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You'd have to feed a lot of mass to it to make it pose a genuine danger gravitationally.
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Aug 7, 2019 02:52
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Well I s'pose. By the time you crash into an asteroid or something big enough and hard enough to damage the containment structure, you're already in a pickle.
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Aug 7, 2019 02:58
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It's difficult to imagine that the Romulans wouldn't weaponize this tech. They can apparently cloak a singularity and move it at FTL speeds. Just park them all over enemy territory.
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Aug 7, 2019 03:23
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The Bloop posted:It's difficult to imagine that the Romulans wouldn't weaponize this tech. They can apparently cloak a singularity and move it at FTL speeds. It's best not to go down that path. Even something like the random ships people like Neelix have would basically be a planet killer if you unleashed all their energy at once.
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Aug 7, 2019 03:34
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So, are there any behind the scene stories of why Genesis is such a weird episode? I mean it's a fun one, but it's best seen as a sort of Halloween special because the ramifications are so mortifying. But it feels like it went through some weird drafting. Barclay weirdly isn't as much a character as the first couple of acts would lead you to believe. The episode also ends pretty abruptly.
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Aug 7, 2019 03:45
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The Bloop posted:It's difficult to imagine that the Romulans wouldn't weaponize this tech. They can apparently cloak a singularity and move it at FTL speeds. Microscopic black holes are really not much of a threat. You'd get more effect from cloaking explosive mines.
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Aug 7, 2019 03:53
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More so than singularities that can power a military FTL starship?
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Aug 7, 2019 04:03
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Son of Sam-I-Am posted:More so than singularities that can power a military FTL starship? Yeah, a microscopic singularity like that is really just a point of constant energy output. The masses starships would be working with would be so small to work as an energy source that you could fly right through it and it wouldn't leave a hole; less than half a million tons or so, with an event horizon far smaller than the radius of an atom. (Remember, you need tiny mass for appreciable energy radiated, large black holes don't emit much). An antimatter explosive, on the other hand, can release all its energy at once instead. Anything big enough to make an actual gravitational field that could pose a threat probably couldn't be contained or cloaked or driven around.
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Aug 7, 2019 04:22
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What the actual gently caress? Did Voyager just have an episode about how we shouldn't assume rape victims are telling the truth because it might hurt the men they accuse? What the gently caress. I get that it was trying to address false recovered memories, which I guess was an issue in the 90s, but Jesus that's just one element and everything else is just horrific. "Imagine how bad you'll feel if your feeling of personal violation isn't valid, and you ruin some guy's life," is the emotional core of this episode. It's loving gross. The episode is "Retrospect," if anyone else wants to figure out if I'm overreacting or not.
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Aug 7, 2019 04:25
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Yeeeeeah. I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that wasn't what they were trying to say, but yeeeeeah, it's what they ended up saying, and it's awful.
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Aug 7, 2019 04:32
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MikeJF posted:Microscopic black holes are really not much of a threat. You'd get more effect from cloaking explosive mines. Probably but flying right into one would have to cause a problem or two, and theoretically be less detectable or at least less traceable than a bomb Senor Tron posted:It's best not to go down that path. Even something like the random ships people like Neelix have would basically be a planet killer if you unleashed all their energy at once. Oh definitely, but it doesn't stop me from being a colossal nerd and thinking about it anyway
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Aug 7, 2019 04:40
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MikeJF posted:Yeah, a microscopic singularity like that is really just a point of constant energy output. The masses starships would be working with would be so small to work as an energy source that you could fly right through it and it wouldn't leave a hole; less than half a million tons or so, with an event horizon far smaller than the radius of an atom. (Remember, you need tiny mass for appreciable energy radiated, large black holes don't emit much). An antimatter explosive, on the other hand, can release all its energy at once instead. I admit all I know about it is what I've read in sci fi stories, but you'd think something able to power a starship would be radiating gigawatts at least, right? That's not just a roadside flare, and there's not going to be an easy way to stop it, without feeding it with something like a very fine-tuned particle beam of massive particles, greater than the equivalent energy it's putting out. Not as explosive as matter-antimatter, sure, but how fast would it evaporate if it weren't being fed matter? It'd be more a weapon of terror than of immediate destruction, but still a weapon.
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Aug 7, 2019 04:43
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The Bloop posted:Probably but flying right into one would have to cause a problem or two, and theoretically be less detectable or at least less traceable than a bomb No, that's his point. Black holes that small would evaporate so fast and be capable of taking in only so much matter. Black holes aren't just some vacuum that suck everything. Bringing real physics to Star Trek is silly. But man science education has failed us.
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Aug 7, 2019 04:52
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Zesty posted:No, that's his point. Black holes that small would evaporate so fast and be capable of taking in only so much matter. Black holes aren't just some vacuum that suck everything. I know what black holes are thanks but one that gives off enough energy to power a goddamn D'deridex-class warbird is probably going to have enough mass to directly damage anything that runs into it pretty severely Not that we really know a single thing about how the Romulans supposedly use these captured singularities
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Aug 7, 2019 05:05
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The relationship is inverse; a larger black hole gives off less energy. You need incredibly tiny ones to power stuff.
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Aug 7, 2019 05:12
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The Bloop posted:I know what black holes are thanks No, you really don't. It's cool you took Astronomy 101 in community college and watched some YouTube videos but you still don't understand how black holes work.
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Aug 7, 2019 05:13
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Timeless Appeal posted:So, are there any behind the scene stories of why Genesis is such a weird episode? The short version is that by the seventh season, the writing staff was completely and utterly burned out. Braga, in particular, was just completely spent because he and Moore were spending all their time working on All Good Things... and Generations, so he barfed out Genesis.
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Aug 7, 2019 05:15
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Zesty posted:No, you really don't. It's cool you took Astronomy 101 in community college and watched some YouTube videos but you still don't understand how black holes work. Yeah I'm not claiming to be an astrophysicist but I certainly understand more than enough for a lay person and I'm learning more even now, no thanks to you acting like a colossal pillock MikeJF posted:The relationship is inverse; a larger black hole gives off less energy. You need incredibly tiny ones to power stuff. See now this I hadn't really considered. Is every singularity necessarily a black hole though, in the sense of warping space enough / having enough gravity to capture even photons? It seems like if it's got that much mass it would be.. dangerous to leave lying around enemy star ships
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Aug 7, 2019 05:26
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Son of Sam-I-Am posted:I admit all I know about it is what I've read in sci fi stories, but you'd think something able to power a starship would be radiating gigawatts at least, right? That's not just a roadside flare, and there's not going to be an easy way to stop it, without feeding it with something like a very fine-tuned particle beam of massive particles, greater than the equivalent energy it's putting out. Not as explosive as matter-antimatter, sure, but how fast would it evaporate if it weren't being fed matter? It'd be more a weapon of terror than of immediate destruction, but still a weapon. The big thing is that nobody really wants to do an actual war of planetary extermination in Star Trek, despite all the nerd masturbation about such things. Even the Dominion planned to destroy Earth after taking the quadrant, probably on the theory that while they might be able to pull it off beforehand, it would probably galvanize everyone else into a fight to the finish, quite possibly including Klingon suicide troops going to do the same thing on the Great Link, the long way around.
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Aug 7, 2019 05:46
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The Bloop posted:Yeah I'm not claiming to be an astrophysicist but I certainly understand more than enough for a lay person and I'm learning more even now, no thanks to you acting like a colossal pillock I mean, you're smart enough to write on Voyager before giving your science advisor a look at the script and then promptly ignoring anything he says because it doesn't make the story cool enough. If you don't like being sassed back, then you shouldn't start the sassing. You don't have to be an astrophysicist. But literally nothing you've said about black holes has been realistic. It'd be better to make up some technobabble about something with no reference frame like the phasers or torpedoes so you don't have to try and say things like "throw microscopic black holes as weapons." MikeJF posted:Yeah, a microscopic singularity like that is really just a point of constant energy output. The masses starships would be working with would be so small to work as an energy source that you could fly right through it and it wouldn't leave a hole; less than half a million tons or so, with an event horizon far smaller than the radius of an atom. (Remember, you need tiny mass for appreciable energy radiated, large black holes don't emit much). An antimatter explosive, on the other hand, can release all its energy at once instead. I missed this post initially. But exactly. A black hole of half a million tons would be the size of an electron. Now let's say you want to make a realistic weapon with your warbird. Just crash that sucker into a planet at a fraction of the speed of light and you'll sterilize that planet no problem with or without a microscopic black hole engine. How fast are Impulse Engines supposed to get you? Zesty fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Aug 7, 2019 |
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Aug 7, 2019 05:59
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The Bloop posted:Is every singularity necessarily a black hole though, in the sense of warping space enough / having enough gravity to capture even photons? It seems like if it's got that much mass it would be.. dangerous to leave lying around enemy star ships Black holes still only have as much gravity as their mass can generate. The only difference is they're compressed far enough that it's possible to get close enough to all of that mass to make escape velocity greater than c. The closer you are to an object, the greater escape velocity is. But for ordinary objects, there's a limit to how close you can get. Take the Moon. You can't really get closer than about a thousand miles to its center of mass and still treat it as a gravitational point source, since you'd start slamming into mountains if you got lower. I mean, you could start tunneling, but then a lot of the mass starts getting behind you and canceling out the downward pull. But collapse the Moon into a black hole, and it'll shrink to the size of a sand grain. You could orbit it at a radius of one millimeter, where escape velocity would be really really really fast but still theoretically doable. Any lower than that, and escape velocity hits c and you're inside the hole. But all those satellites back up there at formerly-low-lunar-orbit level, a thousand miles up, will just keep orbiting pretty much the way they always have. The Moon didn't magically gain any extra gravity by becoming a black hole. A more complete discussion of the black hole Moon scenario: https://what-if.xkcd.com/129/
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Aug 7, 2019 06:45
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Zesty posted:How fast are Impulse Engines supposed to get you? Speed of plot, basically. The Motion Picture says that the Enterprise refit can hit Warp 0.5 at full impulse. In Voyager, full impulse is 1/4c.
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Aug 7, 2019 07:02
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Good thing they changed the speed of light in 2208, then.
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Aug 7, 2019 07:56
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The Bloop posted:Yeah I'm not claiming to be an astrophysicist but I certainly understand more than enough for a lay person and I'm learning more even now, no thanks to you acting like a colossal pillock  all the ignorance and stupidity of Joe Rogan but none of the humility
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Aug 7, 2019 08:21
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Zesty posted:I mean, you're smart enough to write on Voyager before giving your science advisor a look at the script and then promptly ignoring anything he says because it doesn't make the story cool enough. The TNG tech manual contained something about impulse engines using low level warp fields to lower the ships mass so that it could actually get up to decent speeds from Newtonian type engines. So while they can get fast they don't have as much momentum as you'd expect.
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Aug 7, 2019 08:50
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Nessus posted:The big thing is that nobody really wants to do an actual war of planetary extermination in Star Trek Tell that to the Xindi
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Aug 7, 2019 13:12
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feedmegin posted:Tell that to the Xindi And Species 8472 
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Aug 7, 2019 15:42
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Also the Romulans and Cardassians got together and vapourised the crust of what they thought was the founders homeworld with a single wave of photon torpedos.
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Aug 7, 2019 15:49
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MikeJF posted:Yeah, a microscopic singularity like that is really just a point of constant energy output. The masses starships would be working with would be so small to work as an energy source that you could fly right through it and it wouldn't leave a hole; less than half a million tons or so, with an event horizon far smaller than the radius of an atom. (Remember, you need tiny mass for appreciable energy radiated, large black holes don't emit much). An antimatter explosive, on the other hand, can release all its energy at once instead. So Romulan's warp engines are green because they're using green energy then.
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Aug 7, 2019 16:07
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If you want to worry about something not making sense, it is photon torpedo yields. A single hit against an unshielded target should vaporize the entire ship. Even that much energy splashing against the shields would be staggering.
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Aug 7, 2019 16:30
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Talking about weapons and taking Star Trek science too seriously, what the heck does the stun setting actually do? Is it like an electric shock? How does it know how much stun to apply to different species, especially unknown species, without killing them accidentally? Also why didn't they use the ships phasers to stun people from orbit more often? Seems like that would have been useful a bunch of times but they only did it in the gangster planet episode.
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Aug 7, 2019 16:51
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ST Voyager: Stun particles.
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Aug 7, 2019 17:20
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Nullsmack posted:ST Voyager: Stun particles. It's true, the photons emitted by this show may render you unconscious.
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Aug 7, 2019 17:50
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marktheando posted:Talking about weapons and taking Star Trek science too seriously, what the heck does the stun setting actually do? Is it like an electric shock? How does it know how much stun to apply to different species, especially unknown species, without killing them accidentally? Just pretend the stun beam is just targeting for the transporter to beam sedatives into the person.
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Aug 7, 2019 18:17
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socialsecurity posted:Just pretend the stun beam is just targeting for the transporter to beam sedatives into the person. This reminds me of Bashir in "The Quickening" who meets a woman who has quickened and immediately hyposprays her with a sedative to relieve her pain before even pulling out a recorder and going "Wiw their physiology is real different than ours"
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Aug 7, 2019 18:35
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It's actually a beam of concussive force released by opening an aperture to an alternate dimension that can only be held back by ruby-quartz for some reason. The main academic thing that always bugs me about Star Trek is how there's no real scale for anything. The Enterprise is this weird, confusing shape dotted with windows that it's hard to figure out how humans fit inside, and there's supposed to be like a million people onboard just offscreen. Most other ships they encounter are about the same size. Despite how shuttlecraft can be smaller than a van but capable of long-distance independent travel, there is no indication of it being common for smaller ships to scoot around on their own through the galaxy. A bunch of episodes are set up around the Enterprise having a mission to carry an amount of people that I could fit in my hatchback.
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Aug 7, 2019 18:51
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There’s totally small scale interstellar traffic. The problem is that your best option for a ride seems to be Kasidy, noted war criminal. If you’re less lucky you might hitch with a Mudd or an outrageous Okona. Personally I’d prefer the Enterprise, even if you have to face the possibility of being this week’s guest star to make it happen.
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Aug 7, 2019 19:18
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marktheando posted:Talking about weapons and taking Star Trek science too seriously, what the heck does the stun setting actually do? Is it like an electric shock? How does it know how much stun to apply to different species, especially unknown species, without killing them accidentally? Normal brain: Asking how Star Trek's phasers work. Galaxy brain: Asking how Stargate's zat guns work.
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Aug 7, 2019 19:46
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feedmegin posted:Tell that to the Xindi I'm from Fort Lauderdale and I say kill 'em all!!
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Aug 7, 2019 21:16
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Doggles posted:Normal brain: Asking how Star Trek's phasers work. How long do you have to wait before the 2nd shot won't vaporize whatever it is.
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Aug 7, 2019 23:05
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