Scientists Work To Produce 'Star Trek' Deflector Shields 193
cold fjord writes "This might be useful. From CNN: 'Recent evidence from NASA's Curiosity rover mission to the Red Planet has revealed that astronauts on the round-trip would be exposed to high levels of radiation from cosmic rays and high-energy particles from the sun ... this would clearly be bad for your health — and it is proving difficult to find a solution. ... [S]hielding to completely block the radiation danger would have to be "meters thick" and too heavy to be used aboard a spacecraft. In contrast, ... science fiction fans have once again got used to the ease with which Captain Kirk gives the order for "shields up" and the crew of the Enterprise being protected instantly from the hostility of space. Perhaps though, a real Star Trek shield may no longer be science fiction — scientists at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) certainly think so. They have been testing a lightweight system to protect astronauts and spacecraft components from harmful radiation and working with colleagues in America to design a concept spaceship called Discovery that could take astronauts to the Moon or Mars. "Star Trek has great ideas — they just don't have to build it," said Ruth Bamford, lead researcher for the deflector shield project at RAL. ... The RAL plan is to create an environment around the spacecraft that mimics the Earth's magnetic field and recreates the protection we enjoy on the ground — they call it a mini magnetosphere." Related: 'Deflector Shields' protect the Lunar Surface.'"
Make it so... (Score:2, Funny)
Don't forget to be able to boost the shields with auxiliary, emergency and also war drive power... those are always used. Also extendable to protect other ships and maybe a functionality to raise the shields after a shot has been detected even if the "diplomatic" captain doesn't want to raise... since he is surely not going to die (maybe assimilated but no death)
Re:Make it so... (Score:4, Funny)
As a bonus, Roddenberry's First Law states that you can use a main deflector dish to do anything, so if they succeed in building this technology then we can also look forward to faster-than-light travel, instantaneous communication across distances of galactic scale...
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On the other hand, it will break physics so bad that astronomers will just throw up their hands and leave all stellar objects classified as "spatial anomalies."
Re:Make it so... (Score:5, Funny)
To seek out wi-fi and new civilizations
Re: Make it so... (Score:5, Funny)
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...and hot blue alien chicks!
FTFY
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Picture (Score:4, Informative)
Micrometeorites (Score:2)
Now if only they could do something about micrometeorites. Sadly I don't think this technology will help there. Still, it is a great idea.
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If they're magnetized, it will.
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No, it won't.
There are no magnetic monopoles.
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What are the actual odds of being hit?
Are they that frequent outside our ring of garbage?
Some amount of crew loss is going to be acceptable vs spending infinity dollars.
Re:Micrometeorites (Score:5, Informative)
Once you realize that this volume is always going to be enormous for any inter-planetary travel, even for a really really tiny craft, then you stop wondering why sometimes a probe that we send out suddenly stops responding for no obvious reason.
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Once you realize space is mostly empty you might start wondering again.
Also your calculation makes no sense. It assumes that this whole volume must stay micrometeorite free, when only the volume the ship is in at that time has that limitation.
Re:Micrometeorites (Score:4, Insightful)
Mostly empty isn't good enough at the energies involved. It really doesn't matter what the probability for an impact is, since it is almost always going to be > 0. Even at the relatively pedestrian speeds of highway travel, a tiny pebble to the windshield does huge damage if it hits right.
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If it only kills one out of every 100 crews, as an example, their made be no need to bother with additional expensive shielding.
We do not need a risk of 0, just acceptable rates of crew loss.
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That has nothing to do with what I said, good job.
Hint: it does not matter what velocity, it only matters the odds of actually encountering something.
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So what is the craft's swept volume in its own reference frame?
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And you realize that Voyager 1 and 2 are frigging miracles that they are still alive after making it through the Oort Cloud and the trashbin that is our interplanetary space.
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And you realize that Voyager 1 and 2 are frigging miracles that they are still alive after making it through the Oort Cloud and the trashbin that is our interplanetary space.
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You mean the Kupier Belt. They're probably not even at the beginning of Oort Cloud yet. The Oort Cloud is supposed to go out as far as about 1 light-year from the Sun, and a purpose dedicated craft would probably take 30 years just to get to the beginning of it.
Re:Micrometeorites (Score:4, Interesting)
And you realize that Voyager 1 and 2 are frigging miracles that they are still alive after making it through the Oort Cloud and the trashbin that is our interplanetary space.
The Oort cloud is thought to extend out nearly a light year from the sun. Voyager 1 & 2 have most definitely not passed through it. But it's not like it's some super dense Star Wars style asteroid belt. You could fly a planet through it and not hit anything substantial.
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In fact it is not really a miracle.
They have an atomic battery, so no power issues.
Their antennas are orientated the same direction since decades (no power need or trouble with engines and/or gear/transmissions/joints).
The micro processors are on a level an Apple][ was 30 years ago. Same for the memory. The Voyagers will run indefinitely, or in other words: till they either hit something or the atomic battery is running low.
Re:Micrometeorites (Score:4, Interesting)
The velocity of the craft does matter, and I will explain why.
If the velocity of the craft is much greater than the particles (think of dust floating in the air), then the craft will indeed sweep out all the particles in its line of motion.
However, the the velocity of the craft is much less that the particles (think cosmic rays in interplanetary space), then there will be the same number of collisions per unit time during the trip. A five hundred day trip will have ten times the number of collisions as a fifty day trip. Consequently, the faster your craft travels, the fewer particles you encounter during your journey.
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The ISS actually has an issue with micrometeorites hitting the station and making tiny jagged pockmarks which frequently cause problems with tearing fabric on spacesuits. The issue was dangerous enough that they needed to come up with some sort of clamp which allows the astronauts to place it over the damaged handles on the ISS exterior so that they could work without constantly degrading their suits with small tears.
So, yeah, micrometeorites are fairly common. Admittedly, this is still in the near range
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Pardon my ignorance (Score:2)
Aren't space shuttles and (maybe) capsules (from, say, Apollo program) alredy shielded from cosmic rays and radiation somewhat? It's not like engineers and physicists didn't know about them before the Mercury program even was started.
Does it have anything to do with the length of the flight to Mars or the martian thin atmosphere not being able to filter them out?
Re:Pardon my ignorance (Score:4, Informative)
Moon capsules did leave the Earths Magnetosphere but weren't shielded. They were protected by limited time in space (2 weeks at most) and luck that they weren't hit by decent solar storm.
Re:Pardon my ignorance (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ah, but if one layers fails, they all fail. It always works like that.
Re:Pardon my ignorance (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they're not. The engineers and physicists knew all about cosmic radiation but there was nothing they could do about it. The shuttle does well enough since it stays within Earth's magnetosphere.
Apollo did leave the magnetosphere for part of it's mission and the Astronauts were exposed to radiation. They reported that they could see flashes of light believed to be caused by cosmic rays interacting with the fluid in their eyes. Had the sun flared at the wrong time, the crew would have been killed. Given the many risks of the Apollo mission, that was just one more and hardly the largest.
However, a mission to Mars with the crew in space for much longer can't take that approach.
star trek had two types of shields (Score:5, Informative)
Re:star trek had two types of shields (Score:4, Insightful)
+1 NERD!
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Actually, the Enterprise had three types of shields.
First was a set of low power static shields designed to deflect really small particles away from the ship during travel. Imagine a speck of dust striking the hull at full impulse speed.
Second was the deflector dish that emits a deflector beam designed to push bigger particles away from the ship during travel, particles too big for the static shields. Imagine a pebble striking the hull at full impulse speed.
Finally there are the main defensive shields use
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Err, no. Both were deflector shields (Score:4, Interesting)
Err, no. Both kinds were called deflector shields, in the canon. See: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Deflector_shield [memory-alpha.org]
The lower level one emitted by the navigationa deflector (a.k.a., deflector dish) dish was nothing else than a lower intensity force field, but still a deflector shield. (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Navigational_deflector [memory-alpha.org])
In other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
When in doubt, copy nature.
sounds reasonable (Score:2)
the reason physical shielding has to be so thick and dense is the particles are so small and flying so fast that they run through normal matter like it's not hardly even there. (besides the occasional hitting a bit of your dna and knocking the atoms around like a clean break on a pool table) Magnetic deflection would just reroute the HEPs around the capsule. Wouldn't require much weight, but may be a bit power hungry.
I don't know enough about magnetics though... I thought that it only takes significant e
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Feel free to make a coil of wire and then run a magnet through it while you touch the ends to your toungue.
I suggest wrapping about 50 feet of a single internal wire of cat 5 around a piece of PVC and then pass a magnet through it back and forth rapidly.
Electricity 050 introduction to wires level of stuff.
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We are not talking about moving the magnet field.
If you do that with a stationary magnet you will be very safe.
Basic high school stuff here.
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WE are talking about a moving magnetic field, that much particle matter drags a LOT of magnetic field effects with them.
Re:sounds reasonable (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the magnetic field that''s the problem. Until you get EXTREMELY high anyway. Like, "rip the iron out of your blood" high. Or you have an implant with any ferrous material. (thankfully titanium isn't substantially ferrous)
The problem is the HEPs (High Energy Particles) that are flying out of the sun from CMEs (coronal mass ejections) at moderate speed. These are small atomic level particles, and are moving so fast and are so small that the odds of them ever hitting anything are very slim. But there's a lot of them. So it's like someone shooting at you with a shotgun from a few blocks away. But he's got a million shotguns. Odds are he's gonna get lucky eventually. It works the same as radiation. And when one of these "pellets" hits a strand of DNA, it'll break it up like a cue ball breaking a rack on a pool table. It will almost certainly prevent the cell from ever being able to divide, and will affect enzyme production, which may be fatal to the cell.
If there's enough HEPs flying your way, it's like getting hit with a high or massive dose of radiation. And massive DNA damage. There's also a lot of cellular damage, which the cells might be able to repair if they were working right, which they're not due to the DNA damage. So you get massive cell death throughout your body over the next few hours or days. Maybe enough to kill you. Or almost certainly give you cancer if you survive. Possibly a very nasty, widespread, aggressive cancer.
Aaaanyway, these particles are moving fast and there's a lot of them, but they're very light. And usually heavily charged from their explosive exit from the sun. Charged particles are very easy to influence with a magnetic field. So you put a magnetic field around an area, like the earth's magnetic field does around the earth, and the particles tend to route around the area instead of through it.
The aurora borealis is the visible effect of HEPs interacting with the earth's magnetosphere. When you can see that, there's enough HEPs hitting it to actually deform it. (cool videos [youtube.com] of this effect on youtube) The shape of the field is very important. Notice how the north and south magnetic poles of the earth offer far less protection.
The earth's magnetic field protects us from this, so we didn't evolve a resistance to it. So when we leave its protection, we'll need to have something else to keep the HEPs from damaging our cells. And the best two theories going right now are blocking it and deflecting it. Blocking it is heavy, and heavy is never good when you're talking space travel. Deflecting it... well, it's tricky, they're working on it.
Obvious... (Score:2)
Actually recreating the earths magnetosphere seemed so obvious, that the fact that they weren't doing this so far gave me the impression that there was something blocking this or nearly impossible.
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Done 15 years ago (Score:3)
My college professor in plasma sciences told us - 13 years ago - that he invented and patented the deflector shields, using this method. He was working under an Air Force contract, and they immediately classified his patent.
I suspect that is more likely the reason it wasn't being done (publicly) previously. I've assumed every Air Force satellite has had this for a decade.
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My college professor in plasma sciences told us - 13 years ago - that he invented and patented the deflector shields, using this method. He was working under an Air Force contract, and they immediately classified his patent.
Oh, sure he did. And then told you all about it. And you violated the law by not reporting him. If it weren't for the fact that he was almost certainly bullshitting you, I'd suggest you ask Ed S. if he could use a roommate in Ecuador.
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It's bullshit becasue of the power requirements, which thanks to Einstein, we can figure out.
Cue the theme music.... (Score:2)
They have been testing a lightweight system to protect astronauts and spacecraft components from harmful radiation and working with colleagues in America to design a concept spaceship called Discovery that could take astronauts to the Moon or Mars.
Shouldn't a ship called Discovery take them to Europa? (Or Iapetus?)
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Obviously we can't land on Europa.
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Maybe not -- at this rate it will probably take us until 2061 to get out of LEO again anyway.
Mini-magnetosphere Plasma Propulsion? (Score:3)
This reminds me of M2P2 that was all the rage on this site a decade or so ago.
Looks like the Dr. Winglee kept up some research, but their page was last updated in 2011.
But, some pretty pictures, movies, and results from actual experiments.
http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/space/M2P2/ [washington.edu]
If you've never heard of this, the basics are to create a magnetic sail by trapping plasma in a magnetic field around a spacecraft.
Solar wind particles push against the plasma, which is able to expand the range of the magnetic field, and provide force to push the craft.
This is somewhat similar to the concept of solar sails, except the plasma expands outward (increasing surface area exposed to the wind) as the density of the wind decreases. This provides more force than a solar sail the further you are from the sun.
Another benefit was the plasma and magnetic field are deflecting solar particles, so it can shield the occupants, much as this article describes.
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I did some further reading and the drag was when operating in interstellar space.
But inside out system, or even inside the Earth's magnetosphere, I think it still has a lot of potential use.
I mean, it's not like we're swarming in propulsion systems that can get us around the solar system.
Who cares about the 'weight'? (Score:2)
Build the spacecraft in space, using material from meteors or the moon. In fact just hollow out the meteor and move in.
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All things being equal, you still have to accelerate your ship if you want to go anywhere it's not going already. For a given amount of propulsion capability, a more-massive-than-necessary ship will take longer to get somewhere.
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And adding to that, you have to slow it down again at the other end, or any amount of course correction will require you to expend energy to move that unnecessarily large mass along a new vector.
Martian radiation levels (Score:5, Informative)
- 90% of the enroute radiation was from cosmic rays, the rest from solar flares. However a large solar storm could exceed cosmic ray levels.
- The eight month trip resulted in over 300 milliseverts of radiation, about one third of the recommend lifetime human dose.
- The thin Martian atmosphere greatly attenuates the surface radiation. But its still much higher than Earth.
- Hydrogen rich materials like water or certain plastics are useful barriers against cosmic rays. The ISS current has plastic shielded sleeping areas (to wait out solar storms too). It has been suggested to store fresh and waste water in the walls where the astronauts live and work.
How much energy? (Score:2)
Well, duh (Score:2)
Well, duh, they'll just run an electroplasma manifold between it and the warp core ;)
My RAL plan (Score:2)
I'll pay 50 dollars for one! (Score:2)
....scientists at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) certainly think so. They have been testing a lightweight system to protect astronauts and spacecraft components from harmful radiation and working with colleagues in America to design a concept spaceship called Discovery that could take astronauts to the Moon or Mars.....
and it will be ready for production use in less than a year. (sarcasm)
Hey, wait. Didn't we already have a craft called "Discovery?" [wikipedia.org]
They really are nerdin' it out. :)
Engineering (Score:5, Informative)
RAL says, "Yes, here are the results."
NASA says, "Yes, but this is for 10 MeV electrons. Which are not really part of the space radiation problem. Where are the higher energy proton and heavy ion results?"
RAL says, "..."
Space radiation protection is fundamentally different from terrestrial radiation protection. Space radiation is much higher energy and consists mainly of protons (but also heavy ions are important due to the Z^2 effect of radiation dose). And it is omnipresent - you cannot get away from space radiation - it is everywhere.
See, the problem with the unconfined magnetic field work is that the size and mass of the equipment to make a magnetic dipole against cosmic rays is prohibitive. The most recent analysis that I know of is by Paluzek [2] and needs a million kg in equipment with a diameter of 100 meters...
A nice review of the science and engineering aspects of active shielding can be found in Townsend (2005) [1].
[1] Townsend, L.W., "Critical analysis of active shielding methods for space radiation protection," Aerospace Conference, 2005 IEEE , vol., no., pp.724,730, 5-12 March 2005, doi: 10.1109/AERO.2005.1559364
[2] M. A. Paluszek, “Magnetic Radiation Shielding forPermanent Space Habitats,” in The Industrialization of Space: Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Meeting, American Astronautical Society,36 Part 1, 545-574, 1978.
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you're not thinking this through properly...
NASA says, "Yes, but this is for 10 MeV electrons. Which are not really part of the space radiation problem. Where are the higher energy proton and heavy ion results?"
RAL says, "give us some funding and we'll go expand our research".
See, that's why they contact the state department, who know nothing about science but have lots of cash they already fritter away.
If they're going to create ... (Score:2)
A deflector to stop what? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought a thin layer of matter was pretty good at stopping ionized particles such as alpha and beta rays, while you needed a thick slab of matter to stop gamma rays. An electromagnetic deflector will not interact with gamma rays. I'm getting an impression here that a deflector is only useful for cases where there's a cheap alternative.
It could probably deflect pretty powerful ionized particles though, because you can mount it at a long distance from your spacecraft so that a little bit of deflection is enough.
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So, you are correct, stopping low energy particles, especially light low energy particles doesn't
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"That is a huge amount of material to put into space. "
I would like to point out that all the aluminum that exists is already in space.
It may be expensive at the current moment to get of this island floating through space, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
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If terrestrial alpha and beta are like being hit with a foam tennis ball, then cosmic rays out in space beyond the Earth's magnetosphere are like being hit with a golf ball fired out of a high powered cannon.
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Pretty sad that your post got modded up to +5.
See Solar Wind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind [wikipedia.org]
And also Cosmic Rays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray [wikipedia.org]
And Particle Radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_radiation [wikipedia.org]
If you've got a "cheap alternative", we'd all like to hear about it.
"Hal, turn on the shield" (Score:3)
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
weak article, shameful (Score:2)
Basically, "we think it would be cool to fly in outer space, and Star Trek thought of this idea, so give us 10M GBP and we'll dick around with some stuff for a few years, culminating in another riveting 6 point slide deck where we announce it can't be done."
Hello (Score:2)
After installing the Star Trek deflector belt, I have become interested in hygiene, interesting conversation and moving out of my moms basement.
Re:Star Trek? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, sorta (Score:5, Informative)
Well, sorta. If you do enough technobabble and you're willing to count close enough as a hit, then getting it right isn't that hard.
Point in case, in ST's case the Navigational Deflector (emitted by the deflector dish) was actually supposed to protect against space debris, micro-meteorites, etc. (Still a good idea, mind you, because when you're moving even close enough to the speed of light, a single grain of sand packs more energy than a broadside from a 20'th century battleship.)
Dealing with particles via magnetic field was actually the job of the Bussard Collectors (you know, those red glowing things at the front of the nacelles), a.k.a., ramscoops. Which actually didn't deflect it, but collected all that mostly hydrogen in the ship's path.
So, yeah, if you make a complete hash of which did what, and how, and still call it a ST deflector shield, yeah, you can count it as a hit.
But then by the same lax standard I can claim that Jesus endorsed binary code. Matthew 5:37: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." :p
(And yes, I'm a huge ST and SW nerd. I know, I know, I'll go not get laid now.;)
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But then by the same lax standard I can claim that Jesus endorsed binary code. Matthew 5:37: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." :p
(And yes, I'm a huge ST and SW nerd. I know, I know, I'll go not get laid now.;)
HOLY SHIT That Jesus guy really COULD see the future! I'm sold, where's the nearest Christian conversion center?
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Well, sorta. If you do enough technobabble and you're willing to count close enough as a hit, then getting it right isn't that hard.
Point in case, in ST's case the Navigational Deflector (emitted by the deflector dish) was actually supposed to protect against space debris, micro-meteorites, etc. (Still a good idea, mind you, because when you're moving even close enough to the speed of light, a single grain of sand packs more energy than a broadside from a 20'th century battleship.)
Dealing with particles via magnetic field was actually the job of the Bussard Collectors (you know, those red glowing things at the front of the nacelles), a.k.a., ramscoops. Which actually didn't deflect it, but collected all that mostly hydrogen in the ship's path.
So, yeah, if you make a complete hash of which did what, and how, and still call it a ST deflector shield, yeah, you can count it as a hit.
But then by the same lax standard I can claim that Jesus endorsed binary code. Matthew 5:37: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." :p
(And yes, I'm a huge ST and SW nerd. I know, I know, I'll go not get laid now.;)
Yes, the Enterprise had several deflector dishes (main deflector for one) for moving things out of the way
Yes it had ramscoops for collecting things
It (at least the D, the greatest of all Enterprises) also specifically had low power navigational shields
Lasers can't even penetrate our navigation shields. Don't they know that?
Re:Well, sorta (Score:4, Funny)
Lasers can't even penetrate our navigation shields. Don't they know that?
Regulations do call for yellow alert.
Re:Well, sorta (Score:4, Funny)
Are you sure? That does mean changing the light bulb.
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...because otherwise they would be infringing on a patent on traffic light technology.
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Those collectors are something vestigial. They are referred to by that name in TOS on a couple of occasions, but that's really it - the usual theory is that in early planning, they were part of a scientifically plausible propulsion system the ship was supposed to have in which interstellar hydrogen would be collected, used in a fusion reactor to generate power, and the remaining mass accelerated out the back at ridiculous speed. Such a propulsion system was quickly dropped for story reasons (No-one wants to
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And I'm not 100% positive on this but I believe the power came from the dilithium crystals alone, and the antimatter reaction was simply used to generate the warp field.
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To the wiki!
That was easy: Dilithium is required to regulate the reaction, controlling the flow of antimatter to keep the whole thing from going boom. It isn't consumed by the process, but the perfect crystaline pattern is damaged, requiring occasional placement or regeneration of the crystals.
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They were referred to by name in more than just TOS. Next Gen, Voyager, etc all had use for them at one point.
Re:Well, sorta (Score:4, Informative)
But then by the same lax standard I can claim that Jesus endorsed binary code. Matthew 5:37: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil."
This is clearly much more than an endorsement of binary. This is clearly a moral condemnation of any error correcting code that works any way other than just repeating each bit some constant number of times. Hamming codes must be of the devil.
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But then by the same lax standard I can claim that Jesus endorsed binary code. Matthew 5:37: "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil."
Binary code? It looks to me like Jesus is mandating the use of 4-bit ALUs. He was just a man of his time, and I think they only had RISC architecture back then. (Either that, or He played Minecraft way too much.)
Re:Well, sorta (Score:4, Interesting)
Dealing with particles via magnetic field was actually the job of the Bussard Collectors (you know, those red glowing things at the front of the nacelles), a.k.a., ramscoops. Which actually didn't deflect it, but collected all that mostly hydrogen in the ship's path.
They were around several years before Star Trek picked up on them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet [wikipedia.org]
For a fairly long time, in the gap between TOS and TNG, when the books were adding to and fleshing out the universe, there was the idea that the vast majority of interstellar hydrogen is antimatter (discovered by Voyager 6 or something like that, when it transmitted back what it found and was promptly annihilated). That was the key thing that allows for travel without having to carry around a ton of reaction mass. Then add dilithium crystals, which were discovered to have a very powerful resonance effect near a matter-antimatter reaction. The discovery was an lab-bench accident, similar to the discovery of X-Rays. Of course, this is back when first contact was between Earth and Alpha Centari, and the Alpha Centariuns (who look like humans, only a bit more stocky and a second opposable thumb instead of a pinky) worked with Earthlings together to discover warp theory. TNG and later canon continuity wiped out most of that, but I haven't seen anything that directly contradicted the "interstellar hydrogen is mostly antimatter" idea.
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Presumably you mean aside from the fact that we haven't seen any sign of the high energy signatures that would surely happen from annihilation collisions when the solar wind meets this interstellar anti-matter.
If you're going to question facts within fictional works, I'd start out by with the point that we didn't actually discover warp theory with the help of four thumbed aliens from Alpha Centari. After that, the properties of interstellar gas seems fairly minor.
To be clear, let me restate: I haven't seen anything directly contradicting the "interstellar hydrogen is mostly antimatter" idea within any canon work of the fictional Star Trek setting invented for television and expanded in books and films by authors
Why isn't magsails? (Score:2)
Star Trek has little to do with this. The theory has been researched in the past because we hoped we could use it for propulsion [wikipedia.org]. At least it may find some use as shielding this way.
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There was news recently that NASA _is_ paying someone to develop a 3d printer that prints food, for their spaceships. Which I suppose is as close as we can get to a replicator with the tech level we have for now.
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no duh. However, you can create a generic tasteless substance and then inject different types of flavoring.
Soylent Green is people..tasty, tasty, people.
To bad similiar things already exist on the store shelves, and they are cheaper.
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Then just replicate farmers.. DUH!
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The neat thing about having a population of 6 billion people. Is that we can research multiple things at the same time.
Re:one more proof of the moon hoax? (Score:5, Informative)
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