Starfleet Jedi

Since Kane brought it up in another thread, I thought I'd start this one on the matter.

We've seen Gowron and faux klingon what's his name attacking DS9 with klingon ships, yet DS9 has a fusion reactor and the klingon ships have m/am warp cores, I think. So, anyone got any ideas how?

Mine are that, since the new torpedo turrets and phaser banks were added, additional generators and power conduits were put up during the rebuilding of the station. Finding out about the wormhole was probably the reason for the extra weaponry. If it was just about the cardassians, there may not have been as much put in. A m/am core probably wasn't put in, but multiple, independent generators of federation fusion design in clusters throughout the station could have been put in.

I think it was a fusion generator that was being taken to the duckblind on Mintaka 3 and Riker says that the generator they were bringing them could power a small phaser bank. It's unlikely they would have installed just one phaser bank, so clusters of fusion generators per bank could work.

Also, it wasn't that the station suffered zero damage from the ships. The klingons were able to beam people throughout the station. There were klingon reinforcements coming, but the Fed reinforcements were gonna get there sooner and those guys did have m/am warp cores.

The stuff used would be the shows and those 2 books, like it says at st-v-sw.net.

It should be noted that several episodes refer to multiple reactors on the station, and in the episode “Civil Defense” Dukat refers to the “main fusion reactor”. So yes, multiple reactors are apparent. How many reactors were there, and what each reactor was used for (as well as whether or not they're all the same type of reactor) is the question.

Actually, looking back through DS9, while there is reference to fusion reactors, it's never clearly stated as far as I can find, if DS9 has only fusion reactors, or if it is powered by antimatter/matter as a primary power source or what. That the Warsies like to cling to the non-canon DS9 TM tech that states the station uses only fusion power, and has 750 TW of peak power output is probably where a lot of the myths and confusion stem from.
-Mike

Whether a space station is fusion powered or not doesn't really matter. Since we have no size or weight concerns here, the fusion reactors could be huge. Hence the fusion reactor on a space station could easily outpower the M/AM reactors on a spaceship.

However, DS9 is not the only example of engaging without warp power online. This is also seen in "Elaan of Troyius" (in which the Enterprise is stated to be at a severe disadvantage) as well as Star Trek: Insurrection, where - IIRC - the E-E ejects its warp core and continues to fight.

Shall I continue?

Yes, and those two examples involve starships. We've never directly seen another space station other than DS9 involved in combat. Also, it's hard to compare impulse engine reactors on starships to those on DS9 or any other station as we do not have clear indications of the reactor sizes. DS9's reactors could be larger than those on small to medium sized starships. The only real off-hand advantage a station has over a starship is that it can pump all the available power it has into weapons and shields since it does not have to maneuver around as a starship does. Of course that would explain why we see starships essentially pull up to, and sit in formation to slug it out with a space space station, or other large starships because you can at least that way dump your power now into shields and weapons if you are otherwise on an equal footing with an opponent.
-Mike

Mike DiCenso wrote:Yes, and those two examples involve starships. We've never directly seen another space station other than DS9 involved in combat. Also, it's hard to compare impulse engine reactors on starships to those on DS9 or any other station as we do not have clear indications of the reactor sizes. DS9's reactors could be larger than those on small to medium sized starships. The only real off-hand advantage a station has over a starship is that it can pump all the available power it has into weapons and shields since it does not have to maneuver around as a starship does. Of course that would explain why we see starships essentially pull up to, and sit in formation to slug it out with a space space station, or other large starships because you can at least that way dump your power now into shields and weapons if you are otherwise on an equal footing with an opponent.
-Mike

While it is possible to route warp power to shields or weapons, it usually isn't done.

We have a few available pieces of evidence to crack this nut, I believe - and reviewing over my notes, I see I need to tidy up the DS9 and TNG pages relevant to this matter, some of the episode citations are unclear.

While it's true that we don't hear explicitly that DS9 has no antimatter reactors, it's reasonable to assume it doesn't have one, as we never hear of it.

First is the amount of power stored within phaser banks. As we know from episodes like "The Sound of Her Voice," the amount of energy stored in the phaser banks of a ship is substantial - on the order of days of output from the warp core. Presumably this is stored in some "energy matrix" form.

The second piece of the puzzle is shield strength. We know - from "Hero Worship" - that shields are not ordinarily run off warp power, and that diverting six fusion reactors to shields doubles the shield strength. So shields are normally run off a fraction of the power available to the secondary fusion plants of a starship.

Problematically, of course, we also know from "Best of Both Worlds" that the navigational deflector is the only thing on-board the starship that project the full output of the warp core...

The problem here is that we have contradictory effects here. The majority of the statements seem to indicate that the warp core is the prefered method of powering shields and weapons. In "Elann of Troyius" [TOS3] and "The Doomsday Machine" [TOS2], we have some disagreement as to what exactly can be powered by the ship's impulse engines alone. In EoT, the Enterprise was not just at a severe maneuverability disadvantage, but could not power weapons at all, and while it could power the shields, those could not be maintained at anywhere near full power for very long, and they could not stand up to a long term bombardment from a Klingon ship intent on capturing the ship, if at all possible.

In TDM, on the other hand, Scotty is able to power at least one phaser bank on the Constellation using iffy condition impulse engines, and later was able to restore the shields on the heavily damaged ship, athough according to Scotty they "won't last long".

Oddly enough, in EoT and apparently in TDM as well, the photon torpedoes cannot be armed or fired with only impulse power available.

In the TNG-era, we have a number of interesting circumstances, such as the E-D's ability to maintain some level of deflector shields, dispite being down to auxilery power only (no impulse or warp core) in "Relics" [TNG5]. Even then, the ship was capable of withstanding tens of thousands of terajoules of energy from a type-G star that was undergoing massive solar flares and violent matter expulsions for several hours.

I suppose we could justify it as the TNG-era having learned the lessons of the need to be able to maintain enough secondary power to maintain at least some kind of weapons and shielding.
-Mike

On the Relics thing, it shows that whatever powers auxillary power is totally awesome on its own compared to us. Did we ever hear what would supply "auxillary power" in any of the series? I don't think we ever did, but I'm not sure.

Not really, no. In "Mudd's Women", the ship after the last lithium crystal is gone is described as being on "batteries" and "Auxilary impulse engines". The Enterprise's fuel is described as "low" from the effort of limping into orbit about Rigel-12, something we rarely ever hear of for an ST vessel. Is auxilary power a form of low-level fusion power, then?
-Mike

Didn't the Lithium crystals just matter for the warp drive? If they went from using M/AM and multiple fusion reactors to no M/AM and less fusion reactors they would still have to run all the normal flight operations equipment on reduced power, that might be where the batteries come in, to keep everything running by supplementing the impulse drive.

Maybe the auxillary/batteries are a type of fission reactors. Aside from that, we'd be going with something else, a gas powered electrical generator? A chimp destroying a car with a sledgehammer, as it stands on the roof?

:-P

Whatever the nature of auxilary power on a starship is, it is still capable of maintaining shields that can stave off stellar EM radiation to the tune of 5-50 TW on a continuous basis over 3 hours time (54,000 TJ to 180,000 TJ total). That is pretty damned impressive. It would take nearly every single power plant on our early 21st century Earth to equal or slightly surpass just the lower number there.
-Mike

More proof the Feds are great MacGuyverers to get that much energy out of a chimp, a car and a sledgehammer.

Don't forget the exercycles. I mean do why else would you have 430 people on that sized ship.