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

[Starhawk]

Howdy all it's me Starhawk with a question for all you techno nerds and nerdets I have a question for ya'll on Ship's Powerplants in Sci-Fi and WTF it all means.

Now the reason I ask this is because while writing up a tech sheat for my Icaran SuperDreadnought (just for kicks) I had it like this

main power plant generates 100 Terawatts

each turret micro reactor provides 2 Terawatts of firepower per cannon per shot (meaning a total of 6 Terawatts from each main turret per broadside)

Now in ST we hear Riker claim that the Enterprise D does not generate even ONE Terawatt of power and he is astonished to come across a Terawatt powersource.

Now here's where it get's tricky:
In Babylon Five's Tech guide a Narn G'Quan heavy cruiser (not the most advanced ship in B5) Generates 37,500 TERAWATTS!

Now given that Bab5 is considerably less advanced than anything in ST (Aside from First Ones and Minbari) how is this power measurement come across?

Also being that Icarans are much more advanced then any ST race (cept maybe the Pre Voy Borg) I figured a 100 Terawatt powersource for a ship 3 kilometers long that bristles with weapons and has null space shielding would be reasonable but am no longer sure of this.

Any of you guys able to answer what is a reasonable power generation ratio for a ship with energy weapons, shields and powerful drives? Especially considering I read somewhere that the Entire PLANET EARTH only generates a few hundred Terawatts at any given time.

[Renegade 13]

Essentially, since it is SF, you can say whatever the hell you want to say and no one can say you're wrong! That's the beauty of it. 100 Terawatts sounds good to me.

[Starhawk]

lol I was looking for a more "scientific" answer like just how much IS a Terawatt on the grand scale of things other then the obvious in "numbers of watts"

[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.