Speaking of Mr Sulu

Just pray, pray, pray the magnetic containment field (I assume) never fails. At least you wouldn't suffer before you died! Or even have time to see it coming...

Since I know little about the actual science behind it and am talking completely based on my expertise :rolleyes: from the old star trek series, I am fairly certain it will be just fine as long as the dilithium crystals hold at you don't go past warp 9 or was it 10 :D

But that has made me wonder, exactly what would the range of the area of devastation be?
 
Just pray, pray, pray the magnetic containment field (I assume) never fails. At least you wouldn't suffer before you died! Or even have time to see it coming...

No worries, just send Ensign Smith down the Jeffries tube to reroute the phasers through the main generator. It's SOP.
 
...I am fairly certain it will be just fine as long as the dilithium crystals hold at you don't go past warp 9 or was it 10 :D

No worries, just send Ensign Smith down the Jeffries tube to reroute the phasers through the main generator. It's SOP.

*slaps forehead* Of course! What was I worried about? All of these technical issues have already been worked out. :D Even if those didn't work, all we would need to do is generate an inverse tachyon stream by routing the dilithium core matrix through the reverse phase array of the transporter system. Simple!

But that has made me wonder, exactly what would the range of the area of devastation be?

A quick and dirty calculation gets you about 1.8 x10^15 joules of energy released. The amount released with the Hiroshima atomic bomb, a 15kT bomb, was about 6.3 x10^13 joules. Thus, the amount of energy released by this hypothetical antimatter drive upon failure would be the equivalent of about 29 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs, about 435 kT. The largest bomb ever detonated was about 50 mT, 114 times larger, but that took a lot more than 10 grams of fissile material! The Tsar Bomba was the size of a train car.

The reason antimatter releases so much energy is that all of the mass is converted into energy upon annihilation. Nuclear fission/fusion retains most of the mass, only part of it is released as energy. Antimatter is also tricky because any normal matter you might use to contain it will react with it, thus necessitating magnetic fields or something similar.
 
As long as you got a chief engineer like Mr. Scott... miracles will happen at the last possible second.

Of course with Mr. LaForge it's just a matter of reversing the polarity on anything and everything in the ship. :rolleyes:
 
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