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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
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Oh come, people. They're cautious about really dangerous things like antimatter and unknown capital starships. That's fairly basic common sense.

And they are CAUTIOUS, not phobic. They still use antimatter where it's actually needed like in high end warp drives, they just invest in safety systems.

Captain Sabek was practically fanboying over their warp core emergency eject systems using the beginning of a failure as the motive force to get the failing core clear.
 
I am being ultra cautious when I leave the house in a moon suit to avoid bees, though.

Additionally, I invented a system that automatically ejects any bees from the suit if they somehow get inside and begin to sting me, somehow.

I'm actually really curious how that safety system works. Either they have radically different warp core designs or it's just that they eject the warp core more readily. This is like, "Oh, our CANDU reactor is melting down, we'll use the heat to blow the fuel rods out of the reactor and into a containment pool."

Like the warp core as the Fed builds it is basically a meeting place for a stream of AM and a stream of M. In order for their system to work, they'd have to have a system ready-made to detect the warp core having an explosion, some sort of force-field to reflect the gamma rays of the explosion (?) back up the AM pipe, and then open another shaft right out the ship to explode this all into space. Then a torpedo hits the AM pods and you go up in smoke anyways.
 
Bees are not precisely a valid metaphor for fail-deadly megaton explosives that have to be actively prevented from going off.

The reactor is probably a reference to certain IRL nuclear reactor designs where loss of power to the softer safety and control systems also cuts power to the electromagnets used to move the control rods up from the unpowered resting position that causes an instant shutdown.
 
Possibly the only Federation member/near member that doesn't use photon torpedoes are the Risans. So for a major power to have no equivalent weapon type ...
 
Or the blow-out panels on the magazines of modern MBTs. You can drop a penetrator straight into the magazine of an Abrams or Challenger 2 and the explosion will vent to the outside without threatening the crew at all.

If they're using shields to build the vent system, what do you want to bet that it's also a defense against bunker hits? Just extend it to the AM pods. Low volume probably means you can get hilarious shield densities even with a small generator.
 
Goat said:
Possibly the only Federation member/near member that doesn't use photon torpedoes are the Risans. So for a major power to have no equivalent weapon type ...
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This is when we learn that they instead use much safer psi-disruptor torpedoes, that cleanly rend the very souls from their target's bodies, banishing them to literal hell.
 
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pheonix89 said:
The reactor is probably a reference to certain IRL nuclear reactor designs where loss of power to the softer safety and control systems also cuts power to the electromagnets used to move the control rods up from the unpowered resting position that causes an instant shutdown.
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Yes, yes, I've read Mike Wong's musings too.

Ugh, are they Wongtopia? Gr8.

Vebyast said:
Or the blow-out panels on the magazines of modern MBTs. You can drop a penetrator straight into the magazine of an Abrams or Challenger 2 and the explosion will vent to the outside without threatening the crew at all.

If they're using shields to build the vent system, what do you want to bet that it's also a defense against bunker hits? Just extend it to the AM pods. Low volume probably means you can get hilarious shield densities even with a small generator.
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The blowout panels on MBTs basically already apply to the AM pods on Fed ships. As for the warp core, either then they've got it close to the surface so it can blow out safely, itself a safety risk, or they're like, using force-fields to redirect the blast which is like... good? That's kinda what it's implied the Fed does too.

Going back to the MBT analogy, the warp core is like a loaded shell about to be put in the breach. Your blowout panels won't count for shit if that gets hit.
 
Once again, we're the nuttier side of the situation. It's good for things to be back to normal.

Now, near baseless extrapolation.
It seems to me that they seem to have at least one system that pulls power directly from gamma rays, not from gamma ray excited plasma like most warp capable species do.

They then pointed the inputs where a well functioning warp core shouldn't have any gamma rays and hardwired the outputs to the eject system.

I think they actually failsafed at least an attempt at ejection. I'm impressed!
 
Iron Wolf said:
Yes, yes, I've read Mike Wong's musings too.

Ugh, are they Wongtopia? Gr8.
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I've never actually read Wong. And if Wong thinks that particular methodology works with something like AM that requires powered confinement he's a fool.

I just figured it was a shout-out to RL tech or something because I have no clue how the described effect would work.
 
Vebyast said:
Or the blow-out panels on the magazines of modern MBTs. You can drop a penetrator straight into the magazine of an Abrams or Challenger 2 and the explosion will vent to the outside without threatening the crew at all.
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The problem being an M/AM explosion, even vented, is going to throw out enough energy to destroy the ship anyways. This is the progenitor deity of energetic reactions. The reason the ejection systems on Federation ships basically fire them out with railguns is if you don't get it moving at speeds expressible in thousandths of C, it will not reach minimum safe distance and you get to learn the meanings of words like "impulsive shock" via practical demonstration.
 
It just occurred to me that the Interstellar commonwealth could teach us some things about safety in areas that can be improved. like Antimatter storage and Warp Core containment and various other things that I cant think of right now. And we could teach them stuff too. Like how to safely store photon torpedoes and the like. If we are lucky we can establish a good relationship with them before they meet the Cardassians if they haven't already.
 
OneirosTheWriter said:
The described effect works because shut up this is Star Trek :mad:
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What's more Trek, dangerous warp cores that serve as an obvious barometer of ship health for the audience or CANDU reactors? [ThinkingEmoji]

Joshrand1982 said:
It just occurred to me that the Interstellar commonwealth could teach us some things about safety in areas that can be improved. like Antimatter storage and Warp Core containment and various other things that I cant think of right now. And we could teach them stuff too. Like how to safely store photon torpedoes and the like. If we are lucky we can establish a good relationship with them before they meet the Cardassians if they haven't already.
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We already safely store photon torpedos! The antimatter is in the pods until it's piped in!

The pods themselves have failsafes unless you shoot them!
 
Derek58 said:
No no, because *unintelligible technobabble* :D
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Well, you just wrap the entire reactor core with a micro-warp drive, and the gamma flux will trigger a nano-second microbubble slightly larger than the shockwave of the explosion, and projecting the entire problem away at warp 2.7, just far enough to be at a safety factor of 10 radiation exposure through standard civilian hull plating. Its surprisingly similar to the parasite warp drives on photon torpedos, apart from trying not to blow up in the first place.

What is so complex about that?
 
It's interesting that the ISC has has hostile first contacts so often when we managed peaceful first contacts even with aggressive species like the Cardassians and the Ittik-ka.

Hard to say if that's just luck, the nature of the species who manage to rise on the coreward frontier, or if our ability to manage first contacts is just better than theirs thanks to years of refinement and practice. Having their "thing" be safety and security paranoia probably doesn't help.
 
SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
It's interesting that the ISC has has hostile first contacts so often when we managed peaceful first contacts even with aggressive species like the Cardassians and the Ittik-ka.

Hard to say if that's just luck, the nature of the species who manage to rise on the coreward frontier, or if our ability to manage first contacts is just better than theirs thanks to years of refinement and practice. Having their "thing" be safety and security paranoia probably doesn't help.
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Our initial contact with the Cardassians was only peaceful for a very strained definition of peaceful.

The second ship we encountered attacked Enterprise unprovoked.
 
SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
It's interesting that the ISC has has hostile first contacts so often when we managed peaceful first contacts even with aggressive species like the Cardassians and the Ittik-ka.
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It helps that we make first contact with really big ships that nobody else wants to tangle with if they can help it. If we were making first contact in weedy little science vessels (e.g. Keplers, let alone Oberths) we might have run into a lot more problems with first contacts.

The Cardassians and Ittick-ka would very possibly have eaten our lunch. The Dylaarians might well have attacked us for breach of copyright before we could prove what was going on. The Amarki would have thought we were a bunch of lame-o weaklings.

Hard to say if that's just luck, the nature of the species who manage to rise on the coreward frontier, or if our ability to manage first contacts is just better than theirs thanks to years of refinement and practice. Having their "thing" be safety and security paranoia probably doesn't help.
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Yeah. If the Commonwealth is "better safe than sorry"-ing to the point where they act skittish, where they don't actually initiate contact readily in the first place, where they attack ships that 'look like' they're about to attack them, et cetera... That could explain part of their bad contact experiences.

Though given that other species they may have encountered include the Cardies, the Ferengi, the Sydraxians, and the Yrillians who are sometimes literal giant pirates, I wouldn't want to engage in too much victim-blaming here. They could easily be just a bunch of reasonable, well-intentioned, very unlucky beings in a galaxy that wasn't very kind to them.

random_npc said:
I suspect they are going to have really strong nationalist tendencies, and demand to be treated like a peer power. which is going to be awkward because if they expand into Gabriel we might end up in conflict, and the federation is not going to shoot them unless they go full cardisan.
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Honestly that is not a problem at all in my opinion. If a neutral third party tries to move into the Gabriel Expanse, that just means less stuff for the Cardassian-aligned factions. We're not going to be able to claim the whole Expanse for ourselves, and it's not in keeping with the ideals of the Federation to try.

Let's be the good neighbors these people never had before.

Goat said:
Possibly the only Federation member/near member that doesn't use photon torpedoes are the Risans. So for a major power to have no equivalent weapon type ...
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They could just be very, very good at beam weapons? Alternatively, torpedoes with different warheads. I actually pitched the Sydraxians in Devas and Asuras using straight up fusion bombs in their torpedoes, with metallic hydrogen to increase the density so you can get a yield competitive with antimatter.

This would have some advantages, like making it a lot safer to have fully armed torpedoes sitting around ready to launch, and making it more practical to 'dial-a-yield' the torpedo to produce a large 'conventional' explosion by just having the metallic hydrogen blow up without a fusion trigger.
 
Iron Wolf said:
Man next to the Gaeni and even Indorians the ISC are like, so lame. They're the interstellar power equivalent of a kid who won't leave the house in anything other than a full hazmat suit in case they run into bees.

Which I guess, with the Apiata, is more literal than usual, but still.

I wonder what sort of weight premium antimatter scram comes with.
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Meanwhile, in the Federation:

 
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