Do you think all hell would break loose...

[braex27]

Any such technology would pose severe security risks on all levels across the globe.

 

[borg69unimatrix]

We seem to be kind of brain washed by Star Trek's method of transporting. There are other theories on transporting...

Bending Space
Time Travel
Dimensional Doorways
Parallel Universes
Black Holes
"Star Gates" (which I think would fall into worm holes category?)


... what am I forgetting?

 

[Poozy1]

^ "Bending space" I believe is how they achieve warpspeed in Star Trek. By creating a warpshell around the ship and bending space around the shell...I think anyway

 

[Keelandson]

Teleportation is what brought paradise to Earth in the Star Trek universe. The same gizmo is used to create everything, from houses and buildings to bread and circuses.

There's no unemployment because no one needs a job. No one is hungry because the planet's entire population can eat meat-lover's pizza to Klingon gach 24 hours a day.

I, of course, would spurn teleportation travel in favour of my replicated 1912 Stutz Bearcat.

We would all be on the never-ending road of personal improvement because there would be nothing else to do in each of our million square-foot mansions, just as if Canada's NDP took over the world.

 

[Poozy1]

^ Heh! Nice!

 

[borg69unimatrix]

^ "Bending space" I believe is how they achieve warpspeed in Star Trek. By creating a warpshell around the ship and bending space around the shell...I think anyway

The way I envision it is, the Warp Bubble pushes them into "Sub-Space"... Remember the episode with the Parallel universe where Spock had a goatee and was evil? Sub-Space is the 'space' between those parallel universes. The bigger the bubble, the farther into Sub-Space you go, the faster you go. They are still MOSTLY here in the 'real' universe, hence needing the deflector dish to stop minute particles from hitting the ship as they travel, and the force field shields. As well as the Bussard collectors picking up particles to replenish.

I think if they were just bending space, Point A to Point B, they wouldn't need the other technology?



[edit] just found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive_(Star_Trek)





.

 

[Poozy1]

^Is that what the deflecter dish is for? I just thought it was used for shooting radiation/beams at things lol.

 

[borg69unimatrix]

^Is that what the deflecter dish is for? I just thought it was used for shooting radiation/beams at things lol.

Yeah... in the tech manual, (yes I am a geek/nerd), the dish basically shoots out beams ahead of the ship that pushes smaller particles out of the way of the ship as it travels at high speeds. Hitting something as small as a grain of sand at the speeds they go would be devastating.

Comparatively speaking, our own Shuttles were damaged by Styrofoam falling off and hitting the ship at the speeds THEY were going, which is no where near the speeds used in Trek.

 

[Kulindahr]

Meh. I don't think I would. What about long term consequences that might not be immediately visible? Maybe you could develop brain tumors or something if you did.

I'm not buying it. There are still physical limitations.

Hey, if they started testing one on mice tomorrow, with the certification process it would be twenty years before they got around to chimps. I figure it would get certified for shipping livestock before then (Yay! no more truck and ship bottoms to clean out!), which would give us gobs of data on performance.

Human testing would probably be done somewhere they have thousands of people on death row and little regard for life, anyway -- if a death row prisoner there came out messed up, they'd just shoot him, adjust the circuits, and throw another one in.

 

[Kulindahr]

Kudos for using the word 'flippant'.

Other than that, your post sounds a bit condescending and asshole-ish. Several posts in this thread seriously address the topic at hand...while some of us believe it's next to impossible, so we're having some fun. There's nothing wrong with that, Snobbypants.

So, you don't like analytical writing and don't appreciate me expressing appreciation for the serious treatments?

 

[Keelandson]

The deflector dish is for sub-light speeds under "impulse engines," which, though never properly explained in any of the series, as far as I know, took the term from real thought experiments that envision nuclear blasts out the rear end that would move such a ship in spurts.

A Voyager episode discussed the problem of changing the ship's heading without dropping out of warp, an impossibility in the Star Trek universe. So the deflector dish is a handy gadget.

The writers used the warping of space to get around the age-differential problem of light- and faster-than-light speeds, whereby everyone on every planet would be dead of old age while everyone on board ages at the usual rate.

By warping space, the ship isn't travelling at all, let alone faster than light. So relativity never raises its ugly head.

 

[Kulindahr]

We seem to be kind of brain washed by Star Trek's method of transporting. There are other theories on transporting...

Bending Space
Time Travel
Dimensional Doorways
Parallel Universes
Black Holes
"Star Gates" (which I think would fall into worm holes category?)


... what am I forgetting?

"Bending" covers a lot including one from a novel by (IIRC) Keith Laumer where they had 'lensing' which bent space in a way that for whatever maximum focal length a warp lens had could effectively make a ship riding the focal point able to proceed with ordinary drive but when it stopped 'riding' the focal point would arrive back in normal space at a point thousands of times beyond what its vector would ordinarily have reached. The lens was sort of making a multi-dimensional wave that the ship rode; the wave's velocity depended on the power input to the lens while the ship's drive merely served to "surf" that wave. The limitation on the thing was that a lens installation was hundreds of kilometers in size for the dish alone, and tens of kilometers for the power generators -- and as I remember, the mass it was installed on had to be many times greater than that of any ship it "drove", because Newton's laws applied. So it was great for sending out colony ships, but once they departed the wave, the ships were on their own until they could build a Lens to send things back.

One of the heroes in the book, BTW, was a junior technician who had made a loud nuisance of himself until the project director had agreed that the thing to use as a test vehicle was a probe capable of examining planets and telling if they could support human life, and the targets (obviously) systems where NASA and its successor had found what looked to be like earth-like planets. They fired off hundreds of probes, building them ever larger -- and by the time they were ready for a human trial, signals were already coming back from the first dozen probes.


Blastitall, I wish my library wasn't in storage! Now I want to find that and re-read it!

 

[Kyanimal]

Is physical teleportation Theoretically possible? Uh ... Yep!

There is only one "small" problem doing it with Humans, however. Granted, all of your atoms and molecules would arrive completely reassembled in the exact same pattern they were before. However, what of your Memory?

Odds are you would arrive physically recombined, but you'd be as "intelligent" as a new born.

All that training to go through again ...

Keep smilin'!!
Chaz

 

[Poozy1]

Yeah... in the tech manual, (yes I am a geek/nerd), the dish basically shoots out beams ahead of the ship that pushes smaller particles out of the way of the ship as it travels at high speeds. Hitting something as small as a grain of sand at the speeds they go would be devastating.

Comparatively speaking, our own Shuttles were damaged by Styrofoam falling off and hitting the ship at the speeds THEY were going, which is no where near the speeds used in Trek.

there is nothing wrong with being a nerd, nerds are fucking awesome! Except when they hack PSN of course!

And I really had no idea about any of that. that is really cool!

 

[borg69unimatrix]

I'm a sci-fi nerd... I'm horrible at math, science, chemistry, anything too technical with computers. I understand the gist of the technology, but couldn't give you minute technical details. I'm a nerd-wanna-be?

 

[borg69unimatrix]

The deflector dish is for sub-light speeds under "impulse engines," which, though never properly explained in any of the series, as far as I know, took the term from real thought experiments that envision nuclear blasts out the rear end that would move such a ship in spurts.

A Voyager episode discussed the problem of changing the ship's heading without dropping out of warp, an impossibility in the Star Trek universe. So the deflector dish is a handy gadget.

The writers used the warping of space to get around the age-differential problem of light- and faster-than-light speeds, whereby everyone on every planet would be dead of old age while everyone on board ages at the usual rate.

By warping space, the ship isn't travelling at all, let alone faster than light. So relativity never raises its ugly head.

You said it a lot better then I did.

I was under the impression Impulse engines are for less then light speed travel (in emergencies of warp failure), and standard orbit type slower maneuvering.

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Impulse_drive

The impulse drive was a propulsion system used for sublight speeds. In Federation starships, the impulse drive was essentially an augmented fusion rocket, usually consisting of one or more fusion reactors, an accelerator-generator, a driver coil assembly, and a vectored thrust nozzle to direct the plasma exhaust. The fusion reaction generated a highly energized plasma. This plasma, ("electro-plasma") could be employed for propulsion, or could be diverted through the EPS to the power transfer grid, via EPS conduits, so as to supply other systems. The accelerated plasma was passed through the driver coils, thereby generating a subspace field which improved the propulsive effect.

In 2267, Science Officer Spock calculated the explosive force of an overloaded Starship-class impulse engine to be 97.835 megatons. (TOS: "The Doomsday Machine")

By the 2270s, impulse was capable of sustaining warp 0.5 without the warp drive even being on-line. (Star Trek: The Motion Picture)

The impulse drive of Bajoran interceptors could not operate within an atmosphere. (DS9: "The Siege")

According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_drive

There are three practical challenges surrounding impulse drive design: acceleration, time dilation and energy conservation. In the show, inertial dampers compensate for acceleration. These hypothetical devices would have to be set so that the propellant regained its inertia after leaving the craft otherwise the drive would be ineffective.[2] Time dilation would become noticeable at appreciable fractions of the speed of light. Regarding energy conservation, the television series and books offer two explanations:

Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual indicates that the impulse engines are nuclear fusion engines where the plasma from the fusion reactor powers a massive magnetic coil to propel the ship. It is a form of magnetohydrodynamic or magnetoplasmadynamic thruster. This is used in conjunction with the ship's warp drive's alteration of the ship's relativistic mass, to achieve mid-to-high sub-light speeds. Thrusters, on the other hand, are closer to the designs of a high-efficiency reactant propellant (i.e. a sophisticated rocket engine) and are usually used for high-precision maneuvers. Ion propulsion drives are explicitly detailed to be used in Star Trek by Dominion and Iconian Starships and facilities.

Since a ship traveling at impulse velocities (slower than, but approaching, the speed of light) is still traveling in the normal space-time continuum, concerns of time dilation apply, so high relativistic speeds are avoided unless absolutely necessary; impulse power is therefore customarily limited to a maximum of ¼ lightspeed. (Warp travel, on the other hand, does not involve time dilation effects.)

http://www.startrek.com/database_article/impulse-drive

Propulsion system used aboard spacecraft for travel at subwarp speeds, employing traditional Newtonian action-reaction thrust physics. Full impulse speed is about one-quarter light speed, sufficient for interplanetary travel. Aboard Federation starships, fusion reactors power the engines using deuterium fuel to create helium plasma. Overload of an impulse engine on the damaged U.S.S Constellation, a Constitution-class starship, was once rated at 97.835 megatons.

 

[Keelandson]

^^^ Terrific! Plasma exhaust beats pulsing nuke explosions anytime. I bookmarked those sites.

 

[Poozy1]

I'm a sci-fi nerd... I'm horrible at math, science, chemistry, anything too technical with computers. I understand the gist of the technology, but couldn't give you minute technical details. I'm a nerd-wanna-be?

You and me both dude!

 

[Kulindahr]

@ borg69unimatrix --

There's another system that comes to mind: gates -- not stargates, but gates anywhere. I'm thinking mostly of Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, but there are others essentially the same.

A Gate uses focused energy to reach another point in spacetime. To make a connection without a physical receiver, i.e. another Gate, on the other end, requires a GINORMOUS amount of energy; with a Gate on the other end, once the connection's been tuned, not much at all.

To go through a one-ended Gate would be like jumping through a doorway, but when you turn around there's nothing there. To pass through a link with a Gate on each end would be like walking through a door -- or a Gate, so named by one author because while it took more energy to make a larger opening, it also took more energy to maintain the focus of a smaller opening, so the result was about the size (a character observed) of an ancient city gate. The hardest part of making a 'firm' connection was accounting for all the relative motions of the points to be connected: if on different planets, there are different rotational periods, different axis orientations, different orbits around the stars in terms of radii, eccentricity, and period, with of course different inclinations of the orbits, and then the relative motion between the two stars.....

With an opening the size of an old city gate, like ten or fifteen meters wide and ten or more high, the application for commerce are conceptually infinite. Just as an example, a bunch of folks want to take an Antarctic cruise, but they don't want to sit through three weeks getting there and three coming back. Solution? Build a seaGate, big enough that the cruise ship can sail out of Falmouth right into the Falklands.
And the military ones -- let's just say that a nation with a military no one can beat could hit anyone, anywhere, any time, and everyone else would hope they didn't get a leader like a certain recent one.

 

[Kulindahr]

^^^ Terrific! Plasma exhaust beats pulsing nuke explosions anytime. I bookmarked those sites.

They're essentially the same thing: the nuclear explosion gives you a sudden concentrated ball of plasma that has to expand rapidly -- there's a great description of riding a craft using such a drive in Niven & Pournelle's novel Footfall, should you have the urge to read such a thing. A plasma drive skips the nuclear explosion, using a sustained fusion reaction instead to provide a steady, as opposed to an abrupt, supply of propulsion material.

For the sort of energy levels required for a hypothetical transporter/Gate/whatever, fusion power is the only thing we have conceived that could be a source -- and a fusion reactor, in the common designs, has been called "plasma in a (magnetic) bottle".