How Many Nuclear Power Plants Can Power the Enterprise? Let's Calculate!!!

when we see spaceships in sci-fi like the Enterprise accelerate to half the speed of light in a matter of seconds we often take it for granted just how miraculous this kind of thing is fans of sci-fi often lose their sense of perspective relative to the real world especially if you consider what we know about physics and Engineering in our current primitive age probably one of our most efficient and high-yield forms of energy production today is a nuclear reactor one nuclear reactor in the United States outputs on average about one gigawatt of power and that's kind of a lot one gigawatt is a billion watts and to put that into perspective that's about 100 million LED bulbs 1.3 million horses or 2000 Corvette z06s and yes this all seems like a lot but compared to the potential power of a real Starship from Star Trek even a lower tech one it's quite laughable it was stated in the Next Generation episode True Q the Enterprise D could generate 12.75 billion gigawatts and that's about 12 billion nuclear power plants obviously those ships are using a different Power Source in the form of matter antimatter but still in this case we'll use the old movie era Enterprise to make some fun calculations so how much does it really take to power a Starship let's focus on three abilities for this Enterprise that we can easily calculate the power requirements for according to Modern physics and then the fourth gets a bit harder and steeped in exotic theories the three tasks are the ability to reach almost the speed of light at impulse the ability to use energy shields for defense and the ability to fire weapons in this case phasers the first task reach 0.9 times the speed of light is pretty straightforward that is before we throw in special relativity which we will do later in that case we start with the formula for kinetic energy of the objects in joules which one joule equals one watt so that makes it easy kinetic energy equals one half the mass times velocity squared the target velocity is 0.9 C or 0.9 of 299 792 458 meters per second and that comes out to 269 million 813 212 meters per second if we calculate this for just one kilogram for now that comes out to this number in Watts but we want to convert that to a gigawatt which is a billion Watts so we divide that by a billion and it comes out to 36 million 399 584.7 gigawatts but that's only for one gram for a metric ton we have to multiply times a thousand and that comes out to 36 billion 399 million 584 738 gigawatts and consider that this Enterprise could be around 200 000 tons this isn't really stated in Canon anywhere we're just kind of using modern warships for reference here the weight of this Enterprise could be a lot more could be a lot less we have no idea what 23rd Century materials would actually weigh but we'll just go with 200 000 metric tons for now so we take the 36 billion number above and multiply that times 200 000 tons and that comes out to about 727 trillion 991 billion 690 million so yeah that's about 728 trillion nuclear reactors that's quite a bit however according to special relativity it takes a lot more energy to reach higher velocities the closer you are to the speed of light and 0.9 c will definitely cause some relativity issues so yeah we gotta get into some relativistic equations now and we just happen to have one right here for calculating the energy and relativistic speeds for Mass and by the end of the day we come up with 23 quadrillion 262 trillion 612 billion gigawatts of energy so yeah that's a lot even more than what they stated was possible for the Enterprise D so how can even they possibly come up with that much power well they probably can't even with a matter antimatter reactor and this is where we just delve into highly theoretical physics that our technology is not able to manifest we will touch on that briefly a bit later so now how about shields those of you familiar with this channel may have seen my earlier video on real world Shield physics the primary Shields of Star Trek ships are most likely magnetoplasma Shields which is a super hot plasma wall controlled by magnetic fields it's so hot you wouldn't be able to see it with the naked eye and this can be made to deflect or disintegrate objects that collide with it we already have something like this today these high energy plasma fields are used on tokamax which compress plasma and attempt to get a good fusion reaction of course the Power released from tokomax Fusion reactors at this stage is still less than the power put into them to charge all that plasma but we can take this and apply it to Shield technology very much like what you would find in Star Trek let's take the latest known Toca Mac reactor that is to be built called iter the Eider torroid will have a radius of only 6.2 meters and a volume of 840 cubic meters this is quite small compared to the coverage needed to protect a Starship the electrical requirements of this either plant will range from 110 megawatts up to 620 megawatts for Peak periods okay so that's almost an entire nuclear power plant well let's assume the Enterprise needs to project a shield of much greater surface area and volume I mean the whole ship is around 300 meters for this particular one anyway the entire volume of the ship does not need to be encompassed we just need to project a surface area that's perhaps a meter thick we can kind of use a box surface area formula to roughly calculate how much we're going to need and if we're looking at a ship that's about 335 meters by a 76 by 76 meters we're looking at about a hundred thousand square meters to cover here and that's about 120 times the plasma area of The Idler reactor and the outer reactor requires 620 megawatts so that's more than half a gigawatt 620 megawatts times 120 is 74 400 MB Watts so we're looking at about 7.4 gigawatts for Enterprise's Shield or about seven nuclear power plants however the shields of a Starship may be many times stronger than the Tokamak plasma field but I have to admit there are probably tons of equations and simulations that could be conducted to figure out just how strong this plasma Shield has to be to deflect or disintegrate something like say an incoming asteroid to say nothing about some kind of weapon this is where some of you nerds in the comments might have the time to Hash this out if you want to and I would really encourage that but overall a very basic plasma Shield may only require enough power to compare to about a dozen nuclear power plants or so well isn't that nice alright now let's move on to some phasers phasers are a directed energy weapon almost certainly a type of particle weapon or particle beam and there are many types of particle beams there's the Large Hadron Collider for example that accelerates subatomic particles at near the speed of light of course the type and charge of the particles matters a lot especially for keeping the beam cohesive in Star Trek rather than shooting protons or electrons or other types of particles phasers use a particle called a nadion now we aren't going to get into the physics of phasers in the video we certainly can say that phasers are probably a large particle accelerator that uses magnetic fields or lensing devices to focus the beams and the twist ears that the nadions are insanely destructive in cohesive particles the Large Hadron Collider uses 200 megawatts of power when running operations which is quite a bit for our standards but perhaps somewhat small by Star Trek standards and it's pretty clear that a Starship like the Enterprise can Channel a very large portion of all its power into these weapons so we could be talking many dozens of gigawatts here why only dozens so this leads us to the final conundrum about Star Trek technology while it's true that the Enterprises uses a matter antimatter Annihilation for its power source our current physics today cannot output much more than about four times that of a regular fission reactor and let's consider that it may be the case that these Starships do not need as much power as we think they might to brute force their way into doing what they do but instead they finesse it with the warp drive for example the relativistic restrictions on speed are bypassed by creating a warp bubble ways to counter inertia and even Mass have been devised today's physics is still missing a few tricks that will be required to devise not more powerful ways of powering our ships but smarter ways of accomplishing what seems to be the impossible thank you for watching space friends I threw this video together extremely fast due to somewhat low numbers this month I'm going to get over my inherent shyness soon and do some live streaming so subscribe and get the notification for that and I really appreciate anyone who could support this channel through patreon which has 3D model assets and some renders and I've been remiss about putting my vids on their ad free it's time to start doing that isn't it special thanks to recent patreon editions Jonathan Dustin Hatchet and uh rise bro zero three and everyone else who's been a long time supporter there hope everyone is having a great summer now stay tuned for retakes 36 billion 399 comes out we take 36 billion 399 584. we take about 727 billion minimum just how strong this plasma Shield has to be to deflector the second retake so this leads us to the final conundrum about Star Trek technology read it so this kind of leads us to the final conundrum about Star Trek we take so this leads us to the final conundrum about Star Trek retake

Channel: Resurrected Starships

Views: 36,438

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Id: l6L1f2m30bM

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2023