Federation Commander

In Prime Directive the deck plans for the Free/Prime Trader listed there are fuel tanks on the lower deck. Are they representing liquid hydrogen or anti-matter?

The fuel is a deuterium slush.

In my head canon, this deuterium in introduced to the anti-matter inside the reaction chamber as a fairly high ratio, at least 100:1 and perhaps as high as 100,000:1, to ensure there is enough matter-antimatter collision to generate enough power to run the ship.

The anti-matter tank is pretty small and well-shielded.

That slush deuterium is also used as the fuel for the (nuclear fusion powered) impulse engines and auxiliary power reactors (if-any). They use considerably more deuterium than the M/AM reactor and thus the "bunker" storage of sufficient quantities (on the order of 1000/1 or more of deuterium to anti-deuterium).

The upside is the deuterium can be replenished somewhat while underway by Bussard collectors and/or a dip into a gas giant's upper atmosphere. It's still simpler and more-efficient to be refueled by a tanker, but a ship can obtain enough deuterium to eek by, if slowly. Antimatter is much, much harder to come by and any significant amount has to be obtained from a fixed facility or brought from one.

From a story of mine posted over on Trek BBS:

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Marine Lieutenant Zychowski strapped himself in the third chair, the trainer's seat, behind Lieutenant Dupree and Ensign Tillman as they continued their sensor search. "What are you doing exactly?"

"A scoop and go," Tillman replied. "We're looking for a suitable gas giant or proto-star to skim off some hydrogen. Or to be more precise, the heavy hydrogen isotope known as deuterium."

"Deuterium? I though the warp drive runs on anti-matter."

"It does. Or rather, it runs on matter/anti-matter reactions. The deuterium is the matter part of the fuel." She looked at the planet that Dupree pointed to and shook her head as she tapped the screen on the line of the sensor reading that indicated it had too many carbohydrates in the mix. He flagged it as a planet to be surveyed at a later date; it might have indigenous life-forms. "What we'll do is fly low over the target planet and use the tractor beam to draw up a bulge in the atmosphere. Then we'll snap-turn back and fly thru that and pull it in with the Bussard collectors.

"We'll hit it at about warp one point four to one point six, or about three to four times light speed. As the mixture is pulled in, it will naturally begin to spin like a tornado. The heavier deuterium will separate due to centrifugal force, and we'll syphon that off. What's left of the hydrogen atoms will be squeezed together at hyper-luminescent velocities. Some of the atoms will be stripped of their electrons and become free ion particles, or be converted to tritium, which is too radioactive for our use, while a few hydrogen atoms will fuse to become helium atoms. It makes a great light show.

"Occasionally, like perhaps one in a hundred million chances, the hydrogen atoms will smash together in such a way as to create an anti-matter atom. These too will be drawn into the Bussard collector via a magnetic guide. We'll get maybe one part anti-matter for every ten thousand parts deuterium, but that's plenty." Ensign Tillman smiled at the Marine. "That's the dumbed-down high school version. If you really want to know what happens, you need to take a couple years of advanced physics."

Zychowski nodded. "So, if this is how you refuel the ship, why haven't I ever seen it before? And why did the commander say to buckle up?"

"This is an emergency procedure," Dupree explained. "Star Fleet has ships specifically designed to gather material to take to a star base for processing. As to buckling up, just wait until we hit the atmosphere at three times the speed of light. It's going to be a bumpy ride."

"Oh, so you've done this before?"

Both officers shook their heads. "No, never," Dupree admitted, "I think Chief Guzman is one of maybe five or six people on the Magnum who've ever been thru it. Right, Chief?"

"Who? Me? I'm playing this by ear!"

"Bull," Commander Isenberg complained. "I know for a fact you've done this at least a dozen times."

"Only nine, sir," the older man corrected him, "if you only count the times I was flying the ship."

As an aside, I can buy anything in that story excerpt except the warp thing.

1) If a ship hits that much matter going faster than the speed of light, its gonna blow up. Fundamentally, your ship is now *worse* than a near-C rock. Way worse.
2) Part of the technobabble about SFU warp is that anything around the warp field "slips" away. That's why ships can't collide with anything smaller than a moon.

Now, if you'd change that to just saying that they are going in at high impulse, that'd do the same thing and not hit my "nuh-uh" sensor so hard ...

Mike is right.

Well, it's a Trek story, albeit with a ton of SFU influence. That was written off the top of my head, more or less. If it was a real SFU story, I'd have researched it a bit more.

By the way, SVC, your ribbon-rack doesn't show up in your signature. You should have Jean or Simone take a look at the link for you.

The :14189f5de3 at the beginning and end mess up the code and the php software can't read it.

Delete that crap and it works fine (for now - Photobucket is on its way out).

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Jean, fix it please.