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[–] 31 points 13 hours ago* (19 children)

Air-conditioning is pretty power intensive and The Enterprise is a big ass ship. That's not even counting the other things life support does (like heat and CO2 scrubbing), just the air circulation.

But even on the show, there's been a couple times where they mention the power from life support is nearly negligible. 🤷‍♂️

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  • [–] 19 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

    Wouldn't gravity generation and inertial dampners be part of life support? Going max impulse after turning those off is likely to end up with a lot of raspberry jam coating the walls.

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  • [–] 7 points 12 hours ago* (3 children)

    Inertial dampeners probably not; that just stops the ship when not giving any thust because there's nothing to slow the ship down in space once it has momentum. The fake gravity on board tho, may be part of it. Not sure how the gravity plating is supposed to work; but I would be willing to bet there is technical documentation about it somewhere. Unless they just, like... Constantly barrel roll to create "gravity" that way 🤔 (gravity in quotes as it would actually be centripital force).

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  • [–] 13 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 child)

    Inertial dampers are how the crew can survive high-g maneuvers, they'd be pinned to the back wall and have their skulls crushed by their own faces if they suddenly went to full impulse or warp without them active.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 hours ago

    I'm pretty well convinced that gravity plating has to be negligible power draw or possibly even passive technology, since they've boarded centuries-old derelict ships that still have artificial gravity. Maybe the gravity plating contains some exotic space-warping material that generates a gravity field. That could also explain the times when someone becomes intangible and can walk through walls, but don't fall through the floor.

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  • [–] 4 points 12 hours ago (10 children)

    Air-conditioning is pretty power intensive

    Even that should still be minuscle compared to getting rid of the waste heat from a huge antimatter reactor.
    Feels like trying to get your Ferrari faster by switching of the cockpit instrument illumination. Not even worth giving the command.

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  • [–] 4 points 12 hours ago (9 children)

    How does transferring heat out of a ship work? On the one hand, it's really cold in space, but on the other, there's no substrate to absorb and transfer the heat.

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  • [–] 5 points 12 hours ago* (3 children)

    From a thermodynamical standpoint, the whole Enterprise is something of a mess.

    But, hey, if you already have a "Heisenberg-Compensator", also having a "Boltzmann-Compensator" is probably not that implausible... ;-)

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  • [–] 6 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

    And you can always re-arrange the sensor arrays if you're ever really in a pinch, but it'll take some time.

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  • [–] 3 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

    Thermal Radiation, you send it somewhere else. It’s how the sun heats our planet.

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  • [–] 2 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

    Isn't thermal radiation kinda slow, though? It's basically air cooling, but without air or fans.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 hours ago

    It is, yes. A large fraction (about a quarter?) of what looks like solar panels on the ISS are actually dedicated radiator panels. The solar panels are angled to face the sun, and the radiators are angled at 90 degrees from the sun, to face empty space.

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