this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
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I never understood the "divert power from life support" trope of Star Trek.
I mean, how much power could that possibly be?
We essentially already sustained prolonged life support by using a tiny batch of primitive batteries and fuels cells during multi-day trips to reach the moon in the sixties.
With efficient 23th century tech, life support should be almost self-sustaining using ambient waste heat or something.
Always has been one of the major suspension-of-disbelief efforts for me...
Moreover, what exactly is the life support system doing that means near-instant death if you turn it off? Breathable air and heat should last for hours at least.
There is an episode where Voyager is looking for a fuel source because they are dangerously low.
They cram all the staff into two decks and pull all life support from the other thirteen. It only gets them an hour of propulsion at one-quarter impulse thrust.
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. 🤷♂️
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.
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).
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.
I loved how The Expanse handled high speed turn and burn in space.
Fuck Syfy.
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.
And then, when life support fails everybody freezes for some reason.
This guy treks
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.
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.
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... ;-)
And you can always re-arrange the sensor arrays if you're ever really in a pinch, but it'll take some time.
I would consider reversing the polarity first!
But that could destabilize the tachyon field; is it worth risking a temporal anomaly?
Maybe if we invert the thingamajigger coils we could prevent that.
IIRC, they use the plasma manifold for the warp nacells to heat the ship like a radiator. I know they use that plasma for more than just the engines, but not 100% on how.
Thermal Radiation, you send it somewhere else. It’s how the sun heats our planet.
Isn't thermal radiation kinda slow, though? It's basically air cooling, but without air or fans.
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.
Inefficient is maybe the right word? If you have more stuff to absorb the radiation I believe you can transfer it faster. So maybe tethering and tossing asteroids or something could be viable?
They use AI everywhere. That’s power hungry stuff (and people will deny it is).
It's just written in to add weight to a tense moment.
I know the reason why they did it.
Still annoys me slightly. Actually even more than the techno-babble that is mentioned by most as a somewhat annoying thing written in.
But I don't watch Star Trek for its scientific accuracy, so it's ok.
As already said: It is still manageable by suspension of disbelief to enjoy the strong aspects of the show, which mostly are not the specifics of the science-based things being shown (in contrast to the underlying ideas - those are often great!)
I realize now I should have answered the question differently. The life support uses power by a reverse band of takiyons to a flow emitter. This then spread across the ship via a neutrino wave to a tungsten pulse generator.
That's why it uses so much power they have to divert it at times.
My own head-canon that I subconsciously develop while watching those parts of the show, is actually strikingly similar to what you just said! ;-)