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

[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

[Slick]

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?

Not entirely sure but here are some reasons I can imagine:

- the "zero g" environment is preferred for lots of things:
-- some experiments are specifically designed for zero g. Yes, you could place them at the exact center of the craft, but true zero g only exists at a point.
-- making the robotic arms and mechanical things requires much less power/strength. If there were centripital forces needed to be overcome, in practical terms, this means more weight=more money=less payload for other things.
-- reorienting the ship/craft takes less thrust. To overcome gyroscopic forces created by rotation requires more fuel =costlier, less payload, etc.

- the "gravity" will decrease to zero at the center; making it somewhat cumbersome to manage placement of things. (see 2001: Space Odessy for a pretty realistic portrayal)

- in order to simulate earthlike gravity, either the rotational speed or the radius must be increased. But in general the size of the ship/station would need to be larger to make "gravity" somewhat uniform; =costlier, etc.



Perhaps if humans were to undertake a long space journey there would be another solution to simulate artificial gravity. Picture this: A large spacecraft with a huge funnel "scoop" in the front. The scoop would catch residual hydrogen to use as fuel and accelerate at 1g toward the destination. This way the crew lives under 1g all the time. At the halfway point, the crew section and the engine (not the scoop) is rotated 180 degrees and the ship is decelerated at 1 g for the remaining half of the trip. The crew still sees 1g toward their feet during the second half of the trip. I just thought of this, so there are probably a million things that make this just as impractical. (edit: like exceeding the speed of light in a short time...)

[douglas]

Slick said:
Perhaps if humans were to undertake a long space journey there would be another solution to simulate artificial gravity. Picture this: A large spacecraft with a huge funnel "scoop" in the front. The scoop would catch residual hydrogen to use as fuel and accelerate at 1g toward the destination. This way the crew lives under 1g all the time. At the halfway point, the crew section and the engine (not the scoop) is rotated 180 degrees and the ship is decelerated at 1 g for the remaining half of the trip. The crew still sees 1g toward their feet during the second half of the trip. I just thought of this, so there are probably a million things that make this just as impractical. (edit: like exceeding the speed of light in a short time...)

Constant acceleration at 1 g is the perfect solution - if you can find enough fuel. Trying this over any significant distance (astronomically speaking) would require a truly colossal amount of fuel if you carry it all with you, and your collection array would have to be incredibly large to gather enough on the way. Interstellar matter density is typically on the order of 1 atom per cubic meter IIRC.

[Suicide Junkie]

Slick said:
(edit: like exceeding the speed of light in a short time...)

Not to worry, though.

Relativistic time dilation and length contraction will ensure you reach your destination (regardless of if it's a finite distance or not) before that happens.

[Renegade 13]

Hey, I love Armageddon! I didn't want to know it's physics were totally screwed! Even though it was obvious...