To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)
- Thread starter OneirosTheWriter
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Cteatus
A Guy Who Fell Down a Hole
AKuz
Been Better
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Gorram Chronitons, they get all over the place and screw up my hair, it's just this huge hassle.
ClawClawBite
Mad Engineering!
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All you have to do is keep the warp drives in Test/ready mode, then remodulate it to spread infrared radiation over a large enough radius to match the local stellar background. The main issue is then to not obstruct hotter objects and leaving a heat shadow.
This may take a bit of math as the field geometry needed is going to be rather different from a propulsion configuration, but as long as you have a good hull map and baseline emissions model, you should be fine.
This may take a bit of math as the field geometry needed is going to be rather different from a propulsion configuration, but as long as you have a good hull map and baseline emissions model, you should be fine.
Cteatus
A Guy Who Fell Down a Hole
I can imagine.
One season its in a ponytail, the next a bob, and the next its in a bun that's been forged in the depths of mount doom.
Gorram chronitons.
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- Mid-Atlantic
@OneirosTheWriter,
The Constitution-B is still not present in the list of ships eligible for construction. It would be very helpful to have it up there; we're going to spend the next 60-80 in-game turns constantly comparing it with the Renaissance-class.
...
Perhaps the chronitons are responsible for Scotty's third season haircut?
That barber is the only person alive who ever really got away with messing with Scotty...
If the Constellations received a second round of refits between the TOS era and the 2330s, I very much doubt they'd be overworked and underpowered by Picard's standards.
But any further discussion in the immediate future is likely to become unproductive, so yeah.
Another useful aspect of the situation is to come in at angles unlikely to be scanned or where natural phenomena tend to mask your heat signature, both of which are possible in Star Trek.
Or if you have a light-distorting bubble (e.g. every cloaked ship ever) that allows you to control the direction of emitted heat and/or lower the frequency of emitted light as below...
With Trek technology this need not be accomplished by actually refrigerating the hull, although that's probably an option. Distorting or inducing frequency shifts in outgoing light would work too.
The Constitution-B is still not present in the list of ships eligible for construction. It would be very helpful to have it up there; we're going to spend the next 60-80 in-game turns constantly comparing it with the Renaissance-class.
...
Perhaps the chronitons are responsible for Scotty's third season haircut?
That barber is the only person alive who ever really got away with messing with Scotty...
Mediocre ships are much better than NO ships, but leave a lot to be desired otherwise. Fortunately we can leave the Constellations in place and use them to backstop more capable light cruisers starting in around 5-10 years of game time, so that we don't need Excelsiors tied down holding their hands.
I wouldn't count on the Constellations getting another refit. When Picard served on one in the early 2330s, he called them " "overworked, underpowered... always on the verge of flying apart at the seams." He may have been exaggerating, but there's no reason to assume he was exaggerating very much.
If the Constellations received a second round of refits between the TOS era and the 2330s, I very much doubt they'd be overworked and underpowered by Picard's standards.
I'm glad the discussion got as far as it did, especially because some people broke out the facts in a serious way at the end of it. We'd be poorer if that hadn't happened.
But any further discussion in the immediate future is likely to become unproductive, so yeah.
Actually, as long as the crewed spaces and machinery are wrapped in a thermally insulating 'blanket' of hull, you can't see them on infrared. All you see is the hull "skin temperature," and if THAT can be manipulated you're fine. However, you WOULD need to shut down most of the ship's power supply- which is probably why they're creeping along on impulse power.Like all good treknobabble, that tramples on the laws of physics so hard that it causes me pain.
So, um, well done for getting that authentic star trek feel!
The problem is, no matter how you diffuse the heat of the ship, the crewed areas are red hot compared to the vacuum of space (which is at the cosmic background temperature), which makes for one heck of a hot spot that can't be hidden without cooling the ship to the point where you kill the crew (and this is ignoring the much higher heat output of the warp core).
Another useful aspect of the situation is to come in at angles unlikely to be scanned or where natural phenomena tend to mask your heat signature, both of which are possible in Star Trek.
Or if you have a light-distorting bubble (e.g. every cloaked ship ever) that allows you to control the direction of emitted heat and/or lower the frequency of emitted light as below...
It occurs to me that if you can sufficiently lower your heat signature so that your apparent temperature is, say, -20 degrees Celsius, just a LITTLE colder than ambient temperatures survivable for a crew, you might fool automated scans because they'll look at you and say "that's not a spaceship."
With Trek technology this need not be accomplished by actually refrigerating the hull, although that's probably an option. Distorting or inducing frequency shifts in outgoing light would work too.
And yet, the Constellation would continue to serve for another 40 years...
Um. It doesn't matter how insulating the hull is. The heat the ship generates all has to escape through its hull.
Insulation would just levelize the emissions, so if their was a heat spike inside the hull (say a grenade goes off), from outside the hull the spike in heat from the grenade would look less intense but go on for longer.
Problem is, changing the wavelength doesn't change the overall amount of energy radiated - and a space ship is so darn hot. Even if you shifted the emissions all the way down to radio waves, it's still a whole lot of radio waves.
In TOS era, that's completely believable. (TOS sensors are shown as being pretty poor - we have better sensors today.) With TNG era sensors (able to resolve ridiculous amounts of detail even from light years away and armed with the computing power to crunch it all) such a scheme wouldn't work.
fasquardon
AKuz
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Unless you just eat the emissions somehow, which actually sorta explains why the Romulans use babby black holes for a drive system.
No, because the emissions eating still has to obey the laws of thermodynamics. It can't be 100% efficient.
Even black holes obey the laws of thermodynamics. In fact, that (in combination with quantum mechanics) is why they are useful to provide power in the first place.
Cloaking devices seem to work in movie era trek by shifting emissions from the electromagnetic spectrum to neutrinos and in TNG era trek by shifting emissions from the EM spectrum to tachyons.
fasquardon
lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
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Well sure the ships sucked, even refitted, compared to contemporary ships in 2330s like the Renaissance. But clearly it was working well enough to survive to the Dominion War 40 years later, probably undergoing further refits.
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BTW, if you want to "bypass" the law of thermodynamics, the simplest way is to just say that the system involving the ship and its immediate surroundings is not necessarily closed. With a little technobabble, heat emissions can be "warped" away
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Katsuragi
The 1%
Pssssh. The correct answer, of course, is to modify the shields to only let energy pass in and not out.
You'd have to vent eventually, but I dobut anyone will specifically be looking for a ship sizes void in space...the first few times.
Note: Trek science joke suggestion, not real world.
You'd have to vent eventually, but I dobut anyone will specifically be looking for a ship sizes void in space...the first few times.
Note: Trek science joke suggestion, not real world.
BTW, if you want to "bypass" the law of thermodynamics, the simplest way is to just say that the system involving the ship and its immediate surroundings is not necessarily closed. With a little technobabble, heat emissions can be "warped" away
This would handily explain why TNG+ ships emit so much subspace radiation.
Which would cook a ship like an egg. Even today's spacecraft (with much less power output than a warp core) struggle to AVOID cooking in their own waste heat.
fasquardon
AKuz
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Ah, well maybe it's a conversion process? They shove everything in and then radiate out the radiation that does emerge?
I can't remember what it was from but I remember this actually coming up in some Star Trek thing, I think it was either the Original Series or the old Star Trek Academy video game, where they found a cloaked ship by searching for a perfect void in space.Pssssh. The correct answer, of course, is to modify the shields to only let energy pass in and not out.
You'd have to vent eventually, but I dobut anyone will specifically be looking for a ship sizes void in space...the first few times.
Note: Trek science joke suggestion, not real world.
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Although at least some of them were being decommissioned in the 2360s, and in the 2350s when Stargazer was lost in action against the Ferengi, Starfleet apparently didn't deem it worthwhile to go retrieve and repair it.
Sure, it's still in service. It's still a Warp 9-capable starship, and any ship is better than no ship. But we can't make too many assumptions about what the class was capable of from the fact that they were still in service at all.
It's more complicated than that.
For example, imagine a giant ball of ice at -30 degrees Celsius, an ice moon many kilometers across, with a small nuclear reactor buried in the center. The nuclear reactor runs much hotter than the iceball's equilibrium temperature. But no matter how long you wait, the iceball will never melt, even though the reactor core is much hotter than zero degrees. Nor will it ever be possible, by looking at the surface of the iceball, to tell there is a nuclear reactor inside easily. Because the surface temperature is still -30 degrees. The iceball radiates some amount of thermal energy. Now it radiates a little more- at just about exactly the same wavelengths as the rest. Its temperature only increases to, say, -29.9999 degrees Celsius.
Insulation spreads out the thermal emissions not only in TIME, but in SPACE. And spreading out the emission of that thermal energy also "cools" the surface from the point of view of an outside observer.
So the real question is, how efficiently can a Star Trek ship spread its thermal emissions in time and space?
...
Now, it is a fact that Star Trek starships don't boil themselves alive during normal operations, despite having gigawatt/terawatt power plants and no obvious place to store that much heat. They're not just dumping the surplus heat into heat sinks.
It is also a fact that Star Trek ships don't have gigantic ultra-heated radiator assemblies in any obvious locations. Whatever they use to radiate the heat away, it is not recognizable to 20th century observers as a radiator.
So, hypothetically, what happens if the ship uses whatever system it normally has to radiate away waste heat... but while only generating 1% as much power as it would during normal intense operations? It should be possible to create the illusion of a very cold ship.
Indeed, my only explanation for the excess heat aboard the Enterprise-B is that the ship isn't really designed for this kind of thing, so the interior of the ship ends up hot. The ship is normally designed to radiate away tremendous amounts of heat immediately and does not have heat 'sinks,' and the only way to regulate the heat radiation is to use the interior as a heat sink.
There are legitimate questions about just how hot the ship would actually be, and how much energy is actually being generated onboard. It is entirely conceivable that once the ship is moving at the desired speed (from far outside the system) it is mostly "coasting" ballistically (requiring no engine power). All that's needed is a very minimal level of power for sensors and maybe a relative trickle to the deflector (still power hungry, but nowhere near as hungry as if the ship were running at warp).
So you've got a target that has radiator systems far more efficient than "necessary" to cope with the amount of power it's actually generating. This makes it very likely that its heat signature will not look like a normal starship, and that automatic sensor sweeps will not detect it as a normal starship.
Normal starships come in at warp speed, emerge from warp within a few million kilometers of your space station, and emit large amounts of energy and radiation associated with numerous active systems "running hot."
The Enterprise-B is doing none of these things. She's staying tens of millions of kilometers from the station (at least). She's not going to warp within, oh... light-hours of the station at least, maybe more. And she's got few or no high-power systems running.
In principle, sensors COULD spot her, despite the extent to which she deviates from the sensor profile of a normal ship. However, sensors that could do that would be relatively easy to fool (say, they'd freak out every time an unusually fast-moving piece of space debris passed through the system).
Another weakness of such a system would be that it would be easy to actively spoof- because it doesn't discriminate "obvious starship" targets from "might be a starship but looks Photoshopped" targets or "not a starship at all, but looks weird" targets. If you're worried about a deliberate, competent enemy, you might have just as many problems caused indirectly by sensors that are easy to trick into thinking they're looking at a starship, as you do by sensors that normally only spot starships that are doing what starships normally do.
TOS-era sensors are routinely able to do things like scan planets for life forms from a long distance and resolve visual images of starships that are traveling at warp, while themselves traveling at warp. I'm not sure they were as inferior as you believe.
Thing is, black holes don't emit thermal radiation. They have a temperature, but it is measured in microkelvins above absolute zero. And consuming hot material doesn't heat them up significantly, either.
Our normal, intuitive, classic concept of what thermodynamics MEANS is based on the "context" of matter being made out of atoms that behave in certain ways. Black holes obey those laws, but not our intuitive concept of thermodynamics, because they aren't made out of atoms, they're made out of "divide by zero error in the laws of physics."
"Canon did it!" is not a good argument, especially when Canon basically also outs and outright states "Yeah, they're crap."
Yes, we have them. Yes, they're probably going to stick around for a while, because even with churning out new Centaurs and Constitutions and Excelsiors, we aren't gonna hit our Combat-limit anytime soon. It doesn't change the fact that they're a bad design, and the refit does not change that. All the refit does is throw good money after bad, which is a near-perfect example of a sunk cost fallacy.
Any PP we invest into the Constellation is PP that we could spend to much better effect elsewhere. Whether it's more berths and a bigger budget so we can expand and/or modernize the fleet more quickly, diplomatic pushes in order to gain more species as affiliates, new colonies, or pretty much anything and everything else.
UbeOne
Daydreaming CPU
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I take a nap, and wake up to Treknobabble and thermodynamics. Interesting.
By the way, does the Federation have a captured Romulan or Klingon ship to examine their technology? Those two operate on a different tech base after all.
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I take a nap, and wake up to Treknobabble and thermodynamics. Interesting.
By the way, does the Federation have a captured Romulan or Klingon ship to examine their technology? Those two operate on a different tech base after all.
Romulan, probably not, they likely have six of seven redundant self destruct mechanisms on everything of interest.
Klingon, I seem to recall Kirk capturing at least one bird of prey, but it was a while ago so we've probably already learned everything we can from it.
Not to mention that the klingon tech base is actually the hur'q techbase, and a lot of their stuff was probably already absorbed by our more ancient affiliates. Obviously the klingons have made progress of their own since then, but the more fundamental stuff should probably be easy to come by throughout the neighboring sectors.
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- Mid-Atlantic
EDIT: Yes. Kirk captured a Bird of Prey in Star Trek III, took it back in time in 1986 to save the whales (and future humanity) in Star Trek IV, and presumably turned the ship over to Starfleet Intelligence afterwards.
This happened in 2286- from our point of view, roughly twenty years ago. So we do have a pretty good idea of what the last generation of Klingon military technology looked like.
And as AKuz pointed out, the Romulans managed to fight a major space war against the Federation in the mid-22nd century, without humans ever finding out what a Romulan looked like. Presumably they agreed on the boundaries of the Neutral Zone via text message. This indicates that Romulans are very, very good at self-destructing their ships and technology (and bodies) to avoid capture.
Is the problem that refitting the Constellations is a bad idea as such? Or is the problem that at 40 to 45 political will points, the price is too high? If all we were spending were a few dozen points of resources and a year of yard time, would it be worth it in your judgment? Because assuming the Constellations serve out a service life of the next 40-50 years of game time, then the odds are very good that we can make back the resources just in terms of events they pass. They'll be better at "go bonk some pirate heads," better at "go science the shit out of things," even a bit better at presence tests in that they'll show up more often.
It's more debateable whether we'd earn back the high political will cost of the refits, given that we have no intention of ever building more ships of that class.
Basically, it's totally reasonable for you to complain that the political will cost of the Constellation refit is too high to make it an attractive option. That's why we haven't done it, despite having had the opportunity to do so for about the last four snakepit turns.
However, if the cost goes down, which it may well do, then perhaps the refit program will become more attractive. After all, there are very few other ways for us to get increased defense and readiness, in a flexible form that can respond to events, without having to buy additional crew.
And at the moment, crew are about as tight a bottleneck for our fleet as political will is- not least because it costs political will to get more crew!
This happened in 2286- from our point of view, roughly twenty years ago. So we do have a pretty good idea of what the last generation of Klingon military technology looked like.
And as AKuz pointed out, the Romulans managed to fight a major space war against the Federation in the mid-22nd century, without humans ever finding out what a Romulan looked like. Presumably they agreed on the boundaries of the Neutral Zone via text message. This indicates that Romulans are very, very good at self-destructing their ships and technology (and bodies) to avoid capture.
@Kelenas, let's be precise.
Is the problem that refitting the Constellations is a bad idea as such? Or is the problem that at 40 to 45 political will points, the price is too high? If all we were spending were a few dozen points of resources and a year of yard time, would it be worth it in your judgment? Because assuming the Constellations serve out a service life of the next 40-50 years of game time, then the odds are very good that we can make back the resources just in terms of events they pass. They'll be better at "go bonk some pirate heads," better at "go science the shit out of things," even a bit better at presence tests in that they'll show up more often.
It's more debateable whether we'd earn back the high political will cost of the refits, given that we have no intention of ever building more ships of that class.
Basically, it's totally reasonable for you to complain that the political will cost of the Constellation refit is too high to make it an attractive option. That's why we haven't done it, despite having had the opportunity to do so for about the last four snakepit turns.
However, if the cost goes down, which it may well do, then perhaps the refit program will become more attractive. After all, there are very few other ways for us to get increased defense and readiness, in a flexible form that can respond to events, without having to buy additional crew.
And at the moment, crew are about as tight a bottleneck for our fleet as political will is- not least because it costs political will to get more crew!
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That's limited by the first and second law of Thermodynamics:
First law of thermodynamics – Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.
Second law of thermodynamics – the total entropy of an isolated system always increases over time.
The second law means the conversion process must always produce some waste while the first law means you can't just make the energy disappear.
So turning the waste energy (the heat) of the ship into neutrinos, tachyons, subspace radiation or something else that you hope your enemy would struggle to detect (so long as the total entropy of the system has increased) is in keeping with the second law. Converting the energy back into mass is a problem though, because mass is a lower entropy state than heat is, breaking the second law.
That the iceball barely increases in surface temperature once you add a nuclear reactor has nothing to do with the iceball's insulating properties though - you could swap the ice with pure copper and it would make virtually no difference to the amount energy radiated from the surface. It has to do with how effective the iceball is as a radiator. A big iceball with alot of surface area will dissipate the energy of the reactor over its whole surface. Note that ALL of the energy produced by the reactor must be radiated from the surface (because eventually all work must become heat per the second law), but a big surface may mean that the increase in watt radiated per meter squared is too small for any sensor to notice.
However, if you stick the same reactor in a smaller iceball with a smaller surface, the same energy must be radiated over that smaller area which will mean that each square meter of the iceball will be hotter.
HOW INSULATING THE ICEBALL IS DOES NOT MATTER. The energy generated by the reactor wants out, and nothin' is stopping it.
Again, you are taking half of a concept that is correct. Unfortunately, half of a correct concept is still wrong.
When speaking of thermodynamics "heat" is a specific term that isn't strictly the same as what we mean by "heat" in ordinary life. Thermodynamic heat is a special category of energy. The other category of energy is "work".
So "work" is energy that can be used (i.e., it's at disequilibrium), "heat" is energy that can't be used (i.e. it is close to equilibrium).
So yes, black holes have thermodynamic heat.
And yes, black holes aren't hot in the way that we find a frying pan hot.
Most episodes show the TOS sensors as being unable to resolve a starship more than a few million miles away, and being unable to resolve life signs from more than a few hundred kilometers away.
But yes, there are episodes where they're able to do things like create visual images of the insides of cloaked Romulan vessels so they can spy on the enemy talking to each-other.
This is quite sensible. And if the normal means of shifting the heat is hard to detect, basically every ship in Trek is flying around with cooling devices that whose principals give everyone an understanding of the basics of cloaking devices. Which has all sorts of interesting implications...
...
The CREW are energy intensive systems. LIFE SUPPORT is an energy intensive system. Compared to the cold of space, anything that sustains humanoid life on it will look like a hot coal.
The only way to hide a hot coal is to hide it against other hot things.
Like the Miracht hiding in the atmosphere of the large gas giant.
Or a person hiding against the (relatively speaking very hot) surface of the Earth.
Likely the most reasonable explanation of why Trek ships find silent running useful in open space is the magical heat dissipation machinery they have is able to take the hot-coal-ness of their ship operating at minimum levels and radiate most of it as things that are harder to detect than EM radiation.
Actually, black holes are as close to a perfect thermodynamic system as you can get.
Physics only breaks at the singularity. But physics can deal quite happily with black holes as a whole system. Remember, always respect the black hole's modesty! Don't strip the event horizon away!
The only part of canon I am aware of that states that the Constie is crap is a throw-away line by Picard.
All the other sources I've seen portrays the Constie as a heavy cruiser with capabilities somewhere between a Connie and an Excelsior.
And I made the point about their long service life because people keep bringing up that Picard quote to prove that we should drop the whole class like a hot potato.
Needless to say, I don't see why our policy should be dictated by Picard's off-hand line. Picard's line is contradicted by other canon sources and as you say, what really matters in game is what the in game Constie is like.
The actual game stats of the Constellation make it an extremely useful ship design, in that it fills a role that no other ship design does (i.e., a cheap patrol ship).
Also, one of the elements of investing in the Constellation refit is that refits seem very much tied to flavour in this game. As such, the Constellation, with its service life of 90+ years, should receive more refit opportunities than the Renaissance, which was introduced after the Trek movies and completely retired before TNG started.
In other words, from what we've been told about how the quest works, the Constie looks like a very solid long-term investment.
(I'm sure we could build a better cheap patrol cruiser, but there seems to be zero interest in doing this - so if we ever come up short on br and sr and need combat or defense, the Constie looks to be our only option for some considerable time.)
fasquardon
UbeOne
Daydreaming CPU
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Would an almost-Jaldun count?
C4 S2 H3 L4 P3 D4, ~900k t, 90br, ~60sr, 2 years.
That looks like a worthy replacement. How many techs would we need for it?
fasquardon
UbeOne
Daydreaming CPU
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IIRC level 2 techs at most.
It's possible to raise the hull and science by one, but level 5 techs would be needed.
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lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
- Location
- USA
I agree that they are crap, but I think you're abusing the term "sunk cost fallacy". We're not arguing "hey, we have these old crap Constellations, we might as well refit them because we have them". There is actual value to the refit, and that can be priced. You admit yourself that it would be worth it to refit the ships if the PP cost wasn't high. I can turn it around and say "it's a bad design, so we shouldn't throw good money after bad" is just as fallacious.
I do agree that the PP cost is too high for what the refit gets us. But suppose the PP cost was reduced to say the 20, the same as a starbase? I'd be fine with that, since I figure the refit provides around the same value (+garrison, +events, -resources, -berth time).
Suppose the refit gave better stats? I'd be fine with a PP cost of 40 if the refit had an extra +1S, since then it would be superior to the Centaur-A in almost every way, and now could actually serve a similar role as the Centaur-A in a war.
And canon doesn't indicate anything about how and when the Constellation was refit before the Dominion War, so even if we were trying to follow canon (which we're not), that doesn't invalidate the value of a good refit.
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Ah, the Nudlaj class. The face of Starfleet during the early to mid twenty-fourth century.