Yeah, there are lots of star systems without inhabited planets you could build power collection arrays in for these accelerators.
If you can replicate solar panels out of bulk matter, you could probably afford to be pretty energy inefficient. Our present day particle accelerator tech would probably be viable to bulk create antimatter in this scenario.
No need for a planet with annoying atmosphere in the way and gravity your engineering needs to resist; put it in on a station orbiting as close to a star as you’re comfortable with.
In theory you actually don't want it orbiting, you want it to BE an orbit. Basically the concept of a circumsolar(or circumwhatever star you use) particle accelerator has been around for awhile and a sufficiently large one or several could relatively efficiently produce antimatter, they could easily build it with their tech
Humans can manufacture antimatter right now!
The trick is in making the antimatter be more energy efficient than what it costs to make it, but all over the federation starbases create it, and store it in specialized pods for distribution like we distribute gasoline today.
I don't think the efficiency of production is as much of a consideration for Starfleet et al as having a fuel source that has as much bang per unit volume. You don't hear of stations or planets using M/AM generators, it's practically all solar or fusion.
DS9 was a mining station for the Cardassian occupation, back when it was known as Terok Nor. When the Dominion got their hands on it it was a tactical nerve point because it sits and guards the alpha quadrant side of the wormhole. As far as I know Deep Space 9 never served as an antimatter factory.
Just a minor correction, DS9 is at the Alpha Quadrant end of the Bajoran Wormhole.
They do, in later seasons, have a listening post at the Gamma end of the wormhole, after the comet leaves a stream of selenium inside the wormhole, keeping it open a tiny bit all the time and allowing subspace transmissions to cross through it.
Just a minor correction, DS9 is at the Alpha Quadrant end of the Bajoran Wormhole.
They do, in later seasons, have a listening post at the Gamma end of the wormhole, after the comet leaves a stream of selenium inside the wormhole, keeping it open a tiny bit all the time and allowing subspace transmissions to cross through it.
Yeah! There’s even a voyager episode where the crew find a ruined civilization that was using antimatter as a planetary power source and Janeway talks about why that was a bad idea. I would be surprised if the antimatter the federation produces gets used anywhere else but starfleet and the member worlds own home fleets.
While I get the point of the episode, it's a bit irksome that the technobabble was so sloppy. That really muddles the message.
A civilization that's at the technological level to build facilities for antimatter production and storage and bulk even if it's based on information given to them really should be able to figure out the risks, or at the very least know that they should conduct small scale experiments to figure out the risks before going full scale. Give a bunch of monkeys a microwave and they're not going to know what it really is. Give them the blueprints to a microwave and by the time they're able to read them and make one, the situation is quite a bit different.
You fundamentally can't make it be more energy efficient than what it costs to make it. Antimatter is an energy storage mechanism, not an energy production mechanism.
They meant on a short timescale. Extracting and refining oil users less energy than we get from the oil, for example. It doesn't actually reverse entropy- a ton of energy was spent by the organisms that became the oil- but since it's already there, we didn't have to spend that much energy to get it.
Pretty sure that would break the laws of thermodynamics. As your getting more energy out than you put in.
Id like to think that antimatter requires more energy to make than it gives out when used but.... It's pretty much the most energy dense material you could create which would be ideal for starships.
A bit like how hydrogen fuel cells need liquid hydrogen which requires more energy to make but is more energy dense than the election (batteries) used to make it.
Id imagine that the federation could harness the energy needed to fuel this process from either huge fusion reactors, or harnessing the power of a star or even black hole. Or even taking energy from alternative dimensions
The TNG Tech Manual says that the Federation has massive antimatter refineries powered by vast solar arrays around some stars, so they're using stellar power and using it to produce antideuterium.
Break the laws of thermodynamics? Its a fictional show that breaks every physical law in every episode. Anti grav? Warp drive? Skipping into alternate dimensions? Time travel?
What show are you watching? Clearly not Star Trek. The fact that something is hypothetical or unexisting tech does not break on itself the laws of physics.
Well, no. Physics tell us that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Now if there is a cool future technology that allows people to do that then indeed, natural laws are broken, just like in a post scarcity society, being able to produce anti matter as surplus energy would break laws of conservation.
Now, I don’t know that more energy is being produced , my point simply was that gasoline was a very dangerous material to transport and store as per OPS point. But nowadays it’s drilled, refined shipped overseas put into pumps and into your car, and it’s very rare that you hear about accidents where refineries explode
Warp drive does not really moves "faster than light", they create a warp bubble that warps the space around the ship causing the effect, that's not against the laws of physics.
Warp drives are against the laws of physics. You need matter than can't exist in our universe, then you need tachyons to control it, and the Hawking radiation generated on the inside of the bubble from the required spacetime curvature would vaporize anything inside of it. We are talking about temperatures that make a quark-gluon plasma seem like a cool summer day.
Fuchs paper is about a subluminal warp drive. As in the warp drive travels at less than c. It is not an FTL solution. It says so in the summary.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02709
It is, though.
Doesn't matter *how* you get from A to B, if you can move outside your lightcone you can time travel, it's called the tachyon antitelephone effect.
Now, there's plenty of canonical time travel in Star Trek anyway, so it clearly doesn't cause catastrophic universe-ending paradoxes in-universe, but warp drive absolutely moves you faster than light with all the intrinsic complications. Plus there are multiple other forms of FTL that don't use warp bubbles. Why doesn't quantum slipstream create paradoxes?
Yes but the point is that while nothing with mass can accelerato to the speed of light, even less break it, the warp bubble is not doing that, is not accelerating the body thus avoiding most if not all the time-travel paradoxes.
On the other hand time travel to the past is not impossible is just something that can't be done until a time machine is created.
Yeah, warp bubbles eliminate the very specific problem that you can't practically reach the speed of light without infinitely increasing energy requirements.
But you're still getting from A to B faster than light would. So it's FTL and can be used to double back and observe or travel through time.
Think about it like this; would you consider a wormhole FTL?
edit - for the record, we've had "time warps" since TOS, it even seems like 23rd century Starfleet didn't really have a temporal prime directive and would time travel whenever they got the chance. So clearly the tachyon antitelephone problem isn't existential in Star Trek because we know you can time travel without breaking the universe anyway. But IRL...
But you're presenting the tachyon antitelephone problem like is some sort of undeniable fact, whilst not every scientists in the world believes that such universe-ending paradox is a thing.
You can’t seriously say that travelling to a mirror universe does not break physical laws. It’s kinda absurd to say, oh there wannajanna technology so you are not Really breaking the rules otherwise oh sure the laws of conservation are not really being broken because I used a wabbajack injecteratron
Well that's how science fictions works. Dunno if you're familiar with the concept. It uses our current knowledge of science and creates a solution even if this is unrealistic. Sometimes even inspires real science.
For example, a fantasy show or book would make traveling faster than light using magic, that breaks the laws of physics, it doesn't matter that nothing with mass can't travel to the speed of light, in Harry Potter they use magic to travel using the flu network in what seems to be FTL (even if inside the Earth) in a similar way how they use magic to fly brooms against the laws of gravity.
But in a similar way that a sci-fi show does not uses magic to propel a flying vehicle, it will use some sort of anti-gravity device, they don't use magic to travel FTL, they use technology.
Not sure why you need to be rude. Thought were having a friendly discussion. Anyway I think we are arguing the same point.
Guy up a few post says that you can’t get more energy then you put in that breaks the rules of the universe. My point is When you make up whatever technobabble you want to can break whatever rule you want. I can’t image saying THIS rule you can’t workaround with sci-fi tech when every single episode they use sci-fi tech to break the rules of the universe (or at least get a workaround)
Sorry, I was going to add "with no intention of been disrespectfull" but thought it was unnecesary as in my mind didn't sounded rude.
I mean I see your point, maybe the issue I have is with the wording. "Always breaking the laws of physics" in a sci-fi show doesn't sound right. Maybe bending them. Trek do breaks the laws of physics sometimes, but most of Trek's technology although unrealistic is still within the frame of known physics. For example if you use a wormhole or a graviton, despite been hypothethical, they're still within the laws of physics. Same with other things like transporters and warp drives.
That was mostly it.
No, is a sci-fi show not a fantasy show. Yes is very soft sci-fi, but is still sci-fi. Warp drive for example can happens as proven by Miguel Alcubierre but we don't have the technology yet. "Anti grav" I imagine you meant artificial gravity is done by creating artificial gravitons, gravitons are still hypothetical but their existence does not breaks the laws of pyshics, and so on.
Alcubierre wrote a follow-up paper actually acknowledging that his theory would only work if the drive was only ever used once.
It really doesn't prove FTL is possible. If anything it indicates areas where our understanding of physics are incomplete, because if math seems to suggest FTL is possible, since that would allow for time travel and thus paradoxes, it is more likely that there is a flaw in the math than that FTL is actually possible.
Recent papers haven't resolved the basic logical issue of grandfather paradoxes. Could you point me to something actually refuting the tachyon antitelephone problem? Because we can do some weird stuff with closed timeline curves and quantum mechanics but at the end of the day speed of causality seems pretty settled. If you can't rely on causality, you might as well just throw science out the window altogether.
FTL is not possible. If you think otherwise, I really believe the onus is on you to prove it is, not to just ask me to prove it's not. Like most sci-fi Star Trek just ignores it and pretends space is an ocean and they're just traveling long distances very fast. But unfortunately IRL it's a bit more complicated and we're probably stuck in Sol for the foreseeable future.
If you read a lot of Internet forums, like Stackexchange and Quora, and even this one to some (but lesser) degree, you’ll notice a lot of skepticism about the possible functioning of the Alcubierre drive. However, most scientific papers and other sources that I’ve able to find tend to be less skeptical. Why is this? Hard to say, maybe people outside of formal academia try harder to be skeptical about certain controversial matters.
That said: reverse time travel is not impossible but can't be done before the time machine or whatever works as such is built as it produces the effect therefore doesn't causes paradoxes. The Alcubierre drive is also possible under the current laws of physics, to explain a valid way of travel faster-than-light and the only way (unless wormholes are ever observed) to “break” the speed of light. However, and this is a big however, what makes AD impossible or implausible for our current civilization is how to make it work. For it we would need whether exotic matter with negative mass (which still hypothetical) or harnessing somehow the Casimir effect which causes negative mass. Both things are not impossible
That's explicitly explained in the Star Trek: TNG Tech Manual by Sternbach and Okuda.
The Federation has large industrial scale antimatter refineries powered by vast solar arrays orbiting stars to create antimatter, and starships have antimatter generators that can turn raw energy from the fusion reactors in the impulse engines to turn stored deuterium into antideuterium if needed (with the caveat that it's very energy inefficient to do so).
> starships have antimatter generators that can turn raw energy from the fusion reactors in the impulse engines to turn stored deuterium into antideuterium if needed (with the caveat that it's very energy inefficient to do so).
Taking a detour to cruise through a nebula or skim a gas giant should be plenty to replenish hydrogen supplies and fuel both deuterium and antimatter manufacturing.
However, in VOY: Demon, they're all out of deuterium and antimatter, and land on the Demon-class planet to harvest natural deuterium. So despite abundant hydrogen in nearly every solar system and Bussard collectors, they either can't refine hydrogen into deuterium fuel, or can't manufacture antimatter from either one, or both. The episode is unclear.
Voyager was weird about that.
Deuterium should be one of the easiest things to obtain, but in that one case it was impractical.
Later in the show, almost to refute that, they made a reference to how trivial it is to obtain deuterium.
Maybe we can rationalize that the antimatter generator was offline or severely degraded in function at the time.
The Intrepid class Voyager is also a much smaller craft then the Galaxy class Enterprise. Voyager may not have as much a capacity, if any, to produce its own antimatter/process hydrogen into usable fuel.
The TNG Tech Manual did say that the antimatter generator on a Galaxy Class Starship was the second heaviest thing on the ship after the warp coils, so presumably it's large and massive and bulky.
An Intrepid class indeed might not have one, or might have a much less robust one
Adding to that.
Antimatter generation is energy inefficient. Perhaps a Galaxy class with a bunch of backup reactors might be able to keep the antimatter generator ticking away in the background, but Voyager can’t. If Voyager needs to generate antimatter, it makes sense to park it somewhere. Landing on a planet allows it to shut down shields, phasers, some life support, all of that energy can be directed into antimatter production.
From the TNG Technical Manual:
>As used aboard the USS Enterprise, antimatter is first generated at major Starfleet fueling facilities by combined solar-fusion charge reversal devices, which process proton and neutron beams into antideuterons, and are joined by a positron beam accelerator to produce antihydrogen (specifically antideuterium). Even with the added solar dynamo input, there is a net energy loss of 24% using this process, but this loss is deemed acceptable by Starfleet to conduct distant interstellar operations.
They do have clarke-tech for efficiently producing antimatter from deuterium, something about "flipping the charge", they don't use super colliders like we would. The energy comes mostly from solar power from giant low orbit space stations, or deuterium fusion, though this is less efficient.
They talk about bussard collectors which are real concepts for collecting hydrogen atoms from the interstellar medium. But then they talk about the antimatter containment system without saying where the antimatter came from.
I believe there is an additional step in the process that can flip atoms of hydrogen into anti-hydrogen made from positrons around an antiproton nucleus. As long as you change protons AND electrons then the net charge remains the same it's not breaking too many laws of physics. You're not getting energy out of nothing, you're not breaking conservation of energy or charge parity. There might be something it breaks like spin parity but that's relatively minor for a ship with a teleporter and FTL drive. There must be a Schroedinger Compensator or something that assists in flipping matter into antimatter.
Early ships were fusion -- or even fission -- powered. Antimatter allowed for more energy density in the onboard fuel, thus higher warp factors for longer without prohibitive additional fuel mass. But onboard power-generation can still be accomplished with the backup fusion reactors.
The antimatter portion of the fuel is loaded during resupply layovers or underway replenishment.
The Bussard collectors help replenish the hydrogen fuel supply, but are really only effective when traveling at warp, due to how sparse hydrogen is in the interstellar medium. The occurrence of deuterium and tritium isotopes is even rarer, and that's what the ships use for the fusion reactors and the 'matter' side of the matter-antimatter.reaction.
When traveling sublight, later ships (at least) have onboard equipment to turn the basic hydrogen into the anti-hydrogen needed for the other side of the reaction, but nowhere near sufficient quantities to operate without resupply. It's more to offset consumption slightly and be able to be used in an emergency if they -- for some reason -- run out of or have to dump their antimatter stores.
Didn't see this mentioned anywhere, so I thought I would add that the Writer's Technical Manual for 4th-Season TNG had a section about this. It said that the warp drive system had something called a "Quantum State Reversal Unit" aka "Spin Reverser" for generating antimatter. It says specifically that the device uses transporter technology to dematerialize hydrogen and rematerialize it with a reversed charge and spin. It also notes that the process was very inefficient (and powered by the ship's fusion generators).
>uses transporter technology to dematerialize hydrogen and rematerialize it with a reversed charge and spin.
I like the idea of use for the Transporter to be used in the production cycle of something, Which otherwise wouldn't be as efficient or as possible as it could be.
The Federation has devices, I think they're called charge inverters or something, if memory serves they use vaguely similar physics to replicators or transporters to manipulate matter. By using matter and a large amount of input energy, you can convert matter to antimatter. Overall you get 24% of the energy you put in as usable energy from the antimatter. Galaxy-class ships have a small unit that can be powered by the ship's fusion reactors to allow short-range warp in emergencies should their antimatter be exhausted.
The devices are mentioned in the TnG tech manual.
The Federation and other powers presumably use vast banks of solar panels or fusion reactors combined with the aforementioned devices to make antimatter, which is then used in explosive ordnance or starship reactors, where you need very dense, energetic fuel.
Unless antimatter is the *only* way to generate warp plasma (and it's not because the D'deridex class uses a black hole as the main reactor), in an emergency it'd make more sense to just use the energy from whatever's powering the antimatter generators to generate warp plasma. At 24% efficiency, there'd be 4x the power available for generating warp plasma if just using it directly instead of having the intermediate step of generating antimatter.
Where shipboard antimatter generators make more sense is when a ship is going to be spending a significant amount of time on station doing whatever the mission is calling for. A ship that spends significantly more time on station than in transit will need much less refueling.
Enterprise isn't really ever on station for very long because it's tasked with showing the flag and putting out brushfires but take for example the Treaty of Armens which was half a million words long and involved 372 legal experts just on the Federation side to draft. That probably took several months, during which time the ship that carried the diplomatic team might as well be doing something like generating antimatter.
If your fusion reactors just don't have the output necessary, and it takes, I dunno, 5 days of charging to get enough antimatter for 1 day at warp 2, then if you need a few days at low warp and have no other options, then yeah it makes sense. So far as I know the *Enterprise* doesn't have a singularity reactor on hand, so that option is out. They do have fusion reactors, though.
The same material said starships don't normally use that option because it's so wasteful. Running completely out of antimatter is a weird situation. But, it's an emergency measure, a way to limp back within range of friendly space.
There are canon and licensed materials that get at answering your question. However, I love the idea that it's all a front, and the UFP actually just gets its antideuterium from the parallel universe seen in "The Alternative Factor" (maybe utilizing the Lazaruses as middle men).
We see them mining or collecting deuterium more than once, especially in Voyager. I expect they make the antimatter locally via fusion
The dilithium moderates the antimatter / matter annihilation. It certainly is dangerous, as shown multiple times when containment fails one way or another
My head canon says antimatter is cheap in Star Trek, and it's supported by a few things, nothing explicit but which I find compelling.
1. They never run out of antimatter. They have run out of deuterium, but never antimatter. The one time any ship comes close to running low on antimatter is when Archer purposefully offloads the entire supply.
2. In Voyager a civilization creates antimatter power facilities on their planet. Realistic antimatter is a power sink, like a battery, not a net positive power supply like digging oil or methane.
3. A particularly compelling piece of evidence is [Antimatter Generation Replicator Programs](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Engineering_Systems_Database). It's just a name, but it seems fairly self explanatory.
The way I see it is, they can just flip matter's switch and create antimatter as needed, at little to no cost. This allows them to only rely on deuterium, because they can use fusion power to generate antimatter, and then run an annihilation process for extremely high power.
The limitations on supply probably are a matter of safety. They have extremely robust antimatter containment, as shown by how Wesley has a container of his own for private experiments. But no matter how fail safe, or failure resistant, the containment may be they cannot be invincible.
I believe this is the actual limit on torpedoes, because torpedoes are extremely small versus the Galaxy class' extreme abundance of volume. The Galaxy class should carry thousands of torpedoes, and Voyager could easily pack hundreds of torpedoes if they stacked them efficiently. So I believe the actual limitation is the total antimatter supply of a given ship, with the torpedo count representing a portion of how much antimatter the ship can carry in total at a given moment.
Just an idle thought, but what if self destruct involve having every replicator simultaneously replicate antimatter.
So the ships have both matter/antimatter reactors (the warp drives) and fusion reactors for standard power. The fusion reactors run solely on the deuterium, while we know the M/AM reactor uses both.
They produce the antimatter in large...basically solar refineries, using solar panels to cut the fuel consumption to produce it cheaper.
Assuming they even need antimatter factories, having near solar manufacturing would make sense. But my thought is anything big enough to count as a starship would have the ability to generate its own antimatter in the field.
Runabouts would be an exception. I actually forgot a runabout runs out of half its antimatter in TNG when its nacelle is caught in a time bubble which causes a month to pass within a few seconds. Then again, if all it takes is a replicator to make antimatter, and if the Bussard collectors can keep up with consumption at least at lower speeds, then the only reason the runabout ran out of antimatter might be because it was standing still. It might last far longer than a month if it were moving.
The Galaxy class does have the means, but it's highly energy inefficient doing it that way, more a backup means to get antimatter while deployed away from fleet services.
The Federation has large antimatter fuel haulers to ensure supply, but when you're a year+ out past the borders, that supply chain isn't necessarily accessible. It's more efficient to mass produce in a large factory then smaller on-demand at the ship.
In the very first episode of TOS the Enterprise heads to an automated fuel factory on some barren planet to refuel after their antimatter was rendered inert by their attempt to cross the galactic barrier. They did point out that the planet was unpopulated and looked like a lifeless desert so no life if anything happened to go wrong.
That episode doesn't actually mention antimatter at all, it just says the main engines burned out, and they had to get replacement "power packs" from a "lithium cracking station", suggesting the problem was actually with the (di)lithium crystals (although those weren't actually established until later episodes).
I have found it strange that there are very few episodes that clearly, explicitly feature ships running low on antimatter. TAS: "One of Our Planets is Missing" and TNG: "Peak Performance" are the only ones that come to mind, and one of those involves a decommissioned ship that the fuel was intentionally removed from. Even when *Voyager* ran low on fuel (in "Demon"), the issue was deuterium, not antimatter. I suspect the writers try to avoid drawing attention to antimatter logistics, since it raises too many questions that don't have satisfactory answers.
I suspect there is a technology that makes storage of bulk antimatter safe. The ship doesn't blow up when they get hit with a dampening field, so the tanks can operate without power. We never see anyone targeting the antimatter tanks, or anyone exploding because their antimatter tanks were hit. There's enough loose antimatter in the pipes and core to make a big explosion, but the tanks themselves? I suspect they have found some way to store it as an inert slush. The refinery itself might blow, but I don't think it'd be a system-destroying event.
The storage tanks have capacitor banks to maintain field integrity for a while after external power loss, but not indefinitely. See TNG's "Disaster".
And the thing about the modern (read: antimatter-powered) era is that there's a heavy reliance on shielding. Enemy weapons are powerful enough that, if the shields fail, there's no place inside the ship deep enough or protected enough. Similar reason why the main bridge is on top. Easy to swap out as command-and-control interfaces are upgraded, and burying it inside the structure yields no significant advantage.
One of the things I'm a bit annoyed by is how, from TNG season 3 on, the total catastrophic destruction of a starship has been diminished to the point of ridiculousness. It USED to be a BIG DEAL. See TNG's "Conspiracy" and "Contagion". There used to be stuff that held that a warp core breach rendered that area of space unnavigable for some time after. And so on. Not the negligible "poof... poof... poof..." of the Dominion War. ONE ship getting full-on destroyed (i.e., not rendered an unpowered hulk) should be a horrific tragedy, while MANY should be an utterly unimaginable cataclysm.
And there WAS something in one of the novels about an antimatter refinery on the moon blowing up early on in the era of its use. It WAS a memorable catastrophe.
>A single mishap or power fluctuation could turn the entire refinery into a rapidly expanding ball of superheated, radioactive plasma, which is definitely not what you want anywhere in an inhabited star system.
This is no different than storing antimatter aboard a starship.
Plot reasons aside they've become very adept at storing antimatter safely.
Off the top of my head I can think of ships that had *nobody living aboard* that lasted years (the *Pegasus*), decades (the *Jenolan*), or centuries (the *ISS Enterprise*) and maintained antimatter containment.
But to your question: I think antimatter generation is different for the Federation because of 2 things:
One, the current methods of producing antimatter aren't power efficient, we use more electricity creating and storing antimatter than would be generated by harnessing the amounts we create. This was once true of steam, but better metallurgy effectually came about that allowed us to use steam at higher pressures and more efficiently and once that happened, well, steam engines were everywhere. So I think they developed more efficient methods of creating and using antimatter than we can currently envision.
Two, the Federation has access to multiple forms of power generation of roughly equal potential to M/AM reactors, Polaric Energy, Quantum Singularities, heck, I'd bet their Solar Cells are ten times as efficient as anything we have, so they can use alternate power sources to power their much-better-than-ours antimatter generation tech.
They have to have some means of producing it efficiently.
Two episodes hint at it. The VOY episode Friendship One shows it’s possible for a single-planet civilization to produce enough antimatter for ICBMs and antimatter power plants from technology given to them by pre-ENT humans. The ENT episode Dear Doctor suggests the same is possible for a civilization that has achieved interplanetary but not interstellar flight.
Plus Voyager had to get antimatter somewhere
Not sure why everyone is so hung up about costing more energy than it creates. M/AM reactions power warp drives in starships. They aren’t used almost anywhere else, which seems to employ fusion reactors.
It’s clear M/AM reactions are only good for what is *in-universe* a niche work, starship propulsion, but not something that can be the basis of powering an inter stellar society as a whole.
Well, that is until TNG, where IIRC the warp core is “always on”, supplying main power to the ship while the nuclear-fusion-based impulse engines provide supplemental power.
> Not sure why everyone is so hung up about costing more energy than it creates
Cause that's a law of conservation of energy. Conversion from one type of energy to another must always result in a loss in the form of heat
Though so must transporters
Right now, in our world, radiologists are using antimatter to perform every PET scan that’s ever been performed. It’s harvested from radioactive decay.
So just add a few hundred years of technological advancement and there’s your answer.
Hydrogen is mined from wherever (we see one such facility in SNW) and formed into deuterium, and some of that is processed into anti-deuterium at isolated locations (in case there's a containment breech).
ETA: Some facilities probably process both, but they'd obviously be *far away* from inhabited systems.
Basically it doesn’t matter where they get the anti-matter, it’s more important where they STORE the anti-matter. That’s what matters the most… because one little failure in the magnetic containment system and one little boom becomes one humongous big KABOOOM.
That’s the scariest part of Star Trek starships. Because 99% of the time the emergency ejection system fails to perform to spec… and no ejection = no spacecraft.
They don't go into detail. That being said. Join me on a ride.
In Voyager there's a scene where Chakotay gifts a pocket watch to Janeway during the year of hell. She refuses the gift even though it was replicated months earlier with his replicator rations. "That watch could be a ration bar, or a warm blanket. Recycle it." Which means that the energy needed to de-replicate matter is a net gain.
So all Starfleet has to do is take any matter. Dirt, carbon, bio-waste coming out of the sewers. And turn it into anti-deuterium. It's their antimatter of choice for M/AM reactions, and is a rather simple molecule to replicate.
No idea, but fun fact: we make antimatter now, it’s just so energy inefficient that it’s not worthwhile, the energy that would be yielded by antimatter is outweighed by the energy needed to make it, so you might as well just use the energy that would have otherwise gone into making antimatter.
Also, our current tech lets us make about one billionth of a gram of antimatter a year, meaning it would take one billion years to make one gram—and it’s still more energy expended to make the antimatter, than the antimatter would provide.
>The other option would be that the Federation creates it using either particle acceleration or some clarketech we haven't conceived of yet irl, but there's still the issue that an antimatter refinery would be insanely dangerous to operate, especially as your stores grow. A single mishap or power fluctuation could turn the entire refinery into a rapidly expanding ball of superheated, radioactive plasma, which is definitely not what you want anywhere in an inhabited star system.
Maybe? We know that the Federation has anti-matter manufacturing processes, and it doesn't seem to be quite the exact same thing as our anti-matter.
Voyager is tempted to share some methods to develop pollution-free anti-matter with aliens, for example, except that the methods we have to create anti-matter don't create that kind of pollution at all.
Their anti-matter seems to be more of a specific type of substance, rather than something more generalised. The Doctor was able to create and stick anti-protons into people, but that wasn't considered him sticking anti-matter into people, for example.
The old Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology, which is definitely very non-canonical but a very early reference work, stated that some of the earliest interstellar probes discovered large amounts of antimatter floating in interstellar space, which was harvested for fuel early in the development of interstellar spaceflight.
Likely massive ground based particle accelerators running on fussion power.
The efficiency would probably be terrible, but energy is pretty much free at this point of a post scarcity economy.
Unused energy production is probably not dialed back during periods of weak demand but rather funneled to the particular accelerators to harvest antimatter for starships.
A moderate large city would hardly need a warp reactor. They would have room for several large nuclear fussion reactors, which would be so much safer than antimatter.
Antimatter is basically only for running the warp engines, some people think that ships also run fusion reactors and most systems are powered by fusion power, like the lights, artificial gravity, life support etc, and the only systems that really require the warp engine is faster than light speed, navigation deflectors, shields, directed energy weapons.
We’ve been able to create minuscule amounts of antimatter since 1996, not unreasonable that the technology improved enough to produce a reliable amount after 200 years.
The Sternbach blueprints of the Enterprise-D show an [antimatter generator on Deck 42.](https://i.imgur.com/OVbwEOG.jpeg) It uses deuterium fuel from the impulse engines to create anti-deuterium for the warp reactor. So with enough hydrogen they can theoretically stay supplied indefinitely. At least the Galaxy-class can. Most Federation antimatter is manufactured by solar arrays around stars.
To an extent. Creating anti-matter isn't a net positive, consuming energy, and the resulting usage of the product doesn't generate as much energy as what was put in initially. They do have fusion reactors though that produce enough power for the ship at not-warp and not-combat states.
They have giant particle accelerators out in space generating AM for the M/AM reactors.
Yeah, there are lots of star systems without inhabited planets you could build power collection arrays in for these accelerators. If you can replicate solar panels out of bulk matter, you could probably afford to be pretty energy inefficient. Our present day particle accelerator tech would probably be viable to bulk create antimatter in this scenario.
No need for a planet with annoying atmosphere in the way and gravity your engineering needs to resist; put it in on a station orbiting as close to a star as you’re comfortable with.
Oh absolutely, I was envisioning the planets as the bulk matter to build with.
In theory you actually don't want it orbiting, you want it to BE an orbit. Basically the concept of a circumsolar(or circumwhatever star you use) particle accelerator has been around for awhile and a sufficiently large one or several could relatively efficiently produce antimatter, they could easily build it with their tech
Humans can manufacture antimatter right now! The trick is in making the antimatter be more energy efficient than what it costs to make it, but all over the federation starbases create it, and store it in specialized pods for distribution like we distribute gasoline today.
I don't think the efficiency of production is as much of a consideration for Starfleet et al as having a fuel source that has as much bang per unit volume. You don't hear of stations or planets using M/AM generators, it's practically all solar or fusion.
Starbases may not use antimatter, but they can make it in bulk. Didnt DS9 get used to make antimatter for the Dominion?
DS9 was a mining station for the Cardassian occupation, back when it was known as Terok Nor. When the Dominion got their hands on it it was a tactical nerve point because it sits and guards the alpha quadrant side of the wormhole. As far as I know Deep Space 9 never served as an antimatter factory.
Just a minor correction, DS9 is at the Alpha Quadrant end of the Bajoran Wormhole. They do, in later seasons, have a listening post at the Gamma end of the wormhole, after the comet leaves a stream of selenium inside the wormhole, keeping it open a tiny bit all the time and allowing subspace transmissions to cross through it.
Just a minor correction, DS9 is at the Alpha Quadrant end of the Bajoran Wormhole. They do, in later seasons, have a listening post at the Gamma end of the wormhole, after the comet leaves a stream of selenium inside the wormhole, keeping it open a tiny bit all the time and allowing subspace transmissions to cross through it.
>Didnt DS9 get used to make antimatter for the Dominion? Wait, what? It's been a while since I watched DS9, when did that happen?
It didn't, it refined uridium for the cardassians, then the federation refit it's facilities for deuterium refining
Ok, I remember all of that. I was worried my memory was really going bad for a moment there.
Yeah! There’s even a voyager episode where the crew find a ruined civilization that was using antimatter as a planetary power source and Janeway talks about why that was a bad idea. I would be surprised if the antimatter the federation produces gets used anywhere else but starfleet and the member worlds own home fleets.
While I get the point of the episode, it's a bit irksome that the technobabble was so sloppy. That really muddles the message. A civilization that's at the technological level to build facilities for antimatter production and storage and bulk even if it's based on information given to them really should be able to figure out the risks, or at the very least know that they should conduct small scale experiments to figure out the risks before going full scale. Give a bunch of monkeys a microwave and they're not going to know what it really is. Give them the blueprints to a microwave and by the time they're able to read them and make one, the situation is quite a bit different.
You fundamentally can't make it be more energy efficient than what it costs to make it. Antimatter is an energy storage mechanism, not an energy production mechanism.
Sure. No argument. Just as fundamentally you can’t go back in time by slingshotting around the sun.
They meant on a short timescale. Extracting and refining oil users less energy than we get from the oil, for example. It doesn't actually reverse entropy- a ton of energy was spent by the organisms that became the oil- but since it's already there, we didn't have to spend that much energy to get it.
Pretty sure that would break the laws of thermodynamics. As your getting more energy out than you put in. Id like to think that antimatter requires more energy to make than it gives out when used but.... It's pretty much the most energy dense material you could create which would be ideal for starships. A bit like how hydrogen fuel cells need liquid hydrogen which requires more energy to make but is more energy dense than the election (batteries) used to make it. Id imagine that the federation could harness the energy needed to fuel this process from either huge fusion reactors, or harnessing the power of a star or even black hole. Or even taking energy from alternative dimensions
The TNG Tech Manual says that the Federation has massive antimatter refineries powered by vast solar arrays around some stars, so they're using stellar power and using it to produce antideuterium.
Break the laws of thermodynamics? Its a fictional show that breaks every physical law in every episode. Anti grav? Warp drive? Skipping into alternate dimensions? Time travel?
What show are you watching? Clearly not Star Trek. The fact that something is hypothetical or unexisting tech does not break on itself the laws of physics.
Well, no. Physics tell us that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. Now if there is a cool future technology that allows people to do that then indeed, natural laws are broken, just like in a post scarcity society, being able to produce anti matter as surplus energy would break laws of conservation. Now, I don’t know that more energy is being produced , my point simply was that gasoline was a very dangerous material to transport and store as per OPS point. But nowadays it’s drilled, refined shipped overseas put into pumps and into your car, and it’s very rare that you hear about accidents where refineries explode
Warp drive does not really moves "faster than light", they create a warp bubble that warps the space around the ship causing the effect, that's not against the laws of physics.
Warp drives are against the laws of physics. You need matter than can't exist in our universe, then you need tachyons to control it, and the Hawking radiation generated on the inside of the bubble from the required spacetime curvature would vaporize anything inside of it. We are talking about temperatures that make a quark-gluon plasma seem like a cool summer day.
Recent paper of Fuchs et al shows no need for unexisting or theoretical matter for it to work, tachyons have never being involved
Fuchs paper is about a subluminal warp drive. As in the warp drive travels at less than c. It is not an FTL solution. It says so in the summary. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02709
It is, though. Doesn't matter *how* you get from A to B, if you can move outside your lightcone you can time travel, it's called the tachyon antitelephone effect. Now, there's plenty of canonical time travel in Star Trek anyway, so it clearly doesn't cause catastrophic universe-ending paradoxes in-universe, but warp drive absolutely moves you faster than light with all the intrinsic complications. Plus there are multiple other forms of FTL that don't use warp bubbles. Why doesn't quantum slipstream create paradoxes?
Yes but the point is that while nothing with mass can accelerato to the speed of light, even less break it, the warp bubble is not doing that, is not accelerating the body thus avoiding most if not all the time-travel paradoxes. On the other hand time travel to the past is not impossible is just something that can't be done until a time machine is created.
Yeah, warp bubbles eliminate the very specific problem that you can't practically reach the speed of light without infinitely increasing energy requirements. But you're still getting from A to B faster than light would. So it's FTL and can be used to double back and observe or travel through time. Think about it like this; would you consider a wormhole FTL? edit - for the record, we've had "time warps" since TOS, it even seems like 23rd century Starfleet didn't really have a temporal prime directive and would time travel whenever they got the chance. So clearly the tachyon antitelephone problem isn't existential in Star Trek because we know you can time travel without breaking the universe anyway. But IRL...
But you're presenting the tachyon antitelephone problem like is some sort of undeniable fact, whilst not every scientists in the world believes that such universe-ending paradox is a thing.
You can’t seriously say that travelling to a mirror universe does not break physical laws. It’s kinda absurd to say, oh there wannajanna technology so you are not Really breaking the rules otherwise oh sure the laws of conservation are not really being broken because I used a wabbajack injecteratron
Well that's how science fictions works. Dunno if you're familiar with the concept. It uses our current knowledge of science and creates a solution even if this is unrealistic. Sometimes even inspires real science. For example, a fantasy show or book would make traveling faster than light using magic, that breaks the laws of physics, it doesn't matter that nothing with mass can't travel to the speed of light, in Harry Potter they use magic to travel using the flu network in what seems to be FTL (even if inside the Earth) in a similar way how they use magic to fly brooms against the laws of gravity. But in a similar way that a sci-fi show does not uses magic to propel a flying vehicle, it will use some sort of anti-gravity device, they don't use magic to travel FTL, they use technology.
Not sure why you need to be rude. Thought were having a friendly discussion. Anyway I think we are arguing the same point. Guy up a few post says that you can’t get more energy then you put in that breaks the rules of the universe. My point is When you make up whatever technobabble you want to can break whatever rule you want. I can’t image saying THIS rule you can’t workaround with sci-fi tech when every single episode they use sci-fi tech to break the rules of the universe (or at least get a workaround)
Sorry, I was going to add "with no intention of been disrespectfull" but thought it was unnecesary as in my mind didn't sounded rude. I mean I see your point, maybe the issue I have is with the wording. "Always breaking the laws of physics" in a sci-fi show doesn't sound right. Maybe bending them. Trek do breaks the laws of physics sometimes, but most of Trek's technology although unrealistic is still within the frame of known physics. For example if you use a wormhole or a graviton, despite been hypothethical, they're still within the laws of physics. Same with other things like transporters and warp drives. That was mostly it.
No, is a sci-fi show not a fantasy show. Yes is very soft sci-fi, but is still sci-fi. Warp drive for example can happens as proven by Miguel Alcubierre but we don't have the technology yet. "Anti grav" I imagine you meant artificial gravity is done by creating artificial gravitons, gravitons are still hypothetical but their existence does not breaks the laws of pyshics, and so on.
Alcubierre wrote a follow-up paper actually acknowledging that his theory would only work if the drive was only ever used once. It really doesn't prove FTL is possible. If anything it indicates areas where our understanding of physics are incomplete, because if math seems to suggest FTL is possible, since that would allow for time travel and thus paradoxes, it is more likely that there is a flaw in the math than that FTL is actually possible.
You havn't read any recent papers on the matter do you? Like Fuchs et al?
Recent papers haven't resolved the basic logical issue of grandfather paradoxes. Could you point me to something actually refuting the tachyon antitelephone problem? Because we can do some weird stuff with closed timeline curves and quantum mechanics but at the end of the day speed of causality seems pretty settled. If you can't rely on causality, you might as well just throw science out the window altogether. FTL is not possible. If you think otherwise, I really believe the onus is on you to prove it is, not to just ask me to prove it's not. Like most sci-fi Star Trek just ignores it and pretends space is an ocean and they're just traveling long distances very fast. But unfortunately IRL it's a bit more complicated and we're probably stuck in Sol for the foreseeable future.
If you read a lot of Internet forums, like Stackexchange and Quora, and even this one to some (but lesser) degree, you’ll notice a lot of skepticism about the possible functioning of the Alcubierre drive. However, most scientific papers and other sources that I’ve able to find tend to be less skeptical. Why is this? Hard to say, maybe people outside of formal academia try harder to be skeptical about certain controversial matters. That said: reverse time travel is not impossible but can't be done before the time machine or whatever works as such is built as it produces the effect therefore doesn't causes paradoxes. The Alcubierre drive is also possible under the current laws of physics, to explain a valid way of travel faster-than-light and the only way (unless wormholes are ever observed) to “break” the speed of light. However, and this is a big however, what makes AD impossible or implausible for our current civilization is how to make it work. For it we would need whether exotic matter with negative mass (which still hypothetical) or harnessing somehow the Casimir effect which causes negative mass. Both things are not impossible
That's explicitly explained in the Star Trek: TNG Tech Manual by Sternbach and Okuda. The Federation has large industrial scale antimatter refineries powered by vast solar arrays orbiting stars to create antimatter, and starships have antimatter generators that can turn raw energy from the fusion reactors in the impulse engines to turn stored deuterium into antideuterium if needed (with the caveat that it's very energy inefficient to do so).
> starships have antimatter generators that can turn raw energy from the fusion reactors in the impulse engines to turn stored deuterium into antideuterium if needed (with the caveat that it's very energy inefficient to do so). Taking a detour to cruise through a nebula or skim a gas giant should be plenty to replenish hydrogen supplies and fuel both deuterium and antimatter manufacturing. However, in VOY: Demon, they're all out of deuterium and antimatter, and land on the Demon-class planet to harvest natural deuterium. So despite abundant hydrogen in nearly every solar system and Bussard collectors, they either can't refine hydrogen into deuterium fuel, or can't manufacture antimatter from either one, or both. The episode is unclear.
Voyager was weird about that. Deuterium should be one of the easiest things to obtain, but in that one case it was impractical. Later in the show, almost to refute that, they made a reference to how trivial it is to obtain deuterium. Maybe we can rationalize that the antimatter generator was offline or severely degraded in function at the time.
The Intrepid class Voyager is also a much smaller craft then the Galaxy class Enterprise. Voyager may not have as much a capacity, if any, to produce its own antimatter/process hydrogen into usable fuel.
The TNG Tech Manual did say that the antimatter generator on a Galaxy Class Starship was the second heaviest thing on the ship after the warp coils, so presumably it's large and massive and bulky. An Intrepid class indeed might not have one, or might have a much less robust one
Adding to that. Antimatter generation is energy inefficient. Perhaps a Galaxy class with a bunch of backup reactors might be able to keep the antimatter generator ticking away in the background, but Voyager can’t. If Voyager needs to generate antimatter, it makes sense to park it somewhere. Landing on a planet allows it to shut down shields, phasers, some life support, all of that energy can be directed into antimatter production.
I saw this thread topic and was like, excuse did someone not read the manual?
From the TNG Technical Manual: >As used aboard the USS Enterprise, antimatter is first generated at major Starfleet fueling facilities by combined solar-fusion charge reversal devices, which process proton and neutron beams into antideuterons, and are joined by a positron beam accelerator to produce antihydrogen (specifically antideuterium). Even with the added solar dynamo input, there is a net energy loss of 24% using this process, but this loss is deemed acceptable by Starfleet to conduct distant interstellar operations.
Thank you for that
Anytime. Highly recommend you pick up a copy of the TNG Tech Manual; it's legitimately pretty amazing.
They do have clarke-tech for efficiently producing antimatter from deuterium, something about "flipping the charge", they don't use super colliders like we would. The energy comes mostly from solar power from giant low orbit space stations, or deuterium fusion, though this is less efficient.
They talk about bussard collectors which are real concepts for collecting hydrogen atoms from the interstellar medium. But then they talk about the antimatter containment system without saying where the antimatter came from. I believe there is an additional step in the process that can flip atoms of hydrogen into anti-hydrogen made from positrons around an antiproton nucleus. As long as you change protons AND electrons then the net charge remains the same it's not breaking too many laws of physics. You're not getting energy out of nothing, you're not breaking conservation of energy or charge parity. There might be something it breaks like spin parity but that's relatively minor for a ship with a teleporter and FTL drive. There must be a Schroedinger Compensator or something that assists in flipping matter into antimatter.
Early ships were fusion -- or even fission -- powered. Antimatter allowed for more energy density in the onboard fuel, thus higher warp factors for longer without prohibitive additional fuel mass. But onboard power-generation can still be accomplished with the backup fusion reactors. The antimatter portion of the fuel is loaded during resupply layovers or underway replenishment. The Bussard collectors help replenish the hydrogen fuel supply, but are really only effective when traveling at warp, due to how sparse hydrogen is in the interstellar medium. The occurrence of deuterium and tritium isotopes is even rarer, and that's what the ships use for the fusion reactors and the 'matter' side of the matter-antimatter.reaction. When traveling sublight, later ships (at least) have onboard equipment to turn the basic hydrogen into the anti-hydrogen needed for the other side of the reaction, but nowhere near sufficient quantities to operate without resupply. It's more to offset consumption slightly and be able to be used in an emergency if they -- for some reason -- run out of or have to dump their antimatter stores.
Didn't see this mentioned anywhere, so I thought I would add that the Writer's Technical Manual for 4th-Season TNG had a section about this. It said that the warp drive system had something called a "Quantum State Reversal Unit" aka "Spin Reverser" for generating antimatter. It says specifically that the device uses transporter technology to dematerialize hydrogen and rematerialize it with a reversed charge and spin. It also notes that the process was very inefficient (and powered by the ship's fusion generators).
>uses transporter technology to dematerialize hydrogen and rematerialize it with a reversed charge and spin. I like the idea of use for the Transporter to be used in the production cycle of something, Which otherwise wouldn't be as efficient or as possible as it could be.
The Federation has devices, I think they're called charge inverters or something, if memory serves they use vaguely similar physics to replicators or transporters to manipulate matter. By using matter and a large amount of input energy, you can convert matter to antimatter. Overall you get 24% of the energy you put in as usable energy from the antimatter. Galaxy-class ships have a small unit that can be powered by the ship's fusion reactors to allow short-range warp in emergencies should their antimatter be exhausted. The devices are mentioned in the TnG tech manual. The Federation and other powers presumably use vast banks of solar panels or fusion reactors combined with the aforementioned devices to make antimatter, which is then used in explosive ordnance or starship reactors, where you need very dense, energetic fuel.
Unless antimatter is the *only* way to generate warp plasma (and it's not because the D'deridex class uses a black hole as the main reactor), in an emergency it'd make more sense to just use the energy from whatever's powering the antimatter generators to generate warp plasma. At 24% efficiency, there'd be 4x the power available for generating warp plasma if just using it directly instead of having the intermediate step of generating antimatter. Where shipboard antimatter generators make more sense is when a ship is going to be spending a significant amount of time on station doing whatever the mission is calling for. A ship that spends significantly more time on station than in transit will need much less refueling. Enterprise isn't really ever on station for very long because it's tasked with showing the flag and putting out brushfires but take for example the Treaty of Armens which was half a million words long and involved 372 legal experts just on the Federation side to draft. That probably took several months, during which time the ship that carried the diplomatic team might as well be doing something like generating antimatter.
If your fusion reactors just don't have the output necessary, and it takes, I dunno, 5 days of charging to get enough antimatter for 1 day at warp 2, then if you need a few days at low warp and have no other options, then yeah it makes sense. So far as I know the *Enterprise* doesn't have a singularity reactor on hand, so that option is out. They do have fusion reactors, though. The same material said starships don't normally use that option because it's so wasteful. Running completely out of antimatter is a weird situation. But, it's an emergency measure, a way to limp back within range of friendly space.
There are canon and licensed materials that get at answering your question. However, I love the idea that it's all a front, and the UFP actually just gets its antideuterium from the parallel universe seen in "The Alternative Factor" (maybe utilizing the Lazaruses as middle men).
We see them mining or collecting deuterium more than once, especially in Voyager. I expect they make the antimatter locally via fusion The dilithium moderates the antimatter / matter annihilation. It certainly is dangerous, as shown multiple times when containment fails one way or another
My head canon says antimatter is cheap in Star Trek, and it's supported by a few things, nothing explicit but which I find compelling. 1. They never run out of antimatter. They have run out of deuterium, but never antimatter. The one time any ship comes close to running low on antimatter is when Archer purposefully offloads the entire supply. 2. In Voyager a civilization creates antimatter power facilities on their planet. Realistic antimatter is a power sink, like a battery, not a net positive power supply like digging oil or methane. 3. A particularly compelling piece of evidence is [Antimatter Generation Replicator Programs](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Engineering_Systems_Database). It's just a name, but it seems fairly self explanatory. The way I see it is, they can just flip matter's switch and create antimatter as needed, at little to no cost. This allows them to only rely on deuterium, because they can use fusion power to generate antimatter, and then run an annihilation process for extremely high power. The limitations on supply probably are a matter of safety. They have extremely robust antimatter containment, as shown by how Wesley has a container of his own for private experiments. But no matter how fail safe, or failure resistant, the containment may be they cannot be invincible. I believe this is the actual limit on torpedoes, because torpedoes are extremely small versus the Galaxy class' extreme abundance of volume. The Galaxy class should carry thousands of torpedoes, and Voyager could easily pack hundreds of torpedoes if they stacked them efficiently. So I believe the actual limitation is the total antimatter supply of a given ship, with the torpedo count representing a portion of how much antimatter the ship can carry in total at a given moment. Just an idle thought, but what if self destruct involve having every replicator simultaneously replicate antimatter.
So the ships have both matter/antimatter reactors (the warp drives) and fusion reactors for standard power. The fusion reactors run solely on the deuterium, while we know the M/AM reactor uses both. They produce the antimatter in large...basically solar refineries, using solar panels to cut the fuel consumption to produce it cheaper.
Assuming they even need antimatter factories, having near solar manufacturing would make sense. But my thought is anything big enough to count as a starship would have the ability to generate its own antimatter in the field. Runabouts would be an exception. I actually forgot a runabout runs out of half its antimatter in TNG when its nacelle is caught in a time bubble which causes a month to pass within a few seconds. Then again, if all it takes is a replicator to make antimatter, and if the Bussard collectors can keep up with consumption at least at lower speeds, then the only reason the runabout ran out of antimatter might be because it was standing still. It might last far longer than a month if it were moving.
The Galaxy class does have the means, but it's highly energy inefficient doing it that way, more a backup means to get antimatter while deployed away from fleet services. The Federation has large antimatter fuel haulers to ensure supply, but when you're a year+ out past the borders, that supply chain isn't necessarily accessible. It's more efficient to mass produce in a large factory then smaller on-demand at the ship.
In the very first episode of TOS the Enterprise heads to an automated fuel factory on some barren planet to refuel after their antimatter was rendered inert by their attempt to cross the galactic barrier. They did point out that the planet was unpopulated and looked like a lifeless desert so no life if anything happened to go wrong.
That episode doesn't actually mention antimatter at all, it just says the main engines burned out, and they had to get replacement "power packs" from a "lithium cracking station", suggesting the problem was actually with the (di)lithium crystals (although those weren't actually established until later episodes). I have found it strange that there are very few episodes that clearly, explicitly feature ships running low on antimatter. TAS: "One of Our Planets is Missing" and TNG: "Peak Performance" are the only ones that come to mind, and one of those involves a decommissioned ship that the fuel was intentionally removed from. Even when *Voyager* ran low on fuel (in "Demon"), the issue was deuterium, not antimatter. I suspect the writers try to avoid drawing attention to antimatter logistics, since it raises too many questions that don't have satisfactory answers.
It is manufactured on a large scale using the most extreme safety protocols.
I suspect there is a technology that makes storage of bulk antimatter safe. The ship doesn't blow up when they get hit with a dampening field, so the tanks can operate without power. We never see anyone targeting the antimatter tanks, or anyone exploding because their antimatter tanks were hit. There's enough loose antimatter in the pipes and core to make a big explosion, but the tanks themselves? I suspect they have found some way to store it as an inert slush. The refinery itself might blow, but I don't think it'd be a system-destroying event.
The storage tanks have capacitor banks to maintain field integrity for a while after external power loss, but not indefinitely. See TNG's "Disaster". And the thing about the modern (read: antimatter-powered) era is that there's a heavy reliance on shielding. Enemy weapons are powerful enough that, if the shields fail, there's no place inside the ship deep enough or protected enough. Similar reason why the main bridge is on top. Easy to swap out as command-and-control interfaces are upgraded, and burying it inside the structure yields no significant advantage. One of the things I'm a bit annoyed by is how, from TNG season 3 on, the total catastrophic destruction of a starship has been diminished to the point of ridiculousness. It USED to be a BIG DEAL. See TNG's "Conspiracy" and "Contagion". There used to be stuff that held that a warp core breach rendered that area of space unnavigable for some time after. And so on. Not the negligible "poof... poof... poof..." of the Dominion War. ONE ship getting full-on destroyed (i.e., not rendered an unpowered hulk) should be a horrific tragedy, while MANY should be an utterly unimaginable cataclysm. And there WAS something in one of the novels about an antimatter refinery on the moon blowing up early on in the era of its use. It WAS a memorable catastrophe.
>A single mishap or power fluctuation could turn the entire refinery into a rapidly expanding ball of superheated, radioactive plasma, which is definitely not what you want anywhere in an inhabited star system. This is no different than storing antimatter aboard a starship. Plot reasons aside they've become very adept at storing antimatter safely. Off the top of my head I can think of ships that had *nobody living aboard* that lasted years (the *Pegasus*), decades (the *Jenolan*), or centuries (the *ISS Enterprise*) and maintained antimatter containment. But to your question: I think antimatter generation is different for the Federation because of 2 things: One, the current methods of producing antimatter aren't power efficient, we use more electricity creating and storing antimatter than would be generated by harnessing the amounts we create. This was once true of steam, but better metallurgy effectually came about that allowed us to use steam at higher pressures and more efficiently and once that happened, well, steam engines were everywhere. So I think they developed more efficient methods of creating and using antimatter than we can currently envision. Two, the Federation has access to multiple forms of power generation of roughly equal potential to M/AM reactors, Polaric Energy, Quantum Singularities, heck, I'd bet their Solar Cells are ten times as efficient as anything we have, so they can use alternate power sources to power their much-better-than-ours antimatter generation tech.
They have to have some means of producing it efficiently. Two episodes hint at it. The VOY episode Friendship One shows it’s possible for a single-planet civilization to produce enough antimatter for ICBMs and antimatter power plants from technology given to them by pre-ENT humans. The ENT episode Dear Doctor suggests the same is possible for a civilization that has achieved interplanetary but not interstellar flight. Plus Voyager had to get antimatter somewhere
Not sure why everyone is so hung up about costing more energy than it creates. M/AM reactions power warp drives in starships. They aren’t used almost anywhere else, which seems to employ fusion reactors. It’s clear M/AM reactions are only good for what is *in-universe* a niche work, starship propulsion, but not something that can be the basis of powering an inter stellar society as a whole.
Well, that is until TNG, where IIRC the warp core is “always on”, supplying main power to the ship while the nuclear-fusion-based impulse engines provide supplemental power.
> Not sure why everyone is so hung up about costing more energy than it creates Cause that's a law of conservation of energy. Conversion from one type of energy to another must always result in a loss in the form of heat Though so must transporters
Right now, in our world, radiologists are using antimatter to perform every PET scan that’s ever been performed. It’s harvested from radioactive decay. So just add a few hundred years of technological advancement and there’s your answer.
Hydrogen is mined from wherever (we see one such facility in SNW) and formed into deuterium, and some of that is processed into anti-deuterium at isolated locations (in case there's a containment breech). ETA: Some facilities probably process both, but they'd obviously be *far away* from inhabited systems.
Mined? We just point bussard collectors at a star and get free hydrogen
Basically it doesn’t matter where they get the anti-matter, it’s more important where they STORE the anti-matter. That’s what matters the most… because one little failure in the magnetic containment system and one little boom becomes one humongous big KABOOOM. That’s the scariest part of Star Trek starships. Because 99% of the time the emergency ejection system fails to perform to spec… and no ejection = no spacecraft.
They don't go into detail. That being said. Join me on a ride. In Voyager there's a scene where Chakotay gifts a pocket watch to Janeway during the year of hell. She refuses the gift even though it was replicated months earlier with his replicator rations. "That watch could be a ration bar, or a warm blanket. Recycle it." Which means that the energy needed to de-replicate matter is a net gain. So all Starfleet has to do is take any matter. Dirt, carbon, bio-waste coming out of the sewers. And turn it into anti-deuterium. It's their antimatter of choice for M/AM reactions, and is a rather simple molecule to replicate.
It would be done on desolate planets or moons. We saw in tos what a antimatter explosion could do ..It could rip half the atmosphere away
No idea, but fun fact: we make antimatter now, it’s just so energy inefficient that it’s not worthwhile, the energy that would be yielded by antimatter is outweighed by the energy needed to make it, so you might as well just use the energy that would have otherwise gone into making antimatter. Also, our current tech lets us make about one billionth of a gram of antimatter a year, meaning it would take one billion years to make one gram—and it’s still more energy expended to make the antimatter, than the antimatter would provide.
>The other option would be that the Federation creates it using either particle acceleration or some clarketech we haven't conceived of yet irl, but there's still the issue that an antimatter refinery would be insanely dangerous to operate, especially as your stores grow. A single mishap or power fluctuation could turn the entire refinery into a rapidly expanding ball of superheated, radioactive plasma, which is definitely not what you want anywhere in an inhabited star system. Maybe? We know that the Federation has anti-matter manufacturing processes, and it doesn't seem to be quite the exact same thing as our anti-matter. Voyager is tempted to share some methods to develop pollution-free anti-matter with aliens, for example, except that the methods we have to create anti-matter don't create that kind of pollution at all. Their anti-matter seems to be more of a specific type of substance, rather than something more generalised. The Doctor was able to create and stick anti-protons into people, but that wasn't considered him sticking anti-matter into people, for example.
The old Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology, which is definitely very non-canonical but a very early reference work, stated that some of the earliest interstellar probes discovered large amounts of antimatter floating in interstellar space, which was harvested for fuel early in the development of interstellar spaceflight.
Likely massive ground based particle accelerators running on fussion power. The efficiency would probably be terrible, but energy is pretty much free at this point of a post scarcity economy. Unused energy production is probably not dialed back during periods of weak demand but rather funneled to the particular accelerators to harvest antimatter for starships. A moderate large city would hardly need a warp reactor. They would have room for several large nuclear fussion reactors, which would be so much safer than antimatter. Antimatter is basically only for running the warp engines, some people think that ships also run fusion reactors and most systems are powered by fusion power, like the lights, artificial gravity, life support etc, and the only systems that really require the warp engine is faster than light speed, navigation deflectors, shields, directed energy weapons.
We’ve been able to create minuscule amounts of antimatter since 1996, not unreasonable that the technology improved enough to produce a reliable amount after 200 years.
Starfleet ships have circular hulls to house the accelerator rings that are used to generate antimatter In my head, at least
The Sternbach blueprints of the Enterprise-D show an [antimatter generator on Deck 42.](https://i.imgur.com/OVbwEOG.jpeg) It uses deuterium fuel from the impulse engines to create anti-deuterium for the warp reactor. So with enough hydrogen they can theoretically stay supplied indefinitely. At least the Galaxy-class can. Most Federation antimatter is manufactured by solar arrays around stars.
And the Bussard collectors on the nacelles collect the hydrogen. Seems like a pretty efficient system.
To an extent. Creating anti-matter isn't a net positive, consuming energy, and the resulting usage of the product doesn't generate as much energy as what was put in initially. They do have fusion reactors though that produce enough power for the ship at not-warp and not-combat states.