Impulse Engines (Star Trek Lore)
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- Опубліковано 12 лис 2022
- The Impulse drive is the standard form of sublight locomotion in Star Trek ships from Starfleet and beyond.
They are basically fusion reactors with a more traditional exhaust to produce thrust in space, but let's take a look at them in detail.
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My starship kept jumping to half light speed even when I was trying to go slowly. Turned out I'd accidentally installed Impulsive Engines.
Grrrooooaaaannnnnnn.
Here. Have a an upvote. No get out...
Dad joke confirmed.
It was so painful 💔, but have this like for getting me to laugh slightly 😄.
BaDump Boom Tish!! ; )
As a small pedantic note, in the TNG tehcnical manual, subspace driver coils were added to impulse drives with the ambassador class project when simulations projected that the vessel's mass was too great for then current impulse drive designs, taking minutes to reach full impulse. A subspace driver coil, powered by the impulse exhaust, was added to reduce the apparent mass of the ship when powered. This solved the ambassador design problem and became the standard for all impulse drives moving forward. This improvement is so powerful a single impulse engine on the galaxy class can drive it's enormous mass of 4.5 million metric tons to 0.25c in seconds.
tl;dr ships got too big and they made a better impulse engine that cheats physics and now it's the standard
The tech manual might say that but in reality there would have to have been some of mass-reduction system in place on earlier starships as well - there's just no way for a vessel to carry enough fuel to accelerate her to such speeds using Newtonian physics alone.
Yup. ST has been implementing Mass Effect drives since the 80’s. Similarly the structural integrity fields were stated to increase the effective mass of the ship to something like 100,000x to help dissipate the effects of incoming weapons fire.
@@MatthewCaunsfield yeah, Picard put out a memo for everyone to hit the gym.
@@rubaiyat300 I believe you're conflating structural integrity fields and inertial dampening fields. The TNG tech manual says the structural integrity field increases the strength of the ship's superstructure by *up to* 125,000%. Inertial dampening fields compensate for forces acting on the ship.
The TNG tech manual is beta canon at best, but it's a very good read; it's best to no get too into "trek tech works like this because real world X" because it's all magic. The tech in star trek is ludicrous and may as well be magic. *Especially* transporters.
Check the Manual again. Subspace driver coils were part of impulse drives from Enterprise era onward. Back then though they increased the apparent mass of the exhaust to get more reaction force. It's just another way of diddling f=ma.
In Balance of Terror, when Scotty says the Romulan ship was simple impulse, I took it to mean that it used fusion reactors rather than matter/anti-matter reactors. If it had a singularity drive, it's likely Starfleet didn't know about it. That's my little retcon
On screen evidence shows the Bird of Prey to have traveled at least at low warp, between warp 1 and 2, in order to attack multiple earth outposts along the neutral zone within the time mentioned on screen. It’s possible the new cloak reduced warp capability or the Romulans never beat the warp 2 barrier, leading to their deal with the Klingons for new starship tech.
@@russellharrell2747 That lines up nicely with the idea that fusion can power low warp factors. As far as I know, it's never stated what the Phoenix used as a power source, but fusion has a high likelihood
@@ptah956 That was always my interpretation even though realistically advance fusion would produce similar powers to antimatter and be a sh*******t ton safer at least without invoking technobabble. (Much of antimatter's energy is emitted as gamma radiation and neutral particles all hard to use without turning it into a basic steam engine, IIRC.)
@@patrickmccurry1563 Hydrogen Fusion converts ~0.3 of the Fuels mass into energy.
Matter/Antimatter Annihilation converts ~100% of the Fuels mass into energy.
There are a few orders of magnitude fuel efficiency and output/kg between the two technologies. At the cost of safety and reactor complexity.
@@christopherg2347 The point is that the form of energy emitted and your ability to capture and utilize that energy are also important. currently our ability to capture energy from fusion if way beyond our technology for to utilization of the products of matter/antimatter reaction.
Impulse speed is all over the place in Trek. In Star Trek III, Both Kirk and Styles call for 1/4 impulse power...in space dock. I'm sure thrusters is the most you want to use in space dock, but that's what they called for.
1/4 impulse is probably still a lot faster than max thrusters.
I agree- impulse gets mentioned less often in scripts so they haven't really been forced to nail it down like they have with warp drive. Even after almost 60 years of shows, impulse really just means "we're going somewhere but its not warp la la la"
@@confuseatronica while they've nailed down how fast warp is, they're really bad at consistently getting it right in the actual show.
Sometimes they can get from Bajor to Earth in a day but can't get from Earth to Vulcan in the same time...
ST III - 1/4 Impulse in reverse! One of the greatest scenes in all of Trek, with a glaring error...
Yeah quarter impulse is like 67 million km/h. No way you'd do that in spacedock.
Each of the films has problems that could be easily fixed with dialogue/SFX changes.
You should do one on how Stardates work, I bet subspace is easier lol.
Even if full impulse is only 0.25c, that is still ridiculously OP. With that much kinetic energy simply crashing a 100,000 ton starship into Earth would be an extinction level event.
And it's their 'standard' speed when somewhere with lots of rocks to hit.
That's the reason why Worf wanted to pull that option against the Borg Cube in First Contact.
Kinzinti lesson- any interesting space drive is also a weapon of mass destruction.
While an impulse drive is active, a ship's effective mass is reduced, and the regurn of that effective mass probably has some. _Interesting._ effects on a ship's momentum. Would still be a rather interesting impact, but might need some timing trickery to get maximum effect.
Operating vehicles with large numbers of antimatter storage devices anywhere near habitable planets is scary dangerous, though it's totally glossed over in Trek. If a ship in low earth orbit were to have a containment accident it basically kills everyone on the planet.
If Full Impulse is only 1/4 lightspeed, time dilation isn't an issue. You have to get significantly closer to lightspeed before time dilation becomes noticable, at 1/4 lightspeed 20 minutes of measured onboard time will be 21 minutes as measured by an outside observer.
So you would need to be at full impulse for many days before it really matters.
Yep, and they explain this in the TNG tech manual. The ship IS capable of .99c, but almost never go that fast due to the time dilation issues. They stick to .25c at max at all costs except in the case of extreme emergency. Any other time you have to go faster than that, just go to warp to avoid the relativistic issues.
That would still cause issues in a military operation, but would have little effect on day to day machinations. I recall there being a TNG episode where they are forced to reset the ship's chronometer using a reference from a starbase (using a subspace link). It's passed off as a perfectly normal and unremarkable thing that happens often, implying that Starfleet has systems in place to prevent ships from getting out of sync.
That adds up though. Each full day (24 hours) under such conditions would put the ship over an hour behind real time.
@@thewarmwind6171 It's when they think they go through a wormhole (when in reality their memory has been altered, except for Data, in order to hide the presence of a xenophobic race that would have destroyed the ship otherwise), which I wouldn't necessarily believe is common, but not so rare as to be unheard of.
Between the relativistic sublight maneuvering ships do, especially during combat situations, and the many various anomalies and gravitational changes a starship experiences while out on missions, I'd bet the need to resync their own internal chronometers with standard Federation time is pretty common, yes. Time beacons, comm relays, Starbases, other ships....there is lots of evidence there is a network of relay nodes throughout the established Federation to keep everybody on the same page, and navigating properly throughout ever shifting space.
@@thewarmwind6171 just being in orbit has relativistic effects. GPS satellites need to compensate for that. Humans may not notice but a starship that can measure nanoseconds would and need to be resynchronised constantly. Which is partly why a universally agreed stardate is a clever fiction for when now is.
@3:00 if full impulse is 1/4 speed of Light, (approx. 186,000 miles/second) then its 46,500 miles/second.
then 1/4 impulse (standard solar cruising speed,) then that is 11,625 miles/second.
I would note that 'impulse drive' is probably a catch-all term, covering *any* drive system designed for sublight travel.
Correct.
Although for real world physics, antimatter is the only fuel source good enough for near light speed travel.
I remember in the Diane Carey book, Final Frontier (not the film adaptation), she has this scene where George Kirk is talking with some engineers and finds out how Impulse works. It was elegant, I just wish I remembered the exact details. I do remember at the end of the scene, George says, "That sounds a lot like warp drive." The engineer replied, "Oh, no. No. Warp is as far above Impulse as Impulse is above walking." But that's all beta canon at best, or just sheer apocrypha.
I think I remember reading this book in Highschool in the 90s (oi) and they described the engine sort of using the subspace field like a conveyor belt to pull drive along the field itself
@@wolf986 Definitely something along those lines.
@@wolf986 That's really clever! It would also get around the "impulse in reverse" problem as you could theoretically change the vector of the "conveyer," and crawl along in a different direction.
Internally Metered Pulse drive. Pellets of fuel were bombarded with a laser pulse in certain frequencies. This created an sudden release of engergy with a field (magnetic or subspace) crushing it back on the engergy causing a ripple effect in the local space-time continuum and the ship just rode the waves.
That is from memory and it might not be exactly right.
@@michaelmiller3996 Yes! If this isn't it, it's extremely close. Very elegant in my opinion.
I believe the TNG tech manual basically described it as a Mass Effect drive without the branding. There was a fusion reactor and rocket, but in between a component that could lower the effective mass of the ship so it could nearly instantaneously accelerate a ship to high fractions of light speed like hitting full impulse from a stop would require.
In the midst of replaying that game right now, hard not to see the likeness, still, I think I'd rather be on the Normandy than the Enterprise, far fewer things going terrifyingly wrong on a regular basis, and I'd rather drop in on a Make 10,000 times than take the Transporters once
Great explanation of the "slower" engines of Star Trek that we sort of overlook in favor of the "more glamorous" warp.... 😆
Actually Impulse velocities being so slow is probably more of a safety measure to avoid time dilation, at least by the 24th century. In reality, Time dilation wouldn't be really bad until you hit around .75c so, if they are only hitting .25c at full impulse, the effects aren't so bad. Also, this would explain why the Old constitution class start ships used warp drive to maneuver. They were using the drive to assist their otherwise undersized impulse drive in gaining maneuvering speed and probably allowing them to exceed that .25c threshold without always going to warp.
Yeah, at about .25c it's about 2 seconds per minute, so not crazy. A ship flying at full impulse from the Earth to say Jupiter is like 2 hours at .25c and that's probably about as far as they'd travel under Impulse in an heavily populated system. For a sparsely occupied or empty systems they seem to warp right up to their intended location.
I'm glad you brought up time dilation at full impulse. It's something I remember from the books but never the shows. I always thought a good idea for a show would be if a ship lost warp ability and communications. Unless someone rescues them, they have two options: 1) travel at less than full impulse and die of old age in space...or 2) risk full impulse for long periods and time travel into the future with time dilation.
Even 1 year at full impulse for the crew is only 377 days for the stationary observer.
They only gain a year's difference at 3 decades or so
@@Vasious8128 True it's only about a ten day jump per year...but in the Trek-verse a galactic level emergency happens about once a week for our viewing pleasure. Assuming they never make it back cause they die of old age in space (the most probable in my opinion with no repairs/rescue)...just a year at full impose might mean they return to a Borg infested Earth, or a Dominion ruled alpha quadrant, or some other craziness. It is star trek after all ;o) And we can't beat physics. At a certain point time travel becomes outlawed after the Time Wars....so just making it back home might make you a criminal. Just ask the Discovery, they were called criminals just or being in the future. LOL
The real world answer is the Nebula-class is kit-bash from Galaxy-class parts when they needed a new class for the ST:TNG. This kit-bash ended up with a couple of issues that would exist for the Nebula-class. 1. lack of impulse drive, the Galaxy-class's main impulse drive was on the drive section although there were two impulse drives for the saucer section when it separated. 2. the main shuttle bay door is blocked by the pod section; this would make launching and landing shuttles on the Nebula-class interesting.
"shuttle bay door is blocked by the pod section; this would make launching and landing shuttles on the Nebula-class interesting. "
This is where the interphasic sub-hydraulics come in. They open up the distance between the two hulls ... kinda like a lowrider..
looks really cool, too. especially with the special/ground effects. I'm surrprised they haven't show it yet.
I like how handwavium led them to basically create a more complex torchdrive as an impulse engine. Like fusion reactor heating up exhaust propellant is pretty realistic torch drive, and then ya had to go and add in subspace.
that field probably weakens the gravitational forces acting on the hull
I always wondered how ships did impulse in reverse as we never see forward facing impulse engines.
Some mixed messaging surrounding that when it comes to the shows. Best guess based on what I've seen, thrusters are used to slow the ship down and/or reverse, and if they want to do it faster they need to turn around.
It is also possible that impulse works on a principal that drives the ship based on more than what it exhausts, meaning that rear facing engines could apply thrust in all directions.
Or perhaps it's a bit of both. Ideal thrust is normal to the direction that the engines face, but using subspace dynamics the thrust can be (non-ideally) applied in any direction. That would actually explain a lot about why ships move the way they do in the show.
But being perfectly honest, the real explanation is likely oversight by the writers or ship designers.
@@thewarmwind6171 I think in TNG The Nth Degree they reverse impulse from the Space Sausage at speed before turning to warp. Ive always assumed its like reverse thrust on Airplanes where bypass ducts are opened redirecting the thrust. Not sure how this would work on a starship but Im sure Scotty would know
You can design a rocket to have two rocket engines angled off producing thrust, this would lead to cosine losses.
Per the (partly canon) TNG Tech Manual through a thrust reverser effect using the subspace driver coils in the impulse engines. In other words treknobabble.
@@thewarmwind6171 basically... fantasy in space
Thank you for this Video. I always feel like anything not FTL in Scifi is completly neglected by everyone, so this was very nice to see
There is a book series, the first of which is titled Leviathan Wakes and a TV series based on it called The Expanse which heavily features physically realistic spacecraft drives. You may enjoy it if you haven't heard of it yet
Why I like "We are Legion, We are Bob"
They often travel near the speed of light using psudo-gravitational manipulation that the Surge-drive employs which is more than enough to get around, especially when your a digitized mind who can chill out in VR or communicate at FTL speeds instead, at least when a surge drive fails you don't detonate into a burst of high energy gamma rays because the universe caught you violating the speed of light, and fusion reactor damage might damage or destroy your ship, but it won't be an antimatter detonation capable of whiping out the surface of or cracking planets wide open.
That and the Bob's VR is much more stable, possible, and fun than the glitch prone holodeck....
In spite of how much we (the fans) love the technobabble and figuring out how all the tech works, "Impulse Drive" is a sign that the makers of the show don't really care about realistic movement of ships in space.
"One quarter impulse" makes sense to your normie audience because they either are familiar enough with the throttle on a boat to grasp the concept or they can simply figure out that it means something akin to "a quarter of how fast you can go before you have to go to warp". And the "one quarter impulse" is consistent no matter the power of the engine or the mass of the ship, even though anyone familiar with boating would quickly grasp that "one quarter throttle" on my son-in-laws little putt-putt fishing boat is a VERY different thing that "one quarter throttle" on my brother-in-law's "if I can just get a a hundred more RPMs out of this baby, she could break the SOUND BARRIER" ski boat.
But nowhere in the literature do you actually get a "g" value for how much acceleration the engines actually pull. (At least the RCS thruster pages give you the thrust value in Newtons.) In fact almost NEVER is impulse thrust referred to as "acceleration" (which is how a "hard" sci-fi setting would measure ship's speeds). Starship movement is always treated as a "speed" (if the engine is on and set for "one quarter impulse" the ship is moving about a quarter of lightspeed - which would be between 45 and 50,000 miles per second - not that most of your normie audience knows that that would get you to the moon in five or six seconds or to Mars in less than an hour, and is about 120 times faster than the Apollo rockets to the moon could travel). Even "Warp Speed" is a speed level, not an acceleration level. But you can still use "one quarter impulse" INSIDE spacedock without blowing a starship shaped hole through the outer hull 0.0005 seconds after throttling up. It also means the script writers never have to worry about ships having to spend an hour (or a day or two) to SLOW DOWN (space travel works like a car, right? If you stop holding the gas pedal, you start slowing down, right?) Once the engines are off, the ship practically stops instantly (that what that acceleration compensator field thing is for, right?).
In terms of Star Trek, these sorts of things don't matter to the STORY they're trying to tell. It just has to LOOK good on screen (hence starships with phasers and photon torpedoes that have ranges measured in light seconds shooting at one another at less than a kilometer as if they were sailing ships broadsiding one another with seventeenth century canons - heck, even in STO max range is TEN klicks) and make sense to a "normie" audience who doesn't know that what they're watching doesn't make sense in terms of actual physics.
If memory serves, there is an alternative explanation of impulse drives in a novel that featured Robert April. In it, if I can recall, impulse drive doesn’t produce Newtonian thrust, but spatial waves - or something to that effect.
Hmm. I'm reminded of GURPS Space, and their entries on reaction drives (ones that cause motion by throwing matter out the back, and as a result are regulated by their reaction mass--our present-day rockets are reaction drives) and reactionless drives, which only need an energy producing source going in, and use some kind of energy-based effect to produce thrust.
The closest thing would be a gravitational wave rocket.
That was Final Frontier, with April and Jim Kirk's dad. I like that explanation better than the fusion-rocket one given in the TNG Technical Manual. It helps explain why the engines can seemingly be placed without regard to a ship's center of gravity.
Funny that I was watching Trek just now
According to the ST:TNG Technical Manual, space time driver coils weren’t added until the Ambassador class, because it was such a large ship.
The coils effectively reduce the mass of the ship. This allowed the ship to reach an acceptable sub-light performance spec without having the impulse engines be too large.
But the technical manual isn’t necessarily part of canon. So this could have been contradicted by actual shows or movies.
I watched this video on pure impulse.
Great video as always.
As Uhura said.
Things gotta have a tailpipe 😉☺️
In one of the books, they explained that impulse (I. M. Pulse or Internally Metered Pulse) basically rippled space by creating a gravitational distortion. The idea of a fusion rocket motor would not work because (1) a lot of energy would be shot out the back…cooking stuff in the wake and (2) it would take a long time to reach any appreciable speed.
Physics note: impulse engines do not require continuous jets of energy in order to sustain propulsion. Once you have attained inertia in space, no other forces required unless an outside force is acting upon you that you wish to counter.
Well, $#!t-- I was about to quote Uhura. 😀
@@qdllc Which book was this?
It was from Star Trek IV movie, The Undiscovered Country. "I'd pay real money if he'd shut up." McCoy. Another really great line!
The primary reason for the subspace fields of the impulse drives is to reduce apparent mass of the ship. This has 2 effects.
1) less mass means less fuel and thrust needed to move the ship.
2) Time dilation is cause by mass increasing not the speed itself. So if you can reduce your apparent mass as you increase speed you don't have to worry about time dilation. However the faster you go, the faster your mass increases, so at some point you won't have the power to reduce your mass anymore and thus time dilation effects start kicking in. What's worse is that if a galaxy class ship tried accelerating to quickly beyond the safe speed (1/4th c) the impulse drives would begin to accelerate faster than the rest of the ship and due to time dilation would rip themselves out of the ship.
This can actually be seen in DS9 episode 1 where they move the station, the subspace field is used to reduce the stations mass, however when it was unstable various parts were accelerating faster than others and it almost tore itself apart.
Great video, my trek knowledge as always i growing and i shall use it to eventually overthrow the feder- i mean make first contact with a new species !
Whoa, I thought I knew everything about Star Trek technical aspects, but I didn't know the driver coil assembly used subspace fields to compress and accelerate the ion jet. Makes loads of sense considering real-life ion drives cannot transfer enough energy to be useful.
It makes sense to have your two different propulsion systems to come from different power systems. This way you keep your eggs in different baskets - so to speak.
The way i always thought of it was that impulse is the main engine of propulsion. The warp field just negates the relativistic mass of the ship using them.
In the Constitution, the nacelles created the warp field and thrust when at warp. The impulse engines (powered by a fusion reactor) took over at sublight speeds (This is why the original Enterprise had the holes at the rear of the nacelles).
In the refit, the impulse engines provided the thrust at both sublight and warp, hence the much slimmer nacelles. The plasma tapped from the matter/antimatter reaction chamber was focused by the impulse deflection crystal (the glowing blue dome) at the rear of the primary hull. There was also a secondary fusion reactor in case the matter/antimatter reaction chamber went offline, or the primary hull had to separate from the secondary hull.
Love this, *thank you!*
Impulse engines are actually more fascinating, and more necessary in the universe than warp drive is. That would be SO much more useful in the present day than warp drive, it would enable easy single stage to orbit without having to deal with rockets.
How does impulse work? I dunno man, I just get a feeling and go with it.
😀 cool u saw my comment lol 🙏🏽 thank u for making this video bro i definitely appreciate it
Waaaay back in the say, one of the old Star Trek novels described it as Internally Metered PULSE Drive. You contain and compress the energy of the impulse reactors so it has nowhere to go, leading to waves of distortion in space, and the ship rides the waves.
So what I'm getting is:
_Alpha Canon:_ Warp drive but smol.
_Beta Canon:_ The things from Macross that makes them go _zoop._
Great as all ways Rick Retro Badger gave you a mention on his latest vid I all so commented how well you do your videos.
Impulse Power is based on the 1930's Subatomic Impulse Postulate, whereby cold fusion could be achieved by synchronising the subatomic impulse of hydrogen atoms via a yet to be perfected contraption called a Synchroniser. (Scotty mentions a Synchroniser a few times in TOS episodes). Experiments were last conducted, during the 1950's, ending in failure due to spurious detrimental magnetic fields. TOS writers assumed that humans would have solved the problem by the time of TOS.
I had this explained to me by a physicist, back in the mid-1980's.
Ok…impulse is 1/4 warp speed. There might be a glitch with that. In Star Trek The Motion Picture…Kirk is told by Scotty that Impulse Power is ready and he then proceeds to tell Sulu to engage full Impulse Power “ahead Warp .5”. This would suggest full Impulse is in fact 1/2 Warp Speed and not the 1/4 as you’ve stated. I merely seek clarification since this is a divergence in thought.
Fascinating.
Can a giant hamster in an exercise wheel power a generator to drive an impulse drive? I'm a D&D player and that's a thing in wildspace!
Only if it is a Giant MINIATURIZED space hamster!
(Go for the eyes Boo! Go for the eyes!)
At 4:44 you can see the hamster wheel spinning in the lower center of the scene
I think you missed the biggest part of how the impulse engines work. Their subspace fields super-accelerate the propellant so that the ship can move quickly and nimbly, but the inertial dampeners also alter the mass distribution of the ship so that it moves like a much lighter vessel. This is why the ships never need months to get up to speed, and no one ends up splattered against the rear bulkhead when they start moving.
My understanding is that impulse drive is NOT like a rocket or ion-engine, rather it creates a wave in normal space, and the ship rides the wavefront like a surfer. The name “impulse” came from the original abbreviation, “I.M. Pulse”, or Inertially Metered Pulse. The fact that this requires less power than creating a bubble of space time, is why you can get away with powering them from mere fusion reactors. As for a “warp sustainer” engine - as in the saucer section of NCC 1701-D” - I don’t think that’s solely the result of the impulse engines, though they’re probably a portion of it. You’d need something to maintain the warp bubble; the impulse engines aren’t really designed for this, not without turning into (according to Scotty), “a useless pile o’ junk!” 🤣😅
Great video thank you please can you make a video and talk about in the TARDIS from Doctor Who how it functions Alex shields weapons and the communion circuit thank you live long and prosper
0:35
Vessel movement at a speed greater than maneuvering at close range or the holding position before executing certain maneuvers, such as docking to a space station or a space dock
I can't remember where I read it, but I definitely remember somewhere saying that Warp/Subspace fields were used to help turn easier by making the ship momentarily, and/or effectively, mass-less.... Coz otherwise most ships would have turning circles like an oil tanker...I assume therefore a similar principle is in play to allow the impulse driver to accelerate the ship fast and quickly
Extra subspace field coils utilized exclusively to help with maneuvering at speed could be a really cool addition to a ship class.
The idea of impulse as a rocket never made much sense to me, given that the NCC-1701 backed out of Spacedock at 1/4 impulse, the 1701-D backed away from the Barclay probe at impulse, the Nebula not having impulse "exhausts" etc. Fusion reactors powering subspace coils lines up with everything we've seen (and explains why you wouldn't want it in spacedock, bending space inside a hangar with people and ships would be rude). It even explains how the BOP in Balance of Terror could go FTL with its power source being "simple impulse" -- a big fusion reactor powering the coils would produce enough energy to get you above lightspeed, but far less than matter/antimatter.
On that last one, I always figured that Spock wasn't reading active warp coils because the plasma was going to the ship's colossal plasma weapon rather than it not being capable of warp as it has Enterprise style nacelles in pretty prominent positions.
@@matthewkeeling886 Oh, was there a Spock line to that effect? All I remembered was Scotty saying "their power is simple impulse" and figuring there's no reason why you couldn't generate plasma for the coils with a big fusion reactor, thus warp drive but impulse power.
@@saucyduckglobalomnihyperme7510 Its been a while since I saw the episode so I might be misremembering who said it. Basically the idea is that the weapon diverts the warp plasma flow entirely to power itself and leaving the warp coils with no power for the Enterprise to detect (and thus leaving the ship unable to go to warp while the weapon was active), that would be the same whoever delivered the line onscreen.
In a car speedometer, 0-20 mph is thrusters, 21-50 mph is impulse power, and 51-90 mph is warp drive. 🥰😻☺️☺️😇 imho
Subspace driver coils mitigate mist ship mass so sunlight speed is doable but slow enough to mitigate observable tome dilation
i can tell u wrote this on a phone lol 😂 typos are constantly happening to me 2, i always triple check my comments before i post
According to the lore, impulse is actually( internally measured pulse) it also works on the same principle as the ion drives on the space station
I'm just waiting for the video where you explain how the messaging feature of the captain's chair utilizes subspace fields to provide premium stress relief during extended missions. lol
My head-cannon is that when you turn off the subspace field, physics 'catches on', notices that a ship with that little energy shouldn't be going that fast, and slows the ship down to the speed it _would_ have been going if Impulse were just a rocket engine. Thereby totally explaining any scenes where a ship appears to violate Newton's First Law by stopping when power fails.
nothing in canon says warp drive folds space. It simply artificially lowers your mass so you don't get to infinite when going FTL (Deja Q).
so the effect of the D going to warp in the open titles of TNG wasn't a clue?
Thought is was a bubble of subspace around the ship, hence the term "warp bubble"?
@@logicplague Yes, by entering subspace you lower your inertial mass - it's explained in Deja Q - it's why they're trying to put the warp field around the moon - to lower its mass so they can tractor beam it. Nothing to do with "folding space". That's Dune.
@@M3PH11 correct - the enterprise going to warp in the open titles is not a clue that it folds space.
Sounds more like Mass Effect. Warp is similar to the real life Alcubeirre theory of FTL; shrink the space in front of the ship and make it longer to the rear so the ship doesn't ever really move in real space, thereby avoiding the relativistic issues.
But they use subspace bubbles in the first episode of DS9 to move the station faster than it would otherwise by lowering it's mass....but not at FTL speeds.
I'm going to have to go back and watch Deja Q to see what you're talking about...any hint as to a time where they bring this up in the episode?
In one view the impulse drive was reversed engineered from the crashed Fraraghi shuttle in a DS-9 story. The idea was continued in the two novels about Khan and the Eugenic War and Gary Seven
I always thought full impulse was .9 of light speed
It is.
And fusion isn't powerful enough for near light speed travel.
Theres 25 crewmembers on each nacelle rowing...they never show that
I like how some trek fans always go on about how this is the most realistic major sci fi setting and meanwhile the explanation on any given piece of technology always seems to boil down to "its subspace, duh"
It's fascinating to me that people focus on something that doesn't even exist let alone explaining how and what these " systems" would do if they were actually real or could motivate anything in space..
My dude this is not right. The addition of SpaceTime driver coils to impulse engines did not occur in federation technology until the construction of the ambassador class starship as this was necessary to meet the required 1000g acceleration rate of the ship by spec. Impulse refers to and is a shortened form of internal metered pulse drive. This refers to a specific form of laser initiated fusion characterized by spherical reaction Chambers though other shapes have been used. The lasers are pulsed into pellets of Frozen deuterium and forced fuse and then exhausted out the aft of the drive. Because the drive plasma is not produced continuously and reaction Chambers are quite often stacked linearly the pulse length and frequency must be metered so that all reaction Chambers can be vented without interfering with each fusion pulse while at the same time maintaining as constant a flow of plasma for drive acceleration as possible. Impulse engines are considered a step up from standard fusion torch sub light drives because they allow for drastically increased fuel efficiency and considerably more control over the exhaust velocity and direction. Factually sublight engines have changed considerably between the 23rd and 24th centuries as materials technology, computer control, and field manipulation have improved leading to the spherical reaction chamber and reactor stacking becoming commonplace not only on federation ships but the vessels of other races as well.
I've always liked the look of the nx01
I think this was a very interesting and very detailed look at impulse engines you just left out one small thing how the heck did I get this thing to go in reverse that's all I want to know.
That could be a video all its own.
Rods from Cochrane: make a bullet-shaped device that just has a big impulse engine on it, and get it as close to light speed as you can. If it hits a planet, then bye-bye planet.
How do we slow down from Impulse power? If all the thrust is linear and out of the back of the craft, does deceleration involve flipping the craft over and executing a reverse-burn?
They apply the sub space breaks or some such techno babble.
That can happen,or have twin tickets angled off producing sideways thrust.
@@Stormcrow_1 reverse the polarity of the subspace transgressor..
You could say they were a little "impulsive" when coming up with the lore for this tech ;)
I really hope your comment doesn't fly under the radar.
funny, I got a video on variable warp nacelles out of nowhere yesterday
See, as our understanding of science has progressed…it’s changed our interpretation of how the combo of warp and impulse worked…
Growing up watching the show and hearing them talking about the sub space fields and such…was under the impression of the following
The warp nacelles did NOT provide thrust, they simply generated the field. The file had the following effects
- the field negated relativistic effects from high impulse travel
- the field created a bubble that space eff3ctinvely squeezed on…like food down your throat…the more power, the stronger the field and also the geometry of it changed
- ALL thrust was provided by the impulse drives…(see an early TNG episode where a speed change is called for and Geordi replies about impulse speed…the strength of warp field and background squeezing from space was augmented by impulse drive…so for example, engage warp field at minimum, impulse drive at 1/4 you’re at warp one, increase to half impulse with same field strength you’re going faster, increase field strength to 50% max, at 1/4 impulse you’re at warp 4, increase to 3/4 impulse you’re at warp 5
Such a theory and concept may not be how the system works by modern interpretations, but that was how my younger mind comprehended it. Basically inferring a similar field byproduct similar to that of the “eezo field” from ship drive cores in the mass effect series, wherein ships generated a field within which the mass of the ship was decreased allowing for bypassing of replays of relativity.
" Well, the things has to have a tail pipe"- Uhura from Star Trek 6
Ion trail.
Do you have any video's explaining the different types of propulsion/warp drives and their respective designs other than Starfleet.
Thank you
From an early description the maximum speed of a impulse drive is .99 c as in the film Star Trek: the motion picture. Go to the scene when the Enterprise uses her warp drive for the first time.
Impulse was nanoseconds of Warp Drive, as the actual Impulse Engines could not exceed more the 10% of C due to time dilation. Star Fleet regulations.
It was not noticeable to the crew as the view-screen corrected the image to look like smooth acceleration.
Kirk, stealing the Enterprise from inside Spacedock:
“One Quarter impulse power.”
😳
yep. he was wrong. They started violating canon as soon as they had Roddenberry out of the loop.
And I still remember some of the novels presenting the idea (in detail) that impulse propulsion worked through a gravity wave effect instead of action-reaction of an exhaust. But then why do you have an exhaust at all if it worked that way? (yes, way out of main canon)
Well, your reactor is still presumably producing waste gases. You just wouldn't be using them to propel the ship. Like how an internal-combustion car has an exhaust pipe even though it's the tires propelling the vehicle.
Hi Cert, great video. P.s. when do you sleep?
Warp drive aside, If the human race ever develops something close to impulse engines, it would be a game changer.
So in eesence impulse drives are your bog standard fusion drives but with a trek twist to them.
1:44 I'm not sure warp drives came before impulse has a source. Everything in TOS would imply otherwise and note on TOS Earth had interstellar colonies - Khan's ship for example. It would also make sense just as a starship has chemical rockets for thrusters it would maintain the legacy impulse drives too.
Subspace is also necessary to technobabble reduce the required emission velocity. Otherwise it would logically be a WPD on its own... like all realistic high velocity space drives.
New to this and want to know more ..... that background on the desk top .... were do I get that ? is it functional ? the 3D in the beginning of video ?
Uhura - "well the things gotta have a tailpipe"
I can live with that.
Impulse is just what the characters say when they are travelling, but not at warp or not faster than light (even though those two things are not always the same)
There's a lot of extra "official guide to blah blah" books which are officially canon because Okuda or someone worked on them, but that's the lowest level of canon. All that really matters is what the writers actually put into the shows and what gets approved.
Based on what actually happens in the shows, impulse is a vague thing that doesn't get a lot of screen time like warp drives, and to this day it means "moving the ship without going to warp"
If I got to make a Star Trek game you would all loose your minds.. I've kept myself hidden for decades, but no longer..
Next year I plan on doing it all, and creating great games is going to be one of them as one of my projects and it'll also be really funny.
But there are some really awesome idea's I had tinkering in my head for gaming that has yet to be even thought of..
(i) I'm pretty sure I remember full impulse being 0.75c from the TNG tech manual.
(ii) The plasma exhaust from impulse engines was always a big plot hole for cloaking devices. It's even exploited in ST: The Undiscovered Country. I never saw how the cloaking field would be able to mask the plasma trail from the engines.
Where and when did this subspace effect become canon? Also my understanding was that fusion reactor that powers the impulse drive is the matter half of the Matter/Anti-Matter reactor.
I find it funny that while discussion Impulse enginees the video seems to go out of their way to avoid focusing on the Impulse engines in the Star Trek Online ship shots.
The problem with making Impulse drives a reaction based method of propulsion is that you have no way to slow down and stop, or back up.
I still use impulse drive in my Kia Morning. I find full warp drive around town impractical. If I use it to go to the corner 7 Eleven I wind up overshooting by 12 parsecs and 50 years in the future.
The subspace driver coils are the only thing I think smacks of pixie dust and unicorn farts. The rest seems plausible though.
The canon of impulse being developed after warp suggests a level of "learning to run before learning walk".
Unless I mis-read/heard engineers of the space faring industries are actively develop an early form of "impulse engine drive systems" for deep-space missions.
one such type-example should be in the range of the "thermo-nuclear rocket drives"
Doyalist reason for why there were no impulse emitters on the Nebula, someone forgot. Same way the Oberth was designed by someone who probably forgot that you need to travel between the sections.
If they were going 1/4 impulse in space dock, there would be no way they would be able to even start a turn before crashing into the inside of the walls if impulse speeds are anywhere close to that high.
Yeah, it does make me wonder. Could you actually do sub-warp flight, with a warp drive? I'm sure that if we developed warp drive tech now, our first few flights would be exactly that, sub-warp. We'd make many flights to iron out the kinks before actually going FTL with it.
My math skills are rusty but, at 1/16 lightspeed, i got 4.15 hours to travel from neptune to the sun. It it correct, than an impact at that speed would destroy anything it would crash into.
If it were the Enterprise D, the energy would be about twice that of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. 8.77x10^23 J at 1/16th lightspeed.
I know this is about impulse drives bit it makes me wonder what race developed the first warp drive among the current races.
When I was a kid in the late 1960s -1970s, I remember Gene Roddenberry, the showrunners, and Star Trek experts couldn't explain how the warp engines worked, so after a while, they blatantly stole the concept of how Jupiter 2's nuclear engine from Irwin Allen's, Lost in Space operated.
The word "impulse" means "change in momentum". What makes impulse drive different from real-world/present-day rockets is that it employs some unknown/fake physics principle that enables it to "cheat" the rocket equation and get acceleration without reaction mass -- an action *without* an equal and opposite reaction. Hence the name "impulse" drive: it's the one that violates the law of conservation of momentum to give you an unbalanced impulse.
At least, this is what it *should* mean. I don't know how well it squares with canonical Star Trek theory.
In my head canon warp was discovered after noting impulse drives were creating subspace fields from shooting plasma out as thrust. The trick of warp drive is getting the field to move the ship instead of newtonian thrust. (The plasma is recycled in warp drive too. Note all the reaction chamber does is heat the plasma.) But the problem with canon is the folks that think warp was discovered in a Montana slum instead of Alpha Centauri colony have a vastly overrated Berman film and I have original Star Trek to create additional head canon with.
head canon can only be used once ...
way to cover for the modeling team simply forgetting to add the impulse engines!
You got it wrong. Full impulse is more like approaching the speed of light or very least 75 percent of it . One quarter would be around one fourth of c.
Primary purpose of driver coils is in effect to tractor the rest of the ship along with the engine. Otherwise the engine atleast in theory could shoot through the ship. Lack of driver coils would necessitate big ass thrusters like you would see on imperial star destroyer. Driver coils also help mitigate the effects of time dilation, but prolonged use would bring about some time dilation effects.
Impulse could also be used to describe a lower tier of power generation as implied in star trek 2, the wrath of khan
I always figured the subspace component of the impulse engines was also there as the convenient explanation for why ships that need to travel at full impulse along a specific course have to maintain engine output the whole time, rather than let Newtonian physics take over (i.e., the ship is only providing enough thrust to go so fast on reactant alone and it takes the subspace driver coils acting constantly to make up the difference to get to, say, 25% lightspeed).
This would explain, for example, the episode with the Promelian (spelling?) battle cruiser in the energy-draining minefield and why it was such a revelation to push the Enterprise to full impulse for only a second or so and coast the rest of the way. If they're used to needing to keep engines on the whole time, coasting and letting Newtonian physics make up the difference legitimately wouldn't have occurred to them.
Yep, I caught that too. Interestingly, that episode also clarified that Starfleet thrusters _are_ a purely Newtonian reaction as they let the ship coast. "Impulse thrusters" are either not a thing, or at the very least ships carry thrusters that we would recognize today in addition.