Equinox Problem # 6987690008754468

[Mikey]

Well, CPH is our engineer and Thorin our theoretical physicist, and I'm certainly no expert, but...

no. The energy produced by an M/AM annihilation is dependent solely on the mass annihilated. It doesn't matter if it's 15g of dead aliens or 15g of Neelix' plague cheese.

[stitch626]

You are correct Mikey.
Is it possible that the alien's corpse gave off some sort of electrical discharge before being annihalated (yes, I'm grasping at straws... I hate having to make up physics for stupid stuff like this)? Would that explain any increase in speed?

[Mikey]

You mean like burn it as fuel, THEN use it as a component in a M/AM annihilation? Perhaps, but then you'd have to have two different sets of equipment for power generation, power transfer, and power usage. I don't think that the Equinox did.

[stitch626]

Seven mentioned there were major modifications to the warp drive system, maybe these are what she was talking about.

[Tsukiyumi]

Seven mentioned there were major modifications to the warp drive system, maybe these are what she was talking about.

Nah, she was talking about the daiquiri machine and surround-sound system they installed.

[Captain Seafort]

The only possibility I see is to convert some of the energy of the M/AM reaction that is normally dissipated in the form of neutrinos into a more useful form (though how this would be done is a mystery given the fact that neutrinos interact extremely weakly with normal matter).

That's exactly what happens - 70% of the energy released in a M/AM reaction decays to neutrinos within a fraction of a second.

[Graham Kennedy]

We're always hearing about all sorts of strange substances being used for the power systems on a Starship. For instance Voyager's used omicron particles (The Cloud), photonic matter (Heroes and Demons), and tellerium (Resistance). Not to mention that warp cores produce trilithium resin waste (Starship Mine), and use dilithium for some not-terribly-well-defined-purpose.

Point being, there's clearly a lot more going on there than simply slapping some matter and antimatter together and watching gamma rays and neutrinos and whatnot fly out. We can't reasonably use real life physics to talk about what happens in a warp core in any great detail.

[Sionnach Glic]

It's been a long time since my last physics lesson, so correct me if I'm wrong, but

photonic matter

isn't that just light?

[Graham Kennedy]

Lord knows what the hell it's meant to be. It wasn't just a beam of light, though, it was an actual physical substance... kinda gas like.

I can only imagine from the name that photonic matter is a substance in which photons are somehow bonded together like the atoms in a gas, or even a liquid or solid. How on Earth you might do that I don't know. Frankly they might as well have used a term like "magic moonbeams".

[Sionnach Glic]

Chalk another explaination up to "quantum" in that case, I guess.

[Teaos]

I know this is a big stretch but since the creatures were from another dimension maybe their bodies werent burnt as fuel for propulsion so much as used in a way that allowed the ship to travel differently thus crossly larger areas of space... Its a stretch but to explains the speed jumps.

[Mikey]

"magic moonbeams".

Which actually WOULD be "photonic matter."

[Captain Picard's Hair]

What would happen if you planted magic moonbeams in a nebula? Would they blossom into a beanstalk to the land of Trek fairy tales?

[Tsukiyumi]

What would happen if you planted magic moonbeams in a nebula? Would they blossom into a beanstalk to the land of Trek fairy tales?

That sounds about as plausible as some of the crap they threw at us from 1999-2005...

[Sionnach Glic]

Hell, Trek is already past the land of fairy tales and is now making good headway through the lands of Salvadore Dahli.