"Starships" Questions

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Originally posted by Tobian
Erm... but that still doesn't make any sense because the 'warp drive' is off unless it's traveling at warp.. unless you are confusing it with the 'warp core' which if course WOULD be online because it's basically a huge generator... which they would probably need for their cloak !

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It could make sense (as much sesse as Treknobabble ever does). FOr one thing the less power a ship is generating the easier it would be to cloak it (look at modern stealth tech). The cloaking device might not require warp power if it doesn'T have to try and hide a running warp core.

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It's like if you had an ocean liner you can still leave the engine running to power your lights and other things - the 'warp drive' is just the propeller! I can't see them having two seperate power generators - one for JUST the warp drive and one for JUST the cloaking device. If the ship has warp nacelles and a means to travel at warp then I am sure they would have said that, rather than saying it had none?

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Warp Drive and Warp Engines were used fairly interchangably in TOS (and even in ENT). The term warp core didn't get invented unti TNG. Even in the real world there is a habit of reffering to the engine as the means of populsion rather than the power train. Technically the engine just provides the energy to do so, as in a car.

Yes, you can leave the engine running, but if the ship is designed right, you don't have to. Same is true with a car. You don't have to run the engine to have the lights on or listen to the radio. Likewise in TREK there is olttile evidence that you need warp power to run anything other that warp drive. IN fact, the evidence seems to suggest the opposite. Most systems can be run on "impluse auxiliary" or "battery" power for a time.

COnsider that "Baance of Terror" was inspired by WWII submarine battles and the concept makes even more sense- WWII subs had to run or battery power when submerged.

I wouldn't be so sure about what they "would have said". TOS (TREK in general) is full of situations where they didn't say what they should have. I doubt they should have said "proximity fuse phasers" in "Balance of Terror" either, but they did.
It is also possible that they didn't catch it on the scans, since they didn't get much scanning time in (the Rom was cloaked most of the time).

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Or did I misunderstand your statement?

Don't get me wrong - I think it's stupid too but it's what you saw on the show :D

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No, you didn't misundestand my statement. It is just that the sitation leaves room for different interpretations.

I agree, there are a lot of blunders in the episode. No warp drive makes the Romulan War sort of impossible. THe Romulan fleet would probably have just gotten back to Romulus by the time the episode starts. I know Romulans have long lifespans, but really.

Even more stupid is how a ship moving at warp can't manage to catch a ship travelling at impulse before it crosses the Neutral Zone. Guess Kirk wasn't in a hurry. :D

Yes I agree - the whole mess over exactly constitutes a warp drive in TOS makes the entire thing a mishmash of technobabble... you would NEVER have your dilithium crystals sitting on a shelf glowing in the TNG era because it makes no sense whatsoever in a TNG context - but that's exactly how they have them in TOS (and the earlier films) - retrospectivelly TOS technology is SO much more inconsistient than TNG but then it was all just a bunch of props back then :D - I mean the whole scene in Wrath of khan - withe dilithium sitting in a room to one side of the EPS conduit mostly makes no sense - it was just a set :D

However that said nothing in the statements they made in that episode said "THE ROMULANS AS A PEOPLE HAVE NO WARP DRIVE" - all they said is "THAT SHIP" had no warp drive - hence I don't have that much of a problem leaving it allone.... Perhaps the ship was actually just a local ship, built locally in a local shipyard.. perhaps they built hundreds of them like that because the technology was cheap... maybe the cloaking device required so much room they couldn't fit a warp drive IN THAT MODEL - but you know - tractor beams and towing are possible in TOS ! Bottom line there was only one prototype ship in that episode !

With regards to the whole power thing. As a rule you hardly ever saw the enterprise D without her warp core online - of course you can conjecture it's 'cause it looked cool in the set but then that's all we have to go on - the show :) It looks like they do use it allot for power. I suspect that TOS era ships were less demanding - Holodecks use ALOT of power ! :D but then I would probably conjecture things like transporters need that level of power to be available. Fortunatelly EPS systems seem to be able to store energy inherently throughout the grid - so it's not like when you shut off mains line electricity - some power can be coaxed out - which of course does make logical sense in the sense that it's energised plasma held in toroidal magnetic suspension and not 'electricity' :D

With regards to the Romulans and kamikaze runs - well look what they did to those 3 Vulcan ships with boarding parties on them in "Unification" - THAT is the type of thing I mean.. it's fair to say that if the Enterprise hadn't got lucky the Romulan ship could have survived and hailed a nearby ship for a tow - because no matter how good your cloak is it can't cloak your COMMS :D

Using the dilithium as some sort of focusing crstal makes sense. It is just having it sit there that doesn't. At least in TWOK it looked like it was part of something, as opposed to someone's jewlry box.

The TNG warp core on-line thing doesn't apply here since it was a different show, made 20 years later. You have to look at TOS without TNG.

As for the ship not having warp drive, I reinterate, that could have been that it didn't show up on the scans because it wasn't running.

Heck, Kirk has the Enterprise play dead to lure the Romulans back, and the Enterprise didn't have to take the warp engines off line to fool the Roms (if they had it would have taken 30 minutes to get them back up) , just powered down most systems.


Now that is one interpretation. THere are others. But I thingk this one makes a lot of sense. You can see the blasted warp nacelles on the ship.


Another interpretation, as you pointed out, is that the ship does have a warp powered transport that drags it about.

THere are lots of ways to store power. MOst things in the real word can run fine on batteries (you just need a lot at out tech level). According to most of the early TOS era books the matter/antimatter system was needed to get the massive amount of energy required to move a ship at FTL level. Not for the other systems.

Roms don't let themselves get captured. In BoT there were other reasons besides Romulan Pride for the commander to self destruct his ship-it was a testbed with two protetype systems aboard. Couldn't let that fall into the hands of the Federation.

Okay, I'm a bit fuzzy on this, didn't the Phoenix have a fusion-reactor based Warp Drive? (Anti-matter wouldn't be too easy to come by /on Earth). And isn't the fusion reactors on the Enterprise referred to as the 'impulse system'?

As I said before, isn't it possible (though retconning) that the BOP's warp drive (which they had to have had in The Deadly Years, at the very least) was a major power drain from their impulse engines (then channeling power to the warp thingies), rather than the 'intermix' engine of the Enterprise?

"Simple Impulse" ... still keeping the meaning that it was a more primitive drive system, but still a warp-capable one?

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Originally posted by TFVanguard
Okay, I'm a bit fuzzy on this, didn't the Phoenix have a fusion-reactor based Warp Drive? (Anti-matter wouldn't be too easy to come by /on Earth). And isn't the fusion reactors on the Enterprise referred to as the 'impulse system'?

As I said before, isn't it possible (though retconning) that the BOP's warp drive (which they had to have had in The Deadly Years, at the very least) was a major power drain from their impulse engines (then channeling power to the warp thingies), rather than the 'intermix' engine of the Enterprise?

"Simple Impulse" ... still keeping the meaning that it was a more primitive drive system, but still a warp-capable one?

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I think so.
The impulse engine is some sort of reactor or reaction drive.
Yes, according to TOS cannon, it would be a big drain. Much more so than the "impulse".
Could be. If we went this way, we would have to figure out how to reflect this in CODA.

For starters, it would probably have to be a slow engine., since the power requires are non-linear.

Secondly, we'd have to assign temportary damage boxes to systems to reflect the reduced power.

I think it makes sense, and then it also adds the extra drain for the cloak. They really DIDN'T have power for the shields and weapons while cloaked and running at warp. I could easily see how a 'impulse fueled warp system' would keep that drain going.

Then, an easy thought, when true warp cores were added with the D-7 systems, the cloak's required power went up exponentially to deal with a much more profound warp signature.

Not sure how to model this well in CODA. I'm still going through the ICON material I got for a few bucks at the local game store. :)

The plasma weapon was also beastly in the power drain compartment. With that and the cloak running, ther eprobably wasn'T enough power left to run warp drive a the same time.


Since CODA doesn't use power allocation (ships are assumed to generate sufficent power for thier needs until they get damaged), the only way to reflect a power drain would be to reduce the effectiveness of the ship's other systems as through damage.

In ICON (or Spacedock) you could reflect it in the ship's POWER rating. Just make sure the ship has enough energy to do it's thing. THe warp capable variant of the BoP in CODA has a drive capable of Wf3/4/5 if you need stats for a drive.

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Originally posted by tonyg
The plasma weapon was also beastly in the power drain compartment. With that and the cloak running, ther eprobably wasn'T enough power left to run warp drive a the same time.

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Works fine with what we see in the show. The ship dropped out of warp, decloaked, fired, recloaked, and then went into warp again. I don't think we see it maneuver to fire the plasma weapon at warp, do we? (Needs to find that packed DVD to be sure).

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Since CODA doesn't use power allocation (ships are assumed to generate sufficent power for thier needs until they get damaged), the only way to reflect a power drain would be to reduce the effectiveness of the ship's other systems as through damage.

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What's the opposite of 'edge trait' in CODA again? You could say that this system's activation precludes 'X' in power for other systems - rendering them inoperable until this system is powered down. Again, not sure how to balance that out, as I've still only skimmed the books. :)

There is of course a third way on that - that whatever they used for warp drive was just ... different. I could be that the Romulans used a means of warp drive that just didn't register on the enterprises instruments. As we've seen in the later series Romulan technology for warp drive was pretty different - they used quantum singularities. it could be for one reason or another they couldn't / wouldn't use conventional warp drive. they might have used some sort of gravity distortion or some other wierd shenanigans that just didn't conform to what we usually refer 'warp drive' - I suspect that whatever they used it was low powered and not very fast - hence they used Klingon designs later on (through whatever historical means you want to imply :D)

Anyway yes it's a silly debate, with personal opinion and conjecture - let's drop it :D

from what we know about Impluse drive systems they use fusion reactors. I suspect that the pheonix would have used fusion reactors as it only went at just over warp 1 ! Some technical sources (often non canon) I have read that the maximum speed you could get with warp is warp 5 on 'fusion' power (so early earth vessels may well be fusion only). The principal means of generating antimatter in the 21'st century (aka now!) is by supermassive CERN type accelerators kilimeters accross. It's not a huge leap to assume that in 50 years time fusion reactors would be possible but given that it was a post world war holocaust world I can't see super expensive scientific institutions still going round then. That and I don't think Dilithium would have been a compound found on Earth and without it to regulate the reaction I doubt that the explosion could be easilly contained!! They don't have forcefields!

With regards to game traits. You could simply have an edge/flaw called "Underpowered" - you have a number of units of energy available based on your drives reliability (to keep it simple) These can either be used on your drive / weapons / cloak but not all at once.

Well, one of the reason fusion batteries make more sense to me than what we're familiar with for warp drive is that heavy hydrogen is a hell of a lot easier to come up with than anti-matter - and a lot safer to work with.

(Relatively.. it's a bit like saying 'this grenade is safer to toss in your hands without the pin...)

I can easily see the Phoenix's prototype drive (a small fusion plant) being used through the warp 3 and some of the warp 5 fleets, up until the dedicated dilithium flavor crystalled warp cores first came on line.

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Originally posted by TFVanguard
Well, one of the reason fusion batteries make more sense to me than what we're familiar with for warp drive is that heavy hydrogen is a hell of a lot easier to come up with than anti-matter - and a lot safer to work with.

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They do use heavy hydrogen. Just that they call it by it'S other name, deuterium. The matter/antimatter reactor mixes deuterium and anti-dueterium.

THe reason for the M/A reactor is that when Roddeberry created TOS he contacted several scientists to try and come up with a somewhat feasible way for FTL travel, and was told that antimatter was the best way to get the aount of power required. THe power output is orders of magintiude greater than a fusion reactor.

I doubt a standard fusion reactor could get a ship up to warp 5, more like warp 2 or 3 (OCU).


THe dilithium isn't used to make the power, but is a focusing crystal capable of transferring the power. They use dilthium in other things (like lasers and phasers, including the hand variety), and dilithium is useful outside of warp engines.

I believe they use a combination of Deuterium and Tritium in Federation ships. (1 or 2 Neutrons extra)

Tony I suspect you're right about the Warp 2 - my point was that you couldn't get very fast using convntional warp drive without an A/MM reaction

I am not too sure about TOS but Im definatelly sure that Dilthium is not used for Phasers by TNG - they use a crystal emmitter known as Funghumi-no-Umi (which is Japaneese for virtual sea of wonder) - according to the TNG technical manual. What Phasers do is fairly different to what a piece of Dilithium does in a warp core. The whole point about the Dilithium is that it's unusual interior structure renders it transparent to antimatter if it is energised, allowing for the antimatter to be highly focused. Where exactly this happens on the 'jewlery box' in TOS is I don't know :D

I suspect that "orignally" ships probably used the velocity in c for refering to thier speed. THe Warp Scale probably wasn't invented for a few years--once the speeds got up there a bit. Perhaps at 10c (TREK doesn't like to use more wf that humans have fingers), 20c , or 100c. Depends on where you think it get unwieldy.

I am not sure how much on--screen evidence there is of dilithium being used for anythong other that warp drive, but most of the early TOS stuff (pre-TNG) seems to go with that idea.

Things work much differently in TNG (mostly due to the fact that 20 years have passed so out scientists have different theories of how to do things in the future). A lot of TOS tech has been rewritten to TNG terms, even though that wasn't they way it WAS.

In regards to your lack of comprehension regarding the dilithium matrix chamber (the jewlery box), I suspect it is because you don't have a degree in Warp Drive Mechanics. Go get one and I am sure you will understand how it works. :D

Then we'll have someone to explain it to the rest of us. :D

Personally, I'm still in the "We need thing--make ship go" stage.

Ahh no you see - it's because Scotty wasn't dubbed the 'miracle worker' for nothing - all the other ships had them mounted INSIDE the intermix chamber :D

While I know what you mean to a certain extent I think that often they used the right terms on TOS, it's just that the set builders were probably more led by the 'cool' factor than the writers were :D

I suspect that THOSE dilithium crystals were really there for when the admirals came round, but they were really just cheap pieces of plastic with some glowing lights mounted behind them for show.. Lets face it inside the intermix chamber isn't that exciting :D

I think the one shame with TOS is that they explained so much! if they'd just made Engineering like the rest of the ship - banks of blinging and bleeping lights (with the ubiquitus false perspective red mesh things to add some depth) then they could have got away with allot more - but of course because they explained it - they arsed it up :D

I personally do quite prefer the TNG style of technobabble - because while on the one hand they do go into gread ammounts of detail about things we can't refute - such as subspace physics - they had in-joke knowing nods to the science community with things like 'the heisenburg compensator' :D for things we could refute - hence bypassing them! :D

the biggest problem most SciFi has is not that it breaks the laws of physics - it's that it breaks its own laws! Internal consistiency helps far more than scientific accuracy!

Miracle worker nothing. The truth is that dilithium works on broadcast power (see the "Cage") and that the "intermix chamber" is really a safe so people will stop stealing them.

THat why the Enterprise kept running out. (Or else the finest ship of the line isn't sent out with spares).

Glade they replaced the crystals with circut breakers! :D


TOS had the problem of trying to do fake 23rd century hi-tech with 60s mid-tech, and on a low budget. Typically the writers had some good ideas on how things should be, as did the set designers. Then the budget popped up and ideas had to be toned down.

TOS also had some of the worst continutiy snafus, but I am a bit more forgiving as the show was charting new ground, and didn't have many of the benefits the later series had (a preestablished universe, more money, and newer equipment).

TOS did similar things with thier technobable, it is jsut that it was created in the 60s. Sciencetific theory was different then. That is why all the computers in the 23rd century are either mainframe sized, or humanoid.

Internal consistiency is very difficult in SF since the "laws" of a SF setting don't enforce thmeselves they way the laws of physics do. More like Wyle E. Coyote, gravity doesn't apply until you happen to remember it.
THe episodic nature of TV series, combined with the fact that different people write the eposides makes it even worse, as WRITER B isn'T aware of what WRITER A wrote into the show last week.

All things considered, it is supriring that TREK hold up as well as it does.

Well one of the reasons that trek holds up quite well to this day is mostly because of TNG - in the earliest days of the show they had special technical consultants who basically went through many of the plotlines that the writers had done and corrected them - often the writers were trained to just put "Insert technobabble here" in the relevant places :D

That went out of the window somewhat with the ending of TNG but because by and large most writers already had various 'writers handbooks' available to them they were able to do a reaonable job.. but because they had no one managing the overall consistiency and minding reality, it slowly started to drift to the situation we saw in Voyager where they had 'contradictory technology of the week' - I swear they had competitions to see who could come up with the most inconsistient technobabble :D

I think you underestimate TOS. While TNG certainly did it part for the TREK mythos, as did the other series (well, maybe not VOY and ENT, but those are different topics) a good deal, if not the lion's share of TREK's success goes to TOS. TNG even started as the aborted Star Trek II series (what became ST:TMP).It shows too. Riker/Decker, Ilea/Troi, even the full Vulcan who became an Andoid. Even got the same theme song.

TOS did a lot of technical consulting too (one of the consultants is responsible for crewmembers not being able to remotely beam themselves back to the ship via the communicator).

Both good shows.

I have been building some of the ships in the Starships book from scratch and keep winding up with plenty of space left over. for example, the 2245 Connie, after my calcs has 16 space left-over after adding everything up.

Am Ijust doing something wrong, or is it normal to have that much space left.

Any help would be good.

Thx,

Dc

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Originally Posted by Tobian

Well one of the reasons that trek holds up quite well to this day is mostly because of TNG - in the earliest days of the show they had special technical consultants who basically went through many of the plotlines that the writers had done and corrected them - often the writers were trained to just put "Insert technobabble here" in the relevant places :D

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Too bad they didn't have other writers to throw out the shitty scripts. First two seasons of TNG are barely watchable.



...and 'tech the tech tech' is still what they use : P

So I finally got my copy of Starships the other day (Amazon). First attempt didn't work, so I had to try another vendor, he got it to me late, but in excellent condition. In all, I have mixed feelings. Its an improvement over the NG version, though I suppose I would have liked a little more fluff describing each of the new items. Like an expanded description of stuff like the Impulse drives. Sure they give a difference in stats, and date of introduction, but thats about it. When I look at the chart for Impulse drives, all I can really see is that stuff near the bottom is newer than stuff near the top, and in general stuff near the bottom is better than stuff near the top. Some stuff like you'd find in the old tech manuals would have been nice, little headings on WHY they moved from FIE to FIG, or why it skips FIG 5 to FIG 7.

I guess I was hoping more tech manual and less 'monster' (ship) manual. More fluff on the ship design stuff and less info on the ships of various fleets would have been better (for me). Makes me consider going back to the stuff I saw in the Nirvana of Spacedock stuff :) I guess cause I'm an old Starfleet battles dude I like having more info like power consumption and stuff available. It may cause me to come up with a hybrid.

I like the easier use of the Coda system, and tend to think that ships under Spacedock mechanics end up being a bit too fragile. On the other hand I like firing arcs, I also kinda like that at least via description, Spacedock ships tend to be closer in representing loadouts than the Starships version. I mean in starships, the Defiant only has 2 pulse phasers as beam weapons, yet we've seen its got another dorsal mounted 360 degree firing phaser as well.

Anyone have a hybrid system they could point me to?

Say, Don, if you happen to read this...did you ever get something resembling an errata for Starships put together?

From reading through the Starships book I spotted something that seems odd. The Species 8472 Bioship's only weapon is an energy drain. So it has no means to actually destroy a ship? Am I missing something?

Thanks.

By the text, yes it doesn't explain it all that well. However, a ship hit by the bioship will have all it's energy drained... aka - A Starship in almost all cases contains vast quantities of energy potential which has to be carefully contained. In the case of Federation Starships, it's the warp core and antimatter containment pods. In the case of Romulan ships, they have a quantum singularity (micro black hole). If the systems which keep those contained loose power... BOOM.. no more ship. Period! It's why the Breen were so devastatingly effective at destroying ships when they also had the same weapon.

That said it also specifically says in the splat text that.. if it hits.. it destroys a ship.. period, and if 8 of them form a ring, they can destroy a planet. For the purposes of rules, though, as a 'energy drain' weapon, you get a +5 to your TN to be hit with it.. if you do... Roll up some new PC's :D

It's not a ship you should casually throw against characters in a naked combat encounter! :D

Thank you. They could have done with explaining that a bit better.

it isn't something I plan on introducing but it stood out as an anomoly in the ship design that didn't make much sense.