The Star Trek Method.... Versus A Nuke

[Spacescifi]

This is just a fun scenario... perhaps to make fun of star trek or even to justify it... we will see either way.

The usual solution to problems during TNG era was... route more power to this or that ship system, like shields etc.

Scenario: The ship is on Earth on the ground. The ship's shields are down, but their engineer is so awesome he managed to route and convert the ship's main power to it's hull integrity.

Let's assume the ship is carrying 500 tons of antimatter on board... and converts SOME of that into hull integrity force... to withstand the utter brutality of a direct nuclear atmospheric blast. The hull will still absorb heat but will stay intact instead of melting and being blown apart.

 

Main Question: I know this is impossible as far as we know... but I was curious if a method like that WOULD work if it were possible?

 

I presume a more powerful AM blast would push back a weaker nuke blast in the air.

 

So by the same token, I presume a vessel which could convert the awesome power of AM into hull integrity would have durability on par with a superhero.

 

Bullet proof and mostly missile proof.

 

What do you think?

Edited September 1, 2022 by Spacescifi

[Superfluous J]

I assume it would but just powerful enough to stop whatever is endangering the ship while allowing just enough through to cause a few consoles to explode in a shower of sparks.

But I'm just going by what they showed on 60 years of the shows, not any actual science.

[Spacescifi]

10 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

I assume it would but just powerful enough to stop whatever is endangering the ship while allowing just enough through to cause a few consoles to explode in a shower of sparks.

But I'm just going by what they showed on 60 years of the shows, not any actual science.

 

Those sparks are cancer causing plasma... no wonder they die lol.

[Strawberry]

Some tanks use something similar in the form of explosive reactive armor, which explode when penetrated thus reducing the penetration of the incoming projectile. 

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

... and converts SOME of that into hull integrity force...

Any way to do that without shrinking the wall several times in a supermighty magnetic field?

4 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

The hull will still absorb heat but will stay intact instead of melting and being blown apart.

It will be melted by the applied protective force, comparable to the nuclear force it withstands.

4 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

I presume a more powerful AM blast would push back a weaker nuke blast in the air.

After a 500 t of AM blast there would be not much air above that country.

Who at all let that ship to land approach to the Earth inner regions of the Solar System?!

***

500 t of AM (+500 t of M) = 9*10²² J.

So, to produce 500 t of AM, they have to spend ~10²³ J.

That's a weekly solar energy falling to the Earth.

Or 300  000 + t of deuterium.

That's HOW MUCH the AM is ineffective.

[Terwin]

In StarTrek all weapons are blocked by the shield, and without shields any weapon attack will cause significant damage.

Structural integrity fields are for things other than weapons that should rip the ship apart(including moving fast with big holes).

So if the nuclear blast was part of a propulsion system or or the equivalent of a 'terrain hazard', then the structural integrity field will deal with it just fine, even if it is only powered by the energy-cell of a hand-phaser.

On the other hand, if the shields are down and I try to attack the ship with my $5 laser pointer with half-dead batteries, then the ship will take significant damage regardless of how much power the structural integrity field has.

StarTrek is narrative driven, so actual physics does not matter at all, and generally it is avoided to minimize plot holes.

This is probably a big part of why it was so popular: Focus on the story and characters with only the occasional vague nod towards the pseudo-science. (they even had 'technobable' flags in the scripts so that the various script writers did not keep coming up with different terms)

 

[magnemoe]

You have enough energy to handle any nuke we can imagine and an direct hit from an dinosaur killer. 
However shields in sci-fi tend to be able to be overloaded if hit by to much energy so it might survive an smaller nuke but not an large one because the shield overload and it takes some time to restore it so an follow up strike will hit you or the next missile in the salvo. 

 

[wumpus]

3 hours ago, Terwin said:

StarTrek is narrative driven, so actual physics does not matter at all, and generally it is avoided to minimize plot holes.

Anything deeper into star trek tech pretty much leads to bad TV show tropes.  The writers  just write "tech the tech" and the science consultants fill in reasonable/consistent technobabble.  No idea if they've burned away too much good will away to keep this up at a high level.

http://www.bryanreesman.com/2009/10/09/captain-picard-the-tech-is-overteching/

Focusing on the technology is pretty pointless.  Society and maybe weird fundamental bits of science make more sense.  And one thing I learned from a fairly deep study of the history of science and tech (not to mention watching more of it happen than I care to admit) is that "inspired inventions" aren't the key to technology.  Technology depends on the infrastructure.  "Steam engine time" is merely the condition of having enough infrastructure to support steam engines.  If you don't have it, it doesn't matter how good an engineer Hero of Alexandria was.  You don't get steam engines other than toys.

[KSK]

I haven’t watched much Trek beyond Next Generation but ‘teching the tech’ does sound awfully familiar. I recall a lot of reprogramming the deflector array to emit the Particle of the Week.

To answer the original question - I don’t think it would work because that absorbed heat has to go somewhere afterwards. So the good news is that the Enterprise survived the nuke. The bad news is that the crew were summarily cooked by the structural integrity fields.

[Scotius]

The lesson of the week is: Do not mix real science with space opera.

If you want hard sci-fi story, write something akin to "The Martian.", where everything is more or less accurate and understandable to a moderately educated reader. No space magic trying to pass itself as science - because someone will notice it and laugh at it.

But if you want to write engaging space opera full of adventure, flashy explosions and cool looking beams, use handwavium wrapped in unobtanium and powered by mesoprotons-X.

"Sufficiently advanced technology" is a thing exactly for that reason - to bridge the gap between our current level of technology, and demands of the Plot.

[sevenperforce]

2 hours ago, wumpus said:

Focusing on the technology is pretty pointless.  Society and maybe weird fundamental bits of science make more sense.  And one thing I learned from a fairly deep study of the history of science and tech (not to mention watching more of it happen than I care to admit) is that "inspired inventions" aren't the key to technology.  Technology depends on the infrastructure.  "Steam engine time" is merely the condition of having enough infrastructure to support steam engines.  If you don't have it, it doesn't matter how good an engineer Hero of Alexandria was.  You don't get steam engines other than toys.

The only time to go really deep into the science is if it is an integral AND recurring plot point. Like if you want to create a sense of urgency and you have spaceships with basically unlimited energy but no inertial dampeners and so you have to figure out a way to get from point A to point B as fast as possible. Then you can really lean into that particular plot point. But you don't need to go into details about HOW the spaceships have unlimited energy.

For example, an excerpt from a really good short story:

Spoiler

Three and a half g’s! That wasn’t a boost — that was a pullout. Joe heard the surgeon protest, “I’m sorry, sir, but three gravities is all I can approve.”
     Berrio frowned. “Legally, it’s up to the captain. But three hundred lives depend on it.”
     Kleuger said, “Doctor, let’s see that curve.” The surgeon slid a paper across the desk; Kleuger moved it so that Joe could see it. “Here’s the scoop, Appleby—”
     A curve started high, dropped very slowly, made a sudden “knee” and dropped rapidly. The surgeon put his finger on the “knee.” “Here,” he said soberly, “is where the donors are suffering from loss of blood as much as the patients. After that it’s hopeless, without a new source of blood.”
     “How did you get this curve?” Joe asked.
     “It’s the empirical equation of Larkin’s disease applied to two hundred eighty-nine people.”
     Appleby noted vertical lines each marked with an acceleration and a time. Far to the right was one marked: “1 g—18 days” That was the standard trip; it would arrive after the epidemic had burned out. Two gravities cut it to twelve days seventeen hours; even so, half the colony would be dead. Three g’s was better but still bad. He could see why the Commodore wanted them to risk three-and-a-half kicks; that line touched the “knee,” at nine days fifteen hours. That way they could save almost everybody, but, oh, brother!

 The ship was built for high boost; controls were over the pilots’ tanks, where they could be fingered without lifting a hand. The flight surgeon and an assistant fitted Kleuger into one tank while two medical technicians arranged Joe in his. One of them asked, “Underwear smooth? No wrinkles?”
     “I guess.”
     “I’ll check.” He did so, then arranged fittings necessary to a man who must remain in one position for days. “The nipple left of your mouth is water; the two on your right are glucose and bouillon.”
     “No solids?”
     The surgeon turned in the air and answered, “You don’t need any, you won’t want any, and you mustn’t have any. And be careful in swallowing.”
     “I’ve boosted before.”
     “Sure, sure. But be careful.”
     Each tank was like an oversized bathtub filled with a liquid denser than water. The top was covered by a rubbery sheet, gasketed at the edges; during boost each man would float with the sheet conforming to his body. The Salamander being still in free orbit, everything was weightless and the sheet now served to keep the fluid from floating out. The attendants centered Appleby against the sheet and fastened him with sticky tape, then placed his own acceleration collar, tailored to him, behind his head.

When the counter flashed the last thirty seconds he forgot his foregone leave. The lust to travel possessed him. To go, no matter where, anywhere go! He smiled as the torch lit off.
     Then weight hit him.
     At three and one-half gravities he weighed six hundred and thirty pounds. It felt as if a load of sand had landed on him, squeezing his chest, making him helpless, forcing his head against his collar. He strove to relax, to let the supporting liquid hold him together. It was all right to tighten up for a pullout, but for a long boost one must relax. He breathed shallowly and slowly; the air was pure oxygen, little lung action was needed. But he labored just to breathe. He could feel his heart struggling to pump blood grown heavy through squeezed vessels. This is awful! he admitted. I’m not sure I can take it. He had once had four g for nine minutes but he had forgotten how bad it was.

 His ribs hurt, each breath carried the stab of pleurisy. His hands and feet felt “pins-and-needles” from scanty circulation. He wiggled them, which produced crawling sensations and wearied him. So he held still and watched the speed soar. It increased seventy-seven miles per hour every second, more than a quarter million miles per hour every hour. For once he envied rocketship pilots; they took forever to get anywhere but they got there in comfort.
     Without the torch, men would never have ventured much past Mars. E = Mc2, mass is energy, and a pound of sand equals fifteen billion horsepower-hours. An atomic rocketship uses but a fraction of one percent of that energy, whereas the new torchers used better than eighty percent. The conversion chamber of a torch was a tiny sun; particles expelled from it approached the speed of light.

“Doctor, tell me straight: will Joe get well?”
     “No, sir.”
     “Will he get better?’
     “Some, perhaps. Lunar gravity makes it easy to get the most out of what a man has left.”
     “But will his mind clear up?”
     The doctor hesitated. “It’s this way, sir. Heavy acceleration is a speeded-up aging process. Tissues break down, capillaries rupture, the heart does many times its proper work. And there is hypoxia, from failure to deliver enough oxygen to the brain.”
     The Commodore struck his desk an angry blow.  “Damn it, man — think of the way he was. Just a kid, all bounce and vinegar — now look at him! He’s an old man — senile.”
     “Look at it this way,” urged the surgeon, “you expended one man, but you saved two hundred and seventy.”

 

[theJesuit]

19 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Main Question: I know this is impossible as far as we know... but I was curious if a method like that WOULD work if it were possible?

 

19 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

But I'm just going by what they showed on 60 years of the shows, not any actual science.

Never let physics get in the way of a good story

[Spacescifi]

4 hours ago, KSK said:

I haven’t watched much Trek beyond Next Generation but ‘teching the tech’ does sound awfully familiar. I recall a lot of reprogramming the deflector array to emit the Particle of the Week.

To answer the original question - I don’t think it would work because that absorbed heat has to go somewhere afterwards. So the good news is that the Enterprise survived the nuke. The bad news is that the crew were summarily cooked by the structural integrity fields.

 

Well... per the OP, the energy used would be 100% converted into hull integrity with zero waste heat (yes I know that breaks conservation of energy but so be it).

 

The heat the crew might die from is from the heat of the nuclear blast being absorbed by the outer hull... which would cause it to flash cook the ship's innards and radiate and conduct heat inside until it cooled.

 

Yet more likely, the crew would die from the sheer g-force of the equivalent of a multi-megaton hammer slamming down on them on the ground.

 

Crew has a much better chance of survival if the ship is hit from behind while flying away in the air, though the heat would still present real problem.

 

So in conclusion... yeah... the tech is of limited if any value against a nuke, but against bullets it would be awesome.

[magnemoe]

6 hours ago, wumpus said:

Anything deeper into star trek tech pretty much leads to bad TV show tropes.  The writers  just write "tech the tech" and the science consultants fill in reasonable/consistent technobabble.  No idea if they've burned away too much good will away to keep this up at a high level.

http://www.bryanreesman.com/2009/10/09/captain-picard-the-tech-is-overteching/

Focusing on the technology is pretty pointless.  Society and maybe weird fundamental bits of science make more sense.  And one thing I learned from a fairly deep study of the history of science and tech (not to mention watching more of it happen than I care to admit) is that "inspired inventions" aren't the key to technology.  Technology depends on the infrastructure.  "Steam engine time" is merely the condition of having enough infrastructure to support steam engines.  If you don't have it, it doesn't matter how good an engineer Hero of Alexandria was.  You don't get steam engines other than toys.

So much, and its an reason the first steam engines used vacuum rater than over pressure, vacuum is limited to one bar and implodes. 
The first steam engines was also so inefficient they was only practical for pumping water out of coal mines, yes you have to spend 10% of the output but you can keep your mine running. 
At this time they had 500 year experience with high pressure as in cannons and guns. 

So they could not build an steam engine in ancient Rome, they could build an printing press however ancient Egypt could, its bronze age technology, 

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, theJesuit said:

Never let physics get in the way of a good story

True but you have to stay true to your universe, not important in an standalone movie but important in an series. 

Yes it was a very cool scene but kind of ruining everything in the universe. 
Why was it not an common strategy? you could use missile swarms if it most fails. 

[Superfluous J]

46 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Yes it was a very cool scene but kind of ruining everything in the universe. 

Nope they totally 100% fixed that in the next movie by noting it was a 1 in a million shot.

...which never happens in Star Wars.

[SunlitZelkova]

6 hours ago, magnemoe said:

True but you have to stay true to your universe, not important in an standalone movie but important in an series. 

Yes it was a very cool scene but kind of ruining everything in the universe. 
Why was it not an common strategy? you could use missile swarms if it most fails. 

It could be similar to how ships don’t ram each other in real life despite that being a valid tactic.

The lack of a use of hyperdrive weapons could arguably always have been a problem with the series.

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

It could be similar to how ships don’t ram each other in real life despite that being a valid tactic.

The lack of a use of hyperdrive weapons could arguably always have been a problem with the series.

Except that ramming was a an thing with galleys, it came back into fashion with ironclads as armor was better than guns for some decades then went away as gun ranges increased past 20 km.
It still happened during the world wars but mostly against submarines as they came close enough that it was possible 

[KSK]

Ramming with submarines was a thing for a while too, back when a torpedo was a large explosive charge attached to a spar.

[kerbiloid]

Let me introduce the Chisel Orion project

The pusher plate is attached to a hefty chisel.
You get close to the space ironclad, blast a nuke behind, and the chisel kicks the target armor with the force of a nuke.

Edited September 2, 2022 by kerbiloid

[wumpus]

15 hours ago, magnemoe said:

So they could not build an steam engine in ancient Rome, they could build an printing press however ancient Egypt could, its bronze age technology, 

A lot would depend on whether you could get ink to copy from bronze/clay/whatever to papyrus.  It would be a lot easier in Mesopotamia as they wrote on hardened clay (unfortunately I think Summerians/Babalyonians cuniform would require too many stamps, Egyptian might have worked).  In fact, there was at least one Greek artifact (a vase?  some sort of pottery) that appears to have text on it that was printed via individual stamps.  But just one such piece of pottery, and didn't seem to take off.  Don't underestimate the complexity of moveable type, it took a lot of modifications to get from the wine press to moveable type (check the length of time between the Chinese "whole sheet" printing press and the Korean "moveable type" press).  Some of this may be exaggerated: I remember reading that the printing press required special ink, but it sounds almost identical to scribe's ink.  Maybe the proportions changed?

4 hours ago, KSK said:

Ramming with submarines was a thing for a while too, back when a torpedo was a large explosive charge attached to a spar.

Was there ever a case where that wasn't suicide?  There was one such attempt in the US civil war.  The Captain kept the hatch  open to see what he was attacking, and the resulting wave sunk the boat.

[KSK]

31 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Was there ever a case where that wasn't suicide?  There was one such attempt in the US civil war.  The Captain kept the hatch  open to see what he was attacking, and the resulting wave sunk the boat.

Yeah, it was the Civil War subs that I was thinking of, which seemed like deathtraps on a good day. I read a very interesting book (by Rachel Lance - it's referenced in the Wikipedia article) about the Hunley which succeeded in its mission but the crew died under mysterious circumstances, still at their posts with no obvious sign of panic or distress. Lance made the case in her book that they were killed by blast trauma from the torpedo detonation.

I think the book referred to a couple of times where torpedo ramming did work but I'd have to re-read it to be sure. In any case, it's a pretty good warts-and-all popular science version of her investigation - can recommend if you're interested in such things.

[wumpus]

To be honest, the original question can be answered with some physics and roughly a single guessable parameter.

Step 1: figure out just how powerful "navigational shields" are.  These shields have to withstand constant bombardment of various particles (electrons, protons, alpha particles) hitting the ship at nearly the speed of light (granted, we really don't know how fast federation ships go before they switch to warp drive.  Perhaps the  aren't impressive).

Step 2: guess how much stronger "shields" are than "navigational shields".  It should be fairly significant.

Step 3: calculate how many particles would hit the shield and what their energies are.  Since a 25th century craft should survive a 20th century attack (surely the klingons/romulans/borg/villain-of-the-series have access to nukes), you really can use this to establish a lower bound for how much stronger "shields" are than "navigational shields".

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, wumpus said:

A lot would depend on whether you could get ink to copy from bronze/clay/whatever to papyrus.  It would be a lot easier in Mesopotamia as they wrote on hardened clay (unfortunately I think Summerians/Babalyonians cuniform would require too many stamps, Egyptian might have worked).  In fact, there was at least one Greek artifact (a vase?  some sort of pottery) that appears to have text on it that was printed via individual stamps.  But just one such piece of pottery, and didn't seem to take off.  Don't underestimate the complexity of moveable type, it took a lot of modifications to get from the wine press to moveable type (check the length of time between the Chinese "whole sheet" printing press and the Korean "moveable type" press).  Some of this may be exaggerated: I remember reading that the printing press required special ink, but it sounds almost identical to scribe's ink.  Maybe the proportions changed?

Printing presses also require an marked, Rome had an marked for books, ancient Greece to but smaller, the bronze age cultures like ancient Egypt had an to low literacy rate it would make much of an marked. Yes you hand official stuff like new laws but this was so much larger in Rome. 
Saw an Youtube video about lost books, one Roman emperor complained how hard it was to track down some books. An emperor having problems renting a book.
The obvious benefit of printing is that knowledge spread faster and is preserved better because of more copies. 
I say it was an requirement for the renaissance you got more knowledge around to more people.