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Comment by jasperry | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about the physics of the article, but they get the lore of Star Trek wrong right off the bat. Warp drive is certainly not explained in Star Trek in terms of direct propulsion from matter-antimatter collision. That is how the impulse (sub-lightspeed) engines work. Warp is explained as a reaction involving exotic matter that creates a field surrounding the ship to warp spacetime.

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>> That is how the impulse (sub-lightspeed) engines work.

That's wrong too. In TOS, it was basically a fusion rocket driving plasma rockets. In TNG and later, they added a sub-space field to decrease the mass of the ship involved.

> In TOS, it was basically a fusion rocket driving plasma rockets.

Yeah even in TNG-era the impulse engine is fusion, used for both sublight propulsion and as a backup power source.

Why YES, I DID bust out my old Tech Manual. Thank you for asking. Page 75.

In the TNG tech manual, they did say that there is a sub-space field reducing inertial mass :)

Oh I know. I wasn't disagreeing haha

I'd argue there isn't "a" lore of Star Trek. I was given the ST:TNG technical manual a while back, which is nominally derived from the show's bible, and while interesting and amusing in its own way, its correspondence with the show itself is... loose. Not zero by any means, but loose. Some things it claims can do things we never, ever see in the show (hand phasers are spec'd out a great deal more powerful than "usually throw some sparks, occasionally vaporize a person", ship weapons are spec'd to work at a great deal longer than the point-blank range we almost always see), some limits it claims exist are broken fairly routinely (I think it wasn't until Voyager that you got a serious attempt at spec'ing a ship's speed in terms that match the show, and even they were still fuzzy on the implications at times).

And the show's own correspondence with itself is also quite loose.

Honestly, people's fuzzy ideas about how warp drives work are probably pretty accurate because I don't think there's a lot of reason to believe that the show in general had anything other than an equally fuzzy idea. Specific writers for specific episodes may have, but I wouldn't say there was "a" lore to argue so firmly about.

They should just explain it in terms of units of distance. For example, how many parsecs would it be for the kessel run?

Wait - the warp engine doesn't generate power using matter-antimatter annihilation??

My memory is a little fuzzy. Matter-antimatter may in fact be involved in the warp drive, but it's definitely not direct propulsion.

Warp engines are powered by annihilation, since it's an "easy" fuel, but the annihilation itself doesn't move the ship. Similar to how nuclear-powered ships and submarines don't detonate nukes to push themselves forward.

Except when that's the plan?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...

> Similar to how nuclear-powered ships and submarines don't detonate nukes to push themselves forward.

Picturing this in my head was certainly a treat :)

The original series was a bit fuzzy on just what role the matter-antimatter engines (and dilithium crystals) played in making warp drive possible. From the Next Generation era onward, the idea was basically that a matter-antimatter engine was the only practical way to generate the enormous power required to generate the warp field needed to go FTL via warp drive.

Except for the Romulans using some sort of captured/artificial singularities (white holes?) for their power generation IIRC.

Undersized black holes. Maintained and dragged along with the ship by manipulating the gravitational frame of reference in the engine core.

In TNG, they don't practically behave much differently from the warp core, but some of the video game spin-offs had fun with the idea, having destroyed Romulan warbirds collapse into their own engine core, which then evaporated because it was unstable outside of the confines of the gravitational field.

It's a nice way to prevent enemies from salvaging your ships. Seems appropriate for the Romulans!

The entirety of Star Trek revolves around using deuterium-antideuterium annihilation as an energy source. They use those reactors for two things that are essential to the ST setting: warp drive and matter replicators. Both require an astounding amount of energy, made possible by the matter-antimatter reactors, and both address the twin issues of faster-than-light travel and post-scarcity society.

The "warp core" on a ship is just the power plant. The nacelles under the saucer house the "field coil" machinery that generates a warp field.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Warp_drive

Except for Star Trek Discovery where the energy source is...mold.

No, the fungi give them access to the subspace mycelial network which they can navigate/transverse in order execute what is basically galactic-scale teleportation.

Yes, this is gobbledygook. But no moreso than regular "subspace" or anything else in Trek.

For power (ed: including their standard warp drive), the Discovery still has a plain old M/AM reactor. And yes, I did just use the phrase "plain old M/AM reactor" hah

Am I the only one who appreciates that a show with the acronym STD is all about space fungus?

Eh, but in practice the only people who use STD rather than DSC are people who don't like it and go out of their way to shit on those who do.

So using "STD" has turned into kind of a unsavory gatekeepy dogwhistle. It tends to bring out the worst types of stereotypical toxic fandom. /r/DaystromInstitute even automod-bans it for that reason.

ugh.. had no idea. sometimes I hate the internet

DIS is a better short form anyway, matches VOY and ENT.

I remember once seeing a detailed volume of "Star Trek Engineering" in a book store. The drawings were pretty and clearly had taken time to prepare.

As much as one may find popular entertainment diverting, and maybe even think Roddenberrianism is anything more than Cowboys in Space, this popular culture is nonetheless an oceanic quantity of codswalllop disguised as something essential in consumerism.

Whether or not Bart Simpson mocked Batman with cutting sarcasm, our obsession with this rubbish has left Democracy vulnerable to usurpation by... Klingons and Ferengi. (o;

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