Energy requirements for a warp drive

[Lucky]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJZXDEUOao0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwZt1Yh4-1U

However White and his NASA Eagleworks colleagues say that's not necessarily so: it's all down to the shape of the ring. An improved doughnut design, as opposed to a flat ring, would get the requirement down to something more like just annihilating the Voyager One probe craft.

Mass at launch: 815 kg


* Current approximate mass: 733 kg

Nasa thinks a warp drive might only require about 6.5879e+19 joules to 7.3249e+19 joules or 1.5745e+4 megatons of TNT to 1.7507e+4 megatons of TNT? This seems well within the Federation's reactor capabilities.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I'm just skimming this but does it point to petajoules for something that weighs less than a tonne?
Who would call that within the capabilities of the UFP, or any other faction as a matter of fact??

[Lucky]

I'm just skimming this but does it point to petajoules for something that weighs less than a tonne?
Who would call that within the capabilities of the UFP, or any other faction as a matter of fact??

I thought they were saying that it would only take about 17000 megatons to move a ship at ten times the speed of light in theory at least.

Voyager masses in the region of 800kg, so by our calculations one would still need a lump of antimatter (or other reasonably compact super power source) which - if it were mishandled - would explode with a force of some 17,000 megatons, equivalent to several global nuclear wars all in one (or 600-odd Tunguska meteor strikes etc). This would inconveniently take humanity's current atom labs billions of years to make, and there would be other practical issues (see our previous antimatter-bomb analysis here, and then there'd be the exoto-doughnut to fabricate etc).

But White's not done yet, we learn courtesy of SPACE.com, reporting from the 100 Year Starship conference last week. The NASA brainbox calculates that cunningly oscillating the warped region around the spacecraft could cut power requirements by another big margin.
"The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told SPACE.com. "The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab."

17000 megatons is about 17 gigatons, correct?

We have repeated examples of starships in Star Trek generating multiple gigatons whiles basically just sitting there, and we have seen some rather obscene outputs.

[Picard]

Correct; they didn't specify mass of a ship being moved, it's just that mass of Voyager I spaceship would have to be annihilated. Considering this...