I like the idea of the "Transwarp" from Star Trek III simply being an improved warp drive that eventually lead starfleet into revising the warp scale from the one used in TOS to the one used in TNG for the sake of simplicity. This would mean that the Excelsior's Transwarp drive actually did work after they repaired the sabotage Scotty inflicted on it, but it was more of an evolutionary improvement than a revolutionary one. This could also be a reason the Excelsior class was used for such a long time while the recently refit Constitutions were mothballed. Maybe it just wasn't possible from an engineering standpoint for the Constitution to be outfitted with the new "Transwarp" drive, while it was possible to upgrade the Miranda.
My head-canon is that it was the thin neck and pylons of the connie that wasn't compatible with the transwarp, hence why miranda and oberth were also used until the late 24th century
@@Mat0llig Could also lead into the reason the Constellation was a 4-nacelle design with such unusual placement. A brute force method to achieve the same effect, perhaps?
i could see the Federation building gravity catapults. They finally had a technology they understood, could build themselves and allowed ships to jump the equivalent of a three year journey. just put them near secured Starbases or planets and you have the relay network from mass effect for rapid transport.
I wish they could’ve built upon the tech that Barkley developed when his brain was overclocked by the Cyphereans. Starfleet ships could then have a man machine interface like the Bentusi from Homeworld.
@@Mat0llig I really like this idea. As a bonus, maybe the new Excelsior "Transwarp" drive didn't need to have the warp coils as isolated from the rest of the ship as much as the TOS warp coils needed to be isolated. This would have meant future designs could be more robust structurally and the shape of the warp field could be made more efficient since the ships were more streamlined.
With the time travelling Borg sphere - the Ttanswarp coil was used by the re-awakened Borg on their captured ship. Not Section 31. If you watched the episoide the scientidt were trying to remoce the core when they hesrd the scream of the scientists and phaser blasts.
The thing is, we see the Federation constantly trying to make it better. The Excelsior/Great-Experiment to create the next step of warp-drive (which in the expanded universe is accredited to the redrawing of the warp-scale from TOS to TNG), the Soliton-wave, Lenara Kahns experiment, Tom Paris experiment.... But something always goes wrong. Either because the calculations were off, it got sabotaged or had unforeseen side-effects.
Actually, the primary reason aerospikes (which are basically just inverted bell nozzles) aren't used isn't anything to do with infrastructure or anything like that. Its simply that aerospikes are harder to cool, and therefore tend to have a higher mass penalty compared to traditional bell nozzles. Honestly, I figured that the Xindi vortex method doesn't get used is because it probably relies on the weirdness of the expanse (it can probably allow travel between the expanse and normal space, but not without at least one endpoint in the expanse), and so simply doesn't work after the spheres are destroyed. And everything else that isn't basically just Q snapping his fingers probably relies on dilithium crystals, so that's out.
Proto warp not only required dilithium, but was extremely dangerous. Just remember how bad it was when it went critical. You don't want to lose half a star system every time one of these gets blown up.
Well, considering Zephram Cochraine didn't even have dillitium, obviously dillitium is NOT necessary for warp/FTL, it just helps stabilize the antimatter which is merely ONE method of generating Warp (the Romulans, for example, used micro-singularities). Its almost as if the writers of Discovery never watched a single episode of Star Trek. Another great video - very informative.
Fusion powered warp drives peaks at Warp 2. Warp 2 is Uber slow. It would take about a year to get from one side of the Federation to the other. I think that nonbinary couple was on a warp 2 Fusion ship.
@@KertaDrake Trade and, probably, having a second set of ships that they'd been using that don't look like Romulan ships. Dilithium is an important trade good after all
@@KertaDrakeThe Romulan Star Empire used 2 different drives. The D'Deridex Warbird uses the singularity drive, but most of the other ships use a standard warp core. Basically, the singularity drive was only put in the most power-hungry and elite ship class, and everything else got the easier drive.
Iconian Gateways are neat, too. I wish the show would expand on them. When Discovery was teasing the Red Angel I thought that was the direction they were going.
Let's not forget null space, as well as the implications of metaphaseic shielding even though they never did anything with that in terms of travel in TNG.
There is also a major point you did not bring up: if transportation/technology is eliminated, then building back up to a working industry to create it is often based upon it, creating a difficult recursive dependency. In other words, if all land and sea vehicles were wiped out today, we would have grave difficulty making new cars: Chinese steel couldn't go to Tennessee body works to be paired with Detroit engines and Indian electronics and wiring, European batteries, etc. Moreover, each of those individual parts are based on subparts from around the world. Now expand that out across a quadrant of the galaxy and the immensely diverse needs and capabilities of a starship.
As an aside, one other tech that felt like it stagnated in the centuries years leading up to season 3 was weapons technology, as quantum torpedoes were still in use in the 32nd century after about eight centuries.
Quantum Torpedos bsically replaced photon torpedos and would most likely be more powerful, although it is still weird that more advanced weapons like Transphasic Tech aren't mentioned
@@Watcher1134 agreed. You'd think they'd have dark matter warhead and retro-causal energy beams that would travel back in time and so there would be an explosion followed by a beam returning to the attacking ship
And Photon Torpedoes were an old tech even by the time the Federation formed, as the Klingons already had them beforehand and it wouldn't be surprising if the Vulcans and Andorians had them. It may very well be that Photon Torpedoes are very well near the peak of what you can actually do with weapons without getting into the planet-busting stuff that's banned by treaties. Quantum Torpedoes are probably the best you can do without cracking out the crazy uncontrollable subspace stuff. Phaser tech may have advanced in ways that weren't obvious as phaser power seems to depend on how much energy and exotic particles you can shove into the beam, and really fits the Federation style the best due to being a precision weapon, while the alternatives tend towards brute force/annihilation. There's probably some nasty stuff they could put on their ships if they wanted, like subatomic disruptors or whatever, but that's the sort of thing you would probably only see come out in an active wartime situation against a foe of equal or greater power.
@@OrangeRiver Is there a universal time for the entire universe? The answer is- No! According to Einstein's theory of relativity, there is no unambiguous absolute time that applies to the entire universe. Instead, time is a relative concept, dependent on motion and gravity. Different observers in different states of motion or in different gravitational fields may experience different measurements of time. The theory of relativity describes how time and space are related to each other and how they change in the presence of mass and energy. For example, time may pass slower near large masses such as black holes compared to observers farther from the massive object. Therefore, there is no one universal time for the entire Universe, but time is a concept that depends on the context and observational conditions. How does the lack of universal time for the entire Universe affect the idea of the FTL (Faster Than Light) drive? Wouldn't this cause time paradoxes - (grandfather paradox) since there are different times for different observers, e.g. the time of a hypothetical planet orbiting a neutron star and the time of the planet Earth orbiting the Sun and the FTL ship travel? Would this be a trip back in time for either side? The issue of the lack of universal time for the entire universe has important implications for the idea of faster-than-light (FTL) travel and potential time paradoxes. If it were possible to travel FTL, where an object moves faster than light, then according to the theory of relativity, there would be a possibility of violating causality, i.e. sending information or events in a way that appears to violate the established order of cause and effect. For example, if an FTL traveler were to travel from one place to another at faster than light speeds, they could reach their destination before the light they sent out when they began their journey. This seems to lead to a grandfather paradox, where a traveler could travel back in time and prevent the birth of their ancestors. However, due to the lack of a unique time for the entire universe, as well as other theoretical limitations such as the existence of a light speed limit, FTL travel is impossible. There is currently no clear answer in physical theory on how to avoid time paradoxes in the context of FTL travel. My example with a neutron star and our star as objects with different clocks (times) is a good illustration of the phenomenon of differences in the passage of time for observers in different gravitational conditions. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, time flows slower in areas with a larger gravitational field. Therefore, for an observer on a planet orbiting a dense neutron star (which generates a strong gravitational field), time will pass more slowly than for an observer on Earth (which is in a weaker gravitational field). In practice, this means that if we had two clocks - one on a planet orbiting a neutron star and the other on Earth - the elapsed time on these clocks would differ. The clock on a planet orbiting a neutron star will lag behind the clock on Earth. Therefore, if it were possible to travel FTL between these two objects, when the traveler returns to Earth, he or she might notice that a longer time has passed on Earth than on the planet around the neutron star. In this way, the traveler could experience a kind of journey into the past in relation to the Earth and the neutron star. I will give a hypothetical situation with the FTL drive (Alcubierre drive), which does not have time dilation. Some FTL-powered ship flies from Earth to the nearest black hole, where time dilation occurs nearby due to a strong gravitational field. Halfway from Earth to the black hole, this ship stops and sends an FTL signal and another at the speed of light (a signal subject to time dilation) to the vicinity of this black hole with greetings. Then this ship flies at the speed of FTL to the vicinity of this black hole (which generates a strong gravitational field causing time dilation) and from there it receives the signal at the speed of light that it sent itself and then sends a signal FTL, i.e. faster than light (and another one with the same information, but at the speed of light) to the halfway point where it stopped earlier and gave itself the information not to fly to the vicinity of the black hole but to return to Earth, which they do. I'm saying that the captain of the ship wants to deliberately investigate what happens when he triggers a paradox. My example highlights some elements of the FTL paradox. However, it is worth noting that the Alcubierre drive he describes is a hypothetical model and has not yet been proven to be technically feasible. In my scenario, when the FTL ship stops halfway and sends a signal at the speed of light to the vicinity of the black hole, there is a potential contradiction. The signal undergoes time dilation, which means that time on Earth will passe faster than in the vicinity of the black hole. This means that when an FTL ship returns to where it stopped earlier and then receives the signal it sent, that signal may suggest that more time has passed on Earth than has actually passed on the ship. This seems paradoxical because the FTL ship receives information from itself that suggests that a longer period of time has passed on Earth, while the traveler on the ship has not experienced the same passage of time.
The Federation should just capture a Q contain them in a space field suppression cage, then make the Q teleport the ship from one point to another. "Harvest the Q, Harvest the Q, part of the ship part of the crew"
Great video. Enjoying Orangeriver's new video just in time for the holidays is somehow comforting, like visiting an old friend at Christmas. Have a good one, all the best.
While time travel was banned (for the best I guess), ultimately that tech could still be used for space travel, given a ‘time drive’ requires moving through space as well as time, you could, presumably, produce something akin to a ‘jump drive’ out of that; essentially an instantaneous jump from point A to point B… The underlying issue for the franchise is that they’ve clearly decided the audience needs to hear core things like warp drive or photon torpedoes, so they keep coming back to that regardless, even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense to story progression when set much further into the future.
With all the focus on dilithium going inert I kind of have to wonder if everyone collectively forgot about Fusion and Fission powered warp drives, neither of which use antimatter or dilithium. I seriously doubt that Zephram Cochrane was able to scrounge up a single yottagram of antimatter to power the Phoenix when Lily was struggling to pull up enough titanium for the cockpit, especially when there was a convenient fistful of fissionables from the warhead of the missile he converted. I also seriously doubt that early era warp vessels and civilian freighters that were pulling warp 2 at best were using antimatter as fuel on their years-long journeys to the nearest colonies to Earth, since the Kzinti lesson would very much apply when Piracy came into the picture. It's just kind of bizarre from my understanding. Use energy to make plasma, feed into warp coils, go FTL. The only special thing about antimatter is its relative efficiency compared to fusion and fission. Only thing I've heard from STD Stans regarding this is that "Warp Plasma" is different from regular plasma and 'needs' antimatter to make it happen, despite the D'Deridex Singularity based warp essentially proving that generating a warp field is power source agnostic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m sure the Phoenix was fission or fusion powered, but it might still need dilithium. Ultimately it comes down to the age old fan debate over whether the warp coils warp space or whether they’re simply very strong electromagnets to channel the dilithium plasma which is itself what warps space. Now I always favoured the latter, partly because the warp coils remind me of tokamaks (especially Vulcan ones), but Star Trek really doesn’t specify. At least until Discovery saying dilithium does stuff to subspace, but then maybe verterium-cortenide also does and you need both. Of course you could just as well ask where Cochrane got verterium and cortenum from while they struggled to get titanium, especially since the coils we saw in the show seemed to be regular old copper refrigerant tubing. Ultimately it kind of just all breaks down if examined too hard. Even pre-Discovery.
Excellent video! Quite thorough. I'm sure it was a lot of hard work, so thank you very much! You forgot to mention sail technology, which has been around for thousands of years, and is still in use today, before the invention boilers big and powerful enough to provide steam power, which was a quantum leap in propulsion. The transition from warp to faster than warp may have needed to take a while.
What is your response to the comparison of sail to space/time warp, in how long it took for steam to replace sail compared to how long it took other FTL drives to replace standard warp drive?
We dont use aerospikes not because they are buggy, compared with bell nozzles, and not because we cant be bothered "fixing" aerospikes, we do it because we dont know how to make an aerospike good enough that it will be better than a bell nozzle. By that I mean that it won't add so much weight and complexity to the engine that all the added efficiency is effectively lost in the extra weight. When almost every stage of your flight is efficient enough, and you are using staged flight (such that you drop off and land earlier stages) then the advantages of aerospike are even less. Remember aerospike is about having an optimal nozzle at all altitudes. If you drop your nozzle off (ie disconnect stage 1 and land it) you are effectively "varying" you nozzle, because stage 2 will have a different nozzle from stage 1. So you get your "varying" nozzle along with a MUCH lighter and easier to build engine for "free". No need to vary your nozzle, if you are changing nozzles whenever you encounter significantly different environments. Aerospikes WILL have a use, but they will need to compete with bell nozzles. If your engine is only ever operating in 1 atmospheric mode, the bell nozzle will almost always be "better" because it will be lighter and easier to build.
I don't think they forgot anything, it's possible that transwarp was developed as a potential replacement for the spore drive to grant a safe, straightforward and less threatening high speed travel method. One that Next generation and beyond seemed to forget ever happened with the u.s.s. Excelsior, which only failed because scotty tampered with it, if anything THAT is the bigger glaring issue with continuity, logic and canon, that they'd just stop trying with something that was built and ready to work because it didn't work one time, they must have tested it on other ships before slapping it on a crewed heavy cruiser like the Excelsior. Spore drive at the very least had an explanation for why it never showed up again, transwarp had none.
Honestly, I assumed some of them were tried and tested but weren't as great for one reason or another. Think about how lead diesel is more efficient and quieter than normal diesel, but has several negative side effects both to the environment and human health. Also given the Federation seemed to cover more of the galaxy in the 31st century, it's possible the warp scale has shifted again by this time and transwarp is just "too slow" by comparison to "conventional" warp. Edit: it's also possible that these methods require some level of dilithium, possibly even more than usual warp does
I've always liked the idea that the Excelsior's drive _was_ the Kelvin modifications reverse engineered. Just poorly done. Also, as somebody else noted in the comments, there was a fan theory accepted nearly as fact for many years that the TNG era warp was Excelsior's transwarp engine, just referred to as warp (in the same way that "Time Warp Factor" was shortened to warp in TOS era). I'll add in that while the theory has become less commonly stated, I don't know if anything has outright contradicted it in a manner it can't be re-explored in a show.
You’d think starfleet and the federation, who are famous for having backups of backups of backups, would have backup mega storage full of dilithium in case anything like the burn would happen…..
Yeah, I would have much preferred if they had just made it so all the dilithium in the galaxy was used up and warp travel had to be slowly phased out, rather than the single cataclysmic event. It would have served the fossil fuel metaphor much better.
@@OrangeRiver I completely agree. Having be some diablous ex machina just cheapens it for me. I would have liked it if it was something avoidable or with more meaning. Like if the threat of running out of it or conflict over switching to different ftl systems due to warp damaging sub space had led to the fall of the Federation instead of some sudden unknowable event. Be much more interesting and tragic. Not to mention a comment on modern society fighting over fossil fuels
So wait. The burn destabilized and destroyed most of the dilithium in the galaxy. And you think them just having a big stockpile of it would have helped things and not just...gotten the stockpile destroyed? The burn didn't just wreck what was actively in use, it broke it even in backup storage. And even if it hadn't, without knowing what CAUSED it the disaster, they could just be setting up the galaxy for it to happen *again*.
I feel a lot of people are confusing the Warp Core with the Warp Drive, the Warp Core is the power generation for the Warp Drive among other systems on a ship. The UFP needed to be looking into new forms of power generation that didn't need Dilithium. Nearly every FTL tech starfleet had knowledge of required massive amounts of power which required Dilithium as a focusing/regulator material for whether its a M/AM reactor or Quantum Singularity reactor. The fact that it was know that Dilithium is a unsustainable resource in the early day of Warp travel should have started the major powers into looking for different power sources that didn't require it.
The Phoenix (first earth warp ship) and most warp shuttles use a fusion reactor for their power supply. You don’t get MARAs until larger ships like runabouts. All you need is enough plasma to power the coils.
I didn't mind the Burn storyline (granted, it should've come earlier, if not be the impetus of the show, but I digress) except the conclusion. The complacency argument is fine; typical dilithium technology is relatively easy and proliferates, and this happens all the time when explaining the domination of a piece of tech. Again only the conclusion was kinda weak , I felt it should've been a failed experiment/engine or something instead of Kelpien mutation. So... is Dilithium EEZO now or something?
Actually i'm not sure the Traveller needs a warp-drive to do their stuff. Sure it probably helps i guess, but we know they can appear at will whenever they want.
There is one more dillithum alternative. Lithium crystals. In the 23rd century starfleet was able to crystallize lithium for use in warp cores. While just as efficient as dillithum, lithum crystals where much weaker and had to be changed out more often than dillithum. The Enterprise 1701 originally ran on Lithium before being switched to dillithum. Also the spore drive wasn't classified it was banned. This was because of two things. One using a computer to navigate the network cause damage to it. Two using an organic pilot was unethical because for a human to pilot the ship they had to be genetically modified to interface with the spores and to use a native of the network was akin to torture.
"Do you know how many cars there are on planet Earth? Eight hundred million. Imagine that. If you could control them, you'd have eight hundred million weapons."
@@TheMrPeteChannel A quote from the Doctor Who episode The Sontaran Stratagem. It's been 15.5 years since the episode aired though so the 8 million figure is most likely outdated by now.
Could you make a video about the problem of warp tech destroying subspace and how diffrent species deal with it? I think it would be a very interesting topic! (I think Voyager meets a species that dissapproves of space travel through their territory with subspace harming warp tech)
I always assumed that "transwarp" just became "warp" once it was commonly used. I also always assumed subspace vortex wasn't as fast as 23ed and 24th warpdrive, that is why it wasn't used later. There is one potential flaw in some of the transwarp techniques seen, the ones used by Q the caretaker, etc. Those could have involved time dilation. That second that it took Enterprise to be sent to Borg space could have been hours or days in the rest of the universe(still faster than Star Fleet) and the way the Caretaker brought Voyager to the Delta Quadrant the crew may not have experience time even though it passed. We don't know, it was never established either way.
02:54 Terrance McKenna believed that mushrooms, specifically the magic variety, were bioengineered by an extraterrestrial race to direct evolution toward development of intelligence, and also that psilocybin (but not the active psilocin) acted as an ftl beacon letting them know someone was awake. I don't have any reason to believe that, but it fits suspiciously well with the lore and now I suspect a Trek writer read McKenna.
It's a shame that with all this artificial gravity tech, nobody figured they could use that somehow to warp spacetime without using subspace. Im sure it would much more expensive than subspace due to whatever reason though.
Had a great idea about people whining about the inside of discovery being so empty but that was after a refit from the future, a future after the ship that was in enterprise
I miss the days when saying “Q let the federation meet the borg for the first time” didn’t have as big of an asterisk… Note: it ALWAYS had one. In the first episode they appear in there are a few things that strongly imply that [redacted] from the federation has information about them. But in later parts of the series it’s implied that [redacted] is section 31 or whatever the duck they’re called and that the reason there was pre existing information about the Borg that wasn’t readily available was it’s need to know and it’s unlikely anyone would need to know for 200+ years
Late to the party I know, but I never liked the "dil is gone" storyline. If you are familiar with the lore there were plenty of alternatives. To me the easiest one, and I suspect well within their technology was to move to a Dominion style spherical annihilation core. It was just a matter of machining the parts correctly and you had a wildly efficient matter-antimatter drive with no need of crystals at all.
In all likelihood the M/AM reactors were just doing the job fusion reactors do in the 24th century, that of powering secondary systems and making damn sure dangerous stuff doesn’t get out. And I mean Fusion Reactors can blow with enough force to take out a ship too.
My dumv theory about that is stagnation. The federation became so strong it was basically the only power in it's part of the galaxy. Hegemony breeds stagnation, and stagnation breeds inflexibility.
@@padinspi11 They probably peaked sometime around the Enterprise-J, really. After the Sphere Builders, there probably wasn't anything left in the galaxy to challenge them since the Borg were likely as gone as could be at that point.
The idea I thought up was a drive system that crossed light years in seconds, but not in ship time. One second in the (primary) Universe adds up to a week on board the ship. Long jumps can be made in seconds, but require the use of some kind of 'long sleep'. I.E a ten thousand year jump takes just over a minute, but lasts fifty years on board. Interesting plot twists possible with this...
What about the artificial quantum singularity drive that is used in 24th century Romulan D’deridex class warbirds? *I should have watched ALL the way to the end before commenting…
A large number of the writers on that show seemed unfamiliar with Sci-Fi in general. I didn't even bother with the last two episodes of season three. Apparently the Burn happened because some alien kid freaked out and his emotions were amplified by an anomaly? Yeah, totally makes sense...Probably some unconscious commentary on the self centred nature of the Tik Tok generation. Of course a huge interplantary civilisation would grind to a halt because someone felt upset. That's not stupidly solipsistic at all. I have considered watching the last series, as much because of a sense of being a completist, as well as thinking the show wasn't completely meritless. Although I have yet to see them. Because, not completely meritless, is hardly a great motivator when there are so many other better shows out there.
what if fissile fuels wasn't the problem but something more fundamental. the addiction to having everything electric in the first place. it's an exploitable weakness
I kind of hate the burn because its a lot like the blackout in Battletech The setting jsut gets thrown back into a "dark age" for no real reason and it never ghets explained.
@subraxas in a time of general FTL capability, I agree wholeheartedly with you, but when you're reduced to creeping along at sublight, such an infrastructure would become a necessity till something else was found to overcome the Dilithium dearth.
@@OrangeRiver lmao wasn’t tryna be rude. The link to the Romulan singularity video. I ended up finding it I’ve noticed missing referenced links becoming common on some of the channels I’ve watched. I like your in depth analysis of what we know about the singularity
Gonna be honest, this constant statement the Excelsior Transwarp Drive was an abandoned failure annoys me. That drive is the only in-universe explanation we have for the transition from the TOS warp scale to the TNG warp scale.
There’s the unknown secret sequel to Threshold where they realise the shuttle doesn’t need to be manned by a human, so they send the Doctor back to Earth but he evolves temporarily into a cassette tape full of BASIC code.
Speaking of Cytherians, there’s that god that needs with a starship. He’s inside the galactic core barrier which is pretty far and the Enterprise hadn’t been there for 10 years since that whole thing with the Megans
There were a few good concepts but they strayed too far from Star Trek. They failed to have an ensemble cast, had a completely dysfunctional crew and became too obsessed with injecting ideology into everything.
Didn't Westley invent a powercore that looked like a giant ball of putty for that tactical training interrupted by the Ferengi TNG one of the early episodes or mid.
One thing that I continue to think about is is the romulan forced singularity drive. So you need dilithium to control matter antimatter but if the romulan's haven't used matter antimatter for ages why did no one else adopt that power source? Even if this technology was only limited to warships it would only be a matter of time to downscale the technology. I disliked the scale of the burn alternatively I would have gone for a burn on a much smaller scale. Some kind of spatial anomaly blew out all the the dilithium in a single system and everyone's paranoid where it might happen next. Perhaps there was a new weapon that could destabilise dilithium crystals at range or other events that made it unpopular and untrustworthy.
The point is Plasma. Matter and Antimatter create plasma as a byproduct of their mutual annihilation. The dilithium is only used to shift the plasma into a better form called Warp Plasma. That gets sent to the warp coils and create the warp bubble for FTL travel without experiencing relativistic effects. The forced singularity only replaces the M\AM reactor to create plasma, it still needs dilithium to bump it into warp plasma for the warp coils. The plasma made by the introduction of matter to the singularity and being scooped out via magnetic ram scoops near the event horizon is of a poorer quality compared to M\AM annihilation. They're more akin to comparing gas engines to diesels, but they still use petroleum and dilithium is more like the transmission of a vehicle rather than the engine.
I know you did mention it hadn't been proven but that was just the thing I kept thinking about. The Klingons and the federation are always seen fighting over dilithium but the romulan never seem to get involved is it because they aren't as dependent on dilithium or do they just have greater supplies in their own borders.
@@OrangeRiverwe do know the nature of the D’deridex’s power system and it doesn’t use Dilithium. However it doesn’t speak for the entire Romulan fleet, regardless of how many D’deridex’s were shown on-screen
I like the idea of the "Transwarp" from Star Trek III simply being an improved warp drive that eventually lead starfleet into revising the warp scale from the one used in TOS to the one used in TNG for the sake of simplicity. This would mean that the Excelsior's Transwarp drive actually did work after they repaired the sabotage Scotty inflicted on it, but it was more of an evolutionary improvement than a revolutionary one. This could also be a reason the Excelsior class was used for such a long time while the recently refit Constitutions were mothballed. Maybe it just wasn't possible from an engineering standpoint for the Constitution to be outfitted with the new "Transwarp" drive, while it was possible to upgrade the Miranda.
My head-canon is that it was the thin neck and pylons of the connie that wasn't compatible with the transwarp, hence why miranda and oberth were also used until the late 24th century
@@Mat0llig Could also lead into the reason the Constellation was a 4-nacelle design with such unusual placement. A brute force method to achieve the same effect, perhaps?
i could see the Federation building gravity catapults. They finally had a technology they understood, could build themselves and allowed ships to jump the equivalent of a three year journey.
just put them near secured Starbases or planets and you have the relay network from mass effect for rapid transport.
I wish they could’ve built upon the tech that Barkley developed when his brain was overclocked by the Cyphereans. Starfleet ships could then have a man machine interface like the Bentusi from Homeworld.
@@Mat0llig I really like this idea. As a bonus, maybe the new Excelsior "Transwarp" drive didn't need to have the warp coils as isolated from the rest of the ship as much as the TOS warp coils needed to be isolated. This would have meant future designs could be more robust structurally and the shape of the warp field could be made more efficient since the ships were more streamlined.
"Life in Star Trek can be pretty demanding." True words, spoken by one who knows first hand.
With the time travelling Borg sphere - the Ttanswarp coil was used by the re-awakened Borg on their captured ship. Not Section 31.
If you watched the episoide the scientidt were trying to remoce the core when they hesrd the scream of the scientists and phaser blasts.
There's also the Soliton Wave. A dangerous FTL device that could be used as a weapon.
The thing is, we see the Federation constantly trying to make it better. The Excelsior/Great-Experiment to create the next step of warp-drive (which in the expanded universe is accredited to the redrawing of the warp-scale from TOS to TNG), the Soliton-wave, Lenara Kahns experiment, Tom Paris experiment....
But something always goes wrong. Either because the calculations were off, it got sabotaged or had unforeseen side-effects.
Actually, the primary reason aerospikes (which are basically just inverted bell nozzles) aren't used isn't anything to do with infrastructure or anything like that. Its simply that aerospikes are harder to cool, and therefore tend to have a higher mass penalty compared to traditional bell nozzles.
Honestly, I figured that the Xindi vortex method doesn't get used is because it probably relies on the weirdness of the expanse (it can probably allow travel between the expanse and normal space, but not without at least one endpoint in the expanse), and so simply doesn't work after the spheres are destroyed.
And everything else that isn't basically just Q snapping his fingers probably relies on dilithium crystals, so that's out.
This has got me wondering again just how many nigh omnipotent beings are encountered in Star Trek
Proto warp not only required dilithium, but was extremely dangerous. Just remember how bad it was when it went critical. You don't want to lose half a star system every time one of these gets blown up.
Well, considering Zephram Cochraine didn't even have dillitium, obviously dillitium is NOT necessary for warp/FTL, it just helps stabilize the antimatter which is merely ONE method of generating Warp (the Romulans, for example, used micro-singularities). Its almost as if the writers of Discovery never watched a single episode of Star Trek. Another great video - very informative.
Fusion powered warp drives peaks at Warp 2. Warp 2 is Uber slow. It would take about a year to get from one side of the Federation to the other. I think that nonbinary couple was on a warp 2 Fusion ship.
Hell, the Romulan's method never used Dilithium at all with it.
@@AzraelThanatos Does make you wonder just why they were mining out the dilithium on Remus for though...
@@KertaDrake Trade and, probably, having a second set of ships that they'd been using that don't look like Romulan ships. Dilithium is an important trade good after all
@@KertaDrakeThe Romulan Star Empire used 2 different drives. The D'Deridex Warbird uses the singularity drive, but most of the other ships use a standard warp core. Basically, the singularity drive was only put in the most power-hungry and elite ship class, and everything else got the easier drive.
Iconian Gateways are neat, too. I wish the show would expand on them. When Discovery was teasing the Red Angel I thought that was the direction they were going.
Let's not forget null space, as well as the implications of metaphaseic shielding even though they never did anything with that in terms of travel in TNG.
Before the combustion engine, the horse was the fastest thing on the battlefield for 10,000 years
Arrows are much faster than horses. /s
Laughs in chariot.
@@Doctoranthetardis what was pulling the chariot?
@@EnkiSvohden 2 horses
*laughs in rolling down a hill in a barrel*
I do the Mycelial Network thing every time 😂😂😂😂 love it 😂😂😂
There is also a major point you did not bring up: if transportation/technology is eliminated, then building back up to a working industry to create it is often based upon it, creating a difficult recursive dependency. In other words, if all land and sea vehicles were wiped out today, we would have grave difficulty making new cars: Chinese steel couldn't go to Tennessee body works to be paired with Detroit engines and Indian electronics and wiring, European batteries, etc. Moreover, each of those individual parts are based on subparts from around the world. Now expand that out across a quadrant of the galaxy and the immensely diverse needs and capabilities of a starship.
As an aside, one other tech that felt like it stagnated in the centuries years leading up to season 3 was weapons technology, as quantum torpedoes were still in use in the 32nd century after about eight centuries.
Quantum Torpedos bsically replaced photon torpedos and would most likely be more powerful, although it is still weird that more advanced weapons like Transphasic Tech aren't mentioned
Don't Transphasic Torpedoes violate the Temperal Prime Directive because they warp time or some magical BS technology that's illegal?
@@Watcher1134 agreed. You'd think they'd have dark matter warhead and retro-causal energy beams that would travel back in time and so there would be an explosion followed by a beam returning to the attacking ship
@@Mat0lligTime Travel Tech is banned
And Photon Torpedoes were an old tech even by the time the Federation formed, as the Klingons already had them beforehand and it wouldn't be surprising if the Vulcans and Andorians had them. It may very well be that Photon Torpedoes are very well near the peak of what you can actually do with weapons without getting into the planet-busting stuff that's banned by treaties. Quantum Torpedoes are probably the best you can do without cracking out the crazy uncontrollable subspace stuff.
Phaser tech may have advanced in ways that weren't obvious as phaser power seems to depend on how much energy and exotic particles you can shove into the beam, and really fits the Federation style the best due to being a precision weapon, while the alternatives tend towards brute force/annihilation. There's probably some nasty stuff they could put on their ships if they wanted, like subatomic disruptors or whatever, but that's the sort of thing you would probably only see come out in an active wartime situation against a foe of equal or greater power.
I am a big fan of your work.
Thank you!
@@OrangeRiver Is there a universal time for the entire universe? The answer is- No!
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, there is no unambiguous absolute time that applies to the entire universe. Instead, time is a relative concept, dependent on motion and gravity. Different observers in different states of motion or in different gravitational fields may experience different measurements of time.
The theory of relativity describes how time and space are related to each other and how they change in the presence of mass and energy. For example, time may pass slower near large masses such as black holes compared to observers farther from the massive object.
Therefore, there is no one universal time for the entire Universe, but time is a concept that depends on the context and observational conditions.
How does the lack of universal time for the entire Universe affect the idea of the FTL (Faster Than Light) drive? Wouldn't this cause time paradoxes - (grandfather paradox) since there are different times for different observers, e.g. the time of a hypothetical planet orbiting a neutron star and the time of the planet Earth orbiting the Sun and the FTL ship travel? Would this be a trip back in time for either side?
The issue of the lack of universal time for the entire universe has important implications for the idea of faster-than-light (FTL) travel and potential time paradoxes.
If it were possible to travel FTL, where an object moves faster than light, then according to the theory of relativity, there would be a possibility of violating causality, i.e. sending information or events in a way that appears to violate the established order of cause and effect.
For example, if an FTL traveler were to travel from one place to another at faster than light speeds, they could reach their destination before the light they sent out when they began their journey. This seems to lead to a grandfather paradox, where a traveler could travel back in time and prevent the birth of their ancestors.
However, due to the lack of a unique time for the entire universe, as well as other theoretical limitations such as the existence of a light speed limit, FTL travel is impossible. There is currently no clear answer in physical theory on how to avoid time paradoxes in the context of FTL travel.
My example with a neutron star and our star as objects with different clocks (times) is a good illustration of the phenomenon of differences in the passage of time for observers in different gravitational conditions.
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, time flows slower in areas with a larger gravitational field. Therefore, for an observer on a planet orbiting a dense neutron star (which generates a strong gravitational field), time will pass more slowly than for an observer on Earth (which is in a weaker gravitational field).
In practice, this means that if we had two clocks - one on a planet orbiting a neutron star and the other on Earth - the elapsed time on these clocks would differ. The clock on a planet orbiting a neutron star will lag behind the clock on Earth.
Therefore, if it were possible to travel FTL between these two objects, when the traveler returns to Earth, he or she might notice that a longer time has passed on Earth than on the planet around the neutron star. In this way, the traveler could experience a kind of journey into the past in relation to the Earth and the neutron star.
I will give a hypothetical situation with the FTL drive (Alcubierre drive), which does not have time dilation. Some FTL-powered ship flies from Earth to the nearest black hole, where time dilation occurs nearby due to a strong gravitational field. Halfway from Earth to the black hole, this ship stops and sends an FTL signal and another at the speed of light (a signal subject to time dilation) to the vicinity of this black hole with greetings. Then this ship flies at the speed of FTL to the vicinity of this black hole (which generates a strong gravitational field causing time dilation) and from there it receives the signal at the speed of light that it sent itself and then sends a signal FTL, i.e. faster than light (and another one with the same information, but at the speed of light) to the halfway point where it stopped earlier and gave itself the information not to fly to the vicinity of the black hole but to return to Earth, which they do. I'm saying that the captain of the ship wants to deliberately investigate what happens when he triggers a paradox.
My example highlights some elements of the FTL paradox. However, it is worth noting that the Alcubierre drive he describes is a hypothetical model and has not yet been proven to be technically feasible.
In my scenario, when the FTL ship stops halfway and sends a signal at the speed of light to the vicinity of the black hole, there is a potential contradiction. The signal undergoes time dilation, which means that time on Earth will passe faster than in the vicinity of the black hole. This means that when an FTL ship returns to where it stopped earlier and then receives the signal it sent, that signal may suggest that more time has passed on Earth than has actually passed on the ship.
This seems paradoxical because the FTL ship receives information from itself that suggests that a longer period of time has passed on Earth, while the traveler on the ship has not experienced the same passage of time.
The Federation should just capture a Q contain them in a space field suppression cage, then make the Q teleport the ship from one point to another.
"Harvest the Q, Harvest the Q, part of the ship part of the crew"
Great video.
Enjoying Orangeriver's new video just in time for the holidays is somehow comforting, like visiting an old friend at Christmas.
Have a good one, all the best.
While time travel was banned (for the best I guess), ultimately that tech could still be used for space travel, given a ‘time drive’ requires moving through space as well as time, you could, presumably, produce something akin to a ‘jump drive’ out of that; essentially an instantaneous jump from point A to point B…
The underlying issue for the franchise is that they’ve clearly decided the audience needs to hear core things like warp drive or photon torpedoes, so they keep coming back to that regardless, even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense to story progression when set much further into the future.
couldn't help using the Mycelial Network clip 😂
With all the focus on dilithium going inert I kind of have to wonder if everyone collectively forgot about Fusion and Fission powered warp drives, neither of which use antimatter or dilithium. I seriously doubt that Zephram Cochrane was able to scrounge up a single yottagram of antimatter to power the Phoenix when Lily was struggling to pull up enough titanium for the cockpit, especially when there was a convenient fistful of fissionables from the warhead of the missile he converted.
I also seriously doubt that early era warp vessels and civilian freighters that were pulling warp 2 at best were using antimatter as fuel on their years-long journeys to the nearest colonies to Earth, since the Kzinti lesson would very much apply when Piracy came into the picture.
It's just kind of bizarre from my understanding. Use energy to make plasma, feed into warp coils, go FTL. The only special thing about antimatter is its relative efficiency compared to fusion and fission. Only thing I've heard from STD Stans regarding this is that "Warp Plasma" is different from regular plasma and 'needs' antimatter to make it happen, despite the D'Deridex Singularity based warp essentially proving that generating a warp field is power source agnostic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m sure the Phoenix was fission or fusion powered, but it might still need dilithium.
Ultimately it comes down to the age old fan debate over whether the warp coils warp space or whether they’re simply very strong electromagnets to channel the dilithium plasma which is itself what warps space. Now I always favoured the latter, partly because the warp coils remind me of tokamaks (especially Vulcan ones), but Star Trek really doesn’t specify.
At least until Discovery saying dilithium does stuff to subspace, but then maybe verterium-cortenide also does and you need both. Of course you could just as well ask where Cochrane got verterium and cortenum from while they struggled to get titanium, especially since the coils we saw in the show seemed to be regular old copper refrigerant tubing.
Ultimately it kind of just all breaks down if examined too hard. Even pre-Discovery.
You cant pass warp 2.2 without dill to stabilize
Brilliantly and exhaustively done! Thank you putting all these technologies /theories together for us. Now if only there was speed comparison chart 🤔
Great video as always Tyler!
Thanks Worf!
I really loved this video because of the part you added in about the modern day bell shaped engines and the combustion engine. Great tie in.
Excellent video! Quite thorough. I'm sure it was a lot of hard work, so thank you very much!
You forgot to mention sail technology, which has been around for thousands of years, and is still in use today, before the invention boilers big and powerful enough to provide steam power, which was a quantum leap in propulsion. The transition from warp to faster than warp may have needed to take a while.
What is your response to the comparison of sail to space/time warp, in how long it took for steam to replace sail compared to how long it took other FTL drives to replace standard warp drive?
We dont use aerospikes not because they are buggy, compared with bell nozzles, and not because we cant be bothered "fixing" aerospikes, we do it because we dont know how to make an aerospike good enough that it will be better than a bell nozzle.
By that I mean that it won't add so much weight and complexity to the engine that all the added efficiency is effectively lost in the extra weight.
When almost every stage of your flight is efficient enough, and you are using staged flight (such that you drop off and land earlier stages) then the advantages of aerospike are even less.
Remember aerospike is about having an optimal nozzle at all altitudes.
If you drop your nozzle off (ie disconnect stage 1 and land it) you are effectively "varying" you nozzle, because stage 2 will have a different nozzle from stage 1.
So you get your "varying" nozzle along with a MUCH lighter and easier to build engine for "free".
No need to vary your nozzle, if you are changing nozzles whenever you encounter significantly different environments.
Aerospikes WILL have a use, but they will need to compete with bell nozzles. If your engine is only ever operating in 1 atmospheric mode, the bell nozzle will almost always be "better" because it will be lighter and easier to build.
Thank you for that detailed analysis! Great video and well done.
Thank you!
Star Trek law of TOS. No tech introduced survives the episode it’s introduced in.
I don't think they forgot anything, it's possible that transwarp was developed as a potential replacement for the spore drive to grant a safe, straightforward and less threatening high speed travel method.
One that Next generation and beyond seemed to forget ever happened with the u.s.s. Excelsior, which only failed because scotty tampered with it, if anything THAT is the bigger glaring issue with continuity, logic and canon, that they'd just stop trying with something that was built and ready to work because it didn't work one time, they must have tested it on other ships before slapping it on a crewed heavy cruiser like the Excelsior.
Spore drive at the very least had an explanation for why it never showed up again, transwarp had none.
Honestly, I assumed some of them were tried and tested but weren't as great for one reason or another.
Think about how lead diesel is more efficient and quieter than normal diesel, but has several negative side effects both to the environment and human health.
Also given the Federation seemed to cover more of the galaxy in the 31st century, it's possible the warp scale has shifted again by this time and transwarp is just "too slow" by comparison to "conventional" warp.
Edit: it's also possible that these methods require some level of dilithium, possibly even more than usual warp does
Any video with an "All the way" reference gets an automatic like. I really miss it when it doesn't make an appearance.
Man, your content is Fire! Thank you for the Star Trek Content. The quality is Chef's 💋
Thank you!
I've always liked the idea that the Excelsior's drive _was_ the Kelvin modifications reverse engineered. Just poorly done. Also, as somebody else noted in the comments, there was a fan theory accepted nearly as fact for many years that the TNG era warp was Excelsior's transwarp engine, just referred to as warp (in the same way that "Time Warp Factor" was shortened to warp in TOS era). I'll add in that while the theory has become less commonly stated, I don't know if anything has outright contradicted it in a manner it can't be re-explored in a show.
You’d think starfleet and the federation, who are famous for having backups of backups of backups, would have backup mega storage full of dilithium in case anything like the burn would happen…..
Ugh. No. We only have a second backup for our first backups.
I’d feel that starfleet by this point would have some system to shut down or shunt the energy of the reactor if a core breach was imminent
Yeah, I would have much preferred if they had just made it so all the dilithium in the galaxy was used up and warp travel had to be slowly phased out, rather than the single cataclysmic event. It would have served the fossil fuel metaphor much better.
@@OrangeRiver I completely agree. Having be some diablous ex machina just cheapens it for me. I would have liked it if it was something avoidable or with more meaning.
Like if the threat of running out of it or conflict over switching to different ftl systems due to warp damaging sub space had led to the fall of the Federation instead of some sudden unknowable event. Be much more interesting and tragic. Not to mention a comment on modern society fighting over fossil fuels
So wait. The burn destabilized and destroyed most of the dilithium in the galaxy. And you think them just having a big stockpile of it would have helped things and not just...gotten the stockpile destroyed? The burn didn't just wreck what was actively in use, it broke it even in backup storage.
And even if it hadn't, without knowing what CAUSED it the disaster, they could just be setting up the galaxy for it to happen *again*.
I feel a lot of people are confusing the Warp Core with the Warp Drive, the Warp Core is the power generation for the Warp Drive among other systems on a ship. The UFP needed to be looking into new forms of power generation that didn't need Dilithium. Nearly every FTL tech starfleet had knowledge of required massive amounts of power which required Dilithium as a focusing/regulator material for whether its a M/AM reactor or Quantum Singularity reactor. The fact that it was know that Dilithium is a unsustainable resource in the early day of Warp travel should have started the major powers into looking for different power sources that didn't require it.
The Phoenix (first earth warp ship) and most warp shuttles use a fusion reactor for their power supply. You don’t get MARAs until larger ships like runabouts.
All you need is enough plasma to power the coils.
I'm dying EVERY TIME I hear 'Watcha say' and Section 31 comes in like NOPE!!
😂😂😂
I didn't mind the Burn storyline (granted, it should've come earlier, if not be the impetus of the show, but I digress) except the conclusion.
The complacency argument is fine; typical dilithium technology is relatively easy and proliferates, and this happens all the time when explaining the domination of a piece of tech.
Again only the conclusion was kinda weak , I felt it should've been a failed experiment/engine or something instead of Kelpien mutation.
So... is Dilithium EEZO now or something?
Kelpian mutant crying for his mother kills most of space-faring civilizations, everyone forgets Romulans don't need dilithium.
This video was amazing!!! They keep getting better and better. Thanks Tyler!
Thank you!!
Merry Christmas 🎄🎁
Likewise!
I would have thought discovery would be all about the trans-warp
Actually i'm not sure the Traveller needs a warp-drive to do their stuff. Sure it probably helps i guess, but we know they can appear at will whenever they want.
I took it that The Traveller could get around just fine, but was able to reach new places by tapping into the warp drive of starships.
There is one more dillithum alternative. Lithium crystals.
In the 23rd century starfleet was able to crystallize lithium for use in warp cores. While just as efficient as dillithum, lithum crystals where much weaker and had to be changed out more often than dillithum. The Enterprise 1701 originally ran on Lithium before being switched to dillithum.
Also the spore drive wasn't classified it was banned. This was because of two things. One using a computer to navigate the network cause damage to it.
Two using an organic pilot was unethical because for a human to pilot the ship they had to be genetically modified to interface with the spores and to use a native of the network was akin to torture.
Yet another wonderfully informative video essay.Still hoping for photon vs Quantum,etc ❤🖖🖖 Thanks.
Thank you Brian!
Sections 31 and Termporal Agents: "NOPE CAN'T HAVE THAT"
The closing song slaps. Love it.
"Do you know how many cars there are on planet Earth? Eight hundred million. Imagine that. If you could control them, you'd have eight hundred million weapons."
That's funny & scary at the same time.
@@TheMrPeteChannel A quote from the Doctor Who episode The Sontaran Stratagem. It's been 15.5 years since the episode aired though so the 8 million figure is most likely outdated by now.
As always, your videos are a joy to watch.
And yeah, compliancy is definitely the anthesis to creativity,
Really enjoy your channel. you paint good enough pictures that I can game while listening.
Thanks Michael!
Hey there Tyler✌😎! Iam a real big Star Trek Fan and i need to say! Your Videos so awesome. Thanks for all your beautiful work! Greetings 👋
Could you make a video about the problem of warp tech destroying subspace and how diffrent species deal with it? I think it would be a very interesting topic! (I think Voyager meets a species that dissapproves of space travel through their territory with subspace harming warp tech)
for being such an advanced stage of humanity, It always seemed odd to me that the technology would have such a glaring bottle neck.
Really interesting video as always. Have a great Christmas.
Thank you! Same to you
I can’t help but imagine the Borg’s transwarp network being an artificial equivalent of the mycelium
The quiet "nice" fuckin got me haaaahahahhahaha
I always assumed that "transwarp" just became "warp" once it was commonly used.
I also always assumed subspace vortex wasn't as fast as 23ed and 24th warpdrive, that is why it wasn't used later.
There is one potential flaw in some of the transwarp techniques seen, the ones used by Q the caretaker, etc. Those could have involved time dilation. That second that it took Enterprise to be sent to Borg space could have been hours or days in the rest of the universe(still faster than Star Fleet) and the way the Caretaker brought Voyager to the Delta Quadrant the crew may not have experience time even though it passed. We don't know, it was never established either way.
Im actually wondering if the Cytherian drive is a form of Coaxial warp
02:54 Terrance McKenna believed that mushrooms, specifically the magic variety, were bioengineered by an extraterrestrial race to direct evolution toward development of intelligence, and also that psilocybin (but not the active psilocin) acted as an ftl beacon letting them know someone was awake.
I don't have any reason to believe that, but it fits suspiciously well with the lore and now I suspect a Trek writer read McKenna.
Underspace , transpace , null space , fluidic spade , sub space I never realised how many different types of space there was in star trek universe lol
9:53 these cuts are killing me 😂
It's a shame that with all this artificial gravity tech, nobody figured they could use that somehow to warp spacetime without using subspace. Im sure it would much more expensive than subspace due to whatever reason though.
Just use a stargate network
The Technology in Star Trek seams stagnant with all of the superpowers in the future
OMG, that Sloan pop-in f'n cracked me up.
Had a great idea about people whining about the inside of discovery being so empty but that was after a refit from the future, a future after the ship that was in enterprise
I miss the days when saying “Q let the federation meet the borg for the first time” didn’t have as big of an asterisk…
Note: it ALWAYS had one. In the first episode they appear in there are a few things that strongly imply that [redacted] from the federation has information about them. But in later parts of the series it’s implied that [redacted] is section 31 or whatever the duck they’re called and that the reason there was pre existing information about the Borg that wasn’t readily available was it’s need to know and it’s unlikely anyone would need to know for 200+ years
Wasn't the spatial projector perfected by the Borg years later? I.E Picard series.
Happy holidays to you and yours. Love yah brother!! Hope to check out your livestream.
Thanks John!
I think you might have mentioned it but in TNG there was a failed Soliton Wave, can’t remember if you mentioned it, sorry
Yeah that was initially in the script, but I cut it for time since it was proven in the episode that it wouldn't work anyway ;)
Late to the party I know, but I never liked the "dil is gone" storyline. If you are familiar with the lore there were plenty of alternatives. To me the easiest one, and I suspect well within their technology was to move to a Dominion style spherical annihilation core. It was just a matter of machining the parts correctly and you had a wildly efficient matter-antimatter drive with no need of crystals at all.
The Federation still using Dilithium controlled M/A cores to power traditional warp drives in the 32nd century never made any sense.
In all likelihood the M/AM reactors were just doing the job fusion reactors do in the 24th century, that of powering secondary systems and making damn sure dangerous stuff doesn’t get out. And I mean Fusion Reactors can blow with enough force to take out a ship too.
Yeah, it's just bad writing.
My dumv theory about that is stagnation. The federation became so strong it was basically the only power in it's part of the galaxy. Hegemony breeds stagnation, and stagnation breeds inflexibility.
@@padinspi11 They probably peaked sometime around the Enterprise-J, really. After the Sphere Builders, there probably wasn't anything left in the galaxy to challenge them since the Borg were likely as gone as could be at that point.
@@KertaDrake Yeah they ended up like early TNG. There was just nothing bad happening ever so they were completely unprepared against any danger.
The idea I thought up was a drive system that crossed light years in seconds, but not in ship time. One second in the (primary) Universe adds up to a week on board the ship. Long jumps can be made in seconds, but require the use of some kind of 'long sleep'. I.E a ten thousand year jump takes just over a minute, but lasts fifty years on board. Interesting plot twists possible with this...
What about the artificial quantum singularity drive that is used in 24th century Romulan D’deridex class warbirds?
*I should have watched ALL the way to the end before commenting…
Beta canon says Dilithium is still used to regulate the plasma ejected from the singularity
it looks like quantum slip stream really put a hurting on subspace?
I bet half the writers on ST:D never even watched Trek.
They wrote the show like they only ever watched mirror universe episodes.
A large number of the writers on that show seemed unfamiliar with Sci-Fi in general. I didn't even bother with the last two episodes of season three. Apparently the Burn happened because some alien kid freaked out and his emotions were amplified by an anomaly? Yeah, totally makes sense...Probably some unconscious commentary on the self centred nature of the Tik Tok generation. Of course a huge interplantary civilisation would grind to a halt because someone felt upset. That's not stupidly solipsistic at all.
I have considered watching the last series, as much because of a sense of being a completist, as well as thinking the show wasn't completely meritless. Although I have yet to see them. Because, not completely meritless, is hardly a great motivator when there are so many other better shows out there.
Cry harder
@@notmyname5591 why would I cry? It’s not my time wasted
When you realize transwarp is on a spectrum.
😂
LMAO
what if fissile fuels wasn't the problem but something more fundamental. the addiction to having everything electric in the first place. it's an exploitable weakness
“mycelial network!”🍄
I kind of hate the burn because its a lot like the blackout in Battletech
The setting jsut gets thrown back into a "dark age" for no real reason and it never ghets explained.
"Let's find out"?? What have you done with the real Tyler??
Also, have a great holiday season and thanks for all your excellent work!
Thank you! Happy holidays
OMG I'm sitting here letting all that techno babble wash over me 😂 I've rarely felt so lost
Graviton catapult aka the star trek's version of the mass relay
Public transport
SB-19 looks like a Star Gate lol
Public transport
One FTL method that I'm surprised wasn't used when normal warp drives were rendered unviable would be the Soliton Wave.
@subraxas in a time of general FTL capability, I agree wholeheartedly with you, but when you're reduced to creeping along at sublight, such an infrastructure would become a necessity till something else was found to overcome the Dilithium dearth.
How come every UA-camr says they will link something in the description but never do
Sorry, what did I forget this time lol
@@OrangeRiver lmao wasn’t tryna be rude. The link to the Romulan singularity video. I ended up finding it I’ve noticed missing referenced links becoming common on some of the channels I’ve watched. I like your in depth analysis of what we know about the singularity
No worries lol, I was genuinely curious myself. Added it to the description
@@OrangeRiver lol glad to be a tad helpful. Happy new year!
* Hey guys! Don't forget to hit that like button, comment, share this video and subscribe. It really helps the channel a lot. Thanks! *
Gonna be honest, this constant statement the Excelsior Transwarp Drive was an abandoned failure annoys me. That drive is the only in-universe explanation we have for the transition from the TOS warp scale to the TNG warp scale.
Also it was disabled by Scotty, He probably reenabled it at one point and showed thaz it worked. (which then caused the warp scale to evolve to TNG's)
Clikkd within a minute 😂😂😂
Omfg not the Dear Sister references 😂
There’s the unknown secret sequel to Threshold where they realise the shuttle doesn’t need to be manned by a human, so they send the Doctor back to Earth but he evolves temporarily into a cassette tape full of BASIC code.
What about the Holly hop drive?
14:49 "Brutally Sucked"
Speaking of Cytherians, there’s that god that needs with a starship. He’s inside the galactic core barrier which is pretty far and the Enterprise hadn’t been there for 10 years since that whole thing with the Megans
Thank you for tying in scifi with what is going on in the real world. Much love.
What is the figure to your left wearing the black miniskirt?
That would be a custom D'Vana Tendi statue 3d printed and hand painted for me by a fan of the channel!
What video is the desk slap and point “mycellial network” bit from? I’ve only seen it as cuts in Tyler’s videos.
@@subraxas thank you. I’ll look for it.
Discovery just ignored everything. They should have made it a new franchise like The Orville.
There were a few good concepts but they strayed too far from Star Trek. They failed to have an ensemble cast, had a completely dysfunctional crew and became too obsessed with injecting ideology into everything.
Hell, could have just done it like Abrams trek.
holy shit the chocolate rain guy watches orangeriver thats awesome ❤
Didn't Westley invent a powercore that looked like a giant ball of putty for that tactical training interrupted by the Ferengi TNG one of the early episodes or mid.
This is an interesting question. I have not watched any new Star Trek since 2017 so I do not have a good answer.
What about that early Voyager episode where that civilization could walk to a different planet on that transporter pad?
One thing that I continue to think about is is the romulan forced singularity drive. So you need dilithium to control matter antimatter but if the romulan's haven't used matter antimatter for ages why did no one else adopt that power source? Even if this technology was only limited to warships it would only be a matter of time to downscale the technology. I disliked the scale of the burn alternatively I would have gone for a burn on a much smaller scale. Some kind of spatial anomaly blew out all the the dilithium in a single system and everyone's paranoid where it might happen next. Perhaps there was a new weapon that could destabilise dilithium crystals at range or other events that made it unpopular and untrustworthy.
It's never been proven that Romulan warbirds don't need dilithium to operate...I mention this in the video! Lol
The point is Plasma. Matter and Antimatter create plasma as a byproduct of their mutual annihilation. The dilithium is only used to shift the plasma into a better form called Warp Plasma. That gets sent to the warp coils and create the warp bubble for FTL travel without experiencing relativistic effects.
The forced singularity only replaces the M\AM reactor to create plasma, it still needs dilithium to bump it into warp plasma for the warp coils. The plasma made by the introduction of matter to the singularity and being scooped out via magnetic ram scoops near the event horizon is of a poorer quality compared to M\AM annihilation.
They're more akin to comparing gas engines to diesels, but they still use petroleum and dilithium is more like the transmission of a vehicle rather than the engine.
I know you did mention it hadn't been proven but that was just the thing I kept thinking about. The Klingons and the federation are always seen fighting over dilithium but the romulan never seem to get involved is it because they aren't as dependent on dilithium or do they just have greater supplies in their own borders.
@@OrangeRiverwe do know the nature of the D’deridex’s power system and it doesn’t use Dilithium. However it doesn’t speak for the entire Romulan fleet, regardless of how many D’deridex’s were shown on-screen
Plus, the singularity engine is an extremely risky model that may be hard to scale to an entire fleet, let alone galaxy