Engineering

Larry Garfield

Revision History
Revision 3 5 May 2012

Remove course proctor name from exam body.

Revision 2 10 July 2005

Revised biography in introduction

Revision 1 1 February 1999

Original version by Larry Garfield


Table of Contents

Introduction
The real world
Paramount gets involved
Now do it yourself
Build your own
References
Conclusion
Exam
Modern Science
Star Trek Science
Role Playing
Ship Design
References
Extra Credit

Introduction

Hello there, and welcome to the STF Academy Engineering Seminar. Your professor will be Admiral Larry Garfield. Larry has been a member of STF since 22 August 1997 and has served in a variety of capacities. His Engineering work includes co-designer of the Trafalgar, McCoy, and Viking-class specs as well as sole designer of the Yub nub class. He has served as Engineering Director, Asssitant Engineering Director, Engineering Assistant, and Dockmaster, and has authored or co-authored numerous Engineering Department policies. Now that I'm done tooting my own horn, on to the course.

Over the course of the lessons that follow we will be covering one major topic: Real Physics and Star Trek Physics. That is, we will be covering two major topics: Real Physics, Star Trek Physics, and How to Role Play in Engineering. We WILL be covering three major topics: Real Physics, Star Trek Physics, How to Role Play in Engineering, and Starship Design. Amongst the topics that we will be covering are such diverse subjects as...

Anyway, we'll be doing a lot. This class is intended to make you a better RPer as well as a better member of the ED. It will, hopefully, also inform you about matters of physics, real and Paramount, that you never knew and probably never wanted to. Be warned, however, that the pages that follow may contain graphic material, and are not recommended for people who are faint of heart or bandwidth.

So on to the course already!

The real world

One thing that sets Star Trek aside from most other Sci-Fi shows is that almost all of its scientific "techno-babble," the fancy words they throw around to make the warp core sound like something you want for Christmas, is based on real world physics or what we think is real world physics. While shows like Babylon 5 may have more realistic space movement for conventional thrusters, Star Trek delves into the world of quantum physics and relativity and does so accurately, most of the time. Therefore, to understand Star Trek Physics we must first comprehend what is already known about the universe. It is assumed that you are already familiar with Newtonian Physics, as going into that would take too much time.

All matter is made up of atoms. All atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. All protons and neutrons are made up of a special combination of quarks (pronounced "quorks" to rhyme with cork, not with a certain bartender who shall remain nameless). At this point scientists begin to disagree. Some say quarks are the most fundamental building block of the universe. The latest neat theory, known as "M-Theory" is that all matter can be broken down into flat sheets that have dimensions of zero by zero by zero. The most commonly accepted theory, at least this week, is that all matter can be broken down into "superstrings," particles that have dimensions zero by zero by zero and are shaped like a piece of spaghetti. If the logic of a piece of spaghetti with no dimensions doesn't seem quite Vulcan in its soundness, don't worry. It's actually a mathematical representation of something people who don't hold advanced degrees can't possibly hope to understand without a decent helping of tomato sauce. But whichever theory is correct, they all state the same thing: these fundamental building blocks are made up of energy, and all interaction between particles, which are now simply an illusion created by energy, occurs through what are known as mediator particles.

Now that you are totally confused, let's discuss those mediator particles. There are four fundamental forces in the Universe: Gravity, Electromagnetism, the Strong Nuclear Force, and the Weak Nuclear Force. While it is often convenient and easier to think of these forces simply happening, through a simple mathematical equation like F=m*a, that is not completely accurate. All interaction between particles is mediated by special particles that are even smaller. The most famous of these is the still-theoretical graviton. Gravitons, like all other mediator particles, do their thing by exchanging places with other gravitons. If a proton and neutron are close enough to each other, then one graviton from the proton will go flying off towards the neutron and vice versa. In doing so, a force is exerted, a force we know as gravity. The closer the two particles, the faster the gravitons are exchanged and the stronger the force. Of course, while it is a nice theory, modern scientists are still scratching their heads when it comes to finding one outside of a calculator (or supercomputer, as the case may be), but it seems to make sense on printer paper.

Electromagnetism, or EM, exists in the form of radiation. That radiation is a wave of photons, and like any wave has a velocity, a wavelength, and a frequency. The velocity is determined solely by the medium through which the wave is traveling. The wavelength and frequency then inversely related in the equation wavelength*frequency=velocity. The wavelength of the wave determines what the radiation is. Very low wavelength EM radiation is known as radio, and carries such interesting information as accidents on the highway, the latest music by the rock artist who's popular this week, and the latest news on how the government is corrupt and every politician is blaming everyone else except himself. At the other end of the EM spectrum is the extremely short-wavelength of gamma radiation and X-rays. Somewhere in the middle resides visible light, in a very small range. Human eyes are only capable of picking out this small region because our eyes evolved that way, whereas other species can see different ranges of EM radiation, such as ultraviolet. Geordi LaForge's VISOR allowed him to see the entire spectrum at once, which is why everyone else said it was amazing and he said it gave him a headache.

If you are still reading this, congratulations. You are officially a dedicated, devoted, honest-to-goodness fanatic. Fear not, the easy stuff is coming up next, so that only you devoted few will get it.

All particles in the universe have a charge. For some particles, that charge is zero. A good example of this is the neutrino, one of the three building blocks of a neutron. (I'll bet you didn't know that a neutron is really just an electron, a proton, and a neutrino stuck very closely together, did you?) And for every particle there is an anti-particle, identical in absolutely every possible way except for the charge. An electron has a mass of 9.1x10-28 grams and a charge of -1. An anti-electron has a mass of 9.1x10-28 grams and a charge of +1. It is more commonly known as a "positron." (Not to be confused with Data's "positronic net" neurology. That is something else entirely.) In theory, you can build entire atoms, molecules, and even entire galaxies out of anti-matter. There's just one teeny tiny problem. If a particle comes into contact with its anti-particle, they destroy each other in a really cool light show that produces an amount of energy equivalent to their mass, as described by that really neat equation that you really should know before you go any further, E=MC2, where E is energy in joules, M is mass in kilograms (combined mass of both matter and anti-matter), and C is the speed of light in meters per second. In the metric system, the speed of light is approximately 3x108 meters per second. But if you could find a way to safely manufacture or harvest anti-matter and then collect the energy created by destroying it, that would be even better than the still-to-be-invented cold fusion. More on this in the next class.

Easy right?

Paramount gets involved

Now that you have a basic grasp of modern-day cutting edge physics, so what? I mean, who cares about gravitons and anti-whatsits?

Apparently you do, or you wouldn't be reading this lecture. Now to put all that techno-babble into practice. Let's discuss some of the more interesting Star Trek technologies, and see how they make use of these fancy words.

Warp drive is the most interesting of all of Star Trek's technological wonders, and it is the most controversial. The basic principle behind it is quite simple. Remember the anti-matter we talked about in our last class? All Starfleet ships with a warp core carry with them fuel in the form of deuterium and anti-deuterium. "Deuterium" is an isotope of hydrogen, containing one proton and one electron, but also one neutron. Anti-deuterium, therefore, contains one anti-proton, one positron, and one anti-neutron. The anti-deuterium, usually just called anti-matter, is stored in magnetic containers, which use magnetic fields to keep the atoms moving in a circle without ever touching the walls of the container. These storage chambers are connected to one end of the Matter/Anti-Matter Reaction Assembly, or MARA. That's the blue tube with the flashing lights that you see in the middle of engineering on the Enterprise-D. At the other end of the MARA -- usually the top or front, depending on the orientation -- is the deuterium tank, which stores the deuterium in a really big metal tank, similar to the trucks you see on the highway only much bigger and stronger. Matter and anti-matter are both pumped into the MARA at both ends at exactly the same rate, and the stream is controlled by magnetic fields to guide the particles into the Reaction Chamber, that big round thing in main engineering. Inside the Reaction Chamber sits the dilithium crystal, a fictional invention of the producers. Dilithium is special because it's crystal structure is just the right size and shape to channel the flying particles of matter and anti-matter to hit each other head on. It is also the only material known to Federation science that does not interact with anti-matter. How? Good question. We don't have a good answer. When the matter and anti-matter hit each other, they cease to exist, and produce pure energy in the form of plasma. This plasma is then channeled out into the pink tubes you see behind the warp core to the Electro-Plasma System (EPS) and to the warp nacelles. It's here that the explanations differ.

In order to make life easier for future writers, and because they don't quite know how it works either, the producers of Star Trek have deliberately left the description of how this immense power can possibly make a ship go faster than the speed of light quite vague. According to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, published by the producers, it has something to do with a "subspace field" or "warp field" that managed to side-step the restrictions imposed by Einstein's Special Relativity. How? Pick an answer, none of them really work.

  • One theory put forth by Professor Lawrence M. Krauss in his book The Physics of Star Trek is that a warp field somehow manages to create a huge gravity well in front of the ship and a gravity vacuum behind the ship. The ship and the space around it are then pulled forward. But as the ship moves forward, so does the gravity well, so the space around the ship and therefore the ship moves along with it, like hanging a carrot in front of a donkey. Since the ship is at rest relative to the space around it, there is no time dilation problem. And this method works perfectly and logically, according to modern physics and even Einsteinian Relativity. But only if you can produce enough energy to create such a gravity well, which would require several thousand times the energy produced in the entirety of human history, and several thousand times the energy of a matter/anti-matter reaction. Somewhere on the order of a black hole.

  • Another theory put forth by STF's very own Colin Wyers is that subspace is not another dimension but a thin film of zero-dimensional particles that is uniform throughout the universe, and exist for less than a billionth of a second, known as the Zero Point Field. According to him, a warp field causes the ZPF particles in front of the ship to be moved to the back, creating a vacuum in the ZPF in front of the ship, and the ship is sucked in to fill the vacuum. The problem here? Several Star Trek episodes have established that subspace is not a field of particles but another domain, one in which other species can even exist. There's also the problem of moving a particle that exists for only a billionth of a second.

  • STF's Randy McCullick has suggested yet another brand of warp drive, in which subspace is somewhat akin to the hyperspace used by most other shows, such as Star Wars and Babylon 5. He argues that a warp field is a "pocket" of this subspace/hyperspace which allows the ship to break all kinds of fun rules. This theory is the closest to what we have seen on the show, yet is the farthest from what the official publications tell us happens. As a side note, both McCullick's Wave Motion Engine and the failed Transwarp drive worked on the principle of putting the ship into subspace instead of subspace around the ship. The advantage was that if you traveled at a given speed in subspace it would take you 3 weeks ship time to get from point A to point B but that was only 4 days normal time. Of course, that meant the crew was significantly older than they should be.

Which is correct? None of them. There is right now no convincing argument for any of the proposed methods. So until Stephen Hawking manages to figure out just how it all works, the safest thing we fans can do is nod our head and say "Yep, it works" and leave well enough alone.

The second major technology of Star Trek that gets people excited is transporters and their related technologies. In a nutshell, a personnel transporters work by first creating a virtual energy "tube" called an Anular Confinement Beam between the point of origin and the destination. Then, the transporter examines you, determines exactly how you are made up at that precise moment, and chops you down to the quark level. A fancy device called a Heisenburg compensator is used to keep track of the wave/particle duality that makes dealing with quarks so confusing. The individual quarks, along with instructions on how to put them back together again, are sent through the tube and the reassembled at the other end, and voila! Cargo transporters, on the other hand, only break matter down to the molecular level, so they are not able to handle biological material. Replicators do essentially the same thing, except they are stored at the molecular level and and can be held indefinitely. In fact, molecules are stored in the computer somewhere and then assembled one by one on demand to the recipe you call for, such as tomato soup, for which there are over thirty different recipes. Transporters are actually even less grounded in modern physics that warp drive. In fact, they are the least explained and least likely to ever occur. Within the last year, scientists have been able to essentially transport individual quarks, and even at atom at one point, but the same scientists still say that Star Trek-style transporters are not forthcoming, and probably won't be. But, this is Star Trek, and the magic wand has been woven. So, just as for warp, the safest thing to do is push the button and watch your away team disappear in some really nice special effects.

Remember those gravitons we talked about? Well guess what, they're useful too. Through still more unexplained means, starships are able to produce, or maybe collect we are never quite sure, free gravitons. Those gravitons are then held in a field surrounding the ship by more magic. When a phaser beam or torpedo hits the graviton field it is deflected by the gravimetric distortions. From one point of view, the object is suddenly moved elsewhere, usually around the shields and dissipating into space. Since all matter is really just energy, and all energy waves are really just a pattern of motion in particles (one of the universes many ways of giving college students a headache), this works for both phasers and disrupters as well as torpedoes, missiles, and the random asteroid or shuttle craft piloted by Starfleet officers masquerading as Maquis. Or not.

Confused yet? If not, then I guess I'm not doing my job. Digest this lesson for a while, and then go on to the next lesson. Maybe I can confuse you there.

Now do it yourself

We now come to the question of application. You now have -- or should, unless you've been reading these classes out of order in which case shame on you -- a working knowledge of how the Universe works according to modern scientists as well as the key ways in which Star Trek plays with them. Now, is that actually useful in STF? The answer is: Sort of.

The first thing to remember is that most STFers have NOT read this wonderful treatise on everything you ever wanted to know about physics but were afraid to ask. And unless you have an advanced degree yourself , chances are you are sitting there now with no idea how to apply all of this techno-babble in your daily RPing. (Or weekly for those of you in Fleet Two, or hourly for those on the Endevour.) Well guess what, that's not as big a problem as it seems.

There's a great deal of valid, relevant information not covered here, much of it more useful in your IC posting, in the TV shows themselves. And there's still more in the canon publications. More on those later.

So why are you still reading this? Here's why:

To role play in engineering takes 20% technical knowledge, 30% Star Trek technical knowledge, and 60% creativity. And being able to add is often useful. (Damnit!) Some people with extensive knowledge make bad engineering officers, and some of the best engineering officers simply prattle off terms without any clue how they work. Of course, the very best engineers know what they're talking about and can toss around terms that make sense. And you're here because you want to be the very best. Right?

Now then, some things to keep in mind when RPing in engineering:

  1. Being a miracle worker may make for great humor and character development, but it is very easy to get carried away. Even more than security, the miracle worker engineer is the single most likely place to have "superhero" characters develop. Always watch yourself. If the framistan modulator is fused, consider it dead. If it's damaged, consider it repairable in an amount of time that will make it useful just barely in time to save everyone's life.

  2. You can never have a system working too good. Well, that's not quite true. You can. If the ship's specs state that the ship is capable of warp 8.9, then it may be possible to squeeze 9.1 or 9.2 out of it for a few minutes, at the risk of the whole thing blowing up in your face (which is up to the GM to decide). But don't expect to "rig" the engines to pull 9.5 or 9.7. They can't do it. This also comes under the heading of don't abuse your power, or your power distribution systems.

  3. The Chief Engineer especially but other engineers as well should make it his personal responsibility to know the ship forwards and backwards. If there are specs posted for a ship, read them several times and memorize them forwards and backwards. Have a bookmark for them for easy access. And follow them. The CE is normally the person to bring up the special perks of each class. Be sure that you know what they are, and use them appropriately. The CO and CE are the two people in the best position to help create a "personality" for the ship, even if it doesn't have on of those neato Nyetscape AI systems.

  4. If something is broken but you don't know what, use a name that sounds reasonable that you heard them complaining about on the show. If the shields are damaged, the shield emitters could be off-line (read: repairable), they could be fused or destroyed (read: beyond all hope until they are suddenly and miraculously fixed at the start of the next mission), or they could be damaged (read: repairable but maybe not in time). If the phasers don't work, it could be the emitters -- the actual crystals that fire the beam -- it could be the generators which make the energy in the first place, it could be the conduits between them, or it could be something else. The EPS system is the 24th century equivalent of the electrical wiring, although it doesn't run on electricity. When in doubt, try and think what Geordi would yell at the comm system while things were exploding.

  5. If you are the CE, then like any good Department Head, you should make sure your underlings have something to do. During off time this could be running a diagnostic or tweaking the system to be even better. Work with your junior officers, not over them. If everything is exploding and you're under attack from the Evil GM's Nameless Aliens, make sure that everyone is in charge of something. Tell some people to handle repairs while others work on finding the miracle weapon or weakness that saves the day. And make sure that you are in one of those groups.

  6. Speaking of that miracle weapon, the same warning that goes for superheros goes for superweapons. One of the hardest fine lines you will have to walk as an engineer is the line between what you think you should be able to do and what you can do in the context of the RPG.

  7. For those of you who are still trying to aust your CE and take his job, be sure to stand out as a solid RPer, not as a grandstander. One of the easiest traps to fall into is that of superhero or grandstander. Always keep an eye on yourself. Aside from character development and off-duty activity that is uniform to all departments, engineering junior officers should involve themselves in the workings of the ship. If you have no assignments from the CE or CO, interact with your fellow engineers (including NEs) and tweak systems. Often, however, your biggest challenge when things aren't happening will be interacting with other officers, not the machinery. Even engineers need to have lives.

  8. Know your GM's style. Some GMs like to give engineering a hard time and make them do all the work. Others tend to ignore it. Figure out how your GM works and play into it. If nothing is happening make something happen. Not a core breach, but a fluctuation, or a misalignment. Force the GM to remember that you're there. If the GM seems to have a vendetta against engineering, do your best to keep up and try and steer problems to other departments, such as science.

  9. As in any situation, the GM has the final say. You can appeal what the GM says to the FComm and GMDir, but assume that the GM is always right. Even if in reality what you are doing is perfectly legitimate, if the GM says you can't do it, you can't do it.

  10. Remember what you learned in the first two lessons. They will come in handy when fixing major systems, as you can play around with them, as well as find new ways to do things that are the exact same thing but sound cooler, so they will work better for the next 10 minutes, just in time to save the ship.

Build your own

It can be truly said that captains have it easy. All they have to do is tell the ship what to do and it does it. We engineers on the other hand have the task of actually getting the ship to do what it's told. That daunting task is known as Starship Design. In this class we will discuss the intricacies of designing a new starship or technology for STF use.

"Let us redefine progress, to mean that just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that we must do that thing." When the President of the Federation spoke those words at the Khitomer Peace Conference, he was in fact referring to engineering. That holds true especially in STF's ED, where there are limitations to what can be done above and beyond the physical constrains of the universe. These limits exist because STF is not a place where we say "wouldn't it be cool if" but "wouldn't it be great for an RPG if."

"You know engineers, they love to change things." Anyone who follows modern technology can attest to the validity of this statement. Just when you thought they had found the best way of doing something, some engineer comes along and finds a different way of doing it, which as often as not is worse than the previous method. In STF, this is a curse you as an engineer want to avoid, especially where it involves core technologies such as warp drive.

Here are some items to keep in mind while designing your dream ship:

  1. Remember that people will be RPing on this ship. Don't design a ship that you think would be neat for people to look at. Don't design a ship that would be great against the Jem'Hadar. Don't design a Borg killer. Design a ship where STF members can Role Play. That means even a specialty ship -- one that focuses on warfare, science, medical, etc. -- should be well rounded. It should also have enough weaknesses that it won't be able to destroy the entire Dominion Fleet. While it may be tempting to design one of these superships, and even if you think it could be done, that doesn't make it a good ship in the STF context.

  2. Don't reinvent the wheel. If it travels at warp, let it use a warp core. You don't need to recreate FTL drive, because you can't. Warp drive is not possible with our current understanding of the Universe, and the nature of the Star Trek Universe is not clear enough to determine how warp drive works now, much less replace it with something bigger and better. The same holds true for phasers, shields, warp cores, and other main technologies. And don't be ashamed to borrow ideas from other ship designs in STF. Building on the backs of giants is an established practice in science and in STF. Just make sure you give explicit credit to the initial design and designer. Otherwise it's plagiarism, and don't expect a ship to pass then.

  3. Be creative. If the last paragraph seemed to suggest that you shouldn't be creative at all, then you missed the point. New technology isn't bad. It can be fun and constructive, and make for some really nice RPGs. But you need to make sure that your new technologies are very well described, and that they work. For instance, if you are designing a new weapon, then make sure that the way it works makes sense in terms of the Star Trek context. It has been established in numerous episodes that lasers are of almost laughable impact on Starfleet ships. That's why everyone uses phasers and disrupters. So don't try and make lasers bigger and better, try and make phasers bigger and better. Or try to invent a replacement for the phaser. But if you are planning to invent a new technology, be forewarned: Expect a lot of setbacks. It is not uncommon for a new technology to simply not be up to snuf, and therefore not be passed in any form. You should not take it as an attack against you, but a statement that the technology is unfounded, unnecessary, or unworkable.

  4. Don't overdo it. There are a series of recommendations that the ED often makes repeatedly, so I will collect them here so that they need only be said once, thus saving bandwidth and server space. The most important of these is speed. It is very tempting to make a ship faster than the last on, and then even faster than that. Unfortunately, physical constraints and playability make this a bad idea. Impulse speeds, for instance, are measured in terms of a fraction of the speed of light. The Galaxy-class Enterprise-D, for instance, had a maximum cruising speed of .25c, that is, one quarter the speed of light. Theoretically, it could push itself up to .92c, but doing so did nasty things to the structure of the ship and caused all sorts of time dilation relativity problems. In fact, those relativity concerns kick in, realistically, around .4c. For that reason, the STF Engineering department has officially stated that ships are restricted to under .35c impulse speeds in their fundamental design, and well below .35c is strongly encouraged. Lest this seem too unreasonable a suggestion, keep in mind that even at .27c a ship could easily outrun the Enterprise-D, and that the GMD has also made it clear that enemy ships must follow the same restrictions. Warp is not quite as stringent, but there energy and playability concerns come into play. Remember that warp is measured on a logarithmic scale. Warp 9 isn't 9 times the speed of light, it's 1516 times the speed of light. That's pretty darn fast. Also, as the warp speed increases the energy requirements increase, to the point that warp 10 is both infinite velocity and and infinite energy requirements, just as under Einsteinian physics the speed of light requires infinite energy. And when speed increases much farther than warp 9, the power usage increases faster than the speed, so warp 9.4 is actually far less efficient than warp 9.1. In terms of playability, the speed should also not be too fast, as it makes for nonsense RPGs. In fact, in many cases a slower ship can be better than a fast one when it comes to Role Playing. In practice, a maximum warp speed of 9.8 should be sufficient for both physical constraints and RPG usage, as well as satisfy the innate desire to say "Mine is faster than yours." Yes, some ships seen in the show have a higher max warp speed, but in order to make RPGs more challenging this is the STF limit. Most ships, however, can make do with far less than that and still be great designs, depending on their purpose. Staying far under these caps will increase the chances of a ship being approved.

  5. Use standard notation. That means that you should always use the SI system of measurement, more commonly known as metric. Mass is measured in kilograms, distance in meters, and time in seconds, in all cases. When referring to super-high speeds, use a fraction of c, the speed of light. Avoid the complicated and unwieldy Imperial system (also known as English, also known as American, also known as that-damn-system-with-feet-and-pounds) like the Bolian Plague.

References

The question often arises, if one person says one thing, and a second person says another thing, who is right? The answer is often both, but then which do you go with? In this lesson we discuss the hierarchy of sources that are considered valid references. Though there is much disagreement about some sources, a set system needed to be established for sanity's sake.

The criteria for validity in this list is based upon two assumptions. First, like the producers, it is assumed that only the TV show and movies are valid. While there have been a great many novels published in the Star Trek Universe, many of them very good, they often contradict each other. It is also impossible to keep up with all of them. For that reason, novels are not considered canon, in general.

There are a few special cases. The cartoon series of the original cast was not produced by Paramount and Rodenberry, so it too is ignored by the producers. Therefore, we overlook it as well. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is sometimes considered to be apocryphal as well. In fact, it is rumored that Rodenberry liked to ignore it, so that is also on the exempt list. Finally, there is the Voyager episode that is a disgrace to the series, "Threshold." Supposedly, by finding a new, more stable type of dilithium Tom Paris is able to use a shuttle to break the warp 10 barrier, which causes him to evolve at a highly accelerated rate along the predefined course of human evolution. After fans stopped laughing at the utter stupidity of the episode, most agreed that it was safest to pretend it never happened, as it is the worst break of scientific rules, both modern and Star Trek, in 30 year history of the series.

The second assumption is that there are a select number of books published by people like Mike Okuda and Herman Zimmerman that are also considered valid resources. These are different from the often useful but non-canon books from other authors. Only those written by the production staff are valid. In order of prescience, these are:

  1. The Deep Space Nine Technical Manual, by Herman Zimmerman, Rick Sternback, and Doug Drexler, published 1998.

  2. The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, by Rick Sternback and Michael Okuda, published 1991.

  3. The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future, CD-ROM or 2nd Edition book, by Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda, published 1997

  4. The Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future, 2nd Ed, by Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda, published 1996.

When in doubt, go with what these books say. In addition, modern science is always valid, unless Star Trek physics has contradicted it, in which case Star Trek physics takes precedence.

You will likely object to this list, but this is the list the STF Administration has agreed upon, because these are the most readily available and reliable sources. Numerous other sources may be useful references, and may sometimes be referred to, but when in doubt, the above texts are right, and others not wrong, just ignored.

Conclusion

Engineering is one of the most interesting departments in STF, both in an RPG and out of it. It's also one of the most dangerous. The potential for supercharacter problems is extreme. There's also the risk of superships and supertechs in the ED, and in the course of an RPG.

Engineering is also one of the most rewarding departments. It is the one most closely tied into the ship, and therefore often sets the pace for anything regarding hardware. If you know how to check yourself and are willing to take the time to learn, you will be rewarded with a memorable RPG experience even the Captain will envy.

Exam

Submission Instructions

  1. Write out your answers to the questions below.

  2. E-mail them to the course proctor

  3. Be sure to include your full name at the top of the e-mail!

  4. Do not send the original question, just the answers.

  5. Do not send your answers as an attachment. Send them in the body of the e-mail.

  6. Do not use "HTML-enriched" e-mail. It makes it harder to grade.

  7. All answers must be original. Do not simply copy and paste from the lessons.

Modern Science

  1. Scientists generally agree that all matter is at its most fundamental level made up of ______.

    1. Quarks

    2. Energy

    3. Spaghetti with tomato sauce

    4. Protons, neutrons, and electrons

  2. What purpose do mediator particles serve and how do they acomplish it?

  3. If 2 grams of matter and 2 grams of antimatter came in contact, how much energy would be produced? (Calculators are allowed.)

Star Trek Science

  1. The most accurate description of how warp drive works is...

    1. It creates a subspace bubble that makes the ship move into another dimention where physics don't apply.

    2. It manipulates particles that exist for a fraction of an instant to effectively "swim" through space.

    3. The energy is used to create a gravity well which pulls the ship along.

    4. Paramount says so.

  2. Describe in detail what happens to Riker when Chief O'Brian presses the right buttons.

  3. How are gravitons used to defend a ship?

Role Playing

  1. You are the CE. You have three junior officers. There is currently nothing going on that requires Engineering. What do you do and what do you tell your Engineering junior officers to do?

  2. You are an engineering junior officer, and are on an away mission to another ship. Half the ship isn't working, and you have to get it working. What sort of things would you try to do, GM permitting?

  3. You look over the specs for your ship, and find that something the crew has done contradicts what the specs say is possible for that class. What do you do? Why?

Ship Design

  1. You have designed a new class of ship designed as a science vessel in uncharted but generally calm space. What is the most appropriate set of numbers for the ship?

    1. Max Warp 9.8, Max Impulse .34c, 14 phaser banks

    2. Max Warp 8.7, Max Impulse .28c, 5 phaser banks

    3. Max Warp 9.8, Max Impulse .19c, 7 phaser banks

    4. Max Warp 9.5, Max Impulse .26c, 2 phaser banks

  2. You are working on a new weapon. In the process, you find that it relies on several technologies that have been supplanted between now and the 24th century. These technologies are basic to the design. The other members of the ED have pointed out this flaw. What do you do? Why?

  3. You've examined the Tech Manual and modern physics and seen all the TV shows, and have figured out a way to build a ship that would defeat a Borg cube. Other people have looked at it, and determined that technologically it is fairly sound. Do you propose it in the ED? Why?

References

  1. You read in one of the novels about a certain technology. You think it is really cool, and integrate it into a design or RPG. Someone complains, stating that something the TNG Tech Manual says makes it invalid. Can you still use the technology? Why?

  2. You have a technology in a design. You do some additional research, and find that the DS9 Tech Manual states that it is impossible. What do you do? Why?

  3. Digging through one of the Tech Manuals, you notice something about some technology that gives you a way out of your current problem in an RPG. You take advantage of it, planning for the ship to be able to use it to win the day. Someone else disagrees with you, stating that they've never heard of such a feature in the technology. Are you in the right? Why? If the GM is the person you are arguing against, how do you handle it?

Extra Credit

Design a workable miracle technology that you could "invent" in a few minutes on a ship that would work, be useful, not break any laws, and save the ship.