antimatter in the observable universe. While Star Trek dilithium doesn't exist, it is interesting to think of what possible practical applications of antimatter will be found by our various real-life versions of Henry Archer.
I always understood that Dylithum Crystals were used in Focusing and Lenzing the power from a Matter Antimatter Reaction thereby making it more efficient more stable and higher utilization at specific frequencies necessary to power the Warp Nacales as well as the other systems on board the ship that utilized those high levels of power. You'll find reference to Dylithum Crystals being recrystalized and even created artificially!! 🤠👍
@@venomgeekmedia9886 As side note. I always did have theory that Dylithum was alien clarktech nanite hives. Something comparable to Tiberium, Energon or Kyber. That would explain why they couldn't be replicated.
ToS did not use " counterbalance" matter. The antimatter was exposed to the relative matter in the surrounding. A good example is the episode "Obsession"
Though they did mention Deuterium tanks. In TAS they used random matter and an antimatter beast piece ( it was a planet eating cloud) as an emergency power supply. It wasn't ideal by Scotty's recommendations but it was the best they could at the moment.
Excellent video I can only imagine the time it took you to research just to get up to speed on the science and potential means of harnessing fusion. I'm looking forward to your eventual second part
Here’s an idea for a short, in the game Star Trek fleet command there are 2 ships, the realta and the turas, that are said to be from/based on ships from the 2100s, and a video on them would be pretty cool
What do you mean antimatter is not real? It's very real. Acquiring antimatter in sufficient quantities for use in a reactor is just prohibitively expensive today. Creating a reaction with antimatter is much easier than fusion though. In reality, if we solve the issues of acquiring antimatter cheaply, and its storage and transport safely, we'd switch over to it in a second.
We do know how to make antimatter cost effectively theoretically speaking, what we don't have are the capabilities of the materials needed to put an antimatter generator near a star.
Love the video haven't found anyone that does such an indepth explanation of all the technical mumbo jumbo of the franchise. One of the reasons I like Star Trek over the hand waving questionable master-padawan relationships of other series sometimes. Anywho was wondering if you would ever do a video exploring the warp engine designs as a whole leading up to present day star Trek including their discovery. One of the big questions I had in enterprise and the noncannon season 5-7 books was how do they eventually break the warp 7 barriers. As that seemed like the big plot point that was never resolved in the noncannon enterprise books. (What should have been season 5-7). And finally connected the eras between the lesser technology of pre federation and combined technology of the newly created UFP.
I'm still asking when "earth's" and early star fleet ships got artificial gravity generators. That way you can build the ships decks parallel to the line of thrust instead of perpendicular to line of thrust.
Probably around the same time as first contact. Since you know the Vulcans would have had that already and might have offered up a few pieces of tech like that to their new friends.
@@venomgeekmedia9886 Considering that Botany Bay already has artificial gravity, I would assume it was one of the tech recovered from Quark's Shuttle. We do not see examples of Earth not having it. Starliner class rings were engine parts, not the crew's decks.
I like the section regarding the sci-fi lore for generating plasma vs reality as we know it. Cochrane's warp engine was able to fit inside an ICBM for warp. A relatively small antimatter annihilation reaction vessel. It would have been fun to have some pre antimatter warp ship designs based on Toroidal plasma generation as we understand it and therefore need the ship to be cathedral sized to house the gigantic torus. Could be layered, or wide diameter. Either way is would be like humanity launched a leviathan as it's first crewed voyage.
Going into beta lore from Masao that during the transition time between pure fusion and M-AM reactors. They started injecting antimatter into a fusion reactor similar to adding nitrous oxide getting a temporary power boost, at the cost of shorter reactor life. More Masao beta lore was that M-AM reactors were built that did not utilize Di-lithium and were limited. My understanding of Di-lithium was that it has a paticular subspace properties that it does not react to antimatter yet it is able to focus and stabilize reaction within itself and emits a beam of higher energy plasma that is unutilized by the warp. coils.
Absolutely great video... I always loved this fusion era in the starfleet museum. Such low tech to use brute force of energy to push a ship to warp 3 or so.. like a v12 in the 20s.. just to get up to 80mph. Or warp 8 as my childish mind thinks while driving... lol. 4.5 is very economical. Lol
Would love a video covering the constitution class! Such a great video, I learned so much from what you explained about the NX & Archer engine. It makes so much more sense now.
Antimatter does exist in real life, but is difficult to manufacture. And I don't believe it exists naturally. Also, in real life, if you create antimatter, you also create an exactly equal amount of regular matter. There's no known way to produce one without also producing an equal amount of the other. And the amount produced will be exactly equal to the amount of energy put into the system *IF* the system was 100% efficient.
It does actually exist naturally, just in very small amounts. It collects naturally in planetary magnetic fields, and there are theories about collecting antimatter using what are basically bussard collectors in orbit around Jupiter.
@@Gryphorim little bits of antimatter are created during thunderstorms here on earth actually. this phenomenon is most noticeable on gas giants like jupiter due to the scale of the storms, but it is there. kinda neat!
Antimatter does exist naturally. Admittedly it's mostly positrons produced by stellar fusion and doesn't get very far, but it does exist outside of a lab. The total conversion symmetry your talking about does exist, but it has a rather large issue that is currently being puzzled out. Mainly the fact that if such symmetry is true (which it appears to be based on high energy experiments at CERN and Fermi Labs) then there's a lot of antimatter that has inexplicably vanished based on the estimated amount of mass the universe has. Theoretically if one could manipulate the charge states of the quarks that make up the Protons and Electrons, then an atom of anti-matter probably anti-hydrogen or anti-deuterium could be synthesized without producing it's counter part. It would still be energy intensive and probably would make use of the quantum tunneling effect a phenomenon we have little idea how to harness and is probably not going to be feasible in our children's lifetime.
@@marsar1775 Also in bananas. The potassium beta-decays which usually releases an electron, but every now and then it releases a positron instead. edit: both also release a neutrino
As hinted at a bit in a previous response to you thunder storms. If I remember correctly "bolts" of lightning extend up to the edge of atmosphere and anti antimatter has been detected.
Antimatter would be analogous to synthetic petroleum. You can't power a fighter plane or tank directly with a hydro dam or coal plant, so if you don't have access to natural petroleum can use the energy to synthesize gasoline or distill ethanol, then burn the fuel in a compact and mobile internal combustion engine. Thus the Federation would have solar collectors or nuclear plants that produce the energy and then use it to manufacture antimatter. Inertial confinement is currently the only we have to ignite a self-sustaining fusion reaction, as proven by thermonuclear weapons and the National Ignition Facility (NIF's laser might as well be airsoft compared to a hand phaser that can vaporize a man). The fuel isn't imploded by the lasers, they instead heat up a metallic chamber (hohlraum) until it emits x-rays which then drive the fuel implosion. ICF could also be considered more fuel efficient as it consumes less of the rarer tritium isotope of hydrogen. Future magnetic confinement development might reverse the situation in the future, so it makes sense that a civilization would develop ICF first and that federation engineers would consider ICF to be more primitive.
Just so you are aware: You are officially more Startrek lore savvy than the entire writing staff of ST:D (combined). You have in a video about old Archer style warp reactors neatly explained why 'The Burn' (Dilithium crystal failure) would NOT end warp travel. Dilithium is not needed for warp; just lots of power. Notably, the Romulans, Tholians, Borg, Voth, and several other powers DO NOT use Dilithium moderated reactors. Additionally: it would be possible (if significantly less efficiently) to run an Anti-matter reactor with NO moderator (dilithium). It would generate for more radiation, it would be much harder to contain and waste much more power on reaction point control... but it would work.
If Earth hadn't developed the warp 5 engine, would the Earth/Romulan war have happened in the first place? I can't imagine the Romulans would take much notice of a minor power whose warp 2 ships took years to plod around from one place to another. The only reason they took notice of Earth was because Enterprise stopped their plans to start a war between Vulcan and Andor.
Okay, I had to make this a separate post, but I wanted to go over some details of how an anti-matter reactor *might* function in reality. Regarding antimatter reactors and warp plasma, you are correct that matter-antimatter annihilation events create a lot of energy and that a large amount of this energy isn't usable. A significant chunk of the energy comes off in the form of gamma rays. While you can do a 1:1 matter/antimatter ratio for the reaction, there's actually a good argument to using a ratio of much more matter than antimatter. One of the ways humans are experts at is converting heat into usable energy. If you use a type of matter that is very good at absorbing gama rays like, say, lead, those gama rays will heat up the lead. It doesn't need to be lead; any material dense enough to absorb large amounts of gamma radiation will work, and I'm not a materials scientist nor a nuclear physicist. You can, hypothetically, heat said lead until it is at the point of becoming plasma. You're going to want enough lead that you absorb as much of the gamma radiation as possible from the annihilation event, but you're also going to want enough anti-matter to make a powerful enough reaction. I believe this is where intermix ratios come into play. Balancing the ratio of, say, hydrogen, anti-hydrogen, and absorber matter (say lead) will give different results in power output. Increasing the ratio of anti-hydrogen to normal matter will create a more energetic reaction, but this will come at the cost of efficiency. Now, once we have the plasma, we still need to convert it's energy into something usable. Sending that plasma through coils of wire or cabling will create electricity in the same way a magnet moving through wire does. You have a couple options here: you could use a single large generator where the plasma moves through large coils to generate electricity, or you can pipe that plasma to different sections of the ship and have smaller, localized generators spread across the ship. For whatever reason, Starfleet has designs that are better at pulling that power locally than producing it centrally. To me, the idea of pumping plasmized lead through your ship is far more dangerous, but, hey, I'll give the writers some license to be creative. A final note on dilithium. I have no idea how this plays into things. Matter-antimatter reactions don't really "need" a catalyst. By their very nature, protons and anti-protons are attracted to one another and will annihilate if they touch. I assume the dilithium has more to do with the actual warp side of the warp reactor, but, hey, I'm just a historian and science fiction enthusiast. I'm not a particle physicist.
Kelby: "The injectors feed into the dilithium chamber." D'Nesh: "That's where the matter and antimatter mix." Kelby: "That's right." D'Nesh: "The crystals let you control the reaction." Kelby: "That's right."
@@Ni999 in that case, I would assume dilithium helps control the magnetic fields that regulate the reaction. Again, I'm trying to fit dilithium into what we know of antimatter-matter reaction physics. And, again, I changed majors from physics to history education.
@@The_Viscount Abandon lead. It deforms easily under heat and is very toxic. Use tungsten. It's excellent at absorbing gamma and it's expected as the material in plasma-facing components in magnetic confinement fusion devices because of its high melting temperature and high thermal conductivity. And I wouldn't bother with antiprotons because despite the pop science claims by physicists who know better, they're not 100% efficient at annihilation with protons to produce gamma whereas electron-positron mixing is. Not sure what to tell you about power distribution. I'd assume superconducting wiring everywhere and not worry about it. But that's all just my opinions, you ought to make your reactors as you see fit.
I think they can use photons to generate antimater by pair production, generating in the first step positrons So, if Earth can use the one emitted from the sun (sun orbiting stations?), they would have an immense amount of antimater to use without the need to "destroy" ordinary matter
I was always under impression that both matter and antimatter was made into a plasma, then combined in a chamber with the Dilithium in there to simply absorb the energy and convert it to usable energy. Like water in a nuclear reactor.
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but don't recall at any time during Enterprises run the mention of Dilithium crystals. The site you sourced is neat but I don't see anywhere on it referencing canon. As another commenter stated, Dilithium was always portrayed as a focusing material for the M/AM reaction but not a necessity for one in general.
So we do see "pure" MA-AM reactions used by the dominion. And the romulans in the 23rd century. In the prior case its because they have more advanced tech. In the latter case it was very inefficient. Warp 2 and 3 antimatter reactors might have been pure. But dilithuim crystals are such an important part of warp drive. They would constitute a new design.
It comes up repeatedly in Enterprise and it's used as you'd expect. Episode _Bound_ with the Orion babes included this dialog - Kelby: "The injectors feed into the dilithium chamber." D'Nesh: "That's where the matter and antimatter mix." Kelby: "That's right." D'Nesh: "The crystals let you control the reaction." Kelby: "That's right."
Not sure if anyone else asked, but wouldn't warp engines have morphed after the forming of the Federation? My thought is all the different species would finally share tech and try to make each one better. I know this is the warp 5 and that thought is a ways off in years, but something that popped in my head a little bit ago.
When Gene Roddenberry was thinking of the Enterprise and warp engines he was thinking of the internal combustion engines ability to get power out of a little explosion... With warp engines has the same thing on a bigger scale such as the explosive power of matter and antimatter colliding...
I love how all you guys speak in past tense. You don't have to be a science guy. Just need to be a scifi guy. Also love how they used big pink quartz as the dielithium
@@fuzzwork i think it would have to be calculated between quality of crystal, number of crystals used, number of reaction cycles, cumulative output, ship power average operation requirements, and average warp speed usage, along with battle requirements when necessary. oh and also plasma ventilation efficiency. i don't think hours of operation would be necessary, but the total outcome of all those i mention and probably more because the ship's power requires plasma for power which is produced by the warp core, and with the start up requirements at the time it was best to keep that thing running 24/7
@@venomgeekmedia9886 I just mention that in revisited canon. NX ship what exploded was actually smaller Freedom class ship. They were original NX'es, but were too small and fragile, until perfected drive allow them return in service as Warp 4 ships. I always assumed that problem were the vibrations (maybe caused by intermix?), which is why NX was so reinforced. It would be also less obvious issue, they could miss.
With that title, I thought you meant it saved Earth from the Xindi! Guess that's what happens when a Temporal Cold War gets turned into a blazing hot one. But I like how you have the Romulan War as being so central and definitive, and how those events can still remain true even without temporal incursions.
I suspect they're a lot of work, but I think more of your "Wings of..." series would be great. Maybe Wings of the Federation and doing the development of The Legendary Constitution. And the Golden Age of the Galaxy generation. And of course: The Warp 5 Project
The Warp 5 engine also saved humanity by allowing the NX-01 to make the treacherous journey into the Delphic Expanse and back to stop the Xindi. A slower engine couldn’t have done so in time.
As good as it was, didn't the Vulcans have a faster engine at the time. But the Romulans were supposed to have slower engines so I see what you mean about how it's an advantage. More importantly, you're right that it's a draft. The later iterations of the engine worked better and I imagine it had more potential than the Vulcan Ring Engine that was at it's design limits already.
It's amazing how far our understanding of the real science has evolved since the script for enterprise was written. To a scientist the warp engines of star trek look needlessly complicated. Magnetic containment of antimatter fuel and electromagnetic injectors into a reaction chamber that can absorb the energy (which is just photons BTW) would be enough to construct an electrical generator powerful enough to operate the proposed real designs for a warp drive. Such a reactor would by nesessity be a hard vaccume to ensure your antimatter fuel only reacts with the things you want it too.
The whole idea behind using antimatter is that by having it, in a controlled way, combine with matter it converts both matter and antimatter into energy at nearly 100% efficiency. The idea was never elaborated when it was introduced decades ago, now generations ago. Dilithium used to be merely the super-battery that CAN be recrystallized into being usable, just not so easily that it can be done on the spot. However, given what we know about science, Star Trek needed to do a LOT of techno-babble mental gymnastics to make a feasible reality in how using antimatter works. Instead of having a magnetically contained tank of antimatter loaded into starships at starbases, saved for such super-power feats like warp drive, the usage of dilithium changed with the introduction of other fictional elements to make it small-scale, so a destroyed starship doesn't explode like a planet-ending super-weapon. The Romulans using contained singularities is a bit more feasible to our real-world understanding of science than us using antimatter, a thing we can only find in wee bits in space and have no idea how to actually create nor harvest. In reality, using matter to produce positrons, anti-protons, and anti-neutrons (if there COULD be a thing, even in theory), would take far more energy than what they could return to us... nonetheless all the energy needed to contain and use antimatter in a ship made of matter. So, insert: Suspension of Belief. Top it off with: Suspension of Actually Known Science
I wonder who invented the warp 5 engine in the original timeline. You know, the one where the Enterprise E didn't go back in time and the first Enterprise had a warp ring like the Vulcan ships.
7:30 -- RE: "... someone in the Comments will hopefully explain this better.... [short version] You're basically Inverting the Charge on the Deuterium."; A: Strangely, I'm not here to talk about the particle physics at all, *but* notice how it required 2 particles of deuterium being fused in such a manner that the result is a single particle of antimatter. Presumably, the obvious Inequality will be the thing to be addressed more than any other technobabble factor involving "subspace" which means the Quantum realm, ie. interactions occurring below/inside the Planck length. What I'm actually here to talk about is the 2 particles = 1 anti-particle being a *fundamental* characteristic of the Mirror Universe. This is the Deep reason why I suspect the common interpretations of the Mirror universe are ultimately Wrong, and that there doesn't need to be an entire completely separate Other universe Mirroring the Optimistic one. In short, the 2 "real" particles of deuterium, ie. Matter, are the "Twins", and the interaction is like a Lens, to cause some Inversion. See also Voyager Season 2 Episode 21 "Deadlock" where a random spacetime anomaly creates a Duplicate (ie. a Mirror) Voyager slightly out of phase, *but does Not duplicate the Antimatter,* which both ships are now using. It's the same physics you're skipping past, in other words. o7
Hola Ok ok you said you are not a science man but you got the right ideas, but the first and most important thing here, today, with fusion is you need lots of energy to start the reaction, and also a good refrigeration system... It doesn't explode, neither the fision plants, but they of course get very dirty with a lot of bad bad radiation class. The other thing is in the present day we can only use it to heat something like water and the steam moves a turbine. The heat of that steam basically gets to "unusable energy". Another problem with the tokamak is... As quantum says, you start to get stuff like electrons, rogue random particles with negative charge and mass,, not just protons because the high temperature of the plasma as you said. Problem is, those projectiles after a while DO dent the inside of the reactor! If it was in use, a fusion plant would get below the minimum temperature quickly and the reaction will cease in case of a big problem. Antimatter, there's a little bit around. You can't get lots of it. If there's lots, you already said, boom. It can be contained Ok, but how do you get the full power of it, if in the vacuum it's just gamma radiation, and we don't have that dillithium and sub space plot devices, those allows Starfleet's engines... The truth is you can't say an Alcubierre warp drive works even on paper, since it requires stuff like negative mass because on paper you can use that, only there's not something like that around us. What's that? Another thing, there's no way of getting that much energy in a ship. It uses lots of space, like the amount of deuterium the Enterprise and others say they collect from space, but it's just too much! The warp bubble. OK. Let's say we can generate it. How the hekk do you make it advance, and how is it supposed to drag your vessel with it? Radiation. Lots of virtual particles will become very energetic radiation, and I have seen those ships entering and exiting from warp at least near Saturn. It would cause a supernova level radiation waves and much farther than Saturn. Also, that huge spacetime gradient... If you are near the Earth, good bye atmosphere and many things. Spacetime curvature means GRAVITY. And the radiation of course. They have a magical system and.. If they use shields, those need lots of energy too. You can't contain that amount of matter inside your ship because you would have to compress it so much that... Gravity inside your ship... Too much. And all that antimatter or not will start to heat up and fuse. Or fise, worse. No way to contain gravity. Enough density of energy in any form most commonly massive matter in little space, gets a considerable amount of gravity independently of any kind of charge like electromagnetic, U(1) Anti... That prefix means you have particles which have properties like magnetic angular momentum or spin going in the opposite direction, and some of them have electric charge, and in lab experiments we can detect electrons, with certain mass and other properties and some positrons, same properties except charge polarity. And neutral stuff also can be anti, same thing, just they don't manifest electric charge, but the properties are also in the opposite "direction"
Anti-Particles are a byproduct of fusion reactions. Entire anti-atoms are not created but high energy neutrons and anti-protons along with Tritium. The buildup of high-energy neutrons in the interior coatings is an issue in Tokomak reactions because magnetic field has no effect on neutrons. If you separate out the high energy neutrons and anti-protons you could make anti-deuterium (one antiproton and a neutron.) Granted the reactor would have to run for centuries to make a gram. Basically you are converting trillions of tons of hydrogen to make a few grams of anti-deuterium. It would be easier to "mine" positrons from the Jupiter/Io flux tube....
You're pronouncing tokamak as takomak - you have the o and first a exactly backwards. to·ka·mak /ˈtōkəmak/ Derived from the Russian phrase describing the reactor. Tacoma - a city in the US and also a Toyota truck. Takomek is Basque for heels. Please don't call the reactor Basque heels anymore ok. Cheers, thanks a lot! 🙂
The best way of looking at it would to compare the engine of a Civil War ear 1860s US Navy Warship to the engine on a 60s US Navy Destroyer both use the " same kind of engine" but one is why more advanced my guess is "Warp Drive" is more a universal term for a kind of FTL engine design with maby "Tanswarp Drive" being the same as "Nuclear Powered" being the kind of engine a USN or RN submarine is expected to have despite differences between setup and classes of boats and ships or alternatively a Gas Turbine Engine used on almost all modern warship Or am just over thinking about it and should just say to myself "it's just a show i should really just relax for MST3K"
"Someone else in the comments will probably explain [fusion]..." My time has come! Lol but full disclosure I'm not a fusion scientist either, it's just a topic that I'm interested in. So take just as many grains of salt with anything I say about it. Before you click that "read more" button I'll warn you that this is a long post. Fusion is a really interesting field of research that could potentially have real practical applications in power generation and spacecraft propulsion. What's truly amazing about it is that it has the potential to be the holy grail of energy production. It can in theory solve all of the problems that we face today in regards to how we generate electricity. It produces huge amounts of clean energy using a tiny amount of an extremely abundant fuel source. Not to mention that fusion reactors are inherently safer than the fission reactors of today in the sense that it's impossible for them to melt down. A future with nuclear fusion power could very possibly have such an unimaginable abundance of energy that it makes the modern world look like we only just barely learned how to use fire. It's a future I hope humanity gets to see one day. As it stands today fusion is an area of active scientific research. Countries all over the world have devoted billions of dollars to studying it, but we are still a long way away from being able to build an actual fusion power plant. It has incredible potential but it is still hard to say exactly what the technology might look like in the future. Because of this I can't speak too much about how reactors in Star Trek might behave since they're entirely speculative. I can't say if a particular design would have higher power output or lower fuel usage. But what I can talk a little bit about is the basics of fusion and how existing reactors achieve it. So what exactly is fusion? The obvious part is that it's a type of nuclear interaction. It's what happens when two atomic nuclei combine together to form one nucleus, releasing energy in the process. Simple in concept so far. But in practice very difficult to achieve. Under normal, Earthly conditions nuclei don't tend to fuse on their own. This is because all nuclei (that are made of normal matter and not antimatter) have protons in them. All protons have a positive charge. Because of the electromagnetic force this means that all protons, and by extension all normal atomic nuclei, want to repel each other (a phenomenon known as electrostatic repulsion or Coulomb repulsion). Even the protons within a nucleus want to repel each other and fly apart. However, once they're that close together a different force takes over. In the tiny distance between protons inside a nucleus there is a force much stronger than electromagnetism that holds those protons together. That force is creatively named the strong force. The strong force is the most powerful of the 4 fundamental forces, but it can only be meaningfully felt at extremely tiny distances. The electromagnetic force is weaker but can be felt at much greater distances. So the key to making nuclei fuse together is to get them really close together, so close that the strong force takes over and pulls them through that coulomb repulsion. In practice we can't exactly push nuclei together like Lego bricks though. Not only are they incredibly tiny, there's also quantum nonsense to deal with. So that begs the question, how do fusion reactors do it? Essentially the answer is brute force. Fusion reactors attempt to do two things to nuclei, speed them up and confine them in a small space. The idea being that if you get them moving fast enough and confine them in a small enough space then eventually they'll start slamming into one another with enough energy to punch through the electromagnetic barrier of their coulomb repulsion and get close enough that the strong force makes them fuse. Now we're back to sounding simple enough. But of course designing a reactor that can actually do those two things is another story. Over the course of history many reactor designs have been proposed that all attempt to accelerate and confine nuclei (cold fusion is an exception but widely regarded as pseudoscience). The jury is still out on what designs might be the most optimal for any given use case, but broadly speaking they can be categorized by how they go about doing those two things. Most reactors that are actively being researched today fall into 1 of 2 categories, Magnetic Confinement and Inertial Confinement. Magnetic confinement, as the name suggests, confines the nuclei using magnetic fields. It then uses some other tool like microwave beams to accelerate them. ITER (a tokamak currently under construction in France) and Wendelstein 7-X (an operational stellarator in Germany) are promising examples of magnetic confinement reactors. Inertial confinement on the other hand typically tries to confine and accelerate the nuclei all in one step by smashing them into a tiny point. Most inertial confinement reactors today do this using extremely powerful lasers, but other methods have been proposed as well. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) reactor in California is probably the most famous example of inertial confinement, especially after last year. On December 5th 2022 its researchers announced that it was the first reactor in history to achieve scientific breakeven, the point where the energy released from the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy put into the fuel. (Note though that it hasn't yet achieved a practical breakeven. Most of the laser energy was lost as heat before it made it to the fuel. This design still needs quite a bit of work before it could actually be used as a power plant.) So that's where fusion stands today. But what about in a Star Trek like future? Like I said in the beginning I can't really say what exactly the technology might look like in the future. I don't know exactly how good it'll be or what designs might prove most effective for different use cases. But if you're interested in seeing what kinds of things could potentially be done with fusion power in the future I'd recommend checking out Isaac Arthur's youtube videos "Fusion: Powering a Bright Future" and "Fusion Propulsion". On one last slightly pedantic note I did want to mention that the doughnut shaped reactor is called a tokamak rather than tokomak. It's actually an acronym in Russian that translates to "toroidal chamber with magnetic coils".
Antimatter-matter annihilation reactors will probably work by colliding an even number of jets of M and AM, which will produce a superheated plasma and a shower of charged particles. The charged particles can be tapped directly to produce electricity, and the plasma itself is actually an almost perfect electrical conductor. That's what the "plasma conduits" are for.
Antimatter is made in particle accelerators. If you hit a target made of the right material, gold is often used, with protons hard enough you get some antimatter out of the reaction. The higher the energy level of the reaction, the more antimatter you get. Antimatter production is never outlined in Star Trek as far as I'm aware, in several hard science fiction series it's produced by giant particle accelerators floating in space, usually placed in orbits closer than Mercury. The accelerators are powered by massive banks of solar cells and make antimatter as a form of energy storage and transportation. You can probably harvest antimatter from the north or south magnetic poles of large gas giants like Jupiter, and ships traveling at relativistic velocities will produce a bit of antimatter as they collide with the interstellar medium.
Hope this doesn't get too much in the weeds. But I wanted to give a bit of speculation on the "intermix problem." We know that the intermix itself is easy. 1:1 - we know that from real physics and TNG. But, in real annihilation events, contrary to what people think, they are not clean conversions into pure energy. If Trek is annihilating protons, neutrons, and their counterparts, annihilation reactions seen in the real world of these particles have intermediate steps of conversion into exotic high energy particles that eventually fall apart into gamma photons and neutrinos. But it's not an instantaneous "zap." I would suggest the secondary crystals are to help with these exotic daughter product decay. (And i would bet those intermediate products might occasionally decay into stuff that might lead to goodies in the lore like trilithium resin.) But, that flux of particles is going to stress the components, exactly the way fission reactor components have stress and fatigue from neutrons and gamma photons. And the neutrinos - without some technobabble solution, they're just waste 'heat' and particle emmissions, BUT if there are enough of them, they blast everything apart. I mean, crazy concentration neutrino flux is the primary driver that blows apart a star in a supernova. (Supernova reactions are fusion and gravity driven, not antimatter, but the process creates the same end product, photons and crazy amounts of neutrinos.) So, getting back to it, I'd speculate the intermix problem is the stress on the chamber components from irradiation giving you metal and crystal fatigue and such. And with the very early systems, at high levels of annihilations per second, you get so many temporary daughter particles and a high enough neutrino production that you will shatter chamber components, burning out crystals, leading to a core breach. Better tech, focusing mirrors for the gamma photons and the neutrinos, would let you get to higher power with less component fatigue, and thus higher warp capability.
Can be tht I am wrong... But what if they mean with intermix. That the hot and the cold plasma doesn't mix right what makes it hard to measure. Like a hot Pan with a water drop on it. The what're doesn't get hot because it gets seperated from the pan by steam. So if you measure the water. You think the pan isn't hot.
What are you talking about antimatter is real and we know how to make it! We basically just use a particle accelerator to accelerate particles and extremely high velocities at each other or into an iridium block which is a piece of metal which wind fired protons at will create a pair of a proton and an antiproton put that process is very inefficient and currently do not know of any element that can do it more efficiently.
In one of the episodes there was a 3.1 warp engine that used a fuel that could be replicated. I do not remember the episode. I was hoping that you would. the issue of fuel was a big problem. Also the reaction not being as energetic did not use a dilithium crystal. It also did not utilize multiple reactors on a vessel. The people of this society were long lived compared to humans, and went at a much slower pace. could you tell me the show # and where I could find it tyvm.
A point of dilithium…. Trek technology relies on the “transtator” which converts energy from one form to another with virtually no loss in the conversion process. Dilithium crystals are natural transtators and do not react with antimatter. Focusing the matter and antimatter streams into the dilithium at the right point takes the annihilation of the two and instantly makes them into plasma that the ship can utilize. Without dilithium, modern Trek warp technology doesn’t work…at least not with antimatter/matter reactors.
You know what's so amazing about star trek and using plasma to flow and power everything? Just how similar it is to old steam engines that did the same. Sometimes technology goes in a loop...
Well most power systems we use today are still essentially steam engines. We never stopped using them. We just use different methods to heat the water.
we actually can make antimatter now! it's a common enough thing, often performed at the LHC and other particle colliders, iirc our current method is just reeeeeaaaal slow and inefficient bc what happens is, u wait for a particle+antiparticle pair to zoop into existence out of nothingness and then u have to quickly separate them so they don't mutually annihilate and now u have 1 electron & 1 positron in separate spaces the process for making antideuterium (that would be radioactive or "heavy" water only it's all made out of antihydrogens and antioxygens which are themselves made of positrons and shit) from there would be...let's just say laborious and call it a day, which is to say it's a real lossy method of storing energy and not a method of generating it, dig? one could imagine tho, that once the Star Fleet got its act together and figured out matter-antimatter annihilations are higher-energy than fusion reactions, they would work out a process for making a bunch anyway to generate the kinds of energy needed to bend space in such a way as to achieve High Warp, and that's probably what Henry Archer's engine was about too bad about his son tho lol
This post is a year old so I'm sure someone has corrected you already but, you consistently refer to the NX-01 blowing up. The NX-01 was the Enterprise and it didn't blow up, the NX Alpha blew up. I really like most of your description it actually sounds plausible, however anti-matter does exist and has been created in supercolliders, but it is outrageously expensive to create tiny amounts, also one theory of the Universe is that Dark Matter is in fact anti-matter, and it makes up a large portion of the Universe that we can't see.
I do appreciate how the further back in the timeline we go, the more hard sci fi it is. Like, it has to make sense because it is closer to contemporary technology.
Based episode, Venom!
Yeah well that's part of the appeal of TOS it now retro sci-fi and very analogue. Just shows where the scientific interest was in the time.
@@venomgeekmedia9886 It is purely my opinion. But I actually do think that Archer Drives were phased out from 2164 (Franklin Incident). It is because they were notorious for causing Temporal Accidents. What was most likely because they were crude, but capable. As Archer find a hack way to reach higher warp speeds despite high instability of the drive. As result it was common when they breach to subspace. After Ceres class cancellation (due to few missing ships, most notably SS Bonaventure) and because Vulcans allowed Federation members to use they carefully tuned Warp 7 cores (and I'm sure they were aware what was the problem). Archer Drive was only delegated to smaller slower ships, but even there it was gradually replaced. What is interesting, is that Ares/Constitution class could possibly reuse old NX hulls due to they sturdy design (Bonaventure derivative ships of Kelvin Era were notoriously flimsy, despite being larger). And so it is possible that some components of Archer Drive were reused, what could explain why Enterprise become again center of Temporal Anomalies. But that is my theory at least.
@@venomgeekmedia9886 Continuing previous topic. Not many people know but TOS enterprise have actually smaller saucer, or exact same size as NX. It was 2/5 of the length instead later 1/2 (they basically use up armored saucer of Federation class). And if we look on the plans Archer Drive would be located in the same section as Impuls Engines. Those in fact also used Plasma, just as direct means to push ship, instead powering warp coils. So they usually house smaller less powerful reactor, so ship could stay in move even if main drive fails. If my theory that Constitution use same hulls as Loknar class, what basically was late 22'th century NX refit. Is true. It is entirely possible that they basically reuse Archer Drives as Impulse Drives. That ironically would also explain why there was no Enterprise for so long... Maybe it is even the same ship? I'm fairly sure one in Picard is just replica. BTW in books scene watch by Riker in Enterprise finale was faked by S31. I'm fairly sure that what actually what happen was initializing temporal incident, what was reason for Archer presence in temporal cold war. It is BTW why he was present during launch of the Pike's ship, even if he should be long dead. Some people even speculate that he is the Future Guy.
I put it separately, because You Tube don't like those:
www.ststcsolda.space/federation/loknar/loknarprise.jpg
@@TheRezro Wait... Can a Warp Engine be used as a Impulse Drive? Can TOS battery power energize the plasma section in an Archer Engine? Do Impulse Drives use plasma in the same way as a Warp Drive?
A better nerd than me once likened dilithium crystals with antimatter to what a prism is to light. I was 11 years old at the time, and the year was 1998 so take that with a grain of dilithium.
Pretty sure in TNG or one of the TOS movies it mentions dilithium used as focusing crystals.
I love the TNG vertical reactor because you can see what's happening. Visually I always liked seeing behind the red fence in TOS. I wish i could have seen a red fence on ENT.
I am a science man and find it pretty entertaining that the description of these engines are just fancy jet engines rather than something more sci-fi.
I mean that's most trek tech in a nutshell after all roddenberry was an aviator
@@venomgeekmedia9886 What is quite interesting is that he use real scientific ideas to describe fantastical concepts (look magnetic dipoles), so fantastical tech could be understand by analogy, even if it was made up.
4:49 VGM: "I'm not a Science Man! I'm not a Science Man!"
Well we knew that with all the mispronunciations of Toe-Kah-Mack (Tokamak) reactors, but we still love ya. 😋
Also - antimatter is completely real and exists, and it doesn’t “like to explode”. It undergoes annihilation when it comes into contact with normal matter, but in isolation it’s no more or less unstable than regular matter is.
It's true it doesn't explode but the annihilation is a conversion to energy which is basically experienced as an explosion LOL
well, yes, but it can't be contained easily because you have to contain it in a container made of Regular matter --> annihilation --> Energy release --> Kaboom
I think that counts as liking to explode.
The TNG episode relics explains that dilithium crystals can be recrystallized, Scotty was unaware that the Enterprise D could do it without removing the crystals from the engine.
Yep no such technology existed in the 22nd century. There wasnt the need for it yet.
Specifically Scotty was pointing out that they were running their engines so hard that the crystals were going to shatter, which tells you just how hot and fast the Enterprise-D's engines run compared to a late 23rd Century reactor. There was also the problem with the Bird of Prey in Voyage Home, with them having run the Klingon reactor too hard during their time warp and the Crystals were breaking down.
A Trek series exploring the first 10 years after First Contact would be fascinating. Like who were the 2nd alien race to make contact with Humanity after the Vulcans? Did the Vulcans help rebuild Earth? Was there hostilities towards them by certain factions still remaining on Earth? A ton to mine there story wise.
First of all, what many people forget is that there was massive exodus from Earth in first half of century. Like all those eugenic, communist and fascists colonies didn't come from nowhere. I'm fairly sure one of main reason why Ferengi and Cardasians weren't discovered for so long, despite close proximity to Earth, was that until 24'th century, whole region was minefield of semi-independent Earth colonies. Literal Wild West in space. As side note. Earth itself was probably on edge of Vulcan controlled domain. But with few exceptions (Rigelian Pirates?). Earth didn't really have contact with other races, until NX Enterprise mission. It is why they appearance catch Romulans of guard.
I remember one of the old TOS novels (Memory Prime, the one where the Enterprise ferries a whole bunch of scientists to IIRC the future Nobel awards) where it was explained how matter/antimatter engines work better with dilithium, but do not need it as long as you’re content going slow (around warp 4 at best). As the Enterprise was in the heart of Federation space, they didn’t need speed and Mr. Scott took the crystals out for routine maintenance and let the engines run without. It ended up sparing the Enterprise from the worst of a sabotage attempt (a minor inconvenience as opposed to the total destruction had the crystals still been in the reactor).
I always head-canoned the Archer-style Warp 5 engine as being Starfleet’s first use of dilithium because of how neatly it lined up with that book, even if only incidentally.
I actually agree. It would also align with fact that they were notorious for causing temporal accidents.
The Burn 1.0? 😁
Moral of the story: Don't work at the back of the warp core!
This was super neat. I love the hard sci-fi takes, and more Pre-tos stuff! Yay!
Visited HMS Belfast today and the scale of the engines is astonishing and that's for a smaller ship.
Capt Archer "It's called a warp 5 engine"
Cmdr Trip "on paper" 🤣🤣
Trip gets little love. History forgets about him. The sheer fact he did get a Warp 5 Core to go Warp 6, if I recall. Or I am making it up. But, then again, sounds like a very Trip thing. Or I am selling him short and he could take it to Warp 7.
@@Qardo I don't recall him breaking six, but he was the first to push it past warp 5.
@@Qardo No small feat for the time.
@@Qardo I believe the fastest Trip got the NX to was Warp 5.2 (on screen)
@@Qardo getting warp 6 out of isnt as bad as it sound is any of the trek tech books are to be taken for cannon as the you just have get of the hump once your there maintaining it takes only about 50% more power then last warp factor
Well done & Thank you.
I know I'm a little late to the party but I just re watched this video and suddenly it hit me about the the TOS Constitution class warp core. Basically the Engineering room(set) of the Constitution is sitting on TOP of the main dilithium reaction chamber of the ships warp core. I just had a mind blown realization at the sheer size of the Enterprises(NCC-1701) warp core compared to the core of the Enterprise (NX-01) That's probably why they switched to the vertical collision cores. They likely hit the line of diminishing returns on the Archer style engine.(They couldn't increase the power output faster than the downsides of the design increased)
The issue with inertial confinement fusion isn't even the high upfront material cost of it. The primary problem is the gross inefficiency of the lasers required to make it work: The recent "breakthrough" announced by the national ignition facility (NIF) at Livermore laboratories was interesting, but despite what anyone says, was NOT a significant step towards building a self-sustaining fusion reactor. Yes, they got more energy out of the fusion fuel pellet than the energy contained in the laser pulses shot at it. But the underlying problem which they never mentioned publicly was that generating those laser pulses required at minimum 20 times more energy than that, since the efficiency of the conversion between electrical energy input and laser energy output is about 5% at best, on a very good day - often it is worse than that, as little as 2%, meaning you need 50 times the electrical energy input to generate the laser pulses.
Which is before you even think about how to go about taking a portion of that fusion energy output and using it to power the lasers to keep the whole thing running. That is unlikely to happen directly, it's going to need at least 1 energy conversion step (realistically more like 2 or maybe even 3), all with their own inefficiencies. So with the current state of laser technology, allowing for those inefficiencies and energy conversion steps, each fuel pellet used would need to generate hundreds of times more energy from fusion than the lasers used to ignite it - and that's just to make the reactor self-sustaining, to say nothing of making it produce a net energy surplus to allow it to be used as an actual power station.
So I'm not surprised that Chief O'Brien hates the inertial confinement method - it is an almost ludicrously convoluted and hilariously inefficient way of building a fusion reactor. Tokamaks, stellarators or magnetic bottle systems are always going to be easier to build and maintain - and almost certainly more efficient too.
Free electron lasers can be exceedingly efficient at creating light, between 80% and 99%, depending on specifics. If it were just a problem with efficiency --energy transmuted to photons for confinement-- then eventually free electron lasers would get small enough and/or powerful enough to make the whole thing practical.
The real difficulty is confinement control: you want the inward force created by the light to be as close to spherical as possible so that the compressed fusion fuel does not escape out of the irregularities in the field. You can't hold water in a wiffle ball; you can't hold plasma in an irregular field of force.
To that point, the NIF's ability to achieve fusion ignition via the implosion of a fusion fuel pellet using points of force from lasers is an astonishing achievement, akin to momentarily containing water within a wiffle ball. People keep down-playing it but it was a major step. We now KNOW it's laser confinement fusion is possible, not just on paper but in measurable reality. More, the achievement can be replicated and understood. This is huge, even if NIF can never be a power supply. Downplaying it is like looking at a diode and saying, "What good is that? I want a laser!"
I suspect there are going to be several kinds of fusion reactors for all manner of needs. That inertial confinement will work along side with elctro-magnetica confinement in different work cases. I'm too ignorant to be able to predict what will be used for what but I definitely expect the uses and solutions to be wide ranging.
@@bmobert NIF used indirect drive to achieve their latest ignition. The laser heats up a metallic chamber (called a hohlraum) that surrounds the fuel capsule. The hohlraum gets hot enough to emit x-rays which then implode the fuel
@@shanent5793 Yes. That is correct.
@@bmobert If you could ignite the fusion pellet with laser light directly, then it would be a great deal simpler and more efficient. But this isn't the way it works: The laser radiation needs to be converted to X-rays, since these are what actually achieve the fusion ignition - and the conversion between laser and X-rays is horribly inefficient. So whichever way you look at it, the inefficiencies of energy conversion are what make the inertial confinement method impractical for making a fusion reactor.
@@lloydevans2900 Ok. I have several points here.
One of the accomplishments of the NIF is that the shot that achieved ignition used a halraum that was not as perfectly cylindrical as they were previously requiring. They achieved this by pulse-shaping the laser light in order to pulse-shape the x-ray field that compressed the fusion fuel. Which is to say, they were able to overcome the imperfections in the halraum by changing the time-wise shape of the laser pulse. By reducing the manufacturing accuracy needed for the halraum, they've also reduced the expense of making the halraum. Admittedly, not by nearly enough to make it anywhere near being a viable fusion fuel for a power plant, but it's an important step nonetheless. It is just as important a step for any future facility that uses direct laser drive, as the fuel for such a facility will also not be perfectly spherical and learning to compensate for those imperfections will be a requirement there, too.
As to the efficiency of turning electrical energy into x-ray laser light, I again point you in the direction of free electron lasers (FELs). The conversion efficiency of energy to light is 80% to 99% depending on specifics. Electron accelerators that can fit on a microchip have already been been demonstrated and they output electron energies that are already in the correct realm to make the needed x-rays. And the same architecture can be used to design FELs on a chip. (Electron accelerators can be considered inverse FELs, after all.) The current generation of chip based accelerators are underpowered by many orders of magnitude compared to what is needed for laser-based inertial confinement fusion, but I predict that will change rapidly. Chip based accelerator/FEL combos are just too useful.
So, honestly, it's not as bad as you think, it's just needs about a decade worth of solid research. Not that it's going to happen that way; simply that it could.
An interesting look into the different hypothetical reactions between various early warp drives. As for your saying two deuterium atoms colliding together. Perhaps the inverse, but at a greater frequency, is why there is more matter than antimatter in the observable universe. While Star Trek dilithium doesn't exist, it is interesting to think of what possible practical applications of antimatter will be found by our various real-life versions of Henry Archer.
I always understood that Dylithum Crystals were used in Focusing and Lenzing the power from a Matter Antimatter Reaction thereby making it more efficient more stable and higher utilization at specific frequencies necessary to power the Warp Nacales as well as the other systems on board the ship that utilized those high levels of power. You'll find reference to Dylithum Crystals being recrystalized and even created artificially!! 🤠👍
Artificial crystals I think are from the 24th century.
@@venomgeekmedia9886 As side note. I always did have theory that Dylithum was alien clarktech nanite hives. Something comparable to Tiberium, Energon or Kyber. That would explain why they couldn't be replicated.
Dylithum crystals do not actually exist.
@@venomgeekmedia9886 But how, exactly are they made?
@@stephenlangsl67 With love...
ToS did not use " counterbalance" matter. The antimatter was exposed to the relative matter in the surrounding. A good example is the episode "Obsession"
Though they did mention Deuterium tanks. In TAS they used random matter and an antimatter beast piece ( it was a planet eating cloud) as an emergency power supply. It wasn't ideal by Scotty's recommendations but it was the best they could at the moment.
Excellent video I can only imagine the time it took you to research just to get up to speed on the science and potential means of harnessing fusion. I'm looking forward to your eventual second part
"Tokk-uh-makk" rather than "T'koh-makk"...trust me on this point: my friend's dad used to work for the JET project...
Tōk a mak if you're Russian but yeah, definitely not tacomec.
Here’s an idea for a short, in the game Star Trek fleet command there are 2 ships, the realta and the turas, that are said to be from/based on ships from the 2100s, and a video on them would be pretty cool
YES! I so want the connie engine breakdown
Excellent video. I would love to see you do other videos on the Constitution class and Connie refit cores and 24th-century warp cores too.
What do you mean antimatter is not real? It's very real. Acquiring antimatter in sufficient quantities for use in a reactor is just prohibitively expensive today. Creating a reaction with antimatter is much easier than fusion though.
In reality, if we solve the issues of acquiring antimatter cheaply, and its storage and transport safely, we'd switch over to it in a second.
We do know how to make antimatter cost effectively theoretically speaking, what we don't have are the capabilities of the materials needed to put an antimatter generator near a star.
That would be an interesting Alternate universe scenario. If there was no WW3 then maybe humans would take to the stars only ever using antimatter.
Only under capitalism. Remove the profit motive completely, and costs won't be an issue.
Love the video haven't found anyone that does such an indepth explanation of all the technical mumbo jumbo of the franchise. One of the reasons I like Star Trek over the hand waving questionable master-padawan relationships of other series sometimes. Anywho was wondering if you would ever do a video exploring the warp engine designs as a whole leading up to present day star Trek including their discovery. One of the big questions I had in enterprise and the noncannon season 5-7 books was how do they eventually break the warp 7 barriers. As that seemed like the big plot point that was never resolved in the noncannon enterprise books. (What should have been season 5-7). And finally connected the eras between the lesser technology of pre federation and combined technology of the newly created UFP.
I'm still asking when "earth's" and early star fleet ships got artificial gravity generators. That way you can build the ships decks parallel to the line of thrust instead of perpendicular to line of thrust.
Again I would cite starfleet museum. It probably happened at the turn of the 22nd century or maybe even the 2120s
Probably around the same time as first contact. Since you know the Vulcans would have had that already and might have offered up a few pieces of tech like that to their new friends.
@@venomgeekmedia9886 Considering that Botany Bay already has artificial gravity, I would assume it was one of the tech recovered from Quark's Shuttle. We do not see examples of Earth not having it. Starliner class rings were engine parts, not the crew's decks.
I like the section regarding the sci-fi lore for generating plasma vs reality as we know it. Cochrane's warp engine was able to fit inside an ICBM for warp. A relatively small antimatter annihilation reaction vessel. It would have been fun to have some pre antimatter warp ship designs based on Toroidal plasma generation as we understand it and therefore need the ship to be cathedral sized to house the gigantic torus. Could be layered, or wide diameter. Either way is would be like humanity launched a leviathan as it's first crewed voyage.
Maybe in ships like the Bison or tannhauser class
@@venomgeekmedia9886 Hey appreciate the reply. You do amazing work and your effort is clear.
Going into beta lore from Masao that during the transition time between pure fusion and M-AM reactors. They started injecting antimatter into a fusion reactor similar to adding nitrous oxide getting a temporary power boost, at the cost of shorter reactor life.
More Masao beta lore was that M-AM reactors were built that did not utilize Di-lithium and were limited. My understanding of Di-lithium was that it has a paticular subspace properties that it does not react to antimatter yet it is able to focus and stabilize reaction within itself and emits a beam of higher energy plasma that is unutilized by the warp. coils.
Absolutely great video... I always loved this fusion era in the starfleet museum. Such low tech to use brute force of energy to push a ship to warp 3 or so.. like a v12 in the 20s.. just to get up to 80mph. Or warp 8 as my childish mind thinks while driving... lol. 4.5 is very economical. Lol
Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.
5:50 anti-matter does exist irl, though you need a particle collider to create it and it's only around very briefly.
Would love a video covering the constitution class! Such a great video, I learned so much from what you explained about the NX & Archer engine. It makes so much more sense now.
Antimatter does exist in real life, but is difficult to manufacture. And I don't believe it exists naturally. Also, in real life, if you create antimatter, you also create an exactly equal amount of regular matter. There's no known way to produce one without also producing an equal amount of the other. And the amount produced will be exactly equal to the amount of energy put into the system *IF* the system was 100% efficient.
It does actually exist naturally, just in very small amounts. It collects naturally in planetary magnetic fields, and there are theories about collecting antimatter using what are basically bussard collectors in orbit around Jupiter.
@@Gryphorim little bits of antimatter are created during thunderstorms here on earth actually. this phenomenon is most noticeable on gas giants like jupiter due to the scale of the storms, but it is there. kinda neat!
Antimatter does exist naturally. Admittedly it's mostly positrons produced by stellar fusion and doesn't get very far, but it does exist outside of a lab. The total conversion symmetry your talking about does exist, but it has a rather large issue that is currently being puzzled out. Mainly the fact that if such symmetry is true (which it appears to be based on high energy experiments at CERN and Fermi Labs) then there's a lot of antimatter that has inexplicably vanished based on the estimated amount of mass the universe has. Theoretically if one could manipulate the charge states of the quarks that make up the Protons and Electrons, then an atom of anti-matter probably anti-hydrogen or anti-deuterium could be synthesized without producing it's counter part. It would still be energy intensive and probably would make use of the quantum tunneling effect a phenomenon we have little idea how to harness and is probably not going to be feasible in our children's lifetime.
@@marsar1775 Also in bananas. The potassium beta-decays which usually releases an electron, but every now and then it releases a positron instead.
edit: both also release a neutrino
As hinted at a bit in a previous response to you thunder storms. If I remember correctly "bolts" of lightning extend up to the edge of atmosphere and anti antimatter has been detected.
Antimatter would be analogous to synthetic petroleum. You can't power a fighter plane or tank directly with a hydro dam or coal plant, so if you don't have access to natural petroleum can use the energy to synthesize gasoline or distill ethanol, then burn the fuel in a compact and mobile internal combustion engine. Thus the Federation would have solar collectors or nuclear plants that produce the energy and then use it to manufacture antimatter.
Inertial confinement is currently the only we have to ignite a self-sustaining fusion reaction, as proven by thermonuclear weapons and the National Ignition Facility (NIF's laser might as well be airsoft compared to a hand phaser that can vaporize a man). The fuel isn't imploded by the lasers, they instead heat up a metallic chamber (hohlraum) until it emits x-rays which then drive the fuel implosion. ICF could also be considered more fuel efficient as it consumes less of the rarer tritium isotope of hydrogen. Future magnetic confinement development might reverse the situation in the future, so it makes sense that a civilization would develop ICF first and that federation engineers would consider ICF to be more primitive.
Just so you are aware: You are officially more Startrek lore savvy than the entire writing staff of ST:D (combined).
You have in a video about old Archer style warp reactors neatly explained why 'The Burn' (Dilithium crystal failure) would NOT end warp travel.
Dilithium is not needed for warp; just lots of power. Notably, the Romulans, Tholians, Borg, Voth, and several other powers DO NOT use Dilithium moderated reactors.
Additionally: it would be possible (if significantly less efficiently) to run an Anti-matter reactor with NO moderator (dilithium). It would generate for more radiation, it would be much harder to contain and waste much more power on reaction point control... but it would work.
If Earth hadn't developed the warp 5 engine, would the Earth/Romulan war have happened in the first place? I can't imagine the Romulans would take much notice of a minor power whose warp 2 ships took years to plod around from one place to another. The only reason they took notice of Earth was because Enterprise stopped their plans to start a war between Vulcan and Andor.
Its arguable the Trans dimension aliens wouldn't either, and the Xindi war wouldn't happen either.
Okay, I had to make this a separate post, but I wanted to go over some details of how an anti-matter reactor *might* function in reality.
Regarding antimatter reactors and warp plasma, you are correct that matter-antimatter annihilation events create a lot of energy and that a large amount of this energy isn't usable. A significant chunk of the energy comes off in the form of gamma rays. While you can do a 1:1 matter/antimatter ratio for the reaction, there's actually a good argument to using a ratio of much more matter than antimatter. One of the ways humans are experts at is converting heat into usable energy. If you use a type of matter that is very good at absorbing gama rays like, say, lead, those gama rays will heat up the lead. It doesn't need to be lead; any material dense enough to absorb large amounts of gamma radiation will work, and I'm not a materials scientist nor a nuclear physicist. You can, hypothetically, heat said lead until it is at the point of becoming plasma. You're going to want enough lead that you absorb as much of the gamma radiation as possible from the annihilation event, but you're also going to want enough anti-matter to make a powerful enough reaction. I believe this is where intermix ratios come into play. Balancing the ratio of, say, hydrogen, anti-hydrogen, and absorber matter (say lead) will give different results in power output. Increasing the ratio of anti-hydrogen to normal matter will create a more energetic reaction, but this will come at the cost of efficiency.
Now, once we have the plasma, we still need to convert it's energy into something usable. Sending that plasma through coils of wire or cabling will create electricity in the same way a magnet moving through wire does. You have a couple options here: you could use a single large generator where the plasma moves through large coils to generate electricity, or you can pipe that plasma to different sections of the ship and have smaller, localized generators spread across the ship. For whatever reason, Starfleet has designs that are better at pulling that power locally than producing it centrally. To me, the idea of pumping plasmized lead through your ship is far more dangerous, but, hey, I'll give the writers some license to be creative.
A final note on dilithium. I have no idea how this plays into things. Matter-antimatter reactions don't really "need" a catalyst. By their very nature, protons and anti-protons are attracted to one another and will annihilate if they touch. I assume the dilithium has more to do with the actual warp side of the warp reactor, but, hey, I'm just a historian and science fiction enthusiast. I'm not a particle physicist.
Kelby: "The injectors feed into the dilithium chamber."
D'Nesh: "That's where the matter and antimatter mix."
Kelby: "That's right."
D'Nesh: "The crystals let you control the reaction."
Kelby: "That's right."
@@Ni999 in that case, I would assume dilithium helps control the magnetic fields that regulate the reaction. Again, I'm trying to fit dilithium into what we know of antimatter-matter reaction physics. And, again, I changed majors from physics to history education.
@@The_Viscount Abandon lead. It deforms easily under heat and is very toxic. Use tungsten. It's excellent at absorbing gamma and it's expected as the material in plasma-facing components in magnetic confinement fusion devices because of its high melting temperature and high thermal conductivity. And I wouldn't bother with antiprotons because despite the pop science claims by physicists who know better, they're not 100% efficient at annihilation with protons to produce gamma whereas electron-positron mixing is. Not sure what to tell you about power distribution. I'd assume superconducting wiring everywhere and not worry about it. But that's all just my opinions, you ought to make your reactors as you see fit.
I think they can use photons to generate antimater by pair production, generating in the first step positrons
So, if Earth can use the one emitted from the sun (sun orbiting stations?), they would have an immense amount of antimater to use without the need to "destroy" ordinary matter
I was always under impression that both matter and antimatter was made into a plasma, then combined in a chamber with the Dilithium in there to simply absorb the energy and convert it to usable energy. Like water in a nuclear reactor.
Cheers
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but don't recall at any time during Enterprises run the mention of Dilithium crystals. The site you sourced is neat but I don't see anywhere on it referencing canon. As another commenter stated, Dilithium was always portrayed as a focusing material for the M/AM reaction but not a necessity for one in general.
So we do see "pure" MA-AM reactions used by the dominion. And the romulans in the 23rd century. In the prior case its because they have more advanced tech. In the latter case it was very inefficient. Warp 2 and 3 antimatter reactors might have been pure. But dilithuim crystals are such an important part of warp drive. They would constitute a new design.
It comes up repeatedly in Enterprise and it's used as you'd expect. Episode _Bound_ with the Orion babes included this dialog -
Kelby: "The injectors feed into the dilithium chamber."
D'Nesh: "That's where the matter and antimatter mix."
Kelby: "That's right."
D'Nesh: "The crystals let you control the reaction."
Kelby: "That's right."
Not sure if anyone else asked, but wouldn't warp engines have morphed after the forming of the Federation? My thought is all the different species would finally share tech and try to make each one better. I know this is the warp 5 and that thought is a ways off in years, but something that popped in my head a little bit ago.
Tokamak is pronounced like “Toh” (as in tock) “kah” (as in cat) “mak” (as in macintosh). It is NOT pronounced like “Tacoma”, the American city.
When Gene Roddenberry was thinking of the Enterprise and warp engines he was thinking of the internal combustion engines ability to get power out of a little explosion... With warp engines has the same thing on a bigger scale such as the explosive power of matter and antimatter colliding...
I love how all you guys speak in past tense.
You don't have to be a science guy. Just need to be a scifi guy.
Also love how they used big pink quartz as the dielithium
Inertial fusion can only work as burst. Tokamak fusion offers a continuous energy flow. It MUST work as a continuous process.
great video. i wonder what the life expectancy of a dilithium crystal is
What would the life expectancy be measured in? Hours of operation? Cumulative output? Number of reaction cycles? Something to think about
@@fuzzwork i think it would have to be calculated between quality of crystal, number of crystals used, number of reaction cycles, cumulative output, ship power average operation requirements, and average warp speed usage, along with battle requirements when necessary. oh and also plasma ventilation efficiency. i don't think hours of operation would be necessary, but the total outcome of all those i mention and probably more because the ship's power requires plasma for power which is produced by the warp core, and with the start up requirements at the time it was best to keep that thing running 24/7
@@fuzzwork I think cumulative output because they will deplete the harder you run the reactor.
Dilithium crystals function as a governor of the reaction when under the effect of certain magnetic fields.
"anti-matter doesn't exist" - CERN would disagree
I can tell you've been watching Enterprise recently
Maybe a little bit...
@@venomgeekmedia9886 I just mention that in revisited canon. NX ship what exploded was actually smaller Freedom class ship. They were original NX'es, but were too small and fragile, until perfected drive allow them return in service as Warp 4 ships. I always assumed that problem were the vibrations (maybe caused by intermix?), which is why NX was so reinforced. It would be also less obvious issue, they could miss.
With that title, I thought you meant it saved Earth from the Xindi! Guess that's what happens when a Temporal Cold War gets turned into a blazing hot one. But I like how you have the Romulan War as being so central and definitive, and how those events can still remain true even without temporal incursions.
Yeah I think the xindi arc was a dry run for the romulan war alas it was not to be... such is the fate of many TV shows.
@@venomgeekmedia9886 TBH it would not happen if not he invention of the drive.
I suspect they're a lot of work, but I think more of your "Wings of..." series would be great.
Maybe Wings of the Federation and doing the development of The Legendary Constitution.
And the Golden Age of the Galaxy generation.
And of course: The Warp 5 Project
I have done a couple wings of the federation. Its finding the right time. matching content ect...
@@venomgeekmedia9886 I know, I don't demand or expect anything. I just think those are the ships/generations that deserve more than a ship chat.
The Warp 5 engine also saved humanity by allowing the NX-01 to make the treacherous journey into the Delphic Expanse and back to stop the Xindi. A slower engine couldn’t have done so in time.
As good as it was, didn't the Vulcans have a faster engine at the time. But the Romulans were supposed to have slower engines so I see what you mean about how it's an advantage.
More importantly, you're right that it's a draft. The later iterations of the engine worked better and I imagine it had more potential than the Vulcan Ring Engine that was at it's design limits already.
It's amazing how far our understanding of the real science has evolved since the script for enterprise was written. To a scientist the warp engines of star trek look needlessly complicated.
Magnetic containment of antimatter fuel and electromagnetic injectors into a reaction chamber that can absorb the energy (which is just photons BTW) would be enough to construct an electrical generator powerful enough to operate the proposed real designs for a warp drive. Such a reactor would by nesessity be a hard vaccume to ensure your antimatter fuel only reacts with the things you want it too.
You should do a video on why Star Trek ships move as if they're flying in an atmosphere rather than in the vacuum of space.
The whole idea behind using antimatter is that by having it, in a controlled way, combine with matter it converts both matter and antimatter into energy at nearly 100% efficiency. The idea was never elaborated when it was introduced decades ago, now generations ago. Dilithium used to be merely the super-battery that CAN be recrystallized into being usable, just not so easily that it can be done on the spot. However, given what we know about science, Star Trek needed to do a LOT of techno-babble mental gymnastics to make a feasible reality in how using antimatter works. Instead of having a magnetically contained tank of antimatter loaded into starships at starbases, saved for such super-power feats like warp drive, the usage of dilithium changed with the introduction of other fictional elements to make it small-scale, so a destroyed starship doesn't explode like a planet-ending super-weapon. The Romulans using contained singularities is a bit more feasible to our real-world understanding of science than us using antimatter, a thing we can only find in wee bits in space and have no idea how to actually create nor harvest. In reality, using matter to produce positrons, anti-protons, and anti-neutrons (if there COULD be a thing, even in theory), would take far more energy than what they could return to us... nonetheless all the energy needed to contain and use antimatter in a ship made of matter.
So, insert: Suspension of Belief.
Top it off with: Suspension of Actually Known Science
didnt inertial confinement fusion get a big breakthru earlier this year?
Yes, the National Ignition Facility finally lived up to its name :)
I wonder who invented the warp 5 engine in the original timeline. You know, the one where the Enterprise E didn't go back in time and the first Enterprise had a warp ring like the Vulcan ships.
Such a great video!
Did you end up doing a video on the 1701 warp core??
Not yet!
Yes, more warp mechanics!
7:30 -- RE: "... someone in the Comments will hopefully explain this better.... [short version] You're basically Inverting the Charge on the Deuterium."; A: Strangely, I'm not here to talk about the particle physics at all, *but* notice how it required 2 particles of deuterium being fused in such a manner that the result is a single particle of antimatter. Presumably, the obvious Inequality will be the thing to be addressed more than any other technobabble factor involving "subspace" which means the Quantum realm, ie. interactions occurring below/inside the Planck length.
What I'm actually here to talk about is the 2 particles = 1 anti-particle being a *fundamental* characteristic of the Mirror Universe. This is the Deep reason why I suspect the common interpretations of the Mirror universe are ultimately Wrong, and that there doesn't need to be an entire completely separate Other universe Mirroring the Optimistic one. In short, the 2 "real" particles of deuterium, ie. Matter, are the "Twins", and the interaction is like a Lens, to cause some Inversion. See also Voyager Season 2 Episode 21 "Deadlock" where a random spacetime anomaly creates a Duplicate (ie. a Mirror) Voyager slightly out of phase, *but does Not duplicate the Antimatter,* which both ships are now using. It's the same physics you're skipping past, in other words. o7
Hola
Ok ok you said you are not a science man but you got the right ideas, but the first and most important thing here, today, with fusion is you need lots of energy to start the reaction, and also a good refrigeration system... It doesn't explode, neither the fision plants, but they of course get very dirty with a lot of bad bad radiation class.
The other thing is in the present day we can only use it to heat something like water and the steam moves a turbine.
The heat of that steam basically gets to "unusable energy".
Another problem with the tokamak is... As quantum says, you start to get stuff like electrons, rogue random particles with negative charge and mass,, not just protons because the high temperature of the plasma as you said. Problem is, those projectiles after a while DO dent the inside of the reactor!
If it was in use, a fusion plant would get below the minimum temperature quickly and the reaction will cease in case of a big problem.
Antimatter, there's a little bit around. You can't get lots of it. If there's lots, you already said, boom.
It can be contained Ok, but how do you get the full power of it, if in the vacuum it's just gamma radiation, and we don't have that dillithium and sub space plot devices, those allows Starfleet's engines...
The truth is you can't say an Alcubierre warp drive works even on paper, since it requires stuff like negative mass because on paper you can use that, only there's not something like that around us. What's that?
Another thing, there's no way of getting that much energy in a ship. It uses lots of space, like the amount of deuterium the Enterprise and others say they collect from space, but it's just too much!
The warp bubble. OK. Let's say we can generate it. How the hekk do you make it advance, and how is it supposed to drag your vessel with it?
Radiation. Lots of virtual particles will become very energetic radiation, and I have seen those ships entering and exiting from warp at least near Saturn. It would cause a supernova level radiation waves and much farther than Saturn.
Also, that huge spacetime gradient... If you are near the Earth, good bye atmosphere and many things. Spacetime curvature means GRAVITY. And the radiation of course.
They have a magical system and..
If they use shields, those need lots of energy too.
You can't contain that amount of matter inside your ship because you would have to compress it so much that... Gravity inside your ship... Too much. And all that antimatter or not will start to heat up and fuse. Or fise, worse. No way to contain gravity. Enough density of energy in any form most commonly massive matter in little space, gets a considerable amount of gravity independently of any kind of charge like electromagnetic, U(1)
Anti...
That prefix means you have particles which have properties like magnetic angular momentum or spin going in the opposite direction, and some of them have electric charge, and in lab experiments we can detect electrons, with certain mass and other properties and some positrons, same properties except charge polarity.
And neutral stuff also can be anti, same thing, just they don't manifest electric charge, but the properties are also in the opposite "direction"
That's why the restrictor coils were invented for antimatter reactors
I'm definitely interested in a Constitution class's warp core works.
Anti-Particles are a byproduct of fusion reactions. Entire anti-atoms are not created but high energy neutrons and anti-protons along with Tritium. The buildup of high-energy neutrons in the interior coatings is an issue in Tokomak reactions because magnetic field has no effect on neutrons. If you separate out the high energy neutrons and anti-protons you could make anti-deuterium (one antiproton and a neutron.) Granted the reactor would have to run for centuries to make a gram. Basically you are converting trillions of tons of hydrogen to make a few grams of anti-deuterium.
It would be easier to "mine" positrons from the Jupiter/Io flux tube....
This good video
There are No tacos in tokamak.
i could see reversed field configuration fusion being used aswell
You're pronouncing tokamak as takomak - you have the o and first a exactly backwards.
to·ka·mak
/ˈtōkəmak/
Derived from the Russian phrase describing the reactor.
Tacoma - a city in the US and also a Toyota truck.
Takomek is Basque for heels. Please don't call the reactor Basque heels anymore ok. Cheers, thanks a lot! 🙂
The best way of looking at it would to compare the engine of a Civil War ear 1860s US Navy Warship to the engine on a 60s US Navy Destroyer both use the " same kind of engine" but one is why more advanced my guess is "Warp Drive" is more a universal term for a kind of FTL engine design with maby "Tanswarp Drive" being the same as "Nuclear Powered" being the kind of engine a USN or RN submarine is expected to have despite differences between setup and classes of boats and ships or alternatively a Gas Turbine Engine used on almost all modern warship
Or am just over thinking about it and should just say to myself "it's just a show i should really just relax for MST3K"
Brilliant 👍
"Someone else in the comments will probably explain [fusion]..."
My time has come! Lol but full disclosure I'm not a fusion scientist either, it's just a topic that I'm interested in. So take just as many grains of salt with anything I say about it. Before you click that "read more" button I'll warn you that this is a long post.
Fusion is a really interesting field of research that could potentially have real practical applications in power generation and spacecraft propulsion. What's truly amazing about it is that it has the potential to be the holy grail of energy production. It can in theory solve all of the problems that we face today in regards to how we generate electricity. It produces huge amounts of clean energy using a tiny amount of an extremely abundant fuel source. Not to mention that fusion reactors are inherently safer than the fission reactors of today in the sense that it's impossible for them to melt down. A future with nuclear fusion power could very possibly have such an unimaginable abundance of energy that it makes the modern world look like we only just barely learned how to use fire. It's a future I hope humanity gets to see one day. As it stands today fusion is an area of active scientific research. Countries all over the world have devoted billions of dollars to studying it, but we are still a long way away from being able to build an actual fusion power plant. It has incredible potential but it is still hard to say exactly what the technology might look like in the future. Because of this I can't speak too much about how reactors in Star Trek might behave since they're entirely speculative. I can't say if a particular design would have higher power output or lower fuel usage. But what I can talk a little bit about is the basics of fusion and how existing reactors achieve it.
So what exactly is fusion? The obvious part is that it's a type of nuclear interaction. It's what happens when two atomic nuclei combine together to form one nucleus, releasing energy in the process. Simple in concept so far. But in practice very difficult to achieve. Under normal, Earthly conditions nuclei don't tend to fuse on their own. This is because all nuclei (that are made of normal matter and not antimatter) have protons in them. All protons have a positive charge. Because of the electromagnetic force this means that all protons, and by extension all normal atomic nuclei, want to repel each other (a phenomenon known as electrostatic repulsion or Coulomb repulsion). Even the protons within a nucleus want to repel each other and fly apart. However, once they're that close together a different force takes over. In the tiny distance between protons inside a nucleus there is a force much stronger than electromagnetism that holds those protons together. That force is creatively named the strong force. The strong force is the most powerful of the 4 fundamental forces, but it can only be meaningfully felt at extremely tiny distances. The electromagnetic force is weaker but can be felt at much greater distances. So the key to making nuclei fuse together is to get them really close together, so close that the strong force takes over and pulls them through that coulomb repulsion.
In practice we can't exactly push nuclei together like Lego bricks though. Not only are they incredibly tiny, there's also quantum nonsense to deal with. So that begs the question, how do fusion reactors do it? Essentially the answer is brute force. Fusion reactors attempt to do two things to nuclei, speed them up and confine them in a small space. The idea being that if you get them moving fast enough and confine them in a small enough space then eventually they'll start slamming into one another with enough energy to punch through the electromagnetic barrier of their coulomb repulsion and get close enough that the strong force makes them fuse. Now we're back to sounding simple enough. But of course designing a reactor that can actually do those two things is another story. Over the course of history many reactor designs have been proposed that all attempt to accelerate and confine nuclei (cold fusion is an exception but widely regarded as pseudoscience). The jury is still out on what designs might be the most optimal for any given use case, but broadly speaking they can be categorized by how they go about doing those two things.
Most reactors that are actively being researched today fall into 1 of 2 categories, Magnetic Confinement and Inertial Confinement. Magnetic confinement, as the name suggests, confines the nuclei using magnetic fields. It then uses some other tool like microwave beams to accelerate them. ITER (a tokamak currently under construction in France) and Wendelstein 7-X (an operational stellarator in Germany) are promising examples of magnetic confinement reactors. Inertial confinement on the other hand typically tries to confine and accelerate the nuclei all in one step by smashing them into a tiny point. Most inertial confinement reactors today do this using extremely powerful lasers, but other methods have been proposed as well. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) reactor in California is probably the most famous example of inertial confinement, especially after last year. On December 5th 2022 its researchers announced that it was the first reactor in history to achieve scientific breakeven, the point where the energy released from the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy put into the fuel. (Note though that it hasn't yet achieved a practical breakeven. Most of the laser energy was lost as heat before it made it to the fuel. This design still needs quite a bit of work before it could actually be used as a power plant.)
So that's where fusion stands today. But what about in a Star Trek like future? Like I said in the beginning I can't really say what exactly the technology might look like in the future. I don't know exactly how good it'll be or what designs might prove most effective for different use cases. But if you're interested in seeing what kinds of things could potentially be done with fusion power in the future I'd recommend checking out Isaac Arthur's youtube videos "Fusion: Powering a Bright Future" and "Fusion Propulsion".
On one last slightly pedantic note I did want to mention that the doughnut shaped reactor is called a tokamak rather than tokomak. It's actually an acronym in Russian that translates to "toroidal chamber with magnetic coils".
Antimatter-matter annihilation reactors will probably work by colliding an even number of jets of M and AM, which will produce a superheated plasma and a shower of charged particles. The charged particles can be tapped directly to produce electricity, and the plasma itself is actually an almost perfect electrical conductor. That's what the "plasma conduits" are for.
Saved earth about 3 times
Is there a good way to cover warp core/ engine type by ship class rather than only the Enterprise?
...so you're a shipman not a scientist (your comment made me think of that famous set of quotes)
The Tacomak Narrows Bridge was already a bit of a mess so I don't even want to know about their reactors!
The type of fusion-generating reactor he's talking about is called a Tokamak Reactor.
Antimatter is made in particle accelerators. If you hit a target made of the right material, gold is often used, with protons hard enough you get some antimatter out of the reaction. The higher the energy level of the reaction, the more antimatter you get.
Antimatter production is never outlined in Star Trek as far as I'm aware, in several hard science fiction series it's produced by giant particle accelerators floating in space, usually placed in orbits closer than Mercury. The accelerators are powered by massive banks of solar cells and make antimatter as a form of energy storage and transportation.
You can probably harvest antimatter from the north or south magnetic poles of large gas giants like Jupiter, and ships traveling at relativistic velocities will produce a bit of antimatter as they collide with the interstellar medium.
@03:03 so basically Inertial definement is the basis for the drives used in the Expanse Universe?
the hoops people jump through to justify exploding consoles that look cool on TV is comparable to flat earthers
Hope this doesn't get too much in the weeds. But I wanted to give a bit of speculation on the "intermix problem."
We know that the intermix itself is easy. 1:1 - we know that from real physics and TNG. But, in real annihilation events, contrary to what people think, they are not clean conversions into pure energy. If Trek is annihilating protons, neutrons, and their counterparts, annihilation reactions seen in the real world of these particles have intermediate steps of conversion into exotic high energy particles that eventually fall apart into gamma photons and neutrinos. But it's not an instantaneous "zap."
I would suggest the secondary crystals are to help with these exotic daughter product decay. (And i would bet those intermediate products might occasionally decay into stuff that might lead to goodies in the lore like trilithium resin.) But, that flux of particles is going to stress the components, exactly the way fission reactor components have stress and fatigue from neutrons and gamma photons.
And the neutrinos - without some technobabble solution, they're just waste 'heat' and particle emmissions, BUT if there are enough of them, they blast everything apart. I mean, crazy concentration neutrino flux is the primary driver that blows apart a star in a supernova. (Supernova reactions are fusion and gravity driven, not antimatter, but the process creates the same end product, photons and crazy amounts of neutrinos.)
So, getting back to it, I'd speculate the intermix problem is the stress on the chamber components from irradiation giving you metal and crystal fatigue and such. And with the very early systems, at high levels of annihilations per second, you get so many temporary daughter particles and a high enough neutrino production that you will shatter chamber components, burning out crystals, leading to a core breach. Better tech, focusing mirrors for the gamma photons and the neutrinos, would let you get to higher power with less component fatigue, and thus higher warp capability.
Can be tht I am wrong... But what if they mean with intermix.
That the hot and the cold plasma doesn't mix right what makes it hard to measure.
Like a hot Pan with a water drop on it. The what're doesn't get hot because it gets seperated from the pan by steam.
So if you measure the water. You think the pan isn't hot.
What are you talking about antimatter is real and we know how to make it!
We basically just use a particle accelerator to accelerate particles and extremely high velocities at each other or into an iridium block which is a piece of metal which wind fired protons at will create a pair of a proton and an antiproton put that process is very inefficient and currently do not know of any element that can do it more efficiently.
Tok - o - mac
Thank you
In one of the episodes there was a 3.1 warp engine that used a fuel that could be replicated. I do not remember the episode. I was hoping that you would. the issue of fuel was a big problem. Also the reaction not being as energetic did not use a dilithium crystal. It also did not utilize multiple reactors on a vessel. The people of this society were long lived compared to humans, and went at a much slower pace. could you tell me the show # and where I could find it tyvm.
A point of dilithium…. Trek technology relies on the “transtator” which converts energy from one form to another with virtually no loss in the conversion process. Dilithium crystals are natural transtators and do not react with antimatter. Focusing the matter and antimatter streams into the dilithium at the right point takes the annihilation of the two and instantly makes them into plasma that the ship can utilize. Without dilithium, modern Trek warp technology doesn’t work…at least not with antimatter/matter reactors.
Spock: I like Science.
when you a hydrogen atom with a proton, one of the protons will become inert and lose it's charge, becoming a neutron. so you have 1P 1N 1E.
Tokamak reactors boil water. Not sure we would use that in space craft.
5:51 it is though, and is used in the medical field . Lookup positron emission tomography.
I guess this could be a mistake in phrasing, I'm not sure.
You know what's so amazing about star trek and using plasma to flow and power everything? Just how similar it is to old steam engines that did the same. Sometimes technology goes in a loop...
Well most power systems we use today are still essentially steam engines. We never stopped using them. We just use different methods to heat the water.
A position field will contain antimatter. Sorry I'm the inventor of warp drive.
What about the USS Defiant NCC 1764?
(To my ear, stellarator has a cooler sound to it than tokamak, so I would go with that instead.)
2:14 magnetic confinement fusion.
we actually can make antimatter now! it's a common enough thing, often performed at the LHC and other particle colliders, iirc our current method is just reeeeeaaaal slow and inefficient bc what happens is, u wait for a particle+antiparticle pair to zoop into existence out of nothingness and then u have to quickly separate them so they don't mutually annihilate and now u have 1 electron & 1 positron in separate spaces
the process for making antideuterium (that would be radioactive or "heavy" water only it's all made out of antihydrogens and antioxygens which are themselves made of positrons and shit) from there would be...let's just say laborious and call it a day, which is to say it's a real lossy method of storing energy and not a method of generating it, dig?
one could imagine tho, that once the Star Fleet got its act together and figured out matter-antimatter annihilations are higher-energy than fusion reactions, they would work out a process for making a bunch anyway to generate the kinds of energy needed to bend space in such a way as to achieve High Warp, and that's probably what Henry Archer's engine was about
too bad about his son tho lol
This post is a year old so I'm sure someone has corrected you already but, you consistently refer to the NX-01 blowing up. The NX-01 was the Enterprise and it didn't blow up, the NX Alpha blew up. I really like most of your description it actually sounds plausible, however anti-matter does exist and has been created in supercolliders, but it is outrageously expensive to create tiny amounts, also one theory of the Universe is that Dark Matter is in fact anti-matter, and it makes up a large portion of the Universe that we can't see.
So much math now my head hurts
Tokamak Fusion sounds interesting... *Doughnut Fusion* sounds way cooler though 🍩⚛