General Star Trek thread

Two things that didn't happen often enough through the series'. Enterprise D split in two, Voyager landed on a planet.

Nah, warp coils are just really heavy.

Weird that they haven't included the first 4.

Completely agree on Voyager. With the absence of any starbases to patch the ship up after a battle it would have made more sense to see them ask permission to land on planets to fix up their ship.

Was there any practical use to the saucer separation apart from emergency evacuation? We saw it a couple of times in battle, but can’t really see why they’d look to separate the ship in normal circumstances.

Without the saucer it's a much smaller target too and would have less area for the shields to cover.

It'll be fine. If it goes wrong they can try again on Eros

Sounds Amazing

Turning An Asteroid Into A Space Station Might Be Possible In A Relatively Short Time

If you were to house millions of people in space, a restructured asteroid would be the way to do it.

DR. ALFREDO CARPINETI

A ringed space station could be easily and cheaply made from an asteroid, according to a new paper.

Building a large space station, where hundreds of thousands of people, if not more, could live, would not be easy. You would need a lot of material and even when built, your inhabitants would have to deal with two major health issues: the effects of low gravity on their bodies and a lot of cosmic radiation. A new, non-peer-reviewed paper has a bold solution to these problems: build the space station inside an asteroid and get it spinning.

The approach is proposed by David W. Jensen, a retired Technical Fellow at Rockwell Collins, and it gives a pretty detailed view of what would be needed to build it. Very importantly, by using self-replicating robots, the asteroid would be turned into a space station in just 12 years and for as (relatively) little as $4.1 billion. That is a modest sum when it comes to ambitious space projects – and this is certainly ambitious.

Let’s ignore the robotic requirements for the moment. The first step for Jensen was to find a suitable asteroid that could be turned into a space station. He selected asteroid Atira. This is a Near-Earth Object that never crosses the orbit of our planet. It is 4.8 kilometers (3 miles) across and made of stone. It even has a moon, a secondary object of about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles).

The idea would be to use the material on the asteroid to build everything, including solar panels and the station itself. Jensen settled for a torus structure, so shaped like a donut. The exterior edge of the donut would provide protection from several dangers, from radiation to micrometeorites, while multiple levels could be built on the inside to maximize habitability.

Atira rotates every 3.4 hours but this would need to be considerably accelerated in order to provide near-Earth gravity to the inhabitants of this ringed station. With a radius of just over 2.1 kilometers (1.3 miles), it would have to complete one rotation every 105 seconds.

Now the cost and the timescale

Very importantly, by using self-replicating robots, the asteroid.

Sounds like something from Star Trek :) DS9 to be precise.

If you were going to do something like that getting the raw materials at the destination instead of bringing them with you is much more cost effective, that's not rocket science, refining them in space on the other hand seems to be difficult because most (all?) of the methods used on Earth would be extremely difficult to do in space.

The Odyssey wasn't built with plotarmourium like the Rio Grande was.

Critical damage causing power failures all over the ship. One possibility could be anti-matter containment fields lose power, and game over.

Yeah, I really enjoyed the short treks too. There were a really nice bit of fun to stick on, and a pretty good idea. Would probably work even better now with SNW and LD airing, which would lend themselves a bit more to the idea of developing side characters a small bit. Also, plenty of sets floating around!

Meant the Picard and SNW sets, but fair point! Though I'd say they do keep them together, in the pencil case!

07-09-2023 👀

Good date to resume Star Trek 🙂