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Basic overcurrent protection? In my sci-fi?
Next you’re gonna tell me you can’t just “re-route power” by pressing buttons on a screen and not, you know, actually unhooking any wires!
Building everything to be able to re-route to everything is WHY all the consoles are constantly exploding.
What do you mean you dont want to reroute all the power for the warp engines into the navigation console?
With that much power you can navigate anywhere, at least until the console melts through the floor
O’Brien constantly breaking good cardassian engineering with infernal federation secondary backups.
Exactly, sure you could have relays or Automatic Transfer Switches like we use from generators. But if you’re just slamming more power at stuff than it’s meant to use, where’s your overcurrent protection?
one of my favorite jokes about this is on TNG. i think it’s the episode where the bridge gets cut off from the rest of the ship, and Troi is in charge of running the ship. O’Brian makes a comment to Ro about how you can’t ‘just reroute power from things’.
it’s a funny little nod from the writers.
You kind of can, though. A solar system on a house can switch between batteries and mains. It can even do that by itself. Surely if the Enterprise needed that kind of thing, it wouldn’t be hard to build into the ship’s design.
Yes the buttons can control relay switches.
Yeah you can shut the power from anywhere if you’re running low. You just need a sufficient switching system and for the issue to be related to supply or drain elsewhere
I don’t know about you people, but personally, I always write programs at work by removing boards from my computer and plugging them in a different order.
That’s why they are so fit and resourceful. Imagine carrying every IF statement by hand.
That not too far off how they used to program computers with punch cards
Well, it really wasn’t. You’d program by punching the cards, and then insert them into the computer. If they brought the boards from a terminal (or replicator), and switched the old ones to the new ones, the entire thing would make sense.
It’s a bit similar to how people programed analogical computers at the 50s. But it’s actually a lot like programing old sewing machines. The thing those have in common is that their programs were always an order of magnitude smaller than this comment.
How do you know the buttons don’t trigger relais or the like which then actually unhook the wires?
Judging from what things look like when they open up the walls, they could just be telling the system to use a specific circuit path. It looks like everything is just a bunch of blocks or cards with super dense computer chips on them and half the repairs we ever see are just these being unslotted and replaced. The other half being waving fake tools around.
Some real dense, high-tech circuitry going on in there…
…is that an isolinear rod next to Uhura’s head?
It’s an inanimate carbon rod. The hero of space.
That’s an interesting way to spell relays
OP is probably German.
Verflixt und zugenäht!
Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof.
Now we have the salad!
you can’t just “re-route power” by pressing buttons on a screen and not, you know, actually unhooking any wires!
High-voltage switches might be a bit complicated. One I’ve seen requires you to tighten a spring and then have it released extremely fast to prevent sparking. Still, there should be a way to do it safely, without having to go near or touch the wiring.
wait till they rediscover seatbelts
If bracing for impact is good enough for the Enterprise, it’s good enough for my Hyundai.
Everyone else in the minivan:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4d/b2/ee/4db2eedb2235018f827398503423a9ec.jpg
In my CRV I’ll often initiate attack plan omega.
That’s what the inertial dampeners are for!
… if they were working
Have you tried diverting power from life support yet?
“Inertial dampeners have failed.”
Many times someone will say this while the ships is performing combat maneuvers at several hundred kilometers per second.
If that were true, everyone onboard would instantly become “chunky salsa.” (Obscure Trek-related quote, for anyone that can place it.)
and start actually putting on space suits when they should.
But then they can’t get infected by the secret bioengineered virus left behind by the extinct species!
That would of course be a missed opportunity to tell the millionth variation of a space horror story almost as old as the sci-fi genre itself.
Then gatekeeping fans will say it breaks canon, has to be an alternate timeline/universe because they didn’t need those in TOS/TNG.
Oh, wait, that’s one of the criticisms of the environmental suits in Discovery and SNW…
There are a lot of things to criticize about Discovery. How someone could choose to pick the spacesuits evades me.
THEY DO HAVE THEM! Every once in a while a trek will show seatbelts and then proceed to forget about them later.
Isn’t there a joke about that in Nemesis?
Once again I remind you all that these consoles are not powered by a substance as boring as regular electricity. Oh no. It has to be highly energetic tuned plasma…straight to the user interface consoles…for, uh, reasons.
The reason is because the engines produce this material as a waste product. So instead of venting it into space it’s processed and funneled back through the ship to power everything from lights to equipment.
Very efficient and very VERY dangerous. Many Vulcans retired from the VSA because Humans pulled shit like this.
Wouldn’t it be easier and safer to just use it to generate boring old electricity and send that through the ship? Maybe the danger is there to keep the crew excited and working at maximum efficiency…
You have dangerous ideas.
I like the theory that it’s sent to the bridge to uplift the morale of the regular crew. They knew the officers will be the first to get blown up in any hostile encounter.
It keeps the captain in check if he knows he’s going to get a blown up console to the face instead of a lower deck red shirt dying .
When those protocols can’t be used like in landing parties, it’s the red shirts who die first.
All I’m saying is, there’s no way this would pass a MIL-STD-882 safety assessment in the twenty first century. So I have no idea how they got their spaceworthiness certificate.
Gotta have a way to effortlessly kill redshirts. Whoops! Another plasma conduit blew out. Poor Gary.
Battle shorting the practice of negating the fuses in a ship or other war machine because a blown fuse disabling a key system could lead to the loss of the whole ship in battle, and the equipment can maybe work over its rated limit for a time when necessary. Cathode Ray Dude did a video about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpJ_6LCly4A
“In a battle or emergency, where the survival of the vessel (or other protected asset) is dependent upon the continued operation of the equipment, it is sometimes wiser to risk equipment damage than have the equipment shut down when it is needed. For example, the electrical drives to elevate and traverse the guns of a combat warship may have “battleshort” fuses, which are simply copper bars of the correct size to fit the fuse holders, as failure to return fire in a combat situation is a greater threat to the ship and crew than damaging or overheating the electrical motors.”
Huh. Learn something all the time.
So sticking a penny in the fuse slot in my car is actually a galaxy brain move.
when your car is under fire, yes.
If it’s not under fire, it’ll be on fire.
Since fire rises(in atmosphere) anything on fire is technically under fire
Something can probably be done though with matter synthetiser and teleporters.
If only they had Space OSHA.
That would be so cool a sci-fi adaption of forklift-driver Klaus (warning, a bit gory but hilarious):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dckwhat the actual fuck
Don’t say I didn’t warned you.
Another problem is about where to redirect the overcharge. In space there is no ground where the current can go. Yet you need to dissipate the energy somewhere.
Back at the attacking ship, obviously!
Let me just pull a grounding wire to there.
Grounding HARPOON YAAAAAAR
I mean, the NX-01 did have a harpoon.
Ackchyually they were grapplers, not harpoons.
I can’t handle the pedantry in this thread
I need an adult
It’s probably grounded to the hull somewhere, put in a couple electric gizmos and feed the power back into your batteries. Now the enemy is charging your ship while they blow it up because you didn’t turn on your sheild.
Right out the deflector dish.
Fancy name for the toilets
Poseidon’sZeus’ kiss
Oh great, now what am I supposed to do with all these extra damage-accentuation rocks?!?
Do we have fuses that can safely dissipate like 350Megajoules? I don’t remember which specific episode it was, but I remember on DS9 they were going to overload the warpcore to stop something and someone said the only system on the station capable of absorbing that much raw electrical energy was the shield system, since that’s literally what it is; a giant fuse.
Fuses don’t dissipate electricity. They pass electricity and then blow when exceeded. Blowing is either flipping off (like your breaker) or breaking (like replaceable fuses). The point of a fuse is to be the weakest link so if a surge occurs it doesn’t damage equipment or wiring.
In the case you described, they were looking for a load (where energy is used or dissipated to do work) to absorb that much energy at once. There might be a fuse that could withstand that kind of load; there was wiring that could afterall. But if the shield system could absorb the full power of an overloaded warp core, it might not have needed one if there was no downside to overcharging it.
Do we have fuses that can safely dissipate like 350Megajoules?
A 350 Megajoule fuse oughta do it
Hum… I have a 75MJ varistor on each phase of the main wiring of my house. Those are not fuses (because fuses don’t have a total energy specification) but I can certainly get a few more for the Enterprise it they want.
That’s 21 kilowatt hours worth of energy, are you sure about that?
Yes, I’m sure. I used to have 5MJ ones, but one burned down once. So I got the large ones. AFAIK, they are the largest that will fit 1 unity in a DIM panel. It’s supposed to change phases more than once if it receives that kind of abuse, but keep safely conducting electricity all the way.
It’s a common component around lightning protection. You’d want something better to actually deal with the lightning if your network is unprotected (there are plenty of options), but mine is protected.
Maybe don’t put so many things that can catch fire on the bridge too.
In the 24th Century they discovered that liquid napalm was a highly efficient electrical conductor … so they used it to wire their ships.
that what*
When you consider that the bridge is on the top and center of the saucer section and a very enticing target the constant explosions make a bit of sense. It’s not that the enterprise got shot in the ass and it sent a current up to the computer that monitors shift rotations, no the high powered energy weaponry is aimed right on the other side of the wall. Structural integrity fields, shields, ablative armor, and other technobabble keep the the whole bridge from popping like a balloon when something bad happens.
It’s like if your tv is plugged into a house with breakers and safely on a surge protector it’s not going to keep your tv from getting fried if zeus decides to target that outlet specifically and strike it.
Why not put the bridge somewhere internal, then? It’s not like it needs windows.
The enterprise c did have a battle bridge that they used mostly for saucer separations, but there were times when they used it saucer in place and there are some ships which have more protected configurations.
Disregarding the IRL reasons of that’s just where it always goes, I believe the in universe reason is that starfleet at its core does not like to identify as a true military organization. It’s why the enterprise C is built like a cruise ship and why despite being a swift science vessel voyager is also very spacious and sleek and elegant on the inside. They do make plenty of starships that are top in class and capable of holding their own against anything else out there, but starfleet is not in the business of making warships. They overtly mention this in DS9 when it is mentioned that the Defiant is officially an “escort vessel” even though it is a very no frills combat vessel.
Of course they can get away with this concession because generally the shields do most of the work when it comes to absorbing hits anyway. Once shields are down if another vessel wants to go for the kill it wont take long for it to tear through the hull. In theory the centralized location also means that the bridge can get additional protection by tilting the saucer away from the enemy(sorry lower decks).
You mean the Enterprise D?
Resettable fuses and circuit breakers!
