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[–] 49 points 1 week ago* (23 children)

Air-conditioning is pretty power intensive and The Enterprise is a big ass ship. That's not even counting the other things life support does (like heat and CO2 scrubbing), just the air circulation.

But even on the show, there's been a couple times where they mention the power from life support is nearly negligible. 🤷‍♂️

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  • [–] 28 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    Wouldn't gravity generation and inertial dampners be part of life support? Going max impulse after turning those off is likely to end up with a lot of raspberry jam coating the walls.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 week ago* (5 children)

    Inertial dampeners probably not; that just stops the ship when not giving any thust because there's nothing to slow the ship down in space once it has momentum. The fake gravity on board tho, may be part of it. Not sure how the gravity plating is supposed to work; but I would be willing to bet there is technical documentation about it somewhere. Unless they just, like... Constantly barrel roll to create "gravity" that way 🤔 (gravity in quotes as it would actually be centripital force).

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  • [–] 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

    Inertial dampers are how the crew can survive high-g maneuvers, they'd be pinned to the back wall and have their skulls crushed by their own faces if they suddenly went to full impulse or warp without them active.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I loved how The Expanse handled high speed turn and burn in space.

    Fuck Syfy.

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  • Not watching Star Trek for the scientific accuracy.

    And even the Expanse has some instances of bad and/or hard to believe space tech depictions, probably mainly due to production cost restrictions.
    Take the whole bridge design of the Rosinante for example, with its gaming chairs or whatever acting as high-g-chairs. Sure...

    So, you will always have almost always to engage that "I want to believe" mode.

    For another more TNG contemporary show with mostly credible science, I can also strongly recommend Babylon 5 (which feels like a kind of predecessors to the Expanse).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Another good example on how bad the actual details of the science are in most of Star Trek.
    Warp moves you by compressing the space in front of the ship and stretching it behind it.
    Your frame of reference in the middle of it stays at rest.
    So no stains on the wall.
    Impulse power would be a completely different thing, though.
    But even that the writers managed to get wrong most of the time, treating it like a kind of fixed absolute speed that you achieve, like the max speed of a car, instead of the steady acceleration capability it actually is, with no max speed besides relativistic limits.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago

    I'm pretty well convinced that gravity plating has to be negligible power draw or possibly even passive technology, since they've boarded centuries-old derelict ships that still have artificial gravity. Maybe the gravity plating contains some exotic space-warping material that generates a gravity field. That could also explain the times when someone becomes intangible and can walk through walls, but don't fall through the floor.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago (10 children)

    Air-conditioning is pretty power intensive

    Even that should still be minuscle compared to getting rid of the waste heat from a huge antimatter reactor.
    Feels like trying to get your Ferrari faster by switching of the cockpit instrument illumination. Not even worth giving the command.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (9 children)

    How does transferring heat out of a ship work? On the one hand, it's really cold in space, but on the other, there's no substrate to absorb and transfer the heat.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago* (3 children)

    From a thermodynamical standpoint, the whole Enterprise is something of a mess.

    But, hey, if you already have a "Heisenberg-Compensator", also having a "Boltzmann-Compensator" is probably not that implausible... ;-)

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    And you can always re-arrange the sensor arrays if you're ever really in a pinch, but it'll take some time.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Thermal Radiation, you send it somewhere else. It’s how the sun heats our planet.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Isn't thermal radiation kinda slow, though? It's basically air cooling, but without air or fans.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago

    It is, yes. A large fraction (about a quarter?) of what looks like solar panels on the ISS are actually dedicated radiator panels. The solar panels are angled to face the sun, and the radiators are angled at 90 degrees from the sun, to face empty space.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (2 children)

    They use AI everywhere. That’s power hungry stuff (and people will deny it is).

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