The best ever feature of the enterprise is the Dolphins quarters. Yep, Dolphins, Look it up. They were the specialist navigators and had their own section of the ship (cetacean ops)
That makes no sense. Why put dolphins through all that training when you could just do it with humans, who are way smarter and don't need onboard swimming pools?
From the rare episodes when they were mentioned in TNG I always had the Impression the scoops weren't necessary for the continuing operation of the ship but rather a tool that sat idle until needed to collect various particles for whatever plot reason they added in that weeks episode
Yes. I believe the technical manual actually says the scoops are an emergency backup and that the ships have fuel tanks that are refilled at Starbase. At least, the antimatter has to be refueled.
I always thought they were meant to keep their propellant tanks topped up, definitely something that would be great for a five year journey, but also great for any ship to not have to worry about running out of propellant unless in some extreme circumstances
You just reroute power to the turbo encabulator and repolarize the tetryon grid to 1.2776 jiggahertz. Then you energize the plotanium relays to the heizenberg compensator. Eazy peazy lemon squeezy. P.S. Reionize the dingle arm before all of this or you risk a warp core implosion.
@@benholroyd5221 don’t forget you also have to take into account the quantum resonance of the isolinear chips…those bastards always demagnetize before the coulomb bubble degrades to the point of event horizon.
"I like science fiction more than fantasy because in a fantasy story you have someone recite some magic spell in order to fix the problem. In science fiction you have to work things out..." "Like re-phasing the tachyon modulation to 47.994?"
According to the TNG Tech Manual, the 2 work in tangent, so the deflect deflects particles the collectors want toward the collector and then allows said particles to get past it so the collectors can scoop them up.
@@gearandalthefirst7027 Irrelevant. The deflector dish can (and has to if you think about it) aim its Treknobabble deflection beams, and is pre-programmed to have tuned "slots" to channel hydrogen through to the collectors. Yeah, I said Treknobabble because that's what it is. But hey, if you have magic deflectors, what's the problem?
Regarding TOS "string computers": It's important to remember that in the early 1960s, circuit boards had only been invented 20 years prior, and almost nobody had seen one firsthand. Even the Apollo computers were built from components directly wired together and then encased in epoxy for vibration-resistance -- and the RAM they used was literally made of woven copper wires. Yes, that's how new computer technology actually is. Almost every single component in your phone didn't exist when your parents were children. That is astoundingly unusual for technology of any kind.
The epoxy wasn't only for vibration. After the fire that killed an entire crew was identified as being caused by condensation, they encased it to prevent further incidents.
@@dagoonite still had the issue of graphite from pencils getting in the boards and causing fire. in addition to getting into the eyes which is not good in space. hence why grease pens were used until a company invented an ink pen that could work in zero g. the russians btw bought these pens they were better then grease pens. zero or low and well high gravity presents a whole lots of issues that one doesn't think is problem but actually is
@@toomanyaccounts I've been doing research for a hard SF story in space, and I'm learning so many problems caused by microgravity that could be cool plot points that SF just glosses over.
@@IronWarhorsesFun By a vacuum pump, a microwave, an inkjet printer, some overhead transparencies, spin coaters, photoresist and a bunch of lenses and you too can make integrated circuits, with metal and semiconductors of microscopic scale, nothing compared to what we currently can do, but for far less startup cost than a car, you can make chips that are better than anything made 50 years ago.
No no, it's okay The phaser strips are for continuous beams of nadions We're gonna use the deflector like a pulsed phase cannon from ENT Which, being over a century obsolete, should be doable with any random bit of equipment 🤷♂️
Also hardware built to withstand the stresses of firing said nadions (which aren't selective about what they ablate) instead of the deflector, which clearly isn't and will be damaged by doing so.... It's like having a perfectly good rifle then saying "Nah, I think I'll fire my 5.56 round out of this metal pipe and call it a day." and hope it doesn't blow up on you in the process, removing your digits.
@@DIEGhostfish Especially when the deflector is sitting almost right in front of the warp core. The deflector likely has the shortest power feed from the warp core, which also ideally makes for the most capacious power feed. IOW, the deflector can get more power, faster from the warp core than the more remotely located phasers can, and the shorter power transfer distance means fewer things are likely to go wrong... or get shot in battle.
I've loved this paradox since reading about the technologies in the Star Trek Technology manuals. They are a wonderful rabbit hole of contradictory technobabble and yet they become even more fun when you pick them apart. You do it brilliantly.
The TOS era Enterprise has separate navigational deflectors noted as bumps on the sides and bottom of the Big Gold Dish which was the main sensor and communication array. TNG apparently merged the dish and the deflectors. And I guess the original design of the TOS nacelles were meant to be Bussard ramjets, with open nozzles on the aft of the nacelles.
Let's talk about what the TMP/TNG era invention of the central intermix chamber/warp core did to confuse the role of the nacelles, and its effect on Bussard-style collecting. In TOS/TAS, and in the tabletop combat simulators that grew out of the original (abandoned and thought to be never revisited) Star Trek i.p., _the nacelles were the reactors, the energy sources._ And you could warp with one completely out of commission. Having dangerous high-energy reaction separated from the habitable sections (and easily ejectable in case of combat damage or malfunction) was good engineering safety, Having the collectors/scoops on the nacelles made sense, because it made use of whatever "real" forward velocity the ship had, and the reactant this gathered was used immediately. Collecting is irregular, based on local stellar density, so the flow would have to be evened out from supply stored on ship for optimal "combustion". I see this as a major, ongoing task for starship power engineering. What happens to that same hydrogen, now that the warp core is the generation facility, and by the way ejectable in case of mishap, and the nacelles are now just the load? After collection, it has to be piped past the first set of warp coils, make a 90-degree turn (losing most of its velocity benefit), get sent down the pylon, make a 45-degree turn (on Connies at least), get piped to the intermix/warp core, then have the "warp plasma" (combustion product after interaction with dilithium) piped back UP the pylon to be washed over the warp coils to make them do their thing. That's a lot of magnetically shielded piping for a double handful of molecules! There's a lot more I could go into here, maybe you could pick up the thought?
@@SacredCowShipyards Also, the Bussard collectors weren't given that name until late in TOS, and justified by someone pointing out that the Enterprise was supposed to be on its own for five years at a time and couldn't expect to run into a tanker when it needed one. Originally they were just blinky lights intended to look cool because they couldn't figure out what else to put on the front ends of the nacelles. Also also, the Bussard Ramjet turned out to be a theoretical mistake- even assuming 100% efficient fusion, you can't get enough energy to keep it moving because gathering hydrogen induces drag on the vehicle, more than you can compensate for in generated thrust. It is however being considered as a *brake* for future interstellar vehicles under real-world consideration.
@@SacredCowShipyards The majority consensus, though, is that they're for emergency refueling. Voyager, for example, thanks to her Bussards, was never in any danger of running out of fuel. If she got low, she could just park near a particularly loud star and eat the solar wind for a few days/weeks. To fill up on antimatter, she'd need to collect enough hydrogen to fill her dueterium tanks ten times over, but eventually fill up she would. (though, nibbling on a gas giant might be faster.)
I have to give the OG series a pass because the physics just wasn't there. Not so much in the later series though. They could have made some changes to the later ships, spent a little bit of time explaining the changes, and the fans would have been fine with it. When you look at a few of the designs that have warp nacelles attached directly to the saucer, they actually look like they make sense. If something begins to go south in Engineering, you can jettison the nacelle instead of breaking the ship in half.
if you go back through the Original production you find that the interest in it got the science via fans. Roddenberry made a pilot and wanted to have a communist utopia in space, but the producers wanted a western. some of the staff made changes that lead to the equality and other things that seem socially advanced even today. fans back then would write scripts and send them in, and the better ones were used to make episodes. some of the fans were scientists or were very interested in science and introduced very advanced concepts in easy to understand terms. later on when these things were built upon things get a bit crazy since non of the full time staff were big on science. by the time TNG rolled around things were a bit more set in stone, and the changes we see were the production staff, producers, writers, actors, and directors.
Science Time: Bussard Ramjets would actually use lazers to ionized hydrogen so it can be collected by the magnetic field (neutral particles wouldn't be affected). So, perhaps the deflector ionizes the interstellar gases it hits so they can be collected by the ramjets' magnetic fields. But, this would still need a way to make sure the hydrogen isn't kicked away while large debris is.
The funniest thing about the placement of the ramscoops is that they need to move all that hydrogen back up through the ship because the impulse engines are on/near the saucer section.
if you are talking about TNG the saucer had impulse engines but they weren't the main impulse they where for just the saucer and not as powerful . As far as TOS i couldn't tell you .
@@anonymousgeorge8317 There were three impulse engines on the Galaxy class. Two on the saucer, and the main impulse engine on the stardrive. That's why I said "on/near the saucer section" because the main impulse drive is near the point of separation. The gathered hydrogen would need to travel from the front of the nacelles through the entire stardrive section to reach the main engine.
Personally, they just need to have functions switched. The domes would make for paired field emitter covers/lenses, and the dish would make sense as scoop projector more, both in placement and design of function, not to mention its forward project arc of same dish would make more sense to reach past a field projected for the nacelles. Also, everything collected would go straight to cannon engineering and all allow sorting/refining to be housed there.
Here's a tangentially-related tidbit you might enjoy: according to Gene's original concept, the warp nacelles exert forces on each other, pushing the rest of the ship out forward ("like a grape")... which then pulls the nacelles along... creating infinite reactionless motion. In other words, Federation ships are propelled by troll physics. What really always bothered me a bit about the Bussard collectors being part of the propulsion system, even as an emergency measure, is that the Warp drive doesn't use propellant, and after it reacts the N kilograms of anti-matter with the N kilograms of matter it has in its fuel tanks, additional matter sucked up from the interstellar void isn't going to help any. Perhaps you could say the additional mass is used to replace the fuel expended in the impulse engines to make orbital maneuvers. Only Andrew Probert knows for sure.
The way nacelles, bussards and warp drives are "supposed to" work in star trek, the only ship that really makes sense is the original romulan warbird, with the nacelles and the romulan version of bussards above and ahead of the main hull.
The TNG Tech manual on pages 70-71 (yes I'm that big a geek) actually breaks down how it works with the warp field. It is however silent on any interference from the deflector dish.
My knee-jerk reaction [without resorting to my non-existent Ph.D. in physics] is to wave my hands and say that the 'navigational deflectors' shove aside anything that is a liquid or solid...leaving plasmas and gasses. Then the 'Bussard ramscoops' pick up whatever is left. Yeah - that sounds plausible enough...let's go with that.
if you ever thumbed through the technical manual the deuterium tanks are actually way down in the secondary hull, so you have to run pipes down the nacelles and down the pylons to get the fuel to the tanks. then you convert some of that to antimatter. and then funnel the resulting fuel into the warp core, where more magic happens, then the resulting plasma (and matter antimatter reactions do not create plasma, just gamma rays and other high energy photons) is pumped back up the nacelles to get used to make warp bubbles happen. it unravels more if you poke at it.
The Bridges being on top of the ships never made sense to me. I always thought the bridge should be in the center of the ship, in the most protected part of the ship.
@@cujoedaman Yes, but that's the navigation bridge, and as a holdover to tradition before the days of GPS and radar for navigation. These days, there is no reason for a big, exposed navigation bridge except as a backup to better, more modern systems for navigating. During combat, you have your most important people and systems behind the armor of the ship, and in the CIC where all the ship's systems route to for readouts on what's going on, where the enemy is, the ability to target and fire weapons....you lose your navigation bridge, oh well...you've lost a few sailors and the big windows to look out of, but the ship is 100% still combat effective and can still steer and fight. Star Trek is pretty clear that the bridge is the nerve center, and even when there was the "battle bridge", a decent analogue to the CIC of modern day naval vessels, buried in the neck behind decks and armor, we don't see the staff go use that bridge during combat EXCEPT when they separate the ship, which then puts that bridge ON THE TOP AGAIN. Ultimately, it's clearly a holdover to naval tradition even if it makes no sense for even the current day Navy, which does not put any critical systems and people on that exposed bridge during combat situations.
@@cujoedaman If you were in a space battle, would you rather be at the very front of your ship, the place where all of the very fast explodey things are going to make their first impact, or in the center, encased on all sides by layers upon layers of protection?
Because I'm a total geek: The glowy part at the front isn't the actual collector. It's an "ionizing beam emitter" that's supposed to "impart a charge to neutral particles in space for collection by the magnetic field." The actual intakes are the vents on the side just behind the emitters, and the system pulls in particles from the sides at an angle. As for the rest, "At sublight velocities, the [magnetic field generator / collector (MFG/C)] coils sweep forward normally. At warp velocities, however, the coil operation is reversed to /slow down/ the incoming matter. This system works in close connection with the main navigational deflector. In normal operation, of course, the job of the deflector is to /prevent/ any interstellar material from contacting the ship. Small field "holes" are manipulated by the deflector and MFG/C to permit usable amounts of rarified gas through." (Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, pp. 70-71)
On the one hand, this is what I get for not reading the manual. On the other hand, the manual is bullshit. Like I said, inside of the warp bubble surrounding the ship, there is no "incoming matter". Space moves around the bubble. But, beyond that, as expected, they can "modulate the deflector emitters" to let the bussard scoops do what they do, because Star Trek is magic.
I always imagined the bussard collectors are not working most of the time, as the only time we see them actually taking on things is when the ships actually stop in a nebula or something to purposefully take on gasses. I mean, the whole plotline of ST:Voyager revolves around them constantly looking for fuel. So if that were the case then it's not actually completely nonfunctional.
Oh, the concept of Bussard scoops makes perfect sense, and should work just fine. It's just that most scoops use the forward motion of the ship to do the scooping, while Starfleet vessels are also configured to sweep stuff out of their way as they move forward. Sooooo...
@@SacredCowShipyards Yeah, but like I said, we usually only see them working in nebulas and such when the ship is going really slow, so I like to think of it such that the deflector is on and the scoops are off most of the time, but when they specifically want to use the scoops they slow down to a safer speed and turn the deflector off, or at least lower its power to emit a smaller cone.
@@DAKOTA56777 If nebulae were... uniform, and always gaseous, that would be a... safe thing to do. Now Star Trek / Starfleet never talks about the granularity of their sensors and this, that, and the blessed other, but, still. Just find a way to process interstellar debris through your ramscoops at subwarp, and, then, well, like I said - you don't really need a navigational deflector /at/ warp, so... confused.
The ultimate problem with all the technobabble in star-trek is that it is an afterthought. This is why warp numbers don't ever equal the same speed (or even sequential speeds...) Ships in Star Trek are shaped the way they are for visual appeal, and they do the things they do for plot satisfaction. The "cannon" technobabble was all worked in as a response to the fanbase developing their own technohypothesies, so naturally none of it is consistent or makes sense because the actual capabilities and visual aesthetics of the ships (which came first) are not consistent with one another.
Once Roddenberry and... one of the art guys whose name I never remember realized what they'd created, there was an attempt made at putting together a coherent "look", at the very least. ... and then later iterations ignored that standard as much as possible.
Navigational deflector blocks everything and bussard collectors punch a hole on each side in the block for select gases. The structural issues you say with them being in a wrong place are just stylistic assholery decided by the admiralty. Or not.
It's easy to parse the dichotomy of the Nav Deflector and the Ramscoop. _Computer Automation_ See, the problem with being confused by these two seemingly mutually exclusive systems is treating them like they are big, static, field generators al-la huge electro-magnets, when really you need to look at them like big phased-array radars. If they were both just big static magnetic/gravity field projectors, yes, you wonder how you get through the 'push' shell to work with the 'pull' cone. But with proper computer control, and fine granularity in the emitters, the navigational deflector can be tied to sensors and be used to actively sweep and channel matter in front of the ship as it moves. Micrometeoroid? Swat it aside with the deflector beam itself, then open a gap for some slightly higher density hydrogen as the ship passes through a heliopause. Close ranks to pass through interstellar dust and filter hydrogen as you clear it. Like the controls of a fly-by-wire fighter jet, the computer will be sorting out the hazards well ahead of the ship thousands of times a second. Why else would these starships need such absurd computing power to navigate? It's not like floating in the void is a computationally expensive operation by itself. Even at light speed, there's not much to really think about on a macro scale. But if you approach this from 'computer has to track hundreds of thousands of micro-hazards flying at it at FTL speed and categorize, prioritize, and deal with said hazards in a timely fashion via navigational deflector control', then that computing power starts to make sense. And if you ask: "What if the sensors are damaged?" Well, you contingent to 'static field' mode. Yes, that cuts off the ramscoops, but if you're sensors are down to the point you can't scan for navigational hazards... Well, that would be like a submarine missing its bow, sonar, it's towed array, and its fathometer. At that point you have bigger problems. I don't think anyone cares if you're trickle-charging the fuel tank successfully when you're running blind and need to make sure you don't ablate the front of the ship off. You're probably trying to get back to a repair dock. Also consider that with the Ramscoops, the fields they project will also have to _slow down_ the particles being funneled into them. Just like the intakes to a RAMJET engine, the air has to be brought to a reasonable velocity so that combustion can occur and expand the air _BEFORE_ it leaves the back of the engine... But worse since you're bringing the intake to a STOP to throw into a storage tank. As such, you don't want fractional-lightspeed hydrogen particles slamming face-first into your intake maifolds. That would be like _SANDBLASTING_ them, but worse. So you have to consider that the Ramscoop field emitters are likely just has sophisticated and granular as the deflector dish so that it can channel, buffer, condense, and collect the desired gasses of a Starship underway. Now, when you consider a ship at warp, and the argument of 'the ship isn't moving, space is'. Well, really the Warp Bubble is moving. But what happens to matter at the transition point of the warp field? How is it going to move once it transitions from floating in the void, to inside the ship's warp bubble? Does it bunch up on the leading edge? The ship may not be 'moving' mathematically from point A to point B in space, but that space bubble has to, and there is a LOOOONG line you can draw from point to point in the void where that bubble is going to occupy the same position as any random particles that happen to be there. So where do they go? How do they move? What kind of energy or momentum transfer is imparted on them by the passage of a space-time distortion? Questions for later, but ones that raise one more important point. The Deflector dish and the ramscoops _can't_ work at warp using conventional electromagnetic or gravitational systems. Because those propagate at _light speed_ and the ship's warp bubble is going _FASTER_ than that. So the projectors in turn must ALSO be some variant of sub-space manipulation system that everything else in Star Trek invariably uses. Otherwise, every time you go to warp, the fields just pile up at the front of the warp bubble like sound-waves on a supersonic jet.
Thanks, you said it better than I would have. The one thing that does bug me about the bussards is representing them with a glowing glass bulb. Doesn't quite make sense for an intake, but does look nicer than a big vent. I gotta say overall, when you compare Trek to other sci-fi shows of the time they definitely put more thought into how their fictional tech should work than most. It would have been super easy to just make the 1701 a big chrome rocket ship.
Huh. Thank you for this, actually. I am glad the udek brought up the discussion, because the comment section is pretty much gold thanks to answers like these.
@@MysteriousMose If you look at the design of most warp nacelles, you may in fact notice that there is a grill-like object just aft of most ramscoops before you get to the main glowing radiation exhaust parts of the nacelle. On Ent-D, it looks like this ring of gold-colored stuff that wraps around the nacelle. That's the intake manifold itself. At least, according to the tech manual. Honestly, given the particle density of interstellar space, I would expect the size requirements on the intake manifolds to be so small that you don't even have to show them unless you're in mag-boots walking on the nacelles right next to them. I mean, you're not gulping down thousands of liters of gas per second like an air-breathing jet engine, so you don't need a huge intake volume to get the job done. The grill itself probably isn't even vents, but final channeling into the vents.
As a fan of star trek (most of it) and Battlestar Galactica (newer version) I've enjoyed this video and the other one I watched on the BSG. I must however defend the design of starfleet ships and technology in general as in the end its purpose is to entertain not be 100% believably functional. Albeit most of the technology in star trek to my knowledge is hypothetically possible and a lot of modern day inventions were inspired by star trek. Sci fi in general always needs to be taken with a grain of salt when viewing it. You've earned a new sub however and I look forward to viewing more of your content.
Should we even touch on the subject that most of everything in nearly ALL sci-fi is moot anyway because ships all move like planes on Earth? You can't have wings and flaps and rudders to steer a ship in space and there is no "going around" something. I mean, it's for the action, I get that, but still...
I always figured they were used the same way they're used in Elite Dangerous where you just activate the scoop when you're cozied up to a star or gas giant to refuel in deep space where there aren't any stations. Or, in this case, to collect anything from hydrogen to deuterium to contrivium, unobtainium or any such other dumb-namium.
You've obviously underestimated the power of gibberish and gobble-di-gook. (This is from a man who still has a first edition Star Trek Technical Manual from his childhood)
The approved term you are looking for sir is "technobabble". The Trek writers coined the term to cover all the SF jargon used to get the characters out of the plot holes the writers put them in when creating the episodes. Early stages of the scripts would actually have it in place of paragraphs of nonsensical, but scientific sounding words later used to explain what all the blinking lights and buzzing noises on set meant. Followed by everyone crying out in surprise, swaying side to side violently before collapsing to the deck in a shower of foam rocks meant to be debris from exploding control panels.
When they show them when they were spinning they remind me of the bottom part of the C-57D United Planets Cruiser from Forbidden Planet. You think that could've been where they got their inspiration from?
Roddenberry said upfront in many interviews that Forbidden Planet was one of his design and storytelling touchstones. In fact, the movie sure looks a lot like an extended TOS episode, doesn't it?
The navigational deflector prevents collision with any gas that escapes the scoop, the scoop is a funnel made of the same stuff as the deflector shields, the gas comes in and is compressed by the forward motion of the ship, only touching at the point at which the bussard ramscoops focus it to, which is right in front of the red glowy thing, where it's collected, the navigational deflector is needed to prevent collision with the fast moving gas that isn't captured in the scoop.
It seems that Bussard Ram Scoops only make sense when there is nebula and use to suck gases form that. maybe the ran scoops are there just protect the warp nacelles. that deflects push stuff around the ship and nacelles are in place that it can get it.
I had this idea in high school along with riding a nuclear blast wave. Friends called me a fool. Ten years ago I learned that project Orion existed in the 70s and this also was a thing.
I heard that with the nacelle bubble the poles actually funnel the hydrogen into the nacelles.....and the collecters are there to prevent a build up of hydrogen as the ship flies through at warp
Its a bloody great allegory. "Exploring places they hadn't been" always means "...except for all the people who definitely lived there already but will definitely not be treated like equals and whose culture will definitely be described as primitive or savage." Yeah.
Best use I've seen of Bussard Ramjets are by Larry Niven (who wrote for star trek) in his Known Space universe by humans before they got FTL drives. The ships were usually interstellar colony ships or freighters and they were big as a result. Unfortunately I don't remember how these things slowed down when they got to the hallway point of their trip because a turn and burn dosen't work on these things or at least it shouldn't.
@@thebaccathatchews had a feeling it was something like this been a long time since I read the books. Yes, these ships took a long time to get any where. In the books FTL drives schematics were purchased by such a ships crew from some aliens that got curious about them. The first jobs of the first human FTL Ships was to check on all of Earth's extra solar colonies and the ram scoop ships still in transit. Although the 1st Man-Kzinti war was fought before the humans had FTL. One of the short stories I enjoyed was about an asteroid converted into a ram scoop battle ship that flew through a Kzinti occupied solar system without slowing down just blasting every ship and military installation with kinetic projectiles traveling at almost the speed of light. It then took years if not decades to come back and actually try to retake the system along with other ships launched from the Sol system years after the battleship.
My understanding is the Deflectors and Bussard Collectors use the same technology and are designed to work together if needed. Though usually the Bussard Collectors are used as part of them leaving warp to dissipate the Bow Shock effect of Warp Travel. In Star Trek warp works be shifting the vessel into subspace, at least that was the original description, but it generates a bow shock effect upon exit.
As regards the nav deflector and FTL: if warp drives work by the same principles the alcubierre concept does, while the ship itself may not be moving, the compression pulling the ship forward would still be collecting a metric explosion-ton of matter as it went along. Which would then be released when the warp field was removed. An FTL drive that explodes both its own ship and its destination when arriving is. Less than ideal, so deflecting that matter out of your path isn't exactly a *bad* idea...
"...navigational deflector dish that is equipped to the front of every single Starfleet vessel known to f-beep-ing human kind." That is, except for the Miranda Class vessels. Two examples of which are the Reliant of ST2-W.O.K. and Saratoga of ST4-T.V.H. Although I have seen it argued that the small dome aft of the torpedo launchers on a Miranda Class ship is actually a dorsal deflector.
I think the BR is meant to explain away the red lights on the front of the warp engines. I always thought those ram scoops were only a supplementary power source. They can't possibly power the warp drive entirely. And the kind of energy requirement needed to use half the equipment on a typical Star Trek ship I doubt a BR could power any of it. I think the main power should strictly come from the warp core. And the kind of steel they're using to construct starships would probably seem magically strong compared to the steel we have today(check out the fancy steel they're developing these days), and yet there probably would be a level of shields(forcefield) active at all times. You'd never know if some space alien ship might come out of warp nearby and right off the bat start blasting your ship for no apparent reason. Of course the deflector dish shouldn't really be in use while at warp. I think that would probably be a good way to pop your warp bubble.
I justify the deflector and scoops conflict by interpreting the deflector as a selective point system array opposed to an omni directional field shield thingy. That want it can assist with the scoops gathering fuel and not the other stuff.
Not to mention that the drag caused by trying to scoop up and fuse the interstellar hydrogen turns out to be way higher than the thrust that can be produced. The engine doesn't even theoretically work.
If the nav deflector creates a streamlined field (because space aerodynamics?) then that seems like it could be easily designed to allow most of the material deflected away from the ship to then be pulled back from the edge and into the scoop? In *most* cases the Bussard element *is* clear of the forward line of the hull, at least, and you can see them from a forward-on view. I don't think they were really *intended* to be anything though, originally. Could be wrong.
It can get worse. Somewhere on the internet, someone did an external features diagram of the Refit/A, and has those 3 lumps around the deflector dish identified as the collectors.
Did you know bussard ram-jets don't actually produce thrust, apparently brehmstralung (breaking radiation) creates more drag than is generated by fusing them. However if the hydrogen goes into a black hole... you get perfectly efficient mass to energy conversion.
Ships don't always move at (near) lightspeed of course. When in orbit or scanning some nebula the Bussard collectors can do their thing unhindered. Maybe they only need to collect stuff at full power for a short time to get enough fuel to last them a few weeks.
Basically if you read the tech manuals and series bibles, the idea is they are always going, just scooping away and collecting what interstellar hydrogen they can. That hydrogen gets stored as slush deuterium....somehow, for use in the impulse drives and fusion reactors, and in the warp core. Unlike the original theory, the ramscoops are not directly linked to any given engine....it's purely for fuel gathering.
I always thought the "navigational deflectors" are just "the Shields", but on a much lower power setting. When I first heard of the "radar dish" thingy, it was called "primary sensor." Which makes sense, as a device that transmits and receives signals _could_ be rigged up as a potential ionizing modulator that can ignite dust clouds iiiiin spaaaaace.
It's really interesting how the concept of Bussard ram scoops has changed since Star Trek started using them. I'm not an expert by any means, just someone who was curious enough to google it a little. But the concept has gone through a lot of different designs and iterations over the years. The original design by Robert Bussard has largely fallen out of favor and probably wouldn't work. Turns out that hydrogen fusion is extraordinarily difficult and damn near impossible to do reliably. The drag caused by the ram scoop pushing its way through the interstellar medium would most likely exceed the thrust that the fusion rocket could produce. So it would slow the ship down rather than speed it up it. BUT that's not necessarily a bad thing. It can actually be very useful. Normally if you want to slow down in space you'd have to burn a rocket engine and expend propellant. But if you have a ram scoop then you can slow down without expending any propellant. You can even GAIN some to burn later. It'll be a very gradual deceleration because of how diffuse the interstellar medium is. But if you have enough time to do it then that can be an extremely valuable tool to have in space.
The Miranda class (ie, the USS Reliant) was not equipped with a navigational deflector. It kept its combat shielding active at 1/4-power while in motion. Other classes may have used the same adaptation. At least some of the TOS crowd envisioned the warp nacelles as some kind of gigantic direct-thrust rocket engines rather than field generators. At one point Kirk tells Scotty to jettison them if necessary to keep the ship from losing orbit. Definitely unclear on the concept. I've always thought the navigational deflector should instead be an attractor, sweeping dust, sand, and rocks together and pulverizing them for fuel (base matter for the warp engines). Kind of like the Planet-Killer, but with no antiproton beam and a helluva lot less of an appetite. In fact, have one of those at the front of each nacelle, then put the Bussard Collector where the navigational deflector usually sits to collect gas to fuel the impulse engines.
The Miranda class stopped working for me not long after I walked out of the theater. It looks enough like the Enterprise that it is unmistakable as another Federation vessel yet different enough that it isn't confused. It worked perfectly. Once you start to ponder how it is supposed to work coming from the same engineering works. The circle I've never been able to square is that the original Enterprise's main hull appears to be a fully atmospheric landing ship, that docks to a faster than light engineering hull. The Reliant is a ship that started out like the Enterprise, but had far more work done to make sure it did not retain any atmospheric capability.
The Enterprise blueprints did depict a set of telescoping landing legs, but made clear they were for emergency use only. The saucer was meant to be explosively jettisoned and used as a shelter for the crew if the warp drive ever went critical. But I see what you mean. Without the rest of the ship it could be easily mistaken for the ship from Forbidden Planet (and was inspired by it, I'm told), which certainly could land and take off again. I just wish the bridge wasn't a totally exposed surface module. It seems an absurd vulnerability for a ship frequently engaged in space combat.
@@TheDetailsMatter When the Enterprise model was finalized, they still hadn't written the scripts. Much of the operation of the vessel was locked up in Matt Jefferies' imagination. What we can tell by the drawings he left behind is that the Enterprise evolved from a flying saucer. The main interstellar engine was going to be placed in the conical section on the underside of the saucer. Gene Roddenberry insisted that the Enterprise not be a "flying saucer," but Jefferies kept the saucer, only adding on another hull for the FTL engines. The funny thing about the design is that the saucer shaped as a nozzle thrusting downward. Whether intended or not, the saucer actually has a shape that suggests a mechanical purpose. Look up laser propulsion. The enterprise saucer is shaped exactly like the projectiles, only flattened, and is missing vents.
Never quite got how the deflector could be used as a superweapon, able to channel immense power from the ship into powerful blasts. Considering this is not the intended function. Other than that: holograms, Messing with temporal effects, Energy exhaust port, create wormholes, project false radar signatures, and improve transporter functionality.
In a three dimensional volume your ram scoops don't need to be at the leading edge of your ship. It's not an airplane. As long as they have line of sight, they work. Which is my big gripe with the Ambassador class design. It's bussards are at the same level as the primary hull, the sausage section if you will, so they don't have a clear line of sight. A deflector is a massive particle projector. What it functions as depends on the particles generated and projected through it. I think of it like using a jet engine as a leaf blower. If all it's using is compressed air, it blows leaves, and possibly houses away. If you start putting combustible fuels into it, it becomes a flame thrower. Put uranium powder in it, it becomes a radioactive material blower. Given how much control they have with manipulating particles i don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the deflector and the bussards could operate together to funnel hydrogen into the latter, but most starships use deuterium and antimatter to generate power for their propulsion and route it through a mineral that resonates with subspace to generate a warping effect on spacetime. So I don't know why they need it. There are some ships in the franchise that do without them. So they may not be absolutely required and serve some other function.
Hydrogen is used for impulse engines and Deuterium is a form of Hydrogen. Specifically it is a hydrogen atom with a neutron. This is why it is one of the fuels for nuclear fusion.
As for the Bussard Collectors... In theory the Ambassador class, given it uses the same type of collectors as the Galaxy class, can alter the collection zone. It just needs a clear line of sight to the red dome.
@@JTMC93 Again you already have a supply on board, you don't NEED a collector, unless they use them as a means of refueling when there is no support infrastructure, then it makes sense.
@@Lukos0036 That is the main use. That and to reduce the need for having to constantly bring more fuel to the ships. It helps reduce the amount of times they would need to stop and resupply.
I suppose you could tune the deflector to shove stuff away from the delicate bits and toward the collector field…. Still doesn’t make sense that those wouldn’t be in front though.
Well, if we are talking about the "navigational deflectors" and the original intent, I think in the original pilot, a damn radio signal, caused a red alert for passing through all the defenses. So, the dish was clearly originally intended for solid objects, not gases or even radio waves.
StarTrek ship design are inspired by UFO sightings, which report flying saucers, cigar shapes, and strange lights. The designers just took all this, stuck it together and called it a spaceship.
The warp engines don’t make much sense but they’re kinda elegant in a way. At least it’s not like the remakes where the nacelles actually produce thrust. Which is a whole different kind of fuckery. I always interpreted that the deflector just moves shit out of the immediate way of the ship, so like gasses wind run into the hull, but the scoops can still suck it up as it passes by idk
Would not the Bussard collectors be nice to be used to refill hydrogen at the next gas/ice giant at slow speed to fill normal storage tanks. Not in the way a Bussard ramjet actually works, but that contraption might be capable of using it as such, not that it would be a good idea or safe for the ship. After all, as I understand it, normally they get all their power from fusion reactors which are plastered all over the ship those need some hydrogen to work.
Well, now I have a rough re-design in my head.... May fix all issues with the ships of that universe without introducing new technology. Is there a safety reason the engines are so removed from the main body?
@@ZM1306 Sort of. There used to be a design constraint for TOS that stated that nacelles have to have line of sight on each other to function properly. Additionally, the nacelles themselves used to be the actual warp generators, before the whole "intermix chamber" thing took over. Of course, both of those details have been tossed out the airlock over the years.
@@SacredCowShipyards So if I want my re-design to lean towards. The original series I should follow the old ideas... Or the best would be to look into the changes and see what makes more sense.
There is some in universe logic to the warp engines and how they are placed. The engines need to be in pairs for stabilizing the warp field, and the ship in the warp bubble. One can be done for smaller ships. Might limit the speed as well. That little blue disk you see on top of the ship is also a stabilizing devise. The nacelles have to be in line with each other with out obstruction there is an energy field that passes between the engines because warp stuff. Teh big disk is not really the navigational deflector. It's the main communications, dish. The main sensors are in the ventral dome under the saucer. which later on is the berth for the captains yacht. Which is never used. The navigational deflectors are spaced around the ship. The boxy nodes to either side, and above and below the dish are the deflectors. As well as the three circular lights on the front rim of the TOS saucer are also deflectors. However by the time the TOS movies came out common knowledge of the fans along with misconceptions in supplemental art in books. Some inconsistencies in writing in the series, made the dish the deflector. By the time TNG came it became canon. Unless of course I am suffering from a mandela effect.
My understanding is those are the emitters while the dish serves as both a communications system but also generates a signal that is tied to the Deflector shields. By the time of TNG the dish was no longer needed save for the deflector shields and the technology is refined for it.
On the defiant I've seen that listed as a phaser Cannon and a torpedo launcher. And I'm still not entirely convinced that they're even is a docking port at the front
Ram scoops are how the ship fuels itself. They take in deuterium, an isotope of Hydrogen. That's shunted into a storage tank that then feeds the matter/anti-matter warp core that generates warp plasma through a matter-antimatter reaction in a dilithium crystal, then shunted into the warp nacelles that generates the field that warps space-time. There are literal tech manuals written on the subject. I was a submariner. And just like I could pass a qual board on one, I could pass a qual board for a Trek starship. I actually explained warp theory to a radioman on watch, drawing side by side how a nuclear reactor worked compared to a starship's engine. Yes, I am that much of a nerd.
Using deuterium seems like a bad choice There's less than 25 atoms of deuterium to every million atoms of regular hydrogen in interstellar space At one atom per four cubic metres, that's only about 1 atom of deuterium in 160,000m³ Even if deuterium was 1000x more efficient than hydrogen as a fuel (it isn't) it's still seems silly to use it and not the far more abundant and obvious option
My understanding is they take in hydrogen, which then is converted to deuterium and stored with the rest of the slush deuterium in the main holding tank. The antimatter is held in separate pods to minimize the likelihood of an unintentional interaction which of course, would be very bad.
FWIW: I always figured the Bussard ram scoop concept was designed into the Enterprise even during the original series. HOWEVER, since some of the viewing audience -- and ESPECIALLY pretty much EVERY SINGLE TELEVISION NETWORK EXECUTIVE that has existed from the 1960s until today -- might be COMPLETELY CLUELESS on the concept, it was never discussed. I have worked in aviation for several years. I STILL read comments online occasionally from people that have ABSOLUTELY NO CONCEPT of how aircraft work. Not even the basics.
A thought occurs. If you know how fast the interstellar medium is moving relative to you... And you know the mass of hydrogen/helium... Could you configure the two fields to work as a mass spectrometer - funneling all the good hydrogen and helium to collection points/areas - and discarding the junk harmlessly past the ship...?
It seems pretty simple honestly. The navigational deflectors deflect basically just the cross section of the ship. Presumably with some extra margin for safety, but not much more. The scoops are extending out *hundreds of km* if they want to be any use at all (which...even then probably useless for the Federation, but whatever). And there's no real reason for them to be narrow cone much, so anything nudged aside by the deflector will still be caught in the bussard collectors if wanted, and anything further out will be coming in behind the curve of the saucer section. The *BIGGER* question, is why these bussard collectors are often *right behind* the impulse (I.E. *fast stuff coming out the back*) engines.
I just want you to know that since I’m poor I can only support creators by watching adds Becuase if you skip them, well yeah. I had to listen to some bright cheery bloke tell me about pelvic floor muscles and erections for two minutes. I appreciate your content enough to listen that. Carry on.
IIRC, The failure of the Bussard Ram Scoops is not calculating the atmospheric drag of interstellar hydrogen. Fusion drive is a net energy plus to the system but the drag significantly reduces its effectiveness. Though interstellar medium is mostly vacuum, the immensity of the magnetic field needed to pull in enough hydrogen to continually feed the fusion reactor AND power the scoop's magnetic field makes the system much less practical.
If the Ram Scoops are using the space-warping capabilities of the nacelles as the funnel, then it at least _vaguely_ makes sense. It would be designed to make use of the existing hardware, rather then redundancy, which would fit with Starfleet's questionable design philosophy. It would also explain why we usually see them used when the ship is moving slowly or stationary. The deflector dish's capabilities are absurd and used as a plot-device far to much, but at least it makes sense for Starfleet ships to have massively overbuilt protection against the 'environment' when almost every ship in the fleet has investigating dangerous anomalies as part of their design specifications. Getting right up in there is SOP for Starfleet, and having oversized deflector dishes makes sense for that goal. The placement's still garbage. Granted, some replicated probes would likely do the job just as well and without all the ensigns dying, but that's Starfleet for you.
Well the probes could do it but it would make it easier if the ship could at least approach the anomoly to give the probe less room for error on approach to the hazard and closer coms range to relay data.
honestly if you fear space junk you should be using the ram scoop to gather it up and use it for something useful. Not be trying to deflect it at all of you are going to have a ram scoop.
1) the reliant (miranda class doesnt have it 2) they above or below the saucer, probably a good spot while in forward motion. Makes the original tos weathering make sense 3)if it works in tandem, seems reasonable the deflector dish has some kind of trageting capability vs pushing all usefull fuel 4) the bussards seem most usable slow and in nebulas
Something which has annoyed me for a long time is that the Bussard Ramscoops, from TOS to VOY, have always been red(dish) -- except for the period of movies 1-6, when they were blue. I guess they were trying a new technology or technique which didn't work?
I had to go back and check that. Well spotted. However, it turns out that the Enterprise-B, a modified Excelsior class, DID have (blue) ramscoops. How odd.
@@SacredCowShipyards Guess if transwarp worked, they wouldn't be away from a base long enough to need to worry about running out of gas. Or the Federation of that time had so many bases in so many systems that it was thought even an explorer wouldn't run the risk of being stranded anywhere far from home, as we saw multiple classes of ship during this time period go without as well. Also without the big navigational deflector dish as well, for what that's worth.
No, it makes sense... kinda. Think about it, the shield just keeps the stuff away from the bow/front from the side, if the rams scoop what was pushed to the side, there is no issue. You said it yourself, the Bussard rams use force fields that extend, means they can easily extend to the side and scoop in what the shields pushed to the side out of the way of the ship.
WOW!!!! Another great, entertaining, and thought-provoking video! As a Star Trek fan, I will admit that I've never given much thought to how the Enterprise (and all Starfleet vessels) operates in a counterproductive manner with the navigational deflector dish pushing obstacles out of the way and the bussard ram scoops pulling obstacles inside the starship/s. It is definitely a retarded way to design and build a starship! LOL! Come to think of it, one thing that I've always wondered about is why didn't the starship designers place the navigational deflector dish at the very front tip of the saucer section like in the tv show, "Star Trek: Enterprise"? Wouldn't it make more sense to place it on the front tip of the saucer section instead of the secondary hull?
I don't think you've thought your video through. A Bussard Ramjet works great below light speed. A Bussard collector might be nice for a ship to collect fuel if it gets stranded in the middle of nowhere and needs to keep the fusion reactors/life support running. Above light speed, a spec of dust hitting your ship could turn it into Swiss cheese due to inertia. A deflector makes sense. Under the saucer at sonic speeds makes little sense; but at light speed it'd have to shoot so far ahead of the ship, the saucer may as well be a tiny lip; it'd make no real difference. Might also help to have the high power deflector next to the ships power plant (warp reactor). And as for the collectors being behind the impulse engine... the engine that spews out gases; collecting anything still usable might be nice. And putting the field generating collector on the field generating engine might help.
At any appreciable percentage of c, a speck of dust is still going to punch right through the hull of your ship. Even at sublight speeds, the navigational deflector is still essential. The TNG tech manual goes into detail of how this works; the warp field and navigational deflector have "windows" in their fields to allow the hydrogen through so the ramscoops can collect it. How it only allows hydrogen and not debris that can damage the ship is anybody's guess but that's part of the "fantasy" part of Star Trek you kinda just have to handwave away.
Long time ago I thought the scoop of the D was the deflector area. It would make more sense in truth, kind of like the air intake under the cockpit of an F-16. The red thingie in the nacelle I thought was what projected a singularity in front of the ship and then pulled it as it went along space and made the warp happen. Oh well, I didn't even understand english that well back then,but to me that is what I understood from the show lazy explanations and the language barrier for me at the time.
The best ever feature of the enterprise is the Dolphins quarters. Yep, Dolphins, Look it up. They were the specialist navigators and had their own section of the ship (cetacean ops)
At least starfleet learned from that whole whale "issue" lol
I read that book.
That makes no sense. Why put dolphins through all that training when you could just do it with humans, who are way smarter and don't need onboard swimming pools?
@@codymartinson9518 It wasn't an Earth dolphin. It was a cetacean from another world that was fully sentient.
Yeah that was a good one. Especially the hints that the Borg were responsible for damaging the Probe,
From the rare episodes when they were mentioned in TNG I always had the Impression the scoops weren't necessary for the continuing operation of the ship but rather a tool that sat idle until needed to collect various particles for whatever plot reason they added in that weeks episode
Yes. I believe the technical manual actually says the scoops are an emergency backup and that the ships have fuel tanks that are refilled at Starbase. At least, the antimatter has to be refueled.
that kinda describes everything in trek LOL.
The only time I genuinely remember them at all is from the Riker Maneuver (not the one over a chair, the other one) from Insurrection
I always thought they were meant to keep their propellant tanks topped up, definitely something that would be great for a five year journey, but also great for any ship to not have to worry about running out of propellant unless in some extreme circumstances
@@347Jimmy they were also used in the episode the Pakled were introduced- when they kidnapped LaForge.
You just reroute power to the turbo encabulator and repolarize the tetryon grid to 1.2776 jiggahertz. Then you
energize the plotanium relays to the heizenberg compensator. Eazy peazy lemon squeezy.
P.S. Reionize the dingle arm before all of this or you risk a warp core implosion.
BUT BEFORE ALL THAT.... pray to the OMNISIAH and poor holy explodium on the Dash Board.
1.2776? How do you avoid tachyon resonance in the matter / antimatter photon deioniser?
@@benholroyd5221 don’t forget you also have to take into account the quantum resonance of the isolinear chips…those bastards always demagnetize before the coulomb bubble degrades to the point of event horizon.
@@Gillymonster18 but as you approach the farrier limit, the stocastic matrix inverts the Ferrum calceus, resulting in an equinite canter.
"I like science fiction more than fantasy because in a fantasy story you have someone recite some magic spell in order to fix the problem. In science fiction you have to work things out..."
"Like re-phasing the tachyon modulation to 47.994?"
According to the TNG Tech Manual, the 2 work in tangent, so the deflect deflects particles the collectors want toward the collector and then allows said particles to get past it so the collectors can scoop them up.
In _tandem._
@@deusexaethera no, the nav def forms a circle and the scoops make a line that only touches said circle at one point /j
@@gearandalthefirst7027 Irrelevant. The deflector dish can (and has to if you think about it) aim its Treknobabble deflection beams, and is pre-programmed to have tuned "slots" to channel hydrogen through to the collectors.
Yeah, I said Treknobabble because that's what it is. But hey, if you have magic deflectors, what's the problem?
Regarding TOS "string computers": It's important to remember that in the early 1960s, circuit boards had only been invented 20 years prior, and almost nobody had seen one firsthand. Even the Apollo computers were built from components directly wired together and then encased in epoxy for vibration-resistance -- and the RAM they used was literally made of woven copper wires.
Yes, that's how new computer technology actually is. Almost every single component in your phone didn't exist when your parents were children. That is astoundingly unusual for technology of any kind.
The epoxy wasn't only for vibration. After the fire that killed an entire crew was identified as being caused by condensation, they encased it to prevent further incidents.
@@dagoonite still had the issue of graphite from pencils getting in the boards and causing fire. in addition to getting into the eyes which is not good in space. hence why grease pens were used until a company invented an ink pen that could work in zero g. the russians btw bought these pens they were better then grease pens. zero or low and well high gravity presents a whole lots of issues that one doesn't think is problem but actually is
@@toomanyaccounts I've been doing research for a hard SF story in space, and I'm learning so many problems caused by microgravity that could be cool plot points that SF just glosses over.
STONE KNIVES AND BEAR SKINS.
@@IronWarhorsesFun By a vacuum pump, a microwave, an inkjet printer, some overhead transparencies, spin coaters, photoresist and a bunch of lenses and you too can make integrated circuits, with metal and semiconductors of microscopic scale, nothing compared to what we currently can do, but for far less startup cost than a car, you can make chips that are better than anything made 50 years ago.
"We can send a nadion pulse through the navigation deflector!"
"Wait, that's how phasers work. Why are we not using the purpose-built hardware?"
No no, it's okay
The phaser strips are for continuous beams of nadions
We're gonna use the deflector like a pulsed phase cannon from ENT
Which, being over a century obsolete, should be doable with any random bit of equipment
🤷♂️
Also hardware built to withstand the stresses of firing said nadions (which aren't selective about what they ablate) instead of the deflector, which clearly isn't and will be damaged by doing so....
It's like having a perfectly good rifle then saying "Nah, I think I'll fire my 5.56 round out of this metal pipe and call it a day." and hope it doesn't blow up on you in the process, removing your digits.
Doesn't the main deflector have more power than any phaser strip?
@@DIEGhostfish Especially when the deflector is sitting almost right in front of the warp core. The deflector likely has the shortest power feed from the warp core, which also ideally makes for the most capacious power feed. IOW, the deflector can get more power, faster from the warp core than the more remotely located phasers can, and the shorter power transfer distance means fewer things are likely to go wrong... or get shot in battle.
I've loved this paradox since reading about the technologies in the Star Trek Technology manuals. They are a wonderful rabbit hole of contradictory technobabble and yet they become even more fun when you pick them apart. You do it brilliantly.
The navigational deflector BS that appeared in TNG was always so enjoyable.
It can do ALL THE THINGS.
Swiss army deflector when?
Remember, when all else fails, reverse the polarity of the tachyon stream through the main deflector dish. Works every time.
The TOS era Enterprise has separate navigational deflectors noted as bumps on the sides and bottom of the Big Gold Dish which was the main sensor and communication array. TNG apparently merged the dish and the deflectors.
And I guess the original design of the TOS nacelles were meant to be Bussard ramjets, with open nozzles on the aft of the nacelles.
The Red Dwarf reached lightspeed (somehow) after accelerating for 3 million years using a Bussard ram jet. I think.
Let's talk about what the TMP/TNG era invention of the central intermix chamber/warp core did to confuse the role of the nacelles, and its effect on Bussard-style collecting. In TOS/TAS, and in the tabletop combat simulators that grew out of the original (abandoned and thought to be never revisited) Star Trek i.p., _the nacelles were the reactors, the energy sources._ And you could warp with one completely out of commission. Having dangerous high-energy reaction separated from the habitable sections (and easily ejectable in case of combat damage or malfunction) was good engineering safety, Having the collectors/scoops on the nacelles made sense, because it made use of whatever "real" forward velocity the ship had, and the reactant this gathered was used immediately. Collecting is irregular, based on local stellar density, so the flow would have to be evened out from supply stored on ship for optimal "combustion". I see this as a major, ongoing task for starship power engineering. What happens to that same hydrogen, now that the warp core is the generation facility, and by the way ejectable in case of mishap, and the nacelles are now just the load? After collection, it has to be piped past the first set of warp coils, make a 90-degree turn (losing most of its velocity benefit), get sent down the pylon, make a 45-degree turn (on Connies at least), get piped to the intermix/warp core, then have the "warp plasma" (combustion product after interaction with dilithium) piped back UP the pylon to be washed over the warp coils to make them do their thing. That's a lot of magnetically shielded piping for a double handful of molecules! There's a lot more I could go into here, maybe you could pick up the thought?
Might be worth exploring in a later episode.
@@SacredCowShipyards Also, the Bussard collectors weren't given that name until late in TOS, and justified by someone pointing out that the Enterprise was supposed to be on its own for five years at a time and couldn't expect to run into a tanker when it needed one. Originally they were just blinky lights intended to look cool because they couldn't figure out what else to put on the front ends of the nacelles.
Also also, the Bussard Ramjet turned out to be a theoretical mistake- even assuming 100% efficient fusion, you can't get enough energy to keep it moving because gathering hydrogen induces drag on the vehicle, more than you can compensate for in generated thrust. It is however being considered as a *brake* for future interstellar vehicles under real-world consideration.
Isn't the Bussard fusion stuff meant to just run the backup supply rather than merely gathering atoms to toss against the antimatter in the core?
@@DIEGhostfish ST is terribly inconsistent on details like that.
@@SacredCowShipyards The majority consensus, though, is that they're for emergency refueling. Voyager, for example, thanks to her Bussards, was never in any danger of running out of fuel. If she got low, she could just park near a particularly loud star and eat the solar wind for a few days/weeks. To fill up on antimatter, she'd need to collect enough hydrogen to fill her dueterium tanks ten times over, but eventually fill up she would. (though, nibbling on a gas giant might be faster.)
In Star Trek (TOS) the third season, the "domes, or blisters, or shapes" are blue, with white spots rotating in them. I liked it, so it was changed.
In theory you could shape the deflector field to funnel the gas toward the scoops.
I have to give the OG series a pass because the physics just wasn't there. Not so much in the later series though. They could have made some changes to the later ships, spent a little bit of time explaining the changes, and the fans would have been fine with it. When you look at a few of the designs that have warp nacelles attached directly to the saucer, they actually look like they make sense. If something begins to go south in Engineering, you can jettison the nacelle instead of breaking the ship in half.
if you go back through the Original production you find that the interest in it got the science via fans. Roddenberry made a pilot and wanted to have a communist utopia in space, but the producers wanted a western. some of the staff made changes that lead to the equality and other things that seem socially advanced even today. fans back then would write scripts and send them in, and the better ones were used to make episodes. some of the fans were scientists or were very interested in science and introduced very advanced concepts in easy to understand terms. later on when these things were built upon things get a bit crazy since non of the full time staff were big on science. by the time TNG rolled around things were a bit more set in stone, and the changes we see were the production staff, producers, writers, actors, and directors.
Science Time: Bussard Ramjets would actually use lazers to ionized hydrogen so it can be collected by the magnetic field (neutral particles wouldn't be affected). So, perhaps the deflector ionizes the interstellar gases it hits so they can be collected by the ramjets' magnetic fields.
But, this would still need a way to make sure the hydrogen isn't kicked away while large debris is.
The funniest thing about the placement of the ramscoops is that they need to move all that hydrogen back up through the ship because the impulse engines are on/near the saucer section.
if you are talking about TNG the saucer had impulse engines but they weren't the main impulse they where for just the saucer and not as powerful . As far as TOS i couldn't tell you .
@@anonymousgeorge8317 There were three impulse engines on the Galaxy class. Two on the saucer, and the main impulse engine on the stardrive. That's why I said "on/near the saucer section" because the main impulse drive is near the point of separation. The gathered hydrogen would need to travel from the front of the nacelles through the entire stardrive section to reach the main engine.
It still makes more sense than the spore drive...
Bussard Ramjets: The Pac-Men of interstellar space.
Personally, they just need to have functions switched. The domes would make for paired field emitter covers/lenses, and the dish would make sense as scoop projector more, both in placement and design of function, not to mention its forward project arc of same dish would make more sense to reach past a field projected for the nacelles. Also, everything collected would go straight to cannon engineering and all allow sorting/refining to be housed there.
Here's a tangentially-related tidbit you might enjoy: according to Gene's original concept, the warp nacelles exert forces on each other, pushing the rest of the ship out forward ("like a grape")... which then pulls the nacelles along... creating infinite reactionless motion. In other words, Federation ships are propelled by troll physics.
What really always bothered me a bit about the Bussard collectors being part of the propulsion system, even as an emergency measure, is that the Warp drive doesn't use propellant, and after it reacts the N kilograms of anti-matter with the N kilograms of matter it has in its fuel tanks, additional matter sucked up from the interstellar void isn't going to help any.
Perhaps you could say the additional mass is used to replace the fuel expended in the impulse engines to make orbital maneuvers.
Only Andrew Probert knows for sure.
The way nacelles, bussards and warp drives are "supposed to" work in star trek, the only ship that really makes sense is the original romulan warbird, with the nacelles and the romulan version of bussards above and ahead of the main hull.
The TNG Tech manual on pages 70-71 (yes I'm that big a geek) actually breaks down how it works with the warp field. It is however silent on any interference from the deflector dish.
My knee-jerk reaction [without resorting to my non-existent Ph.D. in physics] is to wave my hands and say that the 'navigational deflectors' shove aside anything that is a liquid or solid...leaving plasmas and gasses. Then the 'Bussard ramscoops' pick up whatever is left.
Yeah - that sounds plausible enough...let's go with that.
if you ever thumbed through the technical manual the deuterium tanks are actually way down in the secondary hull, so you have to run pipes down the nacelles and down the pylons to get the fuel to the tanks. then you convert some of that to antimatter. and then funnel the resulting fuel into the warp core, where more magic happens, then the resulting plasma (and matter antimatter reactions do not create plasma, just gamma rays and other high energy photons) is pumped back up the nacelles to get used to make warp bubbles happen. it unravels more if you poke at it.
The Bridges being on top of the ships never made sense to me. I always thought the bridge should be in the center of the ship, in the most protected part of the ship.
Ships today put their bridge at the very top and almost dead center of the ship as possible, so I don't see an issue.
@@cujoedaman Yes, but that's the navigation bridge, and as a holdover to tradition before the days of GPS and radar for navigation. These days, there is no reason for a big, exposed navigation bridge except as a backup to better, more modern systems for navigating.
During combat, you have your most important people and systems behind the armor of the ship, and in the CIC where all the ship's systems route to for readouts on what's going on, where the enemy is, the ability to target and fire weapons....you lose your navigation bridge, oh well...you've lost a few sailors and the big windows to look out of, but the ship is 100% still combat effective and can still steer and fight.
Star Trek is pretty clear that the bridge is the nerve center, and even when there was the "battle bridge", a decent analogue to the CIC of modern day naval vessels, buried in the neck behind decks and armor, we don't see the staff go use that bridge during combat EXCEPT when they separate the ship, which then puts that bridge ON THE TOP AGAIN.
Ultimately, it's clearly a holdover to naval tradition even if it makes no sense for even the current day Navy, which does not put any critical systems and people on that exposed bridge during combat situations.
@@cujoedaman If you were in a space battle, would you rather be at the very front of your ship, the place where all of the very fast explodey things are going to make their first impact, or in the center, encased on all sides by layers upon layers of protection?
@@eatingtheleaf4659 Wherever the plot armor is thickest.
@@cujoedaman Lmao ok, but do you see my point?
Because I'm a total geek:
The glowy part at the front isn't the actual collector. It's an "ionizing beam emitter" that's supposed to "impart a charge to neutral particles in space for collection by the magnetic field." The actual intakes are the vents on the side just behind the emitters, and the system pulls in particles from the sides at an angle.
As for the rest, "At sublight velocities, the [magnetic field generator / collector (MFG/C)] coils sweep forward normally. At warp velocities, however, the coil operation is reversed to /slow down/ the incoming matter. This system works in close connection with the main navigational deflector. In normal operation, of course, the job of the deflector is to /prevent/ any interstellar material from contacting the ship. Small field "holes" are manipulated by the deflector and MFG/C to permit usable amounts of rarified gas through."
(Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, pp. 70-71)
On the one hand, this is what I get for not reading the manual.
On the other hand, the manual is bullshit.
Like I said, inside of the warp bubble surrounding the ship, there is no "incoming matter". Space moves around the bubble.
But, beyond that, as expected, they can "modulate the deflector emitters" to let the bussard scoops do what they do, because Star Trek is magic.
@@SacredCowShipyards yep and cave man would look at us and day clown magic.
I always imagined the bussard collectors are not working most of the time, as the only time we see them actually taking on things is when the ships actually stop in a nebula or something to purposefully take on gasses. I mean, the whole plotline of ST:Voyager revolves around them constantly looking for fuel.
So if that were the case then it's not actually completely nonfunctional.
Oh, the concept of Bussard scoops makes perfect sense, and should work just fine. It's just that most scoops use the forward motion of the ship to do the scooping, while Starfleet vessels are also configured to sweep stuff out of their way as they move forward.
Sooooo...
@@SacredCowShipyards Yeah, but like I said, we usually only see them working in nebulas and such when the ship is going really slow, so I like to think of it such that the deflector is on and the scoops are off most of the time, but when they specifically want to use the scoops they slow down to a safer speed and turn the deflector off, or at least lower its power to emit a smaller cone.
@@DAKOTA56777 If nebulae were... uniform, and always gaseous, that would be a... safe thing to do. Now Star Trek / Starfleet never talks about the granularity of their sensors and this, that, and the blessed other, but, still.
Just find a way to process interstellar debris through your ramscoops at subwarp, and, then, well, like I said - you don't really need a navigational deflector /at/ warp, so... confused.
I thought it was that all the space gas and dust was deflected into the bussard scoops.
The ultimate problem with all the technobabble in star-trek is that it is an afterthought. This is why warp numbers don't ever equal the same speed (or even sequential speeds...)
Ships in Star Trek are shaped the way they are for visual appeal, and they do the things they do for plot satisfaction. The "cannon" technobabble was all worked in as a response to the fanbase developing their own technohypothesies, so naturally none of it is consistent or makes sense because the actual capabilities and visual aesthetics of the ships (which came first) are not consistent with one another.
Once Roddenberry and... one of the art guys whose name I never remember realized what they'd created, there was an attempt made at putting together a coherent "look", at the very least.
... and then later iterations ignored that standard as much as possible.
@@SacredCowShipyards speaking of Rodenberry: Andromeda Ascendent when?
So. Much. Magic.
@@SacredCowShipyards Rommie is pretty badass though. And Lexa Doig is positively smoking.
Navigational deflector blocks everything and bussard collectors punch a hole on each side in the block for select gases. The structural issues you say with them being in a wrong place are just stylistic assholery decided by the admiralty. Or not.
It's easy to parse the dichotomy of the Nav Deflector and the Ramscoop.
_Computer Automation_
See, the problem with being confused by these two seemingly mutually exclusive systems is treating them like they are big, static, field generators al-la huge electro-magnets, when really you need to look at them like big phased-array radars. If they were both just big static magnetic/gravity field projectors, yes, you wonder how you get through the 'push' shell to work with the 'pull' cone.
But with proper computer control, and fine granularity in the emitters, the navigational deflector can be tied to sensors and be used to actively sweep and channel matter in front of the ship as it moves. Micrometeoroid? Swat it aside with the deflector beam itself, then open a gap for some slightly higher density hydrogen as the ship passes through a heliopause. Close ranks to pass through interstellar dust and filter hydrogen as you clear it. Like the controls of a fly-by-wire fighter jet, the computer will be sorting out the hazards well ahead of the ship thousands of times a second. Why else would these starships need such absurd computing power to navigate? It's not like floating in the void is a computationally expensive operation by itself. Even at light speed, there's not much to really think about on a macro scale. But if you approach this from 'computer has to track hundreds of thousands of micro-hazards flying at it at FTL speed and categorize, prioritize, and deal with said hazards in a timely fashion via navigational deflector control', then that computing power starts to make sense.
And if you ask: "What if the sensors are damaged?" Well, you contingent to 'static field' mode. Yes, that cuts off the ramscoops, but if you're sensors are down to the point you can't scan for navigational hazards... Well, that would be like a submarine missing its bow, sonar, it's towed array, and its fathometer. At that point you have bigger problems. I don't think anyone cares if you're trickle-charging the fuel tank successfully when you're running blind and need to make sure you don't ablate the front of the ship off. You're probably trying to get back to a repair dock.
Also consider that with the Ramscoops, the fields they project will also have to _slow down_ the particles being funneled into them. Just like the intakes to a RAMJET engine, the air has to be brought to a reasonable velocity so that combustion can occur and expand the air _BEFORE_ it leaves the back of the engine... But worse since you're bringing the intake to a STOP to throw into a storage tank. As such, you don't want fractional-lightspeed hydrogen particles slamming face-first into your intake maifolds. That would be like _SANDBLASTING_ them, but worse. So you have to consider that the Ramscoop field emitters are likely just has sophisticated and granular as the deflector dish so that it can channel, buffer, condense, and collect the desired gasses of a Starship underway.
Now, when you consider a ship at warp, and the argument of 'the ship isn't moving, space is'. Well, really the Warp Bubble is moving. But what happens to matter at the transition point of the warp field? How is it going to move once it transitions from floating in the void, to inside the ship's warp bubble? Does it bunch up on the leading edge? The ship may not be 'moving' mathematically from point A to point B in space, but that space bubble has to, and there is a LOOOONG line you can draw from point to point in the void where that bubble is going to occupy the same position as any random particles that happen to be there. So where do they go? How do they move? What kind of energy or momentum transfer is imparted on them by the passage of a space-time distortion? Questions for later, but ones that raise one more important point. The Deflector dish and the ramscoops _can't_ work at warp using conventional electromagnetic or gravitational systems. Because those propagate at _light speed_ and the ship's warp bubble is going _FASTER_ than that. So the projectors in turn must ALSO be some variant of sub-space manipulation system that everything else in Star Trek invariably uses. Otherwise, every time you go to warp, the fields just pile up at the front of the warp bubble like sound-waves on a supersonic jet.
Thanks, you said it better than I would have. The one thing that does bug me about the bussards is representing them with a glowing glass bulb. Doesn't quite make sense for an intake, but does look nicer than a big vent. I gotta say overall, when you compare Trek to other sci-fi shows of the time they definitely put more thought into how their fictional tech should work than most. It would have been super easy to just make the 1701 a big chrome rocket ship.
Huh. Thank you for this, actually. I am glad the udek brought up the discussion, because the comment section is pretty much gold thanks to answers like these.
@@MysteriousMose
If you look at the design of most warp nacelles, you may in fact notice that there is a grill-like object just aft of most ramscoops before you get to the main glowing radiation exhaust parts of the nacelle. On Ent-D, it looks like this ring of gold-colored stuff that wraps around the nacelle. That's the intake manifold itself. At least, according to the tech manual.
Honestly, given the particle density of interstellar space, I would expect the size requirements on the intake manifolds to be so small that you don't even have to show them unless you're in mag-boots walking on the nacelles right next to them. I mean, you're not gulping down thousands of liters of gas per second like an air-breathing jet engine, so you don't need a huge intake volume to get the job done. The grill itself probably isn't even vents, but final channeling into the vents.
I would have thought you would have more subs than you do, give it time and I'm sure you will get a lot more, great content.
Up until two weeks ago, I only had about 250 subs.
Things have been... crazy. Thanks, though!
As a fan of star trek (most of it) and Battlestar Galactica (newer version) I've enjoyed this video and the other one I watched on the BSG. I must however defend the design of starfleet ships and technology in general as in the end its purpose is to entertain not be 100% believably functional. Albeit most of the technology in star trek to my knowledge is hypothetically possible and a lot of modern day inventions were inspired by star trek. Sci fi in general always needs to be taken with a grain of salt when viewing it. You've earned a new sub however and I look forward to viewing more of your content.
Should we even touch on the subject that most of everything in nearly ALL sci-fi is moot anyway because ships all move like planes on Earth? You can't have wings and flaps and rudders to steer a ship in space and there is no "going around" something. I mean, it's for the action, I get that, but still...
I always figured they were used the same way they're used in Elite Dangerous where you just activate the scoop when you're cozied up to a star or gas giant to refuel in deep space where there aren't any stations. Or, in this case, to collect anything from hydrogen to deuterium to contrivium, unobtainium or any such other dumb-namium.
You've obviously underestimated the power of gibberish and gobble-di-gook. (This is from a man who still has a first edition Star Trek Technical Manual from his childhood)
The approved term you are looking for sir is "technobabble". The Trek writers coined the term to cover all the SF jargon used to get the characters out of the plot holes the writers put them in when creating the episodes.
Early stages of the scripts would actually have it in place of paragraphs of nonsensical, but scientific sounding words later used to explain what all the blinking lights and buzzing noises on set meant. Followed by everyone crying out in surprise, swaying side to side violently before collapsing to the deck in a shower of foam rocks meant to be debris from exploding control panels.
@@earlware4322 You're right, you have to forgive me, I was only three years old when Star Trek first aired.
When they show them when they were spinning they remind me of the bottom part of the C-57D United Planets Cruiser from Forbidden Planet. You think that could've been where they got their inspiration from?
Roddenberry said upfront in many interviews that Forbidden Planet was one of his design and storytelling touchstones. In fact, the movie sure looks a lot like an extended TOS episode, doesn't it?
The navigational deflector prevents collision with any gas that escapes the scoop, the scoop is a funnel made of the same stuff as the deflector shields, the gas comes in and is compressed by the forward motion of the ship, only touching at the point at which the bussard ramscoops focus it to, which is right in front of the red glowy thing, where it's collected, the navigational deflector is needed to prevent collision with the fast moving gas that isn't captured in the scoop.
It seems that Bussard Ram Scoops only make sense when there is nebula and use to suck gases form that. maybe the ran scoops are there just protect the warp nacelles. that deflects push stuff around the ship and nacelles are in place that it can get it.
Seeing the closeups... what about the window positioning? There are windows on horizontal... or close to horizontal... surfaces of E-D.
I had this idea in high school along with riding a nuclear blast wave. Friends called me a fool. Ten years ago I learned that project Orion existed in the 70s and this also was a thing.
I heard that with the nacelle bubble the poles actually funnel the hydrogen into the nacelles.....and the collecters are there to prevent a build up of hydrogen as the ship flies through at warp
Its a bloody great allegory. "Exploring places they hadn't been" always means "...except for all the people who definitely lived there already but will definitely not be treated like equals and whose culture will definitely be described as primitive or savage."
Yeah.
I have always had problems with the designs of starfleet's ships, 😒 it's nice to know that I'm not alone
4:26 Good grief that meme gave me such a good laugh.
Originally (in the original series) the dish was the main sensor. The three lights on the front of the saucer were the navigational deflectors.
Actually the dome on the bottom of the primary hull was the sensor package.
Best use I've seen of Bussard Ramjets are by Larry Niven (who wrote for star trek) in his Known Space universe by humans before they got FTL drives. The ships were usually interstellar colony ships or freighters and they were big as a result. Unfortunately I don't remember how these things slowed down when they got to the hallway point of their trip because a turn and burn dosen't work on these things or at least it shouldn't.
You can brake using a Bussard Ramscoop. All the gas and dust hitting the field at high speed starts slowing you down, but it takes a *long* time.
@@thebaccathatchews had a feeling it was something like this been a long time since I read the books. Yes, these ships took a long time to get any where. In the books FTL drives schematics were purchased by such a ships crew from some aliens that got curious about them. The first jobs of the first human FTL Ships was to check on all of Earth's extra solar colonies and the ram scoop ships still in transit.
Although the 1st Man-Kzinti war was fought before the humans had FTL. One of the short stories I enjoyed was about an asteroid converted into a ram scoop battle ship that flew through a Kzinti occupied solar system without slowing down just blasting every ship and military installation with kinetic projectiles traveling at almost the speed of light. It then took years if not decades to come back and actually try to retake the system along with other ships launched from the Sol system years after the battleship.
My understanding is the Deflectors and Bussard Collectors use the same technology and are designed to work together if needed. Though usually the Bussard Collectors are used as part of them leaving warp to dissipate the Bow Shock effect of Warp Travel. In Star Trek warp works be shifting the vessel into subspace, at least that was the original description, but it generates a bow shock effect upon exit.
As regards the nav deflector and FTL: if warp drives work by the same principles the alcubierre concept does, while the ship itself may not be moving, the compression pulling the ship forward would still be collecting a metric explosion-ton of matter as it went along. Which would then be released when the warp field was removed.
An FTL drive that explodes both its own ship and its destination when arriving is. Less than ideal, so deflecting that matter out of your path isn't exactly a *bad* idea...
"...navigational deflector dish that is equipped to the front of every single Starfleet vessel known to f-beep-ing human kind."
That is, except for the Miranda Class vessels. Two examples of which are the Reliant of ST2-W.O.K. and Saratoga of ST4-T.V.H.
Although I have seen it argued that the small dome aft of the torpedo launchers on a Miranda Class ship is actually a dorsal deflector.
No, that'd be the two sticky-outy bits on either side of the dorsal saucer, which are itty-bitty ones, along with a few other field shaping bits.
Where does it deflect too? does the Navigational Deflect deflect things to the Ram Scopes?
Bounce the tachyon particle beam
Off the main deflector dish
That's the way we do things, lad
We just make things up as we wish!
I think the BR is meant to explain away the red lights on the front of the warp engines. I always thought those ram scoops were only a supplementary power source. They can't possibly power the warp drive entirely. And the kind of energy requirement needed to use half the equipment on a typical Star Trek ship I doubt a BR could power any of it. I think the main power should strictly come from the warp core. And the kind of steel they're using to construct starships would probably seem magically strong compared to the steel we have today(check out the fancy steel they're developing these days), and yet there probably would be a level of shields(forcefield) active at all times. You'd never know if some space alien ship might come out of warp nearby and right off the bat start blasting your ship for no apparent reason. Of course the deflector dish shouldn't really be in use while at warp. I think that would probably be a good way to pop your warp bubble.
I gotta get a video about the imperial cargo freighter it’s like a pyramid ship but weirder
I justify the deflector and scoops conflict by interpreting the deflector as a selective point system array opposed to an omni directional field shield thingy. That want it can assist with the scoops gathering fuel and not the other stuff.
I don't know when the scoops are supposed to suck everything in because in warp the deflector supposed to protect the ship from collision
Not mentioned on screen but makes some sense to me. The deflectors have to move the stuff in space. So why not some of it is funneled to the scoops?
Not to mention that the drag caused by trying to scoop up and fuse the interstellar hydrogen turns out to be way higher than the thrust that can be produced. The engine doesn't even theoretically work.
If the nav deflector creates a streamlined field (because space aerodynamics?) then that seems like it could be easily designed to allow most of the material deflected away from the ship to then be pulled back from the edge and into the scoop? In *most* cases the Bussard element *is* clear of the forward line of the hull, at least, and you can see them from a forward-on view.
I don't think they were really *intended* to be anything though, originally. Could be wrong.
At high sunlight speeds, hydrogen has another name: Cosmic Rays!
It can get worse. Somewhere on the internet, someone did an external features diagram of the Refit/A, and has those 3 lumps around the deflector dish identified as the collectors.
They aren’t though
They are the deflectors.
Or now that I think of it. Could be the shield projectors. Same with the three circles on the front of the saucer.
Did you know bussard ram-jets don't actually produce thrust, apparently brehmstralung (breaking radiation) creates more drag than is generated by fusing them.
However if the hydrogen goes into a black hole... you get perfectly efficient mass to energy conversion.
Bremstralung is my favorite radiation, and would be a great name for a metal band
Not sure but I don’t recall them being called rams scoops until next gen and always thought they were the part of the warp field emitters
Ships don't always move at (near) lightspeed of course.
When in orbit or scanning some nebula the Bussard collectors can do their thing unhindered.
Maybe they only need to collect stuff at full power for a short time to get enough fuel to last them a few weeks.
Basically if you read the tech manuals and series bibles, the idea is they are always going, just scooping away and collecting what interstellar hydrogen they can. That hydrogen gets stored as slush deuterium....somehow, for use in the impulse drives and fusion reactors, and in the warp core. Unlike the original theory, the ramscoops are not directly linked to any given engine....it's purely for fuel gathering.
I always thought the "navigational deflectors" are just "the Shields", but on a much lower power setting. When I first heard of the "radar dish" thingy, it was called "primary sensor." Which makes sense, as a device that transmits and receives signals _could_ be rigged up as a potential ionizing modulator that can ignite dust clouds iiiiin spaaaaace.
Geeze, & everybody has all kinds of hemorrhoid hemorrhaging over the design of the Steamrunner. Amazing! That class validates this vid 👍👍
It's really interesting how the concept of Bussard ram scoops has changed since Star Trek started using them. I'm not an expert by any means, just someone who was curious enough to google it a little. But the concept has gone through a lot of different designs and iterations over the years. The original design by Robert Bussard has largely fallen out of favor and probably wouldn't work. Turns out that hydrogen fusion is extraordinarily difficult and damn near impossible to do reliably. The drag caused by the ram scoop pushing its way through the interstellar medium would most likely exceed the thrust that the fusion rocket could produce. So it would slow the ship down rather than speed it up it. BUT that's not necessarily a bad thing. It can actually be very useful. Normally if you want to slow down in space you'd have to burn a rocket engine and expend propellant. But if you have a ram scoop then you can slow down without expending any propellant. You can even GAIN some to burn later. It'll be a very gradual deceleration because of how diffuse the interstellar medium is. But if you have enough time to do it then that can be an extremely valuable tool to have in space.
The Miranda class (ie, the USS Reliant) was not equipped with a navigational deflector. It kept its combat shielding active at 1/4-power while in motion. Other classes may have used the same adaptation.
At least some of the TOS crowd envisioned the warp nacelles as some kind of gigantic direct-thrust rocket engines rather than field generators. At one point Kirk tells Scotty to jettison them if necessary to keep the ship from losing orbit. Definitely unclear on the concept.
I've always thought the navigational deflector should instead be an attractor, sweeping dust, sand, and rocks together and pulverizing them for fuel (base matter for the warp engines). Kind of like the Planet-Killer, but with no antiproton beam and a helluva lot less of an appetite. In fact, have one of those at the front of each nacelle, then put the Bussard Collector where the navigational deflector usually sits to collect gas to fuel the impulse engines.
The Miranda class stopped working for me not long after I walked out of the theater. It looks enough like the Enterprise that it is unmistakable as another Federation vessel yet different enough that it isn't confused. It worked perfectly. Once you start to ponder how it is supposed to work coming from the same engineering works.
The circle I've never been able to square is that the original Enterprise's main hull appears to be a fully atmospheric landing ship, that docks to a faster than light engineering hull. The Reliant is a ship that started out like the Enterprise, but had far more work done to make sure it did not retain any atmospheric capability.
The Enterprise blueprints did depict a set of telescoping landing legs, but made clear they were for emergency use only. The saucer was meant to be explosively jettisoned and used as a shelter for the crew if the warp drive ever went critical. But I see what you mean. Without the rest of the ship it could be easily mistaken for the ship from Forbidden Planet (and was inspired by it, I'm told), which certainly could land and take off again.
I just wish the bridge wasn't a totally exposed surface module. It seems an absurd vulnerability for a ship frequently engaged in space combat.
@@TheDetailsMatter When the Enterprise model was finalized, they still hadn't written the scripts. Much of the operation of the vessel was locked up in Matt Jefferies' imagination. What we can tell by the drawings he left behind is that the Enterprise evolved from a flying saucer. The main interstellar engine was going to be placed in the conical section on the underside of the saucer. Gene Roddenberry insisted that the Enterprise not be a "flying saucer," but Jefferies kept the saucer, only adding on another hull for the FTL engines. The funny thing about the design is that the saucer shaped as a nozzle thrusting downward. Whether intended or not, the saucer actually has a shape that suggests a mechanical purpose.
Look up laser propulsion. The enterprise saucer is shaped exactly like the projectiles, only flattened, and is missing vents.
Never quite got how the deflector could be used as a superweapon, able to channel immense power from the ship into powerful blasts.
Considering this is not the intended function.
Other than that: holograms, Messing with temporal effects, Energy exhaust port, create wormholes, project false radar signatures, and improve transporter functionality.
I usually justify the weirdness of the deflector by the fact that its a big dish and you can do whatever you want with it
In a three dimensional volume your ram scoops don't need to be at the leading edge of your ship. It's not an airplane. As long as they have line of sight, they work. Which is my big gripe with the Ambassador class design. It's bussards are at the same level as the primary hull, the sausage section if you will, so they don't have a clear line of sight.
A deflector is a massive particle projector. What it functions as depends on the particles generated and projected through it. I think of it like using a jet engine as a leaf blower. If all it's using is compressed air, it blows leaves, and possibly houses away. If you start putting combustible fuels into it, it becomes a flame thrower. Put uranium powder in it, it becomes a radioactive material blower.
Given how much control they have with manipulating particles i don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the deflector and the bussards could operate together to funnel hydrogen into the latter, but most starships use deuterium and antimatter to generate power for their propulsion and route it through a mineral that resonates with subspace to generate a warping effect on spacetime. So I don't know why they need it. There are some ships in the franchise that do without them. So they may not be absolutely required and serve some other function.
Hydrogen is used for impulse engines and Deuterium is a form of Hydrogen. Specifically it is a hydrogen atom with a neutron. This is why it is one of the fuels for nuclear fusion.
As for the Bussard Collectors... In theory the Ambassador class, given it uses the same type of collectors as the Galaxy class, can alter the collection zone. It just needs a clear line of sight to the red dome.
@@JTMC93 Again you already have a supply on board, you don't NEED a collector, unless they use them as a means of refueling when there is no support infrastructure, then it makes sense.
@@Lukos0036 That is the main use. That and to reduce the need for having to constantly bring more fuel to the ships. It helps reduce the amount of times they would need to stop and resupply.
I suppose you could tune the deflector to shove stuff away from the delicate bits and toward the collector field…. Still doesn’t make sense that those wouldn’t be in front though.
Well, if we are talking about the "navigational deflectors" and the original intent, I think in the original pilot, a damn radio signal, caused a red alert for passing through all the defenses. So, the dish was clearly originally intended for solid objects, not gases or even radio waves.
Well, there's also a difference between navigational deflectors and shields.
You know you're a geek and a nerd when you spend half the time watching this video laughing your ass off.
That's definitely the goal.
When riker does the riker maneuver, dont they open on the front of the saucer?
I always figured that it was pushing things INTO the Ramjets.
StarTrek ship design are inspired by UFO sightings, which report flying saucers, cigar shapes, and strange lights. The designers just took all this, stuck it together and called it a spaceship.
I mean. I always thought the navigational deflector was like radar or for stellar cartogrophy not like to remove obstructions?
The warp engines don’t make much sense but they’re kinda elegant in a way.
At least it’s not like the remakes where the nacelles actually produce thrust. Which is a whole different kind of fuckery.
I always interpreted that the deflector just moves shit out of the immediate way of the ship, so like gasses wind run into the hull, but the scoops can still suck it up as it passes by idk
Would not the Bussard collectors be nice to be used to refill hydrogen at the next gas/ice giant at slow speed to fill normal storage tanks.
Not in the way a Bussard ramjet actually works, but that contraption might be capable of using it as such, not that it would be a good idea or safe for the ship.
After all, as I understand it, normally they get all their power from fusion reactors which are plastered all over the ship those need some hydrogen to work.
Well, now I have a rough re-design in my head....
May fix all issues with the ships of that universe without introducing new technology.
Is there a safety reason the engines are so removed from the main body?
That's... complicated.
@@SacredCowShipyards
So.... Yes?
@@ZM1306 Sort of. There used to be a design constraint for TOS that stated that nacelles have to have line of sight on each other to function properly. Additionally, the nacelles themselves used to be the actual warp generators, before the whole "intermix chamber" thing took over.
Of course, both of those details have been tossed out the airlock over the years.
@@SacredCowShipyards
So if I want my re-design to lean towards. The original series I should follow the old ideas... Or the best would be to look into the changes and see what makes more sense.
There is some in universe logic to the warp engines and how they are placed.
The engines need to be in pairs for stabilizing the warp field, and the ship in the warp bubble. One can be done for smaller ships. Might limit the speed as well.
That little blue disk you see on top of the ship is also a stabilizing devise.
The nacelles have to be in line with each other with out obstruction there is an energy field that passes between the engines because warp stuff.
Teh big disk is not really the navigational deflector. It's the main communications, dish. The main sensors are in the ventral dome under the saucer. which later on is the berth for the captains yacht. Which is never used.
The navigational deflectors are spaced around the ship. The boxy nodes to either side, and above and below the dish are the deflectors. As well as the three circular lights on the front rim of the TOS saucer are also deflectors.
However by the time the TOS movies came out common knowledge of the fans along with misconceptions in supplemental art in books. Some inconsistencies in writing in the series, made the dish the deflector. By the time TNG came it became canon.
Unless of course I am suffering from a mandela effect.
My understanding is those are the emitters while the dish serves as both a communications system but also generates a signal that is tied to the Deflector shields. By the time of TNG the dish was no longer needed save for the deflector shields and the technology is refined for it.
On the defiant I've seen that listed as a phaser Cannon and a torpedo launcher. And I'm still not entirely convinced that they're even is a docking port at the front
Ram scoops are how the ship fuels itself. They take in deuterium, an isotope of Hydrogen. That's shunted into a storage tank that then feeds the matter/anti-matter warp core that generates warp plasma through a matter-antimatter reaction in a dilithium crystal, then shunted into the warp nacelles that generates the field that warps space-time.
There are literal tech manuals written on the subject.
I was a submariner. And just like I could pass a qual board on one, I could pass a qual board for a Trek starship. I actually explained warp theory to a radioman on watch, drawing side by side how a nuclear reactor worked compared to a starship's engine.
Yes, I am that much of a nerd.
Using deuterium seems like a bad choice
There's less than 25 atoms of deuterium to every million atoms of regular hydrogen in interstellar space
At one atom per four cubic metres, that's only about 1 atom of deuterium in 160,000m³
Even if deuterium was 1000x more efficient than hydrogen as a fuel (it isn't) it's still seems silly to use it and not the far more abundant and obvious option
My understanding is they take in hydrogen, which then is converted to deuterium and stored with the rest of the slush deuterium in the main holding tank. The antimatter is held in separate pods to minimize the likelihood of an unintentional interaction which of course, would be very bad.
FWIW: I always figured the Bussard ram scoop concept was designed into the Enterprise even during the original series. HOWEVER, since some of the viewing audience -- and ESPECIALLY pretty much EVERY SINGLE TELEVISION NETWORK EXECUTIVE that has existed from the 1960s until today -- might be COMPLETELY CLUELESS on the concept, it was never discussed.
I have worked in aviation for several years. I STILL read comments online occasionally from people that have ABSOLUTELY NO CONCEPT of how aircraft work. Not even the basics.
Just throw the word Quantum into the terminology for each piece of tech and it just works don’t ya know.
That's kind of the point of quantum mechanics- whether it works or not, you will never be sure. ;>)
Only when you look at it.
A thought occurs.
If you know how fast the interstellar medium is moving relative to you...
And you know the mass of hydrogen/helium...
Could you configure the two fields to work as a mass spectrometer - funneling all the good hydrogen and helium to collection points/areas - and discarding the junk harmlessly past the ship...?
Technically? Yes.
Effectively? Well, naturally, it would be easier to put the collectors in front of the deflectors.
It seems pretty simple honestly. The navigational deflectors deflect basically just the cross section of the ship. Presumably with some extra margin for safety, but not much more.
The scoops are extending out *hundreds of km* if they want to be any use at all (which...even then probably useless for the Federation, but whatever). And there's no real reason for them to be narrow cone much, so anything nudged aside by the deflector will still be caught in the bussard collectors if wanted, and anything further out will be coming in behind the curve of the saucer section.
The *BIGGER* question, is why these bussard collectors are often *right behind* the impulse (I.E. *fast stuff coming out the back*) engines.
I just want you to know that since I’m poor I can only support creators by watching adds Becuase if you skip them, well yeah.
I had to listen to some bright cheery bloke tell me about pelvic floor muscles and erections for two minutes. I appreciate your content enough to listen that.
Carry on.
Your sacrifice has been noted.
I always thought those where reverse impulse engins
IIRC, The failure of the Bussard Ram Scoops is not calculating the atmospheric drag of interstellar hydrogen. Fusion drive is a net energy plus to the system but the drag significantly reduces its effectiveness.
Though interstellar medium is mostly vacuum, the immensity of the magnetic field needed to pull in enough hydrogen to continually feed the fusion reactor AND power the scoop's magnetic field makes the system much less practical.
If the Ram Scoops are using the space-warping capabilities of the nacelles as the funnel, then it at least _vaguely_ makes sense. It would be designed to make use of the existing hardware, rather then redundancy, which would fit with Starfleet's questionable design philosophy. It would also explain why we usually see them used when the ship is moving slowly or stationary.
The deflector dish's capabilities are absurd and used as a plot-device far to much, but at least it makes sense for Starfleet ships to have massively overbuilt protection against the 'environment' when almost every ship in the fleet has investigating dangerous anomalies as part of their design specifications. Getting right up in there is SOP for Starfleet, and having oversized deflector dishes makes sense for that goal. The placement's still garbage.
Granted, some replicated probes would likely do the job just as well and without all the ensigns dying, but that's Starfleet for you.
Well the probes could do it but it would make it easier if the ship could at least approach the anomoly to give the probe less room for error on approach to the hazard and closer coms range to relay data.
honestly if you fear space junk you should be using the ram scoop to gather it up and use it for something useful. Not be trying to deflect it at all of you are going to have a ram scoop.
1) the reliant (miranda class doesnt have it
2) they above or below the saucer, probably a good spot while in forward motion. Makes the original tos weathering make sense
3)if it works in tandem, seems reasonable the deflector dish has some kind of trageting capability vs pushing all usefull fuel
4) the bussards seem most usable slow and in nebulas
It turns out that Robert Bussard HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED, faster than light travel!!
You know that thing on the nose of Red Dwarf? Is that meant to be a Bussard scoop or an asteroid collector, seeing as it's a mining ship?
I always assumed that was some kind of scooping mechanism to gather up smaller rocks / debris and funnel them in for processing.
Something which has annoyed me for a long time is that the Bussard Ramscoops, from TOS to VOY, have always been red(dish) -- except for the period of movies 1-6, when they were blue.
I guess they were trying a new technology or technique which didn't work?
Don't forget the Art Deco era of the Excelsior where ... there didn't appear to /be/ scoops.
I had to go back and check that. Well spotted.
However, it turns out that the Enterprise-B, a modified Excelsior class, DID have (blue) ramscoops. How odd.
@@ErinPalette Maybe they thought the Excelsior with its whiz-bang engine didn't need them, and then realized they were wrong.
@@SacredCowShipyards "Something something transwarp" ?
@@SacredCowShipyards Guess if transwarp worked, they wouldn't be away from a base long enough to need to worry about running out of gas.
Or the Federation of that time had so many bases in so many systems that it was thought even an explorer wouldn't run the risk of being stranded anywhere far from home, as we saw multiple classes of ship during this time period go without as well. Also without the big navigational deflector dish as well, for what that's worth.
No, it makes sense... kinda. Think about it, the shield just keeps the stuff away from the bow/front from the side, if the rams scoop what was pushed to the side, there is no issue.
You said it yourself, the Bussard rams use force fields that extend, means they can easily extend to the side and scoop in what the shields pushed to the side out of the way of the ship.
WOW!!!! Another great, entertaining, and thought-provoking video! As a Star Trek fan, I will admit that I've never given much thought to how the Enterprise (and all Starfleet vessels) operates in a counterproductive manner with the navigational deflector dish pushing obstacles out of the way and the bussard ram scoops pulling obstacles inside the starship/s. It is definitely a retarded way to design and build a starship! LOL! Come to think of it, one thing that I've always wondered about is why didn't the starship designers place the navigational deflector dish at the very front tip of the saucer section like in the tv show, "Star Trek: Enterprise"? Wouldn't it make more sense to place it on the front tip of the saucer section instead of the secondary hull?
I don't think you've thought your video through.
A Bussard Ramjet works great below light speed. A Bussard collector might be nice for a ship to collect fuel if it gets stranded in the middle of nowhere and needs to keep the fusion reactors/life support running.
Above light speed, a spec of dust hitting your ship could turn it into Swiss cheese due to inertia. A deflector makes sense.
Under the saucer at sonic speeds makes little sense; but at light speed it'd have to shoot so far ahead of the ship, the saucer may as well be a tiny lip; it'd make no real difference. Might also help to have the high power deflector next to the ships power plant (warp reactor). And as for the collectors being behind the impulse engine... the engine that spews out gases; collecting anything still usable might be nice. And putting the field generating collector on the field generating engine might help.
At any appreciable percentage of c, a speck of dust is still going to punch right through the hull of your ship. Even at sublight speeds, the navigational deflector is still essential. The TNG tech manual goes into detail of how this works; the warp field and navigational deflector have "windows" in their fields to allow the hydrogen through so the ramscoops can collect it. How it only allows hydrogen and not debris that can damage the ship is anybody's guess but that's part of the "fantasy" part of Star Trek you kinda just have to handwave away.
Long time ago I thought the scoop of the D was the deflector area. It would make more sense in truth, kind of like the air intake under the cockpit of an F-16. The red thingie in the nacelle I thought was what projected a singularity in front of the ship and then pulled it as it went along space and made the warp happen. Oh well, I didn't even understand english that well back then,but to me that is what I understood from the show lazy explanations and the language barrier for me at the time.
Soo why do you ignore the possibility the deflector field is shaped to funnel the particals to the scoops