Tholian Influence

[Meste17]

Would it be possible for Starfleet to build a base inside an asteroid, much like the Tholian asteroid base in Enterprise "In A Mirror Darkly, Parts I and II?"

[shran]

Why bother with it? The asteroid would have to be located, analysed for suitability, dragged from its current path to the desired orbit/route/whatever, hollowed out, outfitted with all sorts of tech to keep it in the proper orbit, then made airtight, only then can one actually even consider putting people inside. Building a new station will do just fine.
Sure, it would look cool, but the resource investment doesn't really give enough return to make it viable, even in a society like the federation where energy and matter are almost scot free.
This is part of the awesome, but impractical versus boring, but practical debate. Will you go for function, or coolness?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... tPractical

[Teaos]

Starbase in a asteroid seems to be the lower end of technology.

So yes. I think they could.

But no, I dont think they would.

[Graham Kennedy]

Would it be possible for Starfleet to build a base inside an asteroid, much like the Tholian asteroid base in Enterprise "In A Mirror Darkly, Parts I and II?"

Don't see why not.

In fact you could say we already saw such a thing with the tunnel system they built on Regula. Not much of a base, but I don't see any reason they couldn't have built a dock and other facilities down there, if they'd wanted to.

Quite why they would want to is another question. Why not just build a deep space station or starbase?

[McAvoy]

Shouldn't be that hard for Starfleet to tunnel an asteroid for a star base. Technically we can do it right now but it would astronomically expensive to do.

So I guess it would be a factor of why, where and how fast which form of base would be better.

[Meste17]

Oh? I was hoping a base that is inside an asteroid would be suitable. -_-

[Teaos]

It would work. But there is no need for it. The federation can build suitable space stations with out needing to hollow a asteroid.

[Sonic Glitch]

They already have. The "Earth Outposts" in Balance of Terror (which I assume were really Federation outposts but the show-runners hadn't decided on terminology yet) were heavily implied to be based in asteroids (and that implication is used in some EU novels). At the very least, Earth Outpost 4 is:

Commander Hansen: Enterprise, can you see it? My command post here. We're a mile deep on an asteroid - almost solid iron. Even through our Deflectors it did this.

[kostmayer]

How much would be involved in tunnelling out an asteroid. In Wrath of Khan, Carol Marcus claimed it took Starfleet Engineer Corps 10 months to tunnel out the underground Genesis lab.

[Graham Kennedy]

That always struck me as weird. Surely you could just beam out chunks of rock quite easily. Even the BoP Kirk stole was able to beam up four hundred tons in one go, and there's no reason you couldn't beam out shaped pieces for tunnels, rooms, whatever. It's not a complete solution but it should make tunnelling a whole hell of a lot easier.

[Teaos]

Even vaporising it would be very fast so long as you had good ventilation.

[McAvoy]

Maybe the Genesis cave was bigger than we thought.

[Graham Kennedy]

Maybe the Genesis cave was bigger than we thought.

They didn't hollow out the cave, just the tunnels. The Genesis effect made the cave. Or such was my impression.

[McAvoy]

The other thing too is if 400 tons is an absolute minimum a transporter can do in one shot and assuming solid iron, and iron weighs 480 pounds per cubic foot, that would roughly equal 25-26 cubic feet transported.

[Graham Kennedy]

And a GCS has at least twenty transporters, which can cycle, oh, say once a minute each. So it could excavate 720,000 cubic feet per day. At that rate a GCS could excavate the 31 mile long channel tunnel in under a year.