Star Trek movie and fusion

[DR.ZARKOF]

Gene Roddenberry wrote a book about "The Making of Star Trek" that gives a lot of info about what was going through his mind when he was laying down the basics of the show. Antimatter was chosen as the power source for the Enterprise because he wanted something far more advanced than any Twentieth Century technology and fusion was already being worked on at the time. Obsessed fans have assumed the responsibility for taking the often contradictory technical details of the show and combining them into a consistent futuristic technology. My own interpretation of the ship's power supply is as follows. The ship's main deflector is used to guide interstellar dust and gas safely around the Enterprise during high speed flight. The Bussard collector is used to extract (probably using a combination of sensors, tractors and transporters) Deuterium from the gas flow. The Deuterium is fused to provide primary power for all ship systems. Warp drive is extremely energy intensive. On fusion power alone it is not possible to go any faster than warp factor three or four. Power from the fusion reactor is directed into Dilithium chrystals where energy is transformed into matter and antimatter through pair production with almost one hundred percent efficiency. When the ship needs more power than fusion alone can provide, the antimatter and matter particles are directed back into the Dilithium where they are converted back into energy, again with almost perfect efficiency. Thus the antimatter containment chamber acts as a super storage battery for energy that originated with Deuterium fusion.

[Xardion]

If you want to know what technical ideas the shows' developers were basing the technology on, I highly recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Generat ... 0671704273

It goes very in-depth into the 'science' behind the fiction.

[krenshala]

I remember hearing that some folks met Rodenbury at a Con and asked him, point blank, "how do the transporters work?". His answer?

"Quite well, thank you."

I think that pretty much sums up the technical accuracy of teh Star Trek universe, irregardless of what real-world tech or theory their stuff is based on.