OT: Revised Edition Star Trek

[El_Phil]

Going for both makes things flexible, you can have cloaked ships with good anti-tachyon work but bad exhausts, or vice versa. Or, on ships that are suitably rare and expensive, good at beating both.

Come to think of it, how about Romulan cloaks you beat with tachyons, Klingons with exhausts? TNG had the throwing tachyons at Romulan cloaks, and ST:VI sought the Klingon exhausts so it's even consistent! (excluding the hundreds of contradictory examples I've almost certainly forgotten)

[Suicide Junkie]

My main issue with the tachyons, is;
What makes them any different from the rest of the "particles-of-the-week"?

IMO, the critical thing about cloaks is that:
- They make it very hard, but not quite impossible, to detect the ship.
Using tachyons to detect the ship smacks of recycled PotW.

[El_Phil]

Suicide Junkie said:
My main issue with the tachyons, is;
What makes them any different from the rest of the "particles-of-the-week"?

They do have a large variety of funky properties, mainly gaining speed when they lose energy. The other man trick is their slowest possible speed, which is the speed of light. Of course this is entirely irreleveant to this issue as no ST writer ever thinks that deeply about it.

What makes them different is that they are a sci-fi standby since they year dot. There must be a law, or strict guideline, that requies the use of tachyons in anything calling itself sci-fi, its the only explanation.

[Suicide Junkie]

Everything you posted there makes it seem more technobabbly.

In the same manner that "gamma rays" make "the hulk", "tachyons" make the "cloak detector".
Pure fertilizer-grade technobabble.

[Atrocities]

What is your favorite Trecknobabble comment of all time?

Mine was in Generation when Scotty was coming with the the idea on how to get the Enterprise B out of the Nexus. I do miss him, and McCoy too.

[Wolfman77]

Yeah tachyons are all technobabble, but how does exhaust make sense? What exhaust does a matter-antimatter reaction produce? The only thing I can find is that they produce gamma-rays (funny how that ties in, huh SJ?). We can detect gamma-rays wit hour current level of technology, It's only fair to assume they can as well. Therefore cloaking devices must block any gamma-rays that the warp core shielding doesn't, or they would be spoted quite easily.

Since we are keeping the artificial gravity, masking that signature should be doable.

I suppose we could say a few gamma rays leak through, compareable to background radiation, but if their sensors are configure to look for only to wavelength produced by certain engines, they could at least narrow it down. Especially it the source is moving. Still a bit of technobabble, but no tachyons.

[NullAshton]

Matter-antimatter engines are only used for warp drive, and are simply not used for impulse engines. Impulse engines use fusion generators, which also serve as secondary power in battle. Helium exhaust! Q is plot device, and doesn't mess with stuff that much, so I say leave him in there. And timetravel is just plain funny, and serves as a good excuse to revisit yesterday's enterprise. Besides, I like that episode where the Enterprise-D is stuck in a timeloop.

[Suicide Junkie]

The goal of a reactor would be to absorb all of the gamma rays for use by ship's systems. None need be emitted by the ship.

The thermodynamic argument is simple. If the cloaking device prevents the ship from emitting energy (in order to be undetectable), then the ship can't be losing energy.
Since the ship is generating energy to power lifesupport, the cloak, and anything else they're using, the energy in the ship is monotonically increasing.
At some point, the temperature of the ship will exceed the melting point of its hull, and its bye-bye cloaked ship.

Thusly, the ship must be emitting at least as much energy as it is generating, averaged over time. Even when cloaked.
This can be in the form of neutrinos, large numbers of low energy photons, small numbers of high energy photons, hot particles, whatever.
It is highly unlikely that you would see gamma rays. That would mean that their reactor is not powering the ship, and is unshielded (in the lead-wall sense).