Semi-OT: A General Tech Question Thread for me :)

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

A heck of a lot of juice, that's what.

[dogscoff]

Invent something, makes things much easier. In one of my sci-fi shorts (War feed four) one of the characters mentions a "4000 BlatterWatt Phased Polaron Array".

http://www.dogscoff.co.uk/fiction

[El_Phil]

As the old joke goes: Watt/what is a unit power? Not actually accurate or indeed that funny. Hey ho.

A watt is a joule a second and a joule is the work done when you apply a force of one newton over one meter. A newton is the force required to accelerate one kilogram at one meter per second every second. Hope all is clear. However all that doesn't really matter.

Usefully. A lightbulb is 100 watts, which is mostly heat only a tiny amount is light. Your PC will have a ~300 watt power supply, again mostly heat. Are you seeing a pattern emerging? Heat disperation is a major factor, especially on energy weapons with thermal blossoming etc. That will sap alot of your power ~90% is not uncommon on lasers.

Other points: Riker is an idiot, so we can't trust anything he says. At all. The man is a goon. B5 ships are huge, as in several times bigger than your average Trek ship so would need more power being bigger.

A smallish nuclear attack sub will have a 200MW nuclear plant for all it's needs, crew of ohh 100 or so and about 90m long. Of course a sub doesn't have power weapons, shields or artifical gravity, but its as good a starting point as any.

US total generating capacity is about 850/900 GW installed. Use is around 3500 Terrawatt hours/year. So your ship will generate over a 100 times more power than the whole of the US, just to put in into context.

Finally one ton of TNT is 4.2 Gigajoules of energy, as it all comes out at one time joules is right. Now a gun can't be measure in watts unless its a continuous output gun. Eg a constant beam of 500 joules would be a 500watt gun. Fudging through it a 6TW turret might fire for a couple of seconds so for each second it fires it produces 6,000 gigajoules. Now if 90% is wasted as heat, etc. 600 GJ might hit the enemy. So that means each turret hits the enemy with a force of 142 tons of TNT.

The above is quick and nasty but, I think, fairly solid. However it's not alot in the grand scheme of things, I do recall someone working out that the trek quantum torpedo is around 128 MegaTons of TNT. That was off at, another place.. A place where people who need a new hobby and to see some sunlight post alot.

This is a long confused post so if any of it is rubbish or needs clarification please say so.

[NullAshton]

Power usage for the Enterprise D at a speed of Warp 9 is 1519 megajoules a second... Average. So, a megajoule a second would be a million watts. So the Enterprise D would use up about 1.5 gigawatts. Okay, another example of how Star Trek physics are screwed, right now one nuclear power plant has enough power to run the Enterprise D at warp 8...

[Starhawk]

WOW thanks for the help guys As far as the "Lasers" they're not heat based weapons for Icara as they are not true Lasers I just didn't have a good name to throw in and didn't want anything like "atomic ray gun" lol I suppose an Icaran weapon would be more akin to a Fusion beam.

Anyway as some of you know I am planning on writing a book (after much practice ) and I think I'd like to get into some of the techno stuff in the book right away and maybe make a tech manual eh



Question 2:

Okay so we all see on Star Trek and Bab 5 and yadda yadda that Artificial gravity is the ultimate sign of the advanced uber race well I have a question regarding this.

As we have seen in such things as Babylon 5 Earth Alliance and Nexus: The Jupiter Incident rotating sections is the poor mans way of getting gravity on a starship, so my question is this why if it is as simple as a rotating section does the US not crank out space ships with rotating sections?

[El_Phil]

'Laser' was an acronym. 'Light Amplified by the Systematic Excitation of Radiation.' given that visible light and IR are all part of the electro-magnetic spectrum it doesn't really matter what part of it, your going to get energy losses.

One question you should consider, what is a fusion beam? Ohh it turns up all over sci-fi, but what is it? A beam of particles undergoing fusion? It just sounds wrong, aside from being inherently impossible of course.

[El_Phil]

Starhawk said:
Question 2:

Okay so we all see on Star Trek and Bab 5 and yadda yadda that Artificial gravity is the ultimate sign of the advanced uber race well I have a question regarding this.

As we have seen in such things as Babylon 5 Earth Alliance and Nexus: The Jupiter Incident rotating sections is the poor mans way of getting gravity on a starship, so my question is this why if it is as simple as a rotating section does the US not crank out space ships with rotating sections?

What on earth do you want gravity for? It will massively increase the cost and complexity of said ship and remove the only reason for doing research in space, zero gravity. Other than that a space lab is just really expensive and not as good normal.

Seriously a rotating section on the shuttle, or the next version, would be horribly expensive and almost certainly decrease payload. You'd be chucking hundreds of tons of extra weight into space, just to make life a little easier for the shuttle crew. No real advantage and massive costs.

[Slick]

some SI prefixes:

Code:

---

Factor Name  Symbol 

10E24  yotta Y 

10E21  zetta Z 

10E18  exa   E 

10E15  peta  P 

10E12  tera  T 

10E9   giga  G 

10E6   mega  M 

10E3   kilo  k 

10E2   hecto h 

10E1   deka  da 

 

10E-1  deci  d 

10E-2  centi c 

10E-3  milli m 

10E-6  micro µ 

10E-9  nano  n 

10E-12 pico  p 

10E-15 femto f 

10E-18 atto  a 

10E-21 zepto z 

10E-24 yocto y  

---

so to answer your question, a terawatt is 1000 gigawatts; or 1,000,000,000,000 watts (12 zeros).

edit: typo

[douglas]

Starhawk said:
Question 2:

Okay so we all see on Star Trek and Bab 5 and yadda yadda that Artificial gravity is the ultimate sign of the advanced uber race well I have a question regarding this.

As we have seen in such things as Babylon 5 Earth Alliance and Nexus: The Jupiter Incident rotating sections is the poor mans way of getting gravity on a starship, so my question is this why if it is as simple as a rotating section does the US not crank out space ships with rotating sections?

First, artificial gravity is only really useful for manned spacecraft, and the most important reason for sending people into space nowadays is so that they can perform experiments in zero g. Having the whole ship rotate would make those experiments possible only at the center of the ship, and having just a section of it rotate would cost extra. Also, and perhaps most important, the rotating section would have to be BIG in order to avoid seriously disorienting the astronauts. If you've ever been in a centrifuge and looked away from the center, you'll know what I mean. The human perception system does not handle that kind of rotation very well.

El_Phil said:
What on earth do you want gravity for? It will massively increase the cost and complexity of said ship and remove the only reason for doing research in space, zero gravity. Other than that a space lab is just really expensive and not as good normal.

Nothing except artificial gravity can prevent muscles from atrophying and bones from weakening during extended stays in space. Even with highly rigorous exercise regimens, astronauts that stay in space for months, or maybe even weeks, aren't even able to stand up on their own when they return to Earth. The whole human maintenance cycle evolved around the assumption of gravity always being present, and the human body has a distinct tendency to deteriorate in long term weightlessness.

[dogscoff]

Many of your questions (and many more) are answered a tthe excellent http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html - which basically looks at the physical limitations of engineering (as they are currently understood) and applies them to all the essential aspects of spacecraft design. It's an invaluable read for any aspiring scifi author who hopes to write with a degree of scientific credibility.

There is a section there headed "artificial gravity" that answers your latest question quote neatly, as well as frequent references to power requirements in the propulsion and weaponry sections.