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Comment by nextstep | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is a joke and I'm taking it too seriously, but doesn't the Enterprise run on antimatter? I don't think we're going to be able to manufacture antimatter in large quantities in the next 20 years.

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The faster than speed of light thing'll be hard aswell.

No worries, we'll just reverse the phase polarity.

That or use a heisenberg compensator.

Or bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish!

Make sure you reverse the polarity of the neutron stream, otherwise it won't work.

Simple. Change the gravitational constant of the universe.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708699/quotes?qt=qt0403693]

The engines on this one use ion engines at about 1.5 GW total. They would be powered by 3 nuclear reactors producing a maximum of 2.5 GW. http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/engines and http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/nuclear-reactors

The Enterprise runs on Westinghouse nuclear reactors burning enriched U-235 (93%+). Also, the quoted price tag here seems steep when you could, quite literally, build the USS Enterprise 52 years ago for $451.3 million USD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CVN-65)

Bah. Those are dirty reactors. Why don't we talk about Thorium or something?

This seems like a "how can we make the Enterprise with modern materials/techniques", as an inspiration to get to the stars.

The design, aside from the overall shape, is completely divorced from the design of the ships in the shows.

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