My
son and I were talking, one day, about the Trek Tech that is
impossible, and were thinking about what would happen if Captain Kirk
came up against these impossibilities during crunch time...
I realize that there are holes in my physics, but these are the some I came up with at the time.
The following is the result.
Captain James T. Kirk sat in his command chair, grimly facing the viewscreen. On it, was the picture of a Klingon Bird of Prey, facing the Enterprise menacingly. "Shields!" he shouted as he saw the orange light start to build at the forward torpedo tube of the small ship.
At the tactical station, Chekov pushed a button, and the familiar dots surrounding the schematic of the Enterprise appeared. The screen went dark.
"What happened? Did they hit us?"
"Scanning now," Spock said from the science console. He stood up from his hooded viewer, and looked back at the captain. "Negative. The Klingons are not responsible for this. Apparently, for shields to be effective against photons, they need to be opaque. We are looking at the inside of our own shields."
Kirk was confused. "What good are shields that we can't see through?"
"We could conceivably have the shields not cover our sensors," the Vulcan speculated.
"Do it!" Kirk ordered.
While Spock got to work, Kirk told his helmsman, "As soon as the screen clears, I want you to perform evasive action."
"Yes, Sir," Sulu acknowledged.
Suddenly, the ship rocked, and the screen lit up again.
"Good work, Mr. Spock!"
"I did not do it, Captain. The screens are overloaded."
"Wonderful!" Kirk said sarcastically. "Evasive, Mr. Sulu."
Sulu punched buttons on the helm, and the enormous starship ponderously started to move.
"Scotty! We need more power to the thrusters!" Kirk yelled into his chair intercom.
"Cap'n! I'm givin 'er all I got!"
"How come we're not moving faster?"
"Ye canna break the laws of physics, Cap'n! We're just too heavy!"
'Can we jettison something?" the Captain wanted to know.
"Aye! We can jettison the warp nacelles. They're useless anyway! Ye canna go faster than the speed o' light."
"What? You can't travel faster than light?" Kirk was amazed.
"Nay! Ye canna break the laws of physics," Scotty said, surprised that Kirk would not know that, considering how many times he had told him.
"Can we transport to the planet?"
"Are ye daft, man?" Scotty was indignant. "The amount of power needed to completely dematerialize a human being in the allotted time is near to that outputted by a fair size star. That would melt th’ power conduits servin' the transporter room, not to mention most of the rest of the ship. An ye want to do it four hundred an thirty times!?"
He was still grumbling about the injustices of it all as he left the bridge to tend to the damaged shields.
Kirk was unsure what to do. The Klingons were still out there, but they hadn't made any moves to attack further. “What can we do, Mr. Spock?”
“At this point, it appears as though our options are severely limited, Captain,” the Vulcan answered.
"Thank you, Spock. I've figured that out." He thought for a few moments, then asked, "What about the shuttlecraft?"
"I would caution against using them. Impulse technology, while not breaking the speed of light, does require much more fuel than a shuttlecraft has room for."
"So you're saying we're pretty well stuck." Kirk was completely frustrated.
"That would be a logical conclusion, Captain."
"Can we at least throw rocks?"
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Comments
Fun
To Quote Guy from Galaxy Quest;
"Look around you… can you fashion some sort of rudimentary lathe?"
Kaetii
I had originally planned
I had originally planned to go beyond Kirk's last statement, but I realized that was probably the best way to end.
There were a lot more tech I could have put in here, but there was no reason (that I could see) to have food processors, subspace communication, etc, talked about in a battle situation.
Hugs!
Rosemary
Warp drive
If the warp drive is useless then they wouldn't be facing off against Klingons, because, if I'm not mistaken, they use warp drives, too. And therefore, they can't meet Klingons in the 1st place, and for that matter any race whose FTL drive is based on warp tech. But this scenario is still funny.
I know.
For that matter, how come the Klingon's tech works? I thought it would be interesting that Kirk not ask how they got there in the first place. I love Monty Python, and this scenario seems to be a bit Monty Pythonish (Pythonish... Is that a word???)
Hugs!
Rosemary
Negated
The klingons fired a TV tropes negator?
Then there's the...
... whole space is BIG issue. For example, V-ger, perhaps a few thousand light-years away, was directly targeting the third planet of the sun. Then for that matter, there was the "programming" of that Voyager.
It would seem to me that they would have encountered the limits of the laws of physics in manufacturing the devices. But then, maybe, "Grifters are gonna grift."
The Enterprise (or the crew) find themselves in a "parallel universe" where the laws of physics are radically different -- yet their equipment and bodies still function.
I am unfamiliar with Star Trek in general. Otherwise, I think I could do a whole lot more than what I've just done.
I am unfortunately unfamiliar with the Star Trek technical jargon.
-- Daphne Xu
Yes! You Can Throw Rocks
Rail guns are a reality (although still under development) and can accelerate rocks (metaphorically) at up to 50G. They do not break the laws of physics.
They are an integral part of the armament of the ships in The Expanse. And real rocks from the asteroid belt are thrown at targets on Earth where gravity helps them to cause immense damage. If you don't believe me just ask the dinosaurs!
Sitting Ducks
If we ever got routine interstellar travel with the rapid accelerations portrayed in science fiction, planets would be sitting ducks -- depending on the ability to aim, of course. Just accelerate a gigantic rock to 0.99c and slam it into the earth. Compound the damage by having whatever powers the craft explode before (or on) impact. If it's antimatter-powered, the antimatter explosion is automatic.
BTW, what's with the "metaphorically"?
EDIT: I think I got it. The rocks, not the acceleration, was the metaphor.
-- Daphne Xu
Rail Guns and Rocks
Current experiments with rail guns are using metallic slugs as ammunition because they work better firing something with magnetic properties but theoretically any particle with mass will do (that's why I said "metaphorically").
You don't need to accelerate an asteroidal rock to 99% of light speed to do lots of damage to a world. Just give one a nudge in the right direction and gravity will do the rest of the work. It has been estimated that a rock 10 metres in diameter travelling at 100000 kilometres per hour would take out the whole of New York City. Increase the size to about one kilometer and you have the dinosaur killer.
Yes
We'd definitely be sitting ducks.
A famous Sci-Fi novel from the 1950s had aliens nuking a city, changing skirmishing into all-out war -- perhaps copying the hit on Pearl Harbor. I figured that as that would be the interstellar equivalent of a wild animal pissing on someone saying, "Here I am, come and get me," I figured it for a false-flag operation. (The attackers could have done so much more damage.) Obviously, the author didn't think of it that way.
-- Daphne Xu
I have to say,
I'm enjoying all the comments on this story.
Hugs!
Rosemary
Who needs antimatter?
A rock at .9C+ is practically pure energy anyway! Any intersection with a target is practically annihilation, as deposition into the target is instantaneous in all but the finest (fastest) detail.
The impact is so narrowly focused that the impactor will penetrate deep beneath the surface where most of the energy will be deposited, resulting in the explosion having lots of nice reaction mass to absorb the energy, blasting a colossal crater into a fireball radiating lots of thermal gamma rays (that's really hot and that's really bad).
Being matter, and not an energy beam, the momentum is also bodacious, giving the planet a serious thump, sending seismic phonons throughout the planet making destructive ground motions practically everywhere, with focusing throwing up instant antipodal mountains, possibly violent enough to throw rocks off the planet. The planet will ring like hammered jello, demolishing most everything that wasn't incinerated by the fireball radiation, with opposite sides being worst for symmetric reasons.
All in all, a very bad day.
Star trekkin
Ok I have to say, warp drive is one theoretical way for a ship to go faster than light while not going faster than light, which might make it possible even with our laws of physics. Phasers should also be possible since we have energy weapons of a sort already. It's a good story but my years of sci-fi reading wouldn't let me not say something.
Time is the longest distance to your destination.
Yes
Warp drive is theoretically possible. The best way I have seen it described is somehow moving the ship into another, parallel universe where the speed of light is much faster. The trick is to keep our universe inside the ship so our bodies still work.
Another way is to warp space, bringing the two points together so the ship doesn't have nearly the distance to travel.
The problem I have with both of these scenarios is that they don't fit with what we've seen in Star Trek.
If the ship is moved to another universe, than how do we have battles at warp speed? Tracking a ship in our universe that is not moving at warp would be tricky, to say the least. Also, a question regarding the jargon, which I feel is a valid question. In the episode "that which survives" in the original series, the Enterprise achieves over warp 14. In the next generation, warp 10 is the theoretical limit, as the ship then expands to be everywhere in the universe, at once. It seems they have changed the universe they use to travel through.
Another interesting point is "the cage". Captain Pike uses an interesting term. He calls warp 2, "time warp factor two". That is a very interesting piece of information. If the ship is put into a time warp, it could be taking the amount of time it would to move at a sublight speed, but somehow shifting back to the amount of time they would take to move at multiple times the speed of light.
That, however begs the question, why does it take any time at all to get from here to there? They obviously have set times to get from one destination to another, but why? If they move the ship through time, why not get there when you left?
Also, why was moving the ship through time such a surprise in the original series? In fact, Kirk is incredibly surprised when they find the ship in "a time warp"
Anyway... I'm close to entering drudgery here, and my autism is showing, so I'll close this comment. Thanks for the compliment! And have a great day!
Hugs!
Rosemary
Consistently Inconsistent
This video, about the problem with transporters (https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI), early on describes Star Trek as consistently inconsistent -- and full of manuals of jargon that still manage to tell very little -- basically, gobbledygook.
One thing concerns me: physics -- especially advanced physics -- is indistinguishable from gobbledygook to the usual layman. The subject one has spent years studying (A BS in physics is worth pretty much that.) compared with the layman. Often, there simply aren't layman's terms.
-- Daphne Xu
As an optimist and long-time science fiction fan ...
... I know none of Trek’s technology is really impossible. It just relies on a deeper understanding of the universe than we have at the current time, along with the inevitable technological developments that follow whenever we inventive humans learn something new.
That being said ... good story!
Randa
Certainly
I agree that things are not really impossible, but I threw this together regarding out current understanding. In a previous comment, I spoke on the problems I have with the different ways I've seen warp described in different books, episodes, and documentaries regarding the possibilities. That, however, is simply regarding inconsistencies in the different episodes.
Don't get me wrong. Those were problems that someone who watches the show every chance she can get will notice.
Hugs!
Rosemary
How the world works
I believe that one day, some high school kid, living in some backwater town, will suddenly realize that faster-than-light travel is not only possible, but simple, and can be accomplished by combining certain items found in the average home.
The rest of us will feel sheepish and stupid, and claim we knew all along but didn't say... but above all, we'll be pretty angry at Albert Einstein for having told us so definitively that we could not do it.
- io
You are very likely right.
You are very likely right. Lol!
Hugs!
Rosemary
Universal Moment
The discovery of the Universal Moment (~1/3300ths of a second) led naturally to HyperQ Theory, faster than light travel, and the solution of the Dark Energy Conundrum. It all happened because Roberta Lynch (nee Bertram Lynch) was experimenting with an egg beater, a curling iron and seven ounces of gelignite in her home kitchen. "I didn't know what happened at first, one moment I was stirring up a quirky recipe for quiche and the next I was trying to explain how I'd gotten there to the Inner Council of the Galactic Forum on the Permeability of Transdimensional Collanders."
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Sounds similar to Wowbagger
Sounds similar to Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged who became immortal with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator, then decided to insult the entire universe in alphabetical order.
Hugs!
Rosemary
Achievements in Ignorance
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/PlayingWith/Achieveme... -- in particular, the parodies and deconstructions.
-- Daphne Xu
"Danny Dunn and the Antigravity Paint"
Might a kid discover that household goods might make it possible to attain 1000 miles a second? (Less than 1/100th the speed of light.)
That's just a technological challenge, always surpassed in particle accelerators. You can get away with using Newtonian physics. But does anyone have any sense of how much of a technological challenge it is to accelerate something of ordinary size and mass to that speed?
I get the sense that people view accelerating to the speed of light and beyond as just another technological challenge, the same as accelerating to 1/100th the speed of light but just harder. That would be the case under Newtonian physics -- there's no limiting speed there.
-- Daphne Xu
A Tale of Two Pennies
I remember, back in the last century, reading some old science fiction story that began with a man who lived a very ordinary life. He wasn't educated or smart or good looking or anything special, but every evening after dinner he would set two pennies, one atop the other, and he'd concentrate on making one lift off the other. After decades of trying, it finally happened, and the top penny rose an inch above the other. He pressed on it, but it stayed up. He piled books and other items on top the penny, but it stayed afloat.
Then he removed the weights, returned to concentrating on the pennies, and the top one fired straight up, leaving a penny-sized hole in the ceiling and the roof, and IT WAS NEVER SEEN AGAIN.
He found it could reproduce the phenomenon at will. Scientists studied it and developed it into a cheap way of sending rockets into space. It triggered a huge diaspora.
That was chapter one.
Undoubtedly, it's easy to say that it could never happen that way, and that time travel is impossible, and that it will take a pile of expensive technology to travel faster than light, and that the only way to travel faster than light is through acceleration.
Think about how little we'd achieve.
- io
Another Version
Someone else could have written the story where he never succeeded. Why? "He never realized that it could not work with pennies. It required Eisenhower silver dollars."
The Playing-With page on Achievements In Ignorance: "If one doesn't understand the subject matter of what one is attempting to invent or achieve, one is simply trying random things one after the other, hoping to hit a bullseye. One won't even achieve the ordinarily possible, let alone the impossible."
"That's just a technological challenge," I wrote. "... it will take a pile of expensive technology to travel faster than light..." No, that's the humongous technological challenge of reaching 1% of the speed of light. Reaching the speed of light requires something fundamentally different.
"Education is deprecated; only the ignorant can achieve or invent anything new. Ignorance Is Strength."
The U.S.S. ACCELERATOR has been accelerating at one gee for 45 days 7 hours, and 13 minutes. (3.914 * 106 seconds)
CAPTAIN: Lefty! Do we have the latest measurements? How close are we now to the speed of light?
LIEUTENANT: Sir! We're still as far from the speed of light than ever, sir.
CAPTAIN: But how can that be possible? By my own calculations, we should be up to 13% of the speed of light by now.
LIEUTENANT: 12.94% of the speed of light, to be precise, sir. But the measurements are unambiguous. We are still 299,800 km/s away from the speed of light.
CAPTAIN: Okay, so we've gained 200 km/s on the speed of light, then?
LIEUTENANT: No sir, it's always been 2.998 hundred thousand km/s. Three hundred thousand km/s is only the three-figure approximation. And just to be clear, sir, 2.998 is the four-figure approximation.
CAPTAIN: I can't take this! How the hay are we to surpass the speed of light if we can't even flipping approach it? Increase acceleration to five gee! Commence the increase within the hour!
LIEUTENANT: Yes sir. [Lieutenant saluted and departed.]
Shortly after, the iINTERCOM: Prepare for the Elephant! Five-gee acceleration to commence in fifty minutes. It's expected to be an extended period of high-gee acceleration.
CAPTAIN grumbled to himself, even as he followed the preparation protocol for the extended period of horizontal immobility, intravenous feeding, and the robotic compression-relaxation substitute for actual physical exercise. "The Elephant" was the code-word for how it would feel when accelerating at high gee.
It had been 50 days of extreme discomfort, delirium, lying motionless with the elephant on top of him, resistant to all pleas to end the acceleration until now. The Captain was determined to make sure he got closer to the speed of light, even if it killed him. But finally, he tapped his robots to gradually decrease the acceleration to one gee. It took another few hours before he could contact Lefty about how fast they were flying, and -- more to the point -- how much closer they were to the speed of light.
Lefty had recovered faster and better from the ordeal than the Captain had, and was able to speak without computational aid.
LIEUTENANT: Sir, we are now traveling 66.35% of the speed of light.
The Captain didn't have it in him to work it through himself. "But what about the speed of light? How much closer are we?"
LIEUTENANT: Sir, I hate to break it to you, but we are no closer to the speed of light. Still 299.8 thousand km/s away.
The Captain looked Lefty over, but Lefty seemed honest and above-board. His lieutenant didn't seemed surprised in the least. "You're not surprised," the Captain said.
LIEUTENANT: No, sir.
CAPTAIN: You expected this to happen.
LIEUTENANT: Yes sir.
CAPTAIN: But you never told me.
LIEUTENANT: Sir, you needed to learn it for yourself. It doesn't matter who measures the speed of light, or how fast he's going. He will always get the same quantity, c = 299.8 thousand km/s. In general, sir, someone already skeptical or dismissive of the notion that one can't surpass the speed of light will dismiss outright the notion that the speed of light is the same in all frames.
CAPTAIN: How would they ever get that idea in the first place?
LIEUTENANT: Ultimately, sir, it's based on electrodynamics although there was the history of failed attempts to detect the earth's own motion by measuring different speeds for light depending on the direction. Electrodynamics led several scientists before Albert Einstein, to produce the Lorentz Transform. Woldemar Voigt gave us a version as far back as 1887, 18 years before Einstein's 2005 paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lorentz_transformat...
CAPTAIN: Apparently, my course in electrodynamics skipped or glossed over its connection with special relativity. Lefty, I can tell you are itching to give a lecture on electrodynamics and relativity. I think that I'm up to standing in front of a white-board now, so let's go for it.
LIEUTENANT: Gladly, sir!
-- Daphne Xu
Yes, but this person from the
Yes, but this person from the backwater town is likely to start thinking she's a hedgehog.
Hugs!
Rosemary
Chaos, Mayhem, Disagreements...
Chaos, Mayhem, Disagreements... My job here is done! LOL
Actually, I'm enjoying the ongoing discussion here. It's fascinating (to quote Mr. Spock) seeing how many people have looked at these "problems" and have interesting ideas about how they might be surpassed. I hope more of these ideas are expressed here.
I was rather surprised when new comments showed up on those story, but I'm pleased that they have started again! Please, keep up the discussions! :-)
Perhaps I should have said, tech that is improbable, rather than impossible, but that might not have sparked such interesting comments. :-D
Hugs!
Rosemary
One Per Cent
Of the speed of light would get us to Mars in a day (less actually, but allowing for acceleration and deceleration) and to Pluto in a month, so it would be more than adequate for use in the Solar System. Accelerations of more than say 1.5 G would be very uncomfortable and likely extremely deleterious to our health if prolonged, so interstellar travel by "conventional" means other than generation ships is probably out of the question.
That is unless we can find wormholes, which may be one-way travel unless they work both ways....but then how would you know whether they worked unless you had FTL communications?
Charles Sheffield explored these problems in his stories and also demonstrated how you could have time travel. Unfortunately he's no longer with us.
1.5 G
Prolonged 1.5 G deleterious to our health? Heh! And I put the Captain and everyone aboard his spacecraft through 5 G for fifty days.
Accelerating at one G up to 1% of the speed of light and then back down would take about seven days of acceleration. The distance traveled during both acceleration periods would be about .9 billion km or about .56 billion miles. So .01c is ruled out for Mars. You would come close with Jupiter before having to reverse thrust and decelerate. You could spend about half of your trip to Saturn at .01c.
My alternate punch line to the upward-shooting-penny story was really the only response I could think of at the moment. The story is a combination of Refuge in Audacity and Programmed Stupidity (my own trope). The reader who buys into it is armed against rationally-based refutation, citing the laws of physics or probabilities. Even magic fantasy worlds do better than that, with their cursed pennies and the like. There's something different about cursed pennies -- they're cursed and curses are plausible in those worlds, while this was an ordinary penny until he tried placing it on another penny. (It didn't even bounce around in his pocket or penny jar!)
-- Daphne Xu
Star Trek was intended to be
Star Trek was intended to be a short-lived tv show in the 1960s it only lasted 3 seasons.
It was never very well thought out and even later they change the basic part of the story in later series.
I suspect they never created a series bible for the writers to refer to.
the writers for star trek voyager had never watched the original series or the next generation and had never written science fiction before. I think they got new writers in when they introduced 7 of 9.
No one gets paid and they have no money, but people still go to work and do dangerous jobs.
They do not have any cure for baldness?
As for warp drive.
In theory, warp drive takes them into subspace and creates a subspace bubble around the ship.
TV fiction tends to be full of mistakes even when based on a historical event.
In the Tudors, they show a flintlock being fired. It was not invented until 100 later. it should have been a matchlock.
TV history documentaries are not much better. Documentaries that say the RAF saved Britain fora German invasion in 1940 when it was not possible at the time.
Star Trek like most stuff on TV is about storytelling. Never let the facts stand in the way of telling a good story.
https://mewswithaview.wordpress.com/
I know many people who love
I know many people who love Voyager, but I have to say, I never liked Janeway. I have no problem with a woman in command, but she is so abrasive. I simply couldn't stand her.
As far as Picard and his baldness, I thought he looked fine (actually, much more than fine). I could understand why Vasch and Beverly were both interested in him. Maybe he choose not to take the treatment.
Hugs!
Rosemary
Actually
The German High Command was considering an invasion of Britain in 1940 but it was contingent upon the Luftwaffe having control of the skies both over France and the South Coast of England. This could not be achieved both because the RAF denied them air superiority and because the British had radar, which the Germans did not. This gave the English an extra half hour of warning to scramble their air defences.
The other factor was that the Germans failed to destroy the British Navy so could not guarantee safe passage for an invasion fleet.
The combination forced Hitler to delay and then cancel his invasion plans.