I've seen a few comments point out that the warp nacelles generate the subspace warp field and this is 100% accurate. I decided not to go into depth with how the warp drive is described as functioning in full detail because, quite frankly, that is a big topic of its own. So when I say that a subspace effect is created by the dilithium itself, I'm not suggesting that this is what allows a ship to actually achieve warp, but from what I have read, this is then conveyed into a warp plasma stream which is channelled to the nacelles which then use this "charged" mix to generate a warp bubble properly. The subspace element to Dilithium merely allows for the M/A energy that would otherwise destroy a reactor to be converted into a different form for regulating the reaction. I'll eventually get around to doing a warp core breakdown video in full, but I hope this clarifies any vagueness in from my glossed-over diagrams/explanation.
Well, not many people know. But Marvel and DC universes are canonically connected to each other. And that deal also include Transformers (Hasbro), Japanese Spiderman (Toei), but with recent deals also Disney (including Star Wars). What are occasionally referencing each other, with agreement between companies. And that also include Star Trek (Flint is the same person as Vandal Savage). Why I mention that? Because all those franchises do have magical crystals, what are implied to be alien clarktech. What quite funnily enough largely look and work the same way. Infinity Stones, Lantern Corps crystals, Energon, Dilithium and Kyber (including Dark Crystal). All provide great energy and may react to emotions. Just food for thought. Edit: And yes. Kryptonite also would be form of Dilit. There is many more similar crystals also in Marvel.
I have theory that "new from of Dilithum" Voyager discovered is actually the same thing what was used to reinforce NX class ships hulls. What were notorious for time travel. Earth has probably only deposit in the quadrant, but Federation was unaware of its properties until The Grand Experiment, though even then they did not mastered it until 25'th century and rise of Temporal Corps. Here important note about how warp drive actually work. So there is in galaxy a hidden network of transdimensional gates, made by T'kon (Icon) Empire. It is the same network Borg use for Transwarp. Warp drive actually hijack auxiliary property of the network. Subspace is a cyberspace of that network and Q may or may not be one of AI maintaining it (squids from Picard are other representatives). Warp 10 is basically when you enter subspace. Most ships are not designed to navigate in it and so land in different time or universe. Or mutate in some crazy way, like Paris and Janeway. People may also stuck in fantasy land like, Kirk and Cochran (and few other people). Anyway, Omega particle is only thing what can destroy the network, who actually use it as power source. Anyway. Warp 3 drives are so unstable that they may reach Warp 10. What is not a good thing, as transwarp border is dangerous and destroy most of the ships. But until Warp 3 you have basically no chances to reach it. From that point you need carefully tune stability of the field to come closer to the border with increasingly higher Warp factor. Earth Warp 5 was unique, because it was unstable drive. But humanity used few clever trick to basically hack through the probe, using third stabilizing nacelle (in NX pod on the back) and ultra rare material what could survive Transwarp. It work as any other drive, until third pod was damaged during high speed Warp. In such case they cold cross Warp 10 for a moment being thrown in space time (what happen to Columbia). Archer later learn how to deliberately cause this effect in his time travel adventures. But this effect come really on surface with Ceres class (UESS Bonaventure). Archer used his influence to kill the project, while Vulcans agree to share they Warp 7 tech, so humans would not drag attention of Machines hiding in center of the galaxy. Here a side note. NX Enterprise was a prototype. Only few serial production NX were made. Class was later redesigned into Poseidon class, what was looking more like proto-Miranda. And few surviving NX get secondary hull upgrade refereed as Columbia class. When earth get access to alien tech, during Earth-Romulan war. Ceres was designed as actual serial production version of NX. But project was killed, with Bonaventure class made from ground up with Vulcan Warp 7 tech. What is the same hull type as used in later Mayflower class. It was too civilian, what was huge problem during war with Klingons. It is why Federation pull from mothball old NX derivatives. With new series of smaller saucer heavy cruisers. What from 2230's become new standard of the Federation ships. Though only rare cases have original NX enriched parts.
You really need to read the "star trek: the next generation technical manual". If that volume is considered Canon, you got just about everything wrong.
I had never heard that dilithium created a subspace field. I had heard it just did not react with anti-matter. I had always thought the dilithiums use was to allow a beam of matter and a beam of anti-matter to meet. I had even seen a digram that seemed to suggest the surface this meeting of the beams made was a diagonal facet that seemed there to allow the combined beams to travel off in another direction. Do Romulan's even need dilithium if their power core is a singularity? If not, then why don't other species not move in this direction?
@@heatheradams4221 you are correct. According to 'TNG Technical Manual',, dilithium is the only substance that will not react with antimatter, but only when is subjected to an electromagnetic field. The dilithium REGULATES the reaction between deuterium and antideuterium, controlling the annihilation of both yielding a flow of electroplasma. The crystalline shape directs the flow into two EPS conduits where it is then carried out of main engineering and into the nacelles, where it is injected into a series of "coils" (matched sets of an exotic alloy resembling two doughnut halves) in a specific sequence. THAT is what generates the subspace field, warping space itself and propelling the ship. Remember "The Hunt For Red October"? Think of warp drive as a "caterpillar" in outer space. This video's narrator has a knowledge of Trek technology that couldn't fill a thimble halfway to the top.
The spent crystals are stored in the walls of federation ships as some form of insulation. You can see this as whenever there's an explosion there's always a large amount of ROCKS thrown everywhere.
The ST:TNG Tech Manual says that it has to be irradiated with specific microwave frequencies to make it transparent to antimatter. Curiously there’s a real world basis for this. It’s been observed in labs that many crystals can pass beams of electrons and protons in certain directions through their crystal lattices almost as if they weren’t there but block the beams if you try to pass the beams through at other angles. If you use quartz, and apply alternating high frequency voltage to the crystal the rock can actually accelerate the particles. It’s also been done using positrons (antimatter version of electrons) but as far as I know, nobody has tried annihilating them with ordinary electrons inside a crystal. I suppose that would be a way to differentiate between plain rose quartz and dilithium; if it explodes, it was dilithium.
i can totally imagine discarded dilithum crystals from famous star fleet ships would be like collectors items or display peaces in people homes in universe
Always going to be a contentious subject, given that Dilithium's exact role was extremely vague in TOS, and the lore around it has been added to and retconned over the decades.
I want to add that diamond is incredibly abundant off Earth, and also aren't really rare at all on Earth itself. They're just condensed carbon, and there are abundant situations in space where carbon is subject to extreme pressure and heat. All this is to say that dilithium being "300 times the value of diamond, " would actually indicate that it's not very expensive, but I doubt that's what they were goin for. In addition, in regard to dilithium being a possible "genus of mineral" consider corundum. All corundum is oxidized aluminum, but rubies and the various colors of sapphire have widely variable visual properties
and to be fair, synthetic diamonds aren't even "that hard" to make today, so it was maybe more a 60s thing and they would today use something different since the Federation isn't interested in Money so besides the industrial use, which is the main market today anyway, there are just shiny pebbles And speaking of corundrum: in the End, all Windows on the Enterprise are also a sort of Saphirglass
Yeah Diamonds price has nothing to do with rarity, as they aren't rare at all. Its an artificial price that is kept high by most of them being kept in warehoused rather than on the market. Just look at the price of industrial diamonds.
yeah, carte4ls cut them and then hoard them in vaults like dragons so they become more valuable and the dollars they get from each one is worth more gold (although gold in our reality is worth more gold in d&d)
One of the old, pre-TNG Star Trek books I read (I think it was Spaceflight Chronology) mentioned that dilithium's purpose was to act as a lens focusing the streams of matter and antimatter together, to ensure an optimum 1:1 mix. Dilithium was the only material that wouldn't be immediately consumed by the reaction. Kinda funny to see how the story of dilithium has changed over the years. BTW, the real element 119 is a hypothetical element called Ununennium. If we ever actually do manage to synthesize it, It'll be one of those elements that'll exist inside a particle accelerator for some tiny fraction of a second before decaying.
@@kaitlyn__L Whilst "long" by the standards of other super-heavy elements, the half-lives of such elements (I'm thinking the predicted half-life of Element 126), will only be in the order of minutes, so "considerably longer" is somewhat relative.
i also read a star trek story where a scientist was working on antimatter when the suposed Quartz in his bracelet started glowing so he took off his bracelet and put a quartz crystal in the antimatter chamber and the reaction sent a beam of plasma out of the chamber and through a steel bench and 12 meters of solid rock before it stopped .
Boy, I'd love to see _that_ alternate-universe Plainly Difficult video. Forget sticking your hand in a particle accelerator, sticking your "quartz" bracelet in an antimatter chamber and blowing up the facility is a whole new level of "oh, balls"!
The 1980 spaceflight chronology book says this. It seems to be some sort of over-unity power converter which makes sense as even matter/antimatter doesn't have the energy density to run a starship.
May as well call MacGuffinite. Comes in multiple colours, can control MaM reactions, translate that energy into warp plasma, help generate and perhaps control.. like I said, MacGuffinite. This video was a huge hill to mount. Kudos to the channel! 🎉
13:26 Apparently Zefram Cochrane used a converter with Regular Lithium for his famous Warp 1 flight. That MIGHT have been enough energy to send the NX-01 to Warp, but NOT the NCC-1701.
@@rakaydosdraj8405That is unclear. Apparently Y-2 freighters use Dilithium, and those are much older than the NX projects. Ships like the Phoenix also make it murky. I know of at least 3 different ways it was powered.
Lots of versions. In a book by William Shatner, a small quantity of dilithium was discovered in Antarctica. I thought this was a little too convenient. The version I liked, the Phoenix used a fusion reaction to power the warp drive. Apparently many races started out working with fusion before moving on to matter/antimatter reactions. Nuclear fusion can only generate so much energy. With it a ship is limited to warp 1.1 or 1.2. That's why the input of the Vulcans became so important.
I remember one Star trek novel had a fascinating potential detail that never got picked up in cannon which I really liked; the idea that something about the way Dilithium forms creates a crystal where one of the atoms in the cubic structure is forced out of the normal 3 dimensions of spacetime, basically a crystal with an atomic bond reaching into a fourth dimension. This would certainly cause some fascinating chemistry!
It was How Much For Just the Planet? by John M. Ford. Isaac Asimov did it first in his thiotimoline stories, in which the named substance would dissolve before water was added.
I like the idea that dilithium is really rare on Earth because of the Voth, they would have pretty much stripped Earth as they developed and left en masse.
That's a pretty cool idea, but I doubt it. I don't recall the Voth having discovered warp at that time but if they did, they could've just as easily have found it elsewhere in the solar system as well.
@@pedrosso0 They would have had to develop it for no trace in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants' respective fossil records. Which makes me think they left with Cochrane level technology, which would have been primitive. They then progressed from there, as their needs became an issue as their journey continued. No different than how Voyager showed.
I've always liked how U.S.S Voyager didn't run out of Dilithium. In "Birth of the Federation" I always build a forced-labor Dilithium mine on Rura Pente.
Voyager never ran out of shuttles and photon torpedoes either despite being destroyed and fired off almost every episode. In fact unless the plot of the episode called for it I don't think they ran out of anything.
As I recall from a TOS novel dilithium was like some small fraction of quartz ending up in the early days of space travel that museum displays needing to be broken open to fuel the earliest space travel.
That was a plot point in "Prime Directive" by the Reeves-Stevenses. It was part of why the Enterprise had to operate in "stealth mode" around Talin IV.
Don’t forget, that dilithium also exists through time, you not only have to hit it today, but you needed to hit it last week, and will need to hit it next week. “How much for just the planet” explains this.
If this were a real thing, the end product would be turned into jewelry that would be highly sought after. If we hold diamonds in such high regard could you imagine Dilithium both spent and unspent being turned into jewlrey. No question. They should have had some Ferengi wearing it. Like the Grand Negus.
@@patrickasplund Trilithium resin is indeed a waste product of warp cores, but was it specified to be altered dilithium from the warp reaction? CI's videos a generally very thoroughly sourced...
@@dupersuper1938You could also imagine TOS era people handling materials that would later be known to be highly dangerous, AFTER the people who handle them end up in medical care.
@@yelwinmoisesacostaduarte8915 It's not bugged problem is there is such a backlog that needs to be cleared. Sometimes it takes 7 days + sometimes even longer. Just leave it up and leave it untill its cleared otherwise if you keep removing and adding you just get put to back of queue. Hope that helps
I always remember a line from TNG "we recrystallize dilithium directly in the articulation frame now. We don't have to worry about changing the crystals out just regenerate it." LaForge said it
Part of my headcanon for how Dilithium works is that it's a room temperature superconductor. That probably wouldn't explain absolutely everything about it, but it helps. Surely it would allow some quantum technobabble multimodal reflection sorting reversing the polarity of the neutron flow to happen, thus Warp.
0:40 This scene just made me wish my ship in STO would continue traveling while I'm wandering the inside. It's an insignificant thing in the grand scheme of the game, but it breaks immersion for me.
3:20 Weren't the Klingon mining Dilithium on Praxis too or the moon was it destroyed due to over mining some other mineral? Also good luck on those trying to get Resurgence...I found it to be a great narrative on my playthrough
Praxis was never mentioned to be a dilithium mine, just a "Key Energy Production Facility", and that Spock said the explosion was the result of over-mining... I personally think it was dilithium but other people have speculated it was a special weapons research facility and the mining accident was just a cover-up, among other speculations.
@@ericlanglois3782It could have been a dilithium refinery where the raw dilithium mined elsewhere was brought in for processing. They had all their 'eggs in the one basket' so when it went up that was why it was such a huge explosion with a subspace shock wave, and why the Empire was screwed. The unanswered question was how far away was it from Kronos? Because that bang would do a lot of damage to a ecosystem.
@@casbot71 No idea, I've heard some say it was a moon of Qo'nos (as a way to explain the disaster Spock spoke about on the Klingon homeworld) while others say it wasn't...
@@casbot71far enough away to cause problems with their atmosphere, but nothing else (at least as I recall the discussion in TUC that was the main consideration for Kronos)
Love this channel!! 🤩 it’s a very interesting concept. However, according to the first contact movie, where there was no dilithium used for the Phoenix, it was just a straight up nuclear reactor. warp drive is possible without the dilithium. it might not be all that great, or even efficient without the dilithium. You might not get passed warp one at the moment, but warp drive is still possible without dilithium. makes one wonder what would’ve happened if they had studied further into a non-dilithium warp drive. it’s possible that is still wouldn’t have been the best warp drive in the galaxy, but perhaps would’ve gone faster than say four or five by the 24th century as a type of emergency, warp engine, a.k.a. spare tire in case of a dilithium problem or failure. 🧐
As I understand it, dilithium doesn’t make matter/antimatter into a subspace field. It converts the explosive force of the matter/antimatter annihilation into pure plasma energy. The nacelles convert the plasma energy into the warp/subspace field via the warp coils.
Matter Antimatter annihilation always produces a plasma and various forms of radiation. From what I recall, dilithium is largely used to help modulate the mam reaction, and tune the resulting high energy plasma into a fundamental resonance frequency which interacts with the material that makes up the warp coils thus inducing the warp field phenomenon. Kind of like if you supply a quartz crystal, with the appropriate crystal lattice make up, with electricity at specific voltage and amperage it vibrates at a specific frequency. The dilithium is modulating the plasma energy into the correct range for the warp field to be induced.
Trilithium is a waste product of dilithium regulated antimatter reactors. It is incredibly toxic, incredibly unstable, and is incredibly energetic. A roughly 2 gallon container can hold enough trilithium to *obliterate* something the size of a runabout. The apparatus to safely contain and store it is part of all ships with such reactors. It's pretty wild stuff.
8:40 That must be one of those things that has changed in the lore, because I don't remember that being the case at all. It used to be that a warp reactor, or a M/ARA (matter/antimatter reaction assembly) is how you got the energy in the first place. Deuterium (the matter) and anti-deiterium (the antimatter) are channeled through the reactor via magnetic suspension to mutually annihilate and release their energy. That energy is then sent to the warp nacelles in the form of warp plasma. That plasma interacts with the verterium cortenide of the warp coils and that is what creates the warp field. Send more fuel in the warp reactor, get more warp plasma for the nacelles, and energize the warp coils in quicker sequence and that is how you go faster. The only role dilithium plays in this is by making it safer to send more fuel into the reactor, because it's "matter" that doesn't react with antimatter, at least under the right conditions. Yes, there's a subspace component to it, but that subspace component is not actually related to the warp field itself.
The TNG and DS9 Tech Manuals didn’t really specify whether the warp coils produced a warp field whenever energised, or whether the warp plasma produced the field and was only constrained by the coils. They merely said you needed both in concert for a functioning warp bubble. Heck, IIRC it doesn’t even outright say whether warp plasma has dilithium in it, though Enterprise had “dilithium hydroxyls” be one of the things someone vented from their plasma vents which implicitly confirms the warp plasma is a highly energetic dilithium plasma. Anyway, yeah, it was Discovery which nailed something to the mast and basically said “it’s the dilithium that makes the subspace field, the warp coils just channel it in the correct geometry for a proper warp bubble”. It still isn’t annihilated, merely super-energised into plasma, by the matter/antimatter reaction. This happens to have been my headcanon for 10-15 years prior to Discovery’s statement anyway, just because sending super-energised plasma in the middle of some (pseudo-)electromagnets didn’t seem like a particularly good energy transfer mechanism to power those coils to me. But powering those coils to channel the space-altering plasma seemed a lot more plausible to me. Either way doesn’t diminish the importance of engineering the materials science of the warp coils, though. Just like with today’s superconducting electromagnets in tokamaks, new materials science leads to orders of magnitude stronger containment fields and thus higher fusion power output. By analogy one can easily imagine the limit to a ship’s top speed is in how much warp plasma they can safely channel before melting (“fusing”) the coils, rather than how much matter and antimatter they can theoretically fling together. (But of course the reactor would also be sized appropriately for the coils’ tolerances.) Squeeze more warp plasma down into the same space, with stronger magnetic fields from the warp coils, and get a stronger warp field.
@kaitlyn__L Ah. Yeah, if it's information introduced in Discovery, then it's definitely something I missed. I remember the TOS novel "Memory Prime" which had the Enterprise escorting some scientists to a prestigious award ceremony in the heart of Federation space. Because they didn't need to go fast, Scotty had taken the dilithium crystals out of the reactor (which ended up sparing them from some unforeseen sabotage later in the story), and apparently they just aren't necessary for speeds below warp 4.
The canon of what Dilitium actually does in ST is a pain in the but to nail down, but those schemes used from the STTNGTM era seem to indicate it's used as nuclear inhibitor, for regulation of matter-antimatter reactions, hence its position in the reactor chamber, right between the deuterium and anti-deuterium streams. The plasma created in this process is then channeled through the warp coils in the nacelles, which creates the warp field.
The main thing which wasn’t specified until Discovery is whether it was the channeled plasma that created the warp bubble, or whether the warp coils produced it when energised. AKA was the plasma just another form of energy transfer, or was the plasma the key that the coils merely condense and contain? Discovery specified it was the dilithium which produced the subspace fields, as mentioned in this video. Which means the warp coils are just extremely durable and strong electromagnets (much as in a tokamak). That was personally my headcanon for the last 15 years, because I didn’t see how a stream of plasma would feasibly non-destructively energise a coil; but I could understand using the coils to constrain and channel highly energetic space-altering plasma in the exact geometry you want to make a warp bubble. But I imagine (nay, know for sure) that it frustrated the other side of headcanoners 😅
Hiya Rick, I’ve been thinking about a video for RUclips. Since I don’t have the time or the know how and considering I don’t think it has been done before, I figured your channel would be perfect. How to operate a starship. It would be about how a starship is powered up, the time it takes, the people involved including thier qualifications and licences. And to some degree, the engineering and operations that are involved. I’m sure it’s not a case of start and go as later Star Trek incarnations and the automatic appointment of whomever to captain would suggest. What are your thoughts?
This was one such inconsistency I found in my research. Rick Sternbach said that the Dilithium chambers of Connie-refit cores were lining the vertical warp cores themselves. The ones in TOS can be explained by having a very different warp core design I guess, but at other times the chamber is just located elsewhere on various ships designs. Other people suggested they were simply the recrystallisation chambers and not the reaction chamber itself. So... I have no idea.
I’m reminded of National Geographic’s old Amazing Planet episode, featuring Volcanos. Dilithium Crystals get mentioned there. It had a pretty neat intro: “Rip Rayon is the captain now, Squee learns to fly~ Komomo tries to fix things up and Orb tells them why~” But my favorite line is “when the Earth Barfs its guts out” (which was just preceded by a bunch of synonym terms for ‘throw up’, including ‘hurls’”)
It should be noted that Romulans did not develop warp drive on their own. They bought the technology from the Klingons during the TOS period. Since the Klingon technology is apparently similar to that of the Federation, the Romulans must have developed their singularity based warp system sometime between TOS and Next Gen. The way canon has developed, you have to really hand it to the Romulans for fighting Earth and its allies to a draw with purely sublight ships.
Likely, at least in the time of The Next Generation, spent Dilithium crystals are simply tossed into a Replicator to be broken down and reconstituted into food, clothing or some other needed resource...
My personal headcanon is the threshold superdilithium wouldn't get voyager to warp 10 because it's a lot bigger than a shuttle. However it does allow them to travel at maximum warp for an unlimited length of time without the usual heat buildup that would shut the engines down after 12 hours, or rather it does build up, but takes longer to overheat than their antimatter supply would keep them at 9.975, and that speed is bonkers inefficient so they don't do it unless they have to.
@@dennisreed6345 only if they could find a good supply of antimatter at or near their maximum range, delta quadrant isn't consistently developed and it's often a bit hostile. Not to mention the dilithium would degrade even with the best reconditioning/recalibrating methods available, depending on how fast or slow it breaks down they may get halfway home and have to do the remaining 30,000 light years the old fashioned way. Personally I think it would be great in emergencies, something goes wrong and they need to go somewhere else real fast and they can.
If there is one thing that I want to see Trek start to tackle is shifting over to a new source of power. It would be a great chance to show some form of peaceful cooperation between the major powers.
Ultraheavy elements would have bizarre quantum properties that would effectively hide the outermost electrons in subspace. The reson is the outer shell Groupe velocity would have to go ftl, and there are two solutions, one is that it gets heavier, the other solution is that the electrons tunnel into local hyperspace giving the material phase partly in the physical domain and partly in a matmatically defined imaginary domain. These stable ultraheavy elements could possibly be generated by neutron star collisions. Other oddball properties is that they might be liquid at room temperature or even superconducting.
I wonder what the formation conditions for dilithium are. I know that dilithium itself can't be replicated, but maybe a pre-dilithium state could be replicated, then it be subjected to the formation conditions to produce finalized dilithium. Probably be resource intensive, but even a limited production would be a boon to any government.
Love nerding out on this stuff. Blown away how thought out it is. Being 51 I have seen tech move very fast. Very cool that we have even thought this stuff up and a explanation on how it would work if real. The only thing that makes me sad is that I wont live long enough to see any of this happen. Would like to see us get to mars at least.
On Galaxy Warp is normally idle on 25:1 so called Warp 0, Warp 1 has 10:1, until Warp 9 has 10:10 and 11:11 and more and most times at normal work, its 0.5 mln Ampers running around.
If Voyager is to be taken as cannon, Humans are the 2nd space faring race to have evolved on earth. Perhaps the reason there is so little is because the dinosaurs that left for the delta quadrant stripped what they could from the planet.
A far simpler way would be to have Matter and Anti Matter destroy each other. Dilithium is the only material that can withstand that reaction, and can transform the heat energy produced in to electrical energy by some form of pizo effect. And everything slse is done after that with magnets.
I guess to make this all more in line with the warp drive theories of Miguel Alcubierre, the channeling of energy through the christals converts it into exotic energy, which is necessary to negatively bend space. Might even be an explanation why there are at least always 2 warp nacelles. One generating positive curviture and one a negative curviture of space.
Why no mention of Praxis? The Klingons over mined their main dilithium moon(local moon of Qo'noS in STO) and caused the same instability you mensioned causing it to explode. This disaster brought them to the negotiating table at Khitomer to end any conflict with the Federation.
8:53 Another thought. Was dilithium ever referenced or mentioned by Zephrym Chochrin in First Contact? I can't even remember if dilithium was used in the Phoenix's warp drive.
@@rakaydosdraj8405 Ahh. Well, if you consider the space-time erosion from warp fields, having warp permanently restricted to Warp 5 might be beneficial.
on used dilithium- it's free mass, you can use transport/replicator technology to break it down to atomic composition and then reform it as a different matter.
The ability to run out of Dilithium within 1000yrs of the federation's founding, galaxy wide, should be functionally impossible. There were too many advanced precursor civilisations which lasted longer than a mere millennia which with Disco's logic of "running out of dilithium" should also have applied to, and meant there would be none left at all in the present day. Plus one dilithium rich planet (especially ones which have enough to cause them to explode), not the "nursery" from disco should be able to do a power like the federation quite well for ages. There are hundreds of billions of planets and trillions of smaller bodies like asteroids, that even a fraction of containing dilithium would probably mean while rare, it's not gonna just vanish in 1000 years from mining.
Also, Voyager had equipment onboard to reprocess Dilithium breakdown product, allowing the ship to operate an extended period without replacement dilithium crystals. The capacity to recycle or use lower grade sources could only expand.
But the most important question 😅 How does it taste!!? I really enjoyed your video, thank you for your amazing content! I really miss the early days of Startrek online 😢
13:52 did you come across Tri-lithium resin? One of the beta cannon TNG books has Wesley working near the tanks that contain it and I believe it was mentioned to be a waste product... Which I remember thinking was interesting because it's used in torpedoes and so could be an analogue of our depleted uranium munitions, or dirty bombs (see sisko dropping it on the marqui)
Given the obvious parallels, I'm surprised Trek hasn't introduced the concept of depleted Dilithium based weaponry much like how we have depleted uranium weapons IRL.
I have wondered before if Dilithium was somehow just some special form of 2 Lithium atoms put together, lol. Thank you for this breakdown. God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
For a moment at 7:24 minutes I thought I was seeing a more accurate depiction of the relative sizes of the Galaxy Class and DS9, till I realized that the starship was in front of the station...
Dilithium is critical to the efficient functioning of Federation Warp Drives and is absolutely required to attain Warp Speeds greater than Warp 4... A Federation Starship can travel at Warp 4 or less with the Dilithium Crystals taken out of the circuit, but it will require more Matter/Antimatter fuel to do so... According to at least one of the Novels anyway...
In the Original Timeline, Praxis was one of if not THE major source for Dilithium Ore in the Klingon Empire...at least until it exploded in the 6th movie anyway...that explosion may or may not have also happened in the Kelvin Timeline as well...
Okay, hear me out: "diamagnetic antilithium". It would be a better fuel than antideuterium, because you can store a larger mass of it in a smaller volume, and you don't have to freeze it to near absolute zero to prevent it from sublimating into a gas and becoming uncontrollable (and before anyone asks, antihelium would be even worse). And while it would be possible to artificially produce it in small amounts, natural deposits that somehow didn't annihilate themselves would be invaluable to any warp-traveling civilization. This is not at all a valid theory for the existing lore, but if there were ever a hard reset of the franchise, that's the explanation I would go for.
I suspect that Star Fleet and the Fed at large would have been very careful to keep and carefully store spent Dilithium crystals. For that possible day when a way would be found to reconstitute them. If that day came they wouldn't want to be confiscating everyone's "salt lamps" ...whatever those are.
If you know anything about the Periodic Table, you will know that lithium has a lot of free electrons in its outer shell. That is why one can get so much energy out of it from such a light weight metal. It only has 2 Isotopes. Lithium does not appear as a metal in nature.
The Warp specialist T'airn'KA (Species: S'dima'Lus) is still in the experimental testing phase of converting spent Dilithium into a gas that after several processes, produce (unconfirmed), a refined grade of the crystal, but these processes are time consuming, and the results are of "fair" quality (warp 4 max). Continuing research is being done, secretly. ;-)
I always figured that Dilithium had no relation to Lithium per-say, except as a similar name. Like the one who discovered the ore was named Dilith, and named it after themselves. And mining manually for it make sense given how... reactive... it is to induced energy. Since it turns force into energy and back, using a big ore-driller machine might accidentally deliver enough physical or energy-based energy to cause a reaction, where as using manual mining is more precise and cuts down on wildcat reactions. I thought that Dilithium-based reactors were just the Federation's version. The Romulans used an artificial singularity instead of a standard warp core, so it stands that they weren't using dilithium for that. Dilithium-use is just ONE way to make warp travel possible. They're just the easiest.
I thought the warp drive just needed crazy power for the large warp coils to generate the warp bubble, thats why in first contact he could use a nuclear reactor to power the coils for warp 1, however for more power they use antimatter and matter using dilithium as the regulator and used the energy to drive the large coils.
I love that, over a year later, still no one calls it just X. The name "Twitter" is still attached in some way, usually as "formerly Twitter". As much as Space Karen tries to get rid of it, he cant.
In Star trek The Next Generation, they establish that, while it can't be replicated, it can be regenerated in a matter, extending the life of the crystals longer Earth has no dilithium The moon of Quonus had dilithium deposits as seen The Undiscovered Country as over mining as a cause for the moon to explode The pphenomenon of too much dilithium causing a planet to explode was seen in the ST:TNG episode Pen Pals, in which several planets in that sector exploded due to too much dilithium, so it might not be that rare
So it I think correctly, after all 4 years of physics, it means Dilithium allows Matter and Antimatter to pass through into subspace, thus accompanied by plasma from matter, since Antimatter anihilates completely and it goes charged, as warp plasma electrically to the nacelles using electeomagnets, right? I wonder, is there a way to use Technical Manual to know how much of matter and antimatter is used for each warp factor in the TNG era? Ps. It would be immensely cool to see a video about how the MARA warp reactor really works in details. I have alot of data in one finger, but still after watching Star Trek TNG and Enterprise I still dont know all. Its fascinating both this video and Star Trek, also Krauss book and quantum physics was recently combined to normal physics, that is EPR = ER ,D
i cant remember where i found it from but i was made aware that dilithium was only required in a warp core to get beyond warp factor 5. that its a catalyst for faster and more powerful reactions in the warp core to enable the core to make enough power to gain the higher warp speeds and that the dilithium isnt used at lower speeds. i really wish i can remember where i found that out
I've seen a few comments point out that the warp nacelles generate the subspace warp field and this is 100% accurate.
I decided not to go into depth with how the warp drive is described as functioning in full detail because, quite frankly, that is a big topic of its own.
So when I say that a subspace effect is created by the dilithium itself, I'm not suggesting that this is what allows a ship to actually achieve warp, but from what I have read, this is then conveyed into a warp plasma stream which is channelled to the nacelles which then use this "charged" mix to generate a warp bubble properly. The subspace element to Dilithium merely allows for the M/A energy that would otherwise destroy a reactor to be converted into a different form for regulating the reaction.
I'll eventually get around to doing a warp core breakdown video in full, but I hope this clarifies any vagueness in from my glossed-over diagrams/explanation.
Well, not many people know. But Marvel and DC universes are canonically connected to each other. And that deal also include Transformers (Hasbro), Japanese Spiderman (Toei), but with recent deals also Disney (including Star Wars). What are occasionally referencing each other, with agreement between companies. And that also include Star Trek (Flint is the same person as Vandal Savage).
Why I mention that? Because all those franchises do have magical crystals, what are implied to be alien clarktech. What quite funnily enough largely look and work the same way. Infinity Stones, Lantern Corps crystals, Energon, Dilithium and Kyber (including Dark Crystal). All provide great energy and may react to emotions.
Just food for thought.
Edit: And yes. Kryptonite also would be form of Dilit. There is many more similar crystals also in Marvel.
I have theory that "new from of Dilithum" Voyager discovered is actually the same thing what was used to reinforce NX class ships hulls. What were notorious for time travel. Earth has probably only deposit in the quadrant, but Federation was unaware of its properties until The Grand Experiment, though even then they did not mastered it until 25'th century and rise of Temporal Corps.
Here important note about how warp drive actually work. So there is in galaxy a hidden network of transdimensional gates, made by T'kon (Icon) Empire. It is the same network Borg use for Transwarp. Warp drive actually hijack auxiliary property of the network. Subspace is a cyberspace of that network and Q may or may not be one of AI maintaining it (squids from Picard are other representatives).
Warp 10 is basically when you enter subspace. Most ships are not designed to navigate in it and so land in different time or universe. Or mutate in some crazy way, like Paris and Janeway. People may also stuck in fantasy land like, Kirk and Cochran (and few other people). Anyway, Omega particle is only thing what can destroy the network, who actually use it as power source.
Anyway. Warp 3 drives are so unstable that they may reach Warp 10. What is not a good thing, as transwarp border is dangerous and destroy most of the ships. But until Warp 3 you have basically no chances to reach it. From that point you need carefully tune stability of the field to come closer to the border with increasingly higher Warp factor.
Earth Warp 5 was unique, because it was unstable drive. But humanity used few clever trick to basically hack through the probe, using third stabilizing nacelle (in NX pod on the back) and ultra rare material what could survive Transwarp. It work as any other drive, until third pod was damaged during high speed Warp. In such case they cold cross Warp 10 for a moment being thrown in space time (what happen to Columbia).
Archer later learn how to deliberately cause this effect in his time travel adventures. But this effect come really on surface with Ceres class (UESS Bonaventure). Archer used his influence to kill the project, while Vulcans agree to share they Warp 7 tech, so humans would not drag attention of Machines hiding in center of the galaxy.
Here a side note. NX Enterprise was a prototype. Only few serial production NX were made. Class was later redesigned into Poseidon class, what was looking more like proto-Miranda. And few surviving NX get secondary hull upgrade refereed as Columbia class. When earth get access to alien tech, during Earth-Romulan war. Ceres was designed as actual serial production version of NX.
But project was killed, with Bonaventure class made from ground up with Vulcan Warp 7 tech. What is the same hull type as used in later Mayflower class. It was too civilian, what was huge problem during war with Klingons. It is why Federation pull from mothball old NX derivatives. With new series of smaller saucer heavy cruisers. What from 2230's become new standard of the Federation ships. Though only rare cases have original NX enriched parts.
You really need to read the "star trek: the next generation technical manual".
If that volume is considered Canon, you got just about everything wrong.
I had never heard that dilithium created a subspace field. I had heard it just did not react with anti-matter. I had always thought the dilithiums use was to allow a beam of matter and a beam of anti-matter to meet. I had even seen a digram that seemed to suggest the surface this meeting of the beams made was a diagonal facet that seemed there to allow the combined beams to travel off in another direction.
Do Romulan's even need dilithium if their power core is a singularity? If not, then why don't other species not move in this direction?
@@heatheradams4221 you are correct. According to 'TNG Technical Manual',, dilithium is the only substance that will not react with antimatter, but only when is subjected to an electromagnetic field.
The dilithium REGULATES the reaction between deuterium and antideuterium, controlling the annihilation of both yielding a flow of electroplasma.
The crystalline shape directs the flow into two EPS conduits where it is then carried out of main engineering and into the nacelles, where it is injected into a series of "coils" (matched sets of an exotic alloy resembling two doughnut halves) in a specific sequence.
THAT is what generates the subspace field, warping space itself and propelling the ship.
Remember "The Hunt For Red October"?
Think of warp drive as a "caterpillar" in outer space.
This video's narrator has a knowledge of Trek technology that couldn't fill a thimble halfway to the top.
The spent crystals are stored in the walls of federation ships as some form of insulation. You can see this as whenever there's an explosion there's always a large amount of ROCKS thrown everywhere.
I have also heard that up to 75% of the Oberth class ships are made from (or used to store) spent Dilithium crystals. 😶💥💀
That's no dilitheum that is explodium
ROCKS!
@@earlware4322 People joke, but there are proves that Dilit was used as hull shielding.
I thought they used them to make their consoles?;
''The Dilithium must flow'' - General Kenobi.
Fatboy Slim puts out another banger
That's probably my all-time favorite Mass Effect quote
Its nice that Ric is using fotage from Resurgence as well as STO
I believe he was known as the Grey, and master instructor of defense....against the Dark Arts.
@@tomarmadiyer2698 I think he’s going by the name “Wat Tambor of the Techno Union” now.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Dilithium's other unique property - it's matter that doesn't react directly, or destructively, with Antimatter.
Expanded universe materials say it has to have some sort of charge passing through it for antimatter to be able to go through it without reacting.
The ST:TNG Tech Manual says that it has to be irradiated with specific microwave frequencies to make it transparent to antimatter.
Curiously there’s a real world basis for this. It’s been observed in labs that many crystals can pass beams of electrons and protons in certain directions through their crystal lattices almost as if they weren’t there but block the beams if you try to pass the beams through at other angles. If you use quartz, and apply alternating high frequency voltage to the crystal the rock can actually accelerate the particles.
It’s also been done using positrons (antimatter version of electrons) but as far as I know, nobody has tried annihilating them with ordinary electrons inside a crystal.
I suppose that would be a way to differentiate between plain rose quartz and dilithium; if it explodes, it was dilithium.
@@StormsparkPegasus this, it acts as a moderator basicly in lore by controlling the charge you could control the reaction rate of matter/anti-matter
So does anti matter pod material
@@markaous1212No, Antimatter Pods are magnetic bottles that maintain a magnetic field that prevents the Antimatter from making physical contact.
i can totally imagine discarded dilithum crystals from famous star fleet ships would be like collectors items or display peaces in people homes in universe
Always going to be a contentious subject, given that Dilithium's exact role was extremely vague in TOS, and the lore around it has been added to and retconned over the decades.
I want to add that diamond is incredibly abundant off Earth, and also aren't really rare at all on Earth itself. They're just condensed carbon, and there are abundant situations in space where carbon is subject to extreme pressure and heat. All this is to say that dilithium being "300 times the value of diamond, " would actually indicate that it's not very expensive, but I doubt that's what they were goin for.
In addition, in regard to dilithium being a possible "genus of mineral" consider corundum. All corundum is oxidized aluminum, but rubies and the various colors of sapphire have widely variable visual properties
and to be fair, synthetic diamonds aren't even "that hard" to make today, so it was maybe more a 60s thing and they would today use something different since the Federation isn't interested in Money so besides the industrial use, which is the main market today anyway, there are just shiny pebbles
And speaking of corundrum: in the End, all Windows on the Enterprise are also a sort of Saphirglass
Yeah Diamonds price has nothing to do with rarity, as they aren't rare at all. Its an artificial price that is kept high by most of them being kept in warehoused rather than on the market. Just look at the price of industrial diamonds.
@@enisra_bowman There's occasional mention of eddy currents in transparent aluminum. Sapphire is an excellent electrical insulator.
federation citizens have no idea how money works.
yeah, carte4ls cut them and then hoard them in vaults like dragons so they become more valuable and the dollars they get from each one is worth more gold (although gold in our reality is worth more gold in d&d)
Used dilithium is a desert topping popular at Horta birthday parties.
I love this comment! Thank you! God bless! ✝️ :)
It’s a dessert topping and a floor wax. SNL
Dilithium sprinkles. A real taste treat!
@@hopelessnerd6677 Exactly! Everything is better wiith Li^2 crystals! Now in The Burn resistant packaging!
NO KILL I.
One of the old, pre-TNG Star Trek books I read (I think it was Spaceflight Chronology) mentioned that dilithium's purpose was to act as a lens focusing the streams of matter and antimatter together, to ensure an optimum 1:1 mix. Dilithium was the only material that wouldn't be immediately consumed by the reaction. Kinda funny to see how the story of dilithium has changed over the years.
BTW, the real element 119 is a hypothetical element called Ununennium. If we ever actually do manage to synthesize it, It'll be one of those elements that'll exist inside a particle accelerator for some tiny fraction of a second before decaying.
Unless that’s where the mythical island of stability lies 😅 (and of course if we do make it, it won’t be called ununennium anymore)
@@kaitlyn__L Whilst "long" by the standards of other super-heavy elements, the half-lives of such elements (I'm thinking the predicted half-life of Element 126), will only be in the order of minutes, so "considerably longer" is somewhat relative.
i also read a star trek story where a scientist was working on antimatter when the suposed Quartz in his bracelet started glowing so he took off his bracelet and put a quartz crystal in the antimatter chamber and the reaction sent a beam of plasma out of the chamber and through a steel bench and 12 meters of solid rock before it stopped .
Boy, I'd love to see _that_ alternate-universe Plainly Difficult video. Forget sticking your hand in a particle accelerator, sticking your "quartz" bracelet in an antimatter chamber and blowing up the facility is a whole new level of "oh, balls"!
The 1980 spaceflight chronology book says this. It seems to be some sort of over-unity power converter which makes sense as even matter/antimatter doesn't have the energy density to run a starship.
May as well call MacGuffinite. Comes in multiple colours, can control MaM reactions, translate that energy into warp plasma, help generate and perhaps control.. like I said, MacGuffinite. This video was a huge hill to mount. Kudos to the channel! 🎉
MacGuffinite, as you know, is the official mineralogical name:-)
Or Phlebotinum.
Lovely to see threshold getting exactly how much love it deserves.
Now if only "the burn" was treated the same.
13:26
Apparently Zefram Cochrane used a converter with Regular Lithium for his famous Warp 1 flight. That MIGHT have been enough energy to send the NX-01 to Warp, but NOT the NCC-1701.
NX-01? The warp 5 experiment?
I'm gonna guess they probably mean "The Phoenix"
I remember hearing that "the warp 5 barrier" was as far as you could push the physics of warp travel WITHOUT Dilithium.
@@rakaydosdraj8405That is unclear. Apparently Y-2 freighters use Dilithium, and those are much older than the NX projects. Ships like the Phoenix also make it murky. I know of at least 3 different ways it was powered.
Lots of versions. In a book by William Shatner, a small quantity of dilithium was discovered in Antarctica. I thought this was a little too convenient.
The version I liked, the Phoenix used a fusion reaction to power the warp drive. Apparently many races started out working with fusion before moving on to matter/antimatter reactions.
Nuclear fusion can only generate so much energy. With it a ship is limited to warp 1.1 or 1.2. That's why the input of the Vulcans became so important.
I remember one Star trek novel had a fascinating potential detail that never got picked up in cannon which I really liked; the idea that something about the way Dilithium forms creates a crystal where one of the atoms in the cubic structure is forced out of the normal 3 dimensions of spacetime, basically a crystal with an atomic bond reaching into a fourth dimension. This would certainly cause some fascinating chemistry!
It was How Much For Just the Planet? by John M. Ford. Isaac Asimov did it first in his thiotimoline stories, in which the named substance would dissolve before water was added.
@@tomkerruish2982 oh nice! Thanks, I have been trying to remember for years where I heard that haha
I like the idea that dilithium is really rare on Earth because of the Voth, they would have pretty much stripped Earth as they developed and left en masse.
That's a pretty cool idea, but I doubt it. I don't recall the Voth having discovered warp at that time but if they did, they could've just as easily have found it elsewhere in the solar system as well.
@@pedrosso0 They would have had to develop it for no trace in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants' respective fossil records.
Which makes me think they left with Cochrane level technology, which would have been primitive.
They then progressed from there, as their needs became an issue as their journey continued.
No different than how Voyager showed.
I've always liked how U.S.S Voyager didn't run out of Dilithium. In "Birth of the Federation" I always build a forced-labor Dilithium mine on Rura Pente.
Well Scotty figured out how to recharge dilithium so they probably did that.
Voyager never ran out of shuttles and photon torpedoes either despite being destroyed and fired off almost every episode. In fact unless the plot of the episode called for it I don't think they ran out of anything.
As I recall from a TOS novel dilithium was like some small fraction of quartz ending up in the early days of space travel that museum displays needing to be broken open to fuel the earliest space travel.
Specifically a version of quartz that tunneled into the 4th dimension.
That was a plot point in "Prime Directive" by the Reeves-Stevenses. It was part of why the Enterprise had to operate in "stealth mode" around Talin IV.
@@rubaiyat300aka subspace
This feels like a chemistry lesson, and I’m here for it.
Don’t forget, that dilithium also exists through time, you not only have to hit it today, but you needed to hit it last week, and will need to hit it next week. “How much for just the planet” explains this.
So... it is literally a Time Crystal (check Wikipedia, real thing).
The.secret is unlike usual quartz is that dilithium has a 4 dimensional lattice.
That was a good book...the excerpt you reference is feom the instructional 'Professor Proton"-esque video in the book.
Best. Story. Ever.
@@beatadalhagen I laugh when I read it to this day
If this were a real thing, the end product would be turned into jewelry that would be highly sought after. If we hold diamonds in such high regard could you imagine Dilithium both spent and unspent being turned into jewlrey. No question. They should have had some Ferengi wearing it. Like the Grand Negus.
Does it come with complementary lead shielding?
@@patrickasplund It's not radioactive, as the video says.
@dupersuper1938 the "end product " would be what's left over once used- trilithium, which is absolutely radioactive in-story.
@@patrickasplund Trilithium resin is indeed a waste product of warp cores, but was it specified to be altered dilithium from the warp reaction? CI's videos a generally very thoroughly sourced...
@@dupersuper1938You could also imagine TOS era people handling materials that would later be known to be highly dangerous, AFTER the people who handle them end up in medical care.
Its something that will be bane of my excisitence in STO waiting to convert to Zen! Thats what they are!
Relatable!!😅
can someone help mei every time i tried to convert dilitium to zen i dont have any offer in the panel i am from venezuela
@@yelwinmoisesacostaduarte8915 It's not bugged problem is there is such a backlog that needs to be cleared. Sometimes it takes 7 days + sometimes even longer. Just leave it up and leave it untill its cleared otherwise if you keep removing and adding you just get put to back of queue. Hope that helps
8000 per day, ferengi rules
I always remember a line from TNG "we recrystallize dilithium directly in the articulation frame now. We don't have to worry about changing the crystals out just regenerate it." LaForge said it
Spock recrystallized the di lithium in the bird of prey with the bi product radiation from fission reactors in the movie
Part of my headcanon for how Dilithium works is that it's a room temperature superconductor. That probably wouldn't explain absolutely everything about it, but it helps. Surely it would allow some quantum technobabble multimodal reflection sorting reversing the polarity of the neutron flow to happen, thus Warp.
0:40 This scene just made me wish my ship in STO would continue traveling while I'm wandering the inside. It's an insignificant thing in the grand scheme of the game, but it breaks immersion for me.
3:20 Weren't the Klingon mining Dilithium on Praxis too or the moon was it destroyed due to over mining some other mineral?
Also good luck on those trying to get Resurgence...I found it to be a great narrative on my playthrough
Praxis was never mentioned to be a dilithium mine, just a "Key Energy Production Facility", and that Spock said the explosion was the result of over-mining... I personally think it was dilithium but other people have speculated it was a special weapons research facility and the mining accident was just a cover-up, among other speculations.
@@ericlanglois3782It could have been a dilithium refinery where the raw dilithium mined elsewhere was brought in for processing.
They had all their 'eggs in the one basket' so when it went up that was why it was such a huge explosion with a subspace shock wave, and why the Empire was screwed.
The unanswered question was how far away was it from Kronos? Because that bang would do a lot of damage to a ecosystem.
@@casbot71 No idea, I've heard some say it was a moon of Qo'nos (as a way to explain the disaster Spock spoke about on the Klingon homeworld) while others say it wasn't...
@@casbot71far enough away to cause problems with their atmosphere, but nothing else (at least as I recall the discussion in TUC that was the main consideration for Kronos)
@@ericlanglois3782 It can't be a moon of Qo'nos, there's no way the excelsior would have been in range of the explosion then.
Love this channel!! 🤩
it’s a very interesting concept. However, according to the first contact movie, where there was no dilithium used for the Phoenix, it was just a straight up nuclear reactor. warp drive is possible without the dilithium.
it might not be all that great, or even efficient without the dilithium. You might not get passed warp one at the moment, but warp drive is still possible without dilithium.
makes one wonder what would’ve happened if they had studied further into a non-dilithium warp drive.
it’s possible that is still wouldn’t have been the best warp drive in the galaxy, but perhaps would’ve gone faster than say four or five by the 24th century as a type of emergency, warp engine, a.k.a. spare tire in case of a dilithium problem or failure. 🧐
I could see a market for spent dilithium jewelry, if only because it's pretty.
As I understand it, dilithium doesn’t make matter/antimatter into a subspace field. It converts the explosive force of the matter/antimatter annihilation into pure plasma energy. The nacelles convert the plasma energy into the warp/subspace field via the warp coils.
Matter Antimatter annihilation always produces a plasma and various forms of radiation. From what I recall, dilithium is largely used to help modulate the mam reaction, and tune the resulting high energy plasma into a fundamental resonance frequency which interacts with the material that makes up the warp coils thus inducing the warp field phenomenon. Kind of like if you supply a quartz crystal, with the appropriate crystal lattice make up, with electricity at specific voltage and amperage it vibrates at a specific frequency. The dilithium is modulating the plasma energy into the correct range for the warp field to be induced.
Trilithium is a waste product of dilithium regulated antimatter reactors. It is incredibly toxic, incredibly unstable, and is incredibly energetic. A roughly 2 gallon container can hold enough trilithium to *obliterate* something the size of a runabout. The apparatus to safely contain and store it is part of all ships with such reactors. It's pretty wild stuff.
Trying to figure out why Picard knew it well in Starship Mine but Riker and Worf act like it’s brand new, in Generations.
Never try to steal it. Why don't they have an auxiliary reactor to use Trilithium for power?
8:40 That must be one of those things that has changed in the lore, because I don't remember that being the case at all. It used to be that a warp reactor, or a M/ARA (matter/antimatter reaction assembly) is how you got the energy in the first place. Deuterium (the matter) and anti-deiterium (the antimatter) are channeled through the reactor via magnetic suspension to mutually annihilate and release their energy. That energy is then sent to the warp nacelles in the form of warp plasma. That plasma interacts with the verterium cortenide of the warp coils and that is what creates the warp field. Send more fuel in the warp reactor, get more warp plasma for the nacelles, and energize the warp coils in quicker sequence and that is how you go faster.
The only role dilithium plays in this is by making it safer to send more fuel into the reactor, because it's "matter" that doesn't react with antimatter, at least under the right conditions. Yes, there's a subspace component to it, but that subspace component is not actually related to the warp field itself.
The TNG and DS9 Tech Manuals didn’t really specify whether the warp coils produced a warp field whenever energised, or whether the warp plasma produced the field and was only constrained by the coils. They merely said you needed both in concert for a functioning warp bubble.
Heck, IIRC it doesn’t even outright say whether warp plasma has dilithium in it, though Enterprise had “dilithium hydroxyls” be one of the things someone vented from their plasma vents which implicitly confirms the warp plasma is a highly energetic dilithium plasma.
Anyway, yeah, it was Discovery which nailed something to the mast and basically said “it’s the dilithium that makes the subspace field, the warp coils just channel it in the correct geometry for a proper warp bubble”. It still isn’t annihilated, merely super-energised into plasma, by the matter/antimatter reaction.
This happens to have been my headcanon for 10-15 years prior to Discovery’s statement anyway, just because sending super-energised plasma in the middle of some (pseudo-)electromagnets didn’t seem like a particularly good energy transfer mechanism to power those coils to me. But powering those coils to channel the space-altering plasma seemed a lot more plausible to me.
Either way doesn’t diminish the importance of engineering the materials science of the warp coils, though. Just like with today’s superconducting electromagnets in tokamaks, new materials science leads to orders of magnitude stronger containment fields and thus higher fusion power output. By analogy one can easily imagine the limit to a ship’s top speed is in how much warp plasma they can safely channel before melting (“fusing”) the coils, rather than how much matter and antimatter they can theoretically fling together. (But of course the reactor would also be sized appropriately for the coils’ tolerances.)
Squeeze more warp plasma down into the same space, with stronger magnetic fields from the warp coils, and get a stronger warp field.
@kaitlyn__L Ah. Yeah, if it's information introduced in Discovery, then it's definitely something I missed.
I remember the TOS novel "Memory Prime" which had the Enterprise escorting some scientists to a prestigious award ceremony in the heart of Federation space. Because they didn't need to go fast, Scotty had taken the dilithium crystals out of the reactor (which ended up sparing them from some unforeseen sabotage later in the story), and apparently they just aren't necessary for speeds below warp 4.
Good man Rick thanks for another fantastic informative piece respect 😊
The canon of what Dilitium actually does in ST is a pain in the but to nail down, but those schemes used from the STTNGTM era seem to indicate it's used as nuclear inhibitor, for regulation of matter-antimatter reactions, hence its position in the reactor chamber, right between the deuterium and anti-deuterium streams. The plasma created in this process is then channeled through the warp coils in the nacelles, which creates the warp field.
The main thing which wasn’t specified until Discovery is whether it was the channeled plasma that created the warp bubble, or whether the warp coils produced it when energised. AKA was the plasma just another form of energy transfer, or was the plasma the key that the coils merely condense and contain?
Discovery specified it was the dilithium which produced the subspace fields, as mentioned in this video. Which means the warp coils are just extremely durable and strong electromagnets (much as in a tokamak).
That was personally my headcanon for the last 15 years, because I didn’t see how a stream of plasma would feasibly non-destructively energise a coil; but I could understand using the coils to constrain and channel highly energetic space-altering plasma in the exact geometry you want to make a warp bubble. But I imagine (nay, know for sure) that it frustrated the other side of headcanoners 😅
@@kaitlyn__L
Aye, agreed! As mentioned....the canon is a mess! Especially when trying to reconcile everything put on screen during the decades 😅
I’ve always wondered why they use deuterium, tritium has a significantly (relatively speaking) higher binding energy
@@vanguard9067 i would guess because deuterium is easier to find and much more readily accessible and stable.
I’m glad your threshold of decency precludes you from naming the episode that shall not be named.
That part made me laugh.
Hiya Rick, I’ve been thinking about a video for RUclips. Since I don’t have the time or the know how and considering I don’t think it has been done before, I figured your channel would be perfect.
How to operate a starship.
It would be about how a starship is powered up, the time it takes, the people involved including thier qualifications and licences. And to some degree, the engineering and operations that are involved.
I’m sure it’s not a case of start and go as later Star Trek incarnations and the automatic appointment of whomever to captain would suggest.
What are your thoughts?
Have you done any videos that address why TOS and the TOS films seem to have the dilithium chambers kept anywhere OTHER than the warp core and why?
This was one such inconsistency I found in my research. Rick Sternbach said that the Dilithium chambers of Connie-refit cores were lining the vertical warp cores themselves. The ones in TOS can be explained by having a very different warp core design I guess, but at other times the chamber is just located elsewhere on various ships designs. Other people suggested they were simply the recrystallisation chambers and not the reaction chamber itself. So... I have no idea.
@@CertifiablyIngame Erm, only problem with Sternbach's claim is that the dilithium chamber was in a room off to the side - it's where Spock died.
@@adamgoss3638 I figured that that room was something else, like maybe part of the injector system like how the NX-01 has injectors off to the side.
I’m reminded of National Geographic’s old Amazing Planet episode, featuring Volcanos. Dilithium Crystals get mentioned there.
It had a pretty neat intro: “Rip Rayon is the captain now, Squee learns to fly~ Komomo tries to fix things up and Orb tells them why~”
But my favorite line is “when the Earth Barfs its guts out” (which was just preceded by a bunch of synonym terms for ‘throw up’, including ‘hurls’”)
It should be noted that Romulans did not develop warp drive on their own. They bought the technology from the Klingons during the TOS period. Since the Klingon technology is apparently similar to that of the Federation, the Romulans must have developed their singularity based warp system sometime between TOS and Next Gen.
The way canon has developed, you have to really hand it to the Romulans for fighting Earth and its allies to a draw with purely sublight ships.
how'd they get around in ENT if they bought the tech in TOS?
What if Star Wars used a Dilithium crystal in a lightsaber instead of a Kyber crystal?
Likely, at least in the time of The Next Generation, spent Dilithium crystals are simply tossed into a Replicator to be broken down and reconstituted into food, clothing or some other needed resource...
My personal headcanon is the threshold superdilithium wouldn't get voyager to warp 10 because it's a lot bigger than a shuttle. However it does allow them to travel at maximum warp for an unlimited length of time without the usual heat buildup that would shut the engines down after 12 hours, or rather it does build up, but takes longer to overheat than their antimatter supply would keep them at 9.975, and that speed is bonkers inefficient so they don't do it unless they have to.
And they'll get home in 10 years
@@dennisreed6345 only if they could find a good supply of antimatter at or near their maximum range, delta quadrant isn't consistently developed and it's often a bit hostile. Not to mention the dilithium would degrade even with the best reconditioning/recalibrating methods available, depending on how fast or slow it breaks down they may get halfway home and have to do the remaining 30,000 light years the old fashioned way. Personally I think it would be great in emergencies, something goes wrong and they need to go somewhere else real fast and they can.
Love your ch. All your stuff is so good.
If there is one thing that I want to see Trek start to tackle is shifting over to a new source of power. It would be a great chance to show some form of peaceful cooperation between the major powers.
Ultraheavy elements would have bizarre quantum properties that would effectively hide the outermost electrons in subspace. The reson is the outer shell Groupe velocity would have to go ftl, and there are two solutions, one is that it gets heavier, the other solution is that the electrons tunnel into local hyperspace giving the material phase partly in the physical domain and partly in a matmatically defined imaginary domain. These stable ultraheavy elements could possibly be generated by neutron star collisions. Other oddball properties is that they might be liquid at room temperature or even superconducting.
FTL outer shell electron speed - I like it!
@vanguard9067 gold is actually very close to the mark, that's why it has a yeĺow color. A quirk of spin resonance makes it do this.
@@christopherleubner6633 seriously?! Thank so much for sharing the info/your expertise. Have a great weekend.
I wonder what the formation conditions for dilithium are. I know that dilithium itself can't be replicated, but maybe a pre-dilithium state could be replicated, then it be subjected to the formation conditions to produce finalized dilithium. Probably be resource intensive, but even a limited production would be a boon to any government.
Likely too expensive to for large scale use
@@dennisreed6345 Oh, very expensive, but a reliable of source of secure fuel always is.
@@gmradio2436 but not many ships could afford to use it they'll have to use gateways like sb19 for most ships
Expensive or not, you'd think the Federation would be all over 'renewable dilithium' production.
@@tba113They or an independent planet.
It's amazing how detailed everyone gets about something that doesn't even exist.
Religion?
Maybe THATS where all the rocks in the exploding consoles come from!
I now need a spent dilithium lamp!
Love nerding out on this stuff. Blown away how thought out it is. Being 51 I have seen tech move very fast. Very cool that we have even thought this stuff up and a explanation on how it would work if real. The only thing that makes me sad is that I wont live long enough to see any of this happen. Would like to see us get to mars at least.
Right off the bat, a beutiful purple view.
On Galaxy Warp is normally idle on 25:1 so called Warp 0, Warp 1 has 10:1, until Warp 9 has 10:10 and 11:11 and more and most times at normal work, its 0.5 mln Ampers running around.
If Voyager is to be taken as cannon, Humans are the 2nd space faring race to have evolved on earth. Perhaps the reason there is so little is because the dinosaurs that left for the delta quadrant stripped what they could from the planet.
Always with the Twitter/X... I'd love to have partaken, but I refuse to use this cursed thing
A far simpler way would be to have Matter and Anti Matter destroy each other.
Dilithium is the only material that can withstand that reaction, and can transform the heat energy produced in to electrical energy by some form of pizo effect. And everything slse is done after that with magnets.
Magnetism is essentially magic anyway:-)
I guess to make this all more in line with the warp drive theories of Miguel Alcubierre, the channeling of energy through the christals converts it into exotic energy, which is necessary to negatively bend space. Might even be an explanation why there are at least always 2 warp nacelles. One generating positive curviture and one a negative curviture of space.
Why no mention of Praxis? The Klingons over mined their main dilithium moon(local moon of Qo'noS in STO) and caused the same instability you mensioned causing it to explode. This disaster brought them to the negotiating table at Khitomer to end any conflict with the Federation.
I wondered about that too and What are Voyager's gel packs about?
Nice video. You should totally do a look at Minovsky physics in the Universal Century Gundam universe.
8:53 Another thought. Was dilithium ever referenced or mentioned by Zephrym Chochrin in First Contact? I can't even remember if dilithium was used in the Phoenix's warp drive.
I always heard that warp travel was POSSIBLE without dilithium, but that "the warp 5 barrier" was impossible to crack without it.
@@rakaydosdraj8405 Ahh. Well, if you consider the space-time erosion from warp fields, having warp permanently restricted to Warp 5 might be beneficial.
on used dilithium- it's free mass, you can use transport/replicator technology to break it down to atomic composition and then reform it as a different matter.
The ability to run out of Dilithium within 1000yrs of the federation's founding, galaxy wide, should be functionally impossible. There were too many advanced precursor civilisations which lasted longer than a mere millennia which with Disco's logic of "running out of dilithium" should also have applied to, and meant there would be none left at all in the present day.
Plus one dilithium rich planet (especially ones which have enough to cause them to explode), not the "nursery" from disco should be able to do a power like the federation quite well for ages. There are hundreds of billions of planets and trillions of smaller bodies like asteroids, that even a fraction of containing dilithium would probably mean while rare, it's not gonna just vanish in 1000 years from mining.
Welcome to STD, the stupidest Star Trek, hopefully ever.
@@the_travelingbreeze Yup where a crying alien can destroy a galaxy lol....god that was stupid
Also, Voyager had equipment onboard to reprocess Dilithium breakdown product, allowing the ship to operate an extended period without replacement dilithium crystals. The capacity to recycle or use lower grade sources could only expand.
They used gateways or teleportation or other non warp drive alternatives
"Gimmie them pink rocks"
Dilithium winds up, at least partially, converted to dangerous trilithium waste.
Looks like X DMs are closed Ric. So buzzed FB instead of
Upvoting so that Ric would see this.
How did the biomatter from the subspace creatures in “Equinox” affect dilithium formation?
Very interesting as I figured now on the dilthium now your video is 5days old as of Thursday March 14th 2024. 😊 good information on this topic 👏 👌
If the Federation isn’t working on a way to grow dilithium I will eat the Enterprise’s warp core.
I've said it before. I love how they used pink quart as props
This is wonderful.
This video reminds me of the Trek novel, how much for just the planet?. It was a really good and really funny book.
But the most important question 😅
How does it taste!!?
I really enjoyed your video, thank you for your amazing content!
I really miss the early days of Startrek online 😢
13:52 did you come across Tri-lithium resin?
One of the beta cannon TNG books has Wesley working near the tanks that contain it and I believe it was mentioned to be a waste product... Which I remember thinking was interesting because it's used in torpedoes and so could be an analogue of our depleted uranium munitions, or dirty bombs (see sisko dropping it on the marqui)
Given the obvious parallels, I'm surprised Trek hasn't introduced the concept of depleted Dilithium based weaponry much like how we have depleted uranium weapons IRL.
So....what did Zefram Cochrane use for HIS warp reactor???
A nuclear reactor, which was good enough for Warp 1.
5:29; Dare I ask, Which episode is the 'episode that shall not be named'? The Warp 10 episode to be exact.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)
Excellent game footage.
I have wondered before if Dilithium was somehow just some special form of 2 Lithium atoms put together, lol. Thank you for this breakdown.
God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
If spent dilithium is also piezoelectric, there are a lot of uses for it. Finally an energy source that its byproduct is also useful!
The original sources for Star Trek almost all have changed. So what you said is as true as possible for a fictional thing!
With an atomic number like that it'd be really really really really really heavy unless it wasn't a dense material.
Is like energon?
And what does Praxis have to do with Dilithium?
For a moment at 7:24 minutes I thought I was seeing a more accurate depiction of the relative sizes of the Galaxy Class and DS9, till I realized that the starship was in front of the station...
Michael Burham: In the future, dilithium makes great fireworks.
Dilithium is critical to the efficient functioning of Federation Warp Drives and is absolutely required to attain Warp Speeds greater than Warp 4...
A Federation Starship can travel at Warp 4 or less with the Dilithium Crystals taken out of the circuit, but it will require more Matter/Antimatter fuel to do so...
According to at least one of the Novels anyway...
In the Original Timeline, Praxis was one of if not THE major source for Dilithium Ore in the Klingon Empire...at least until it exploded in the 6th movie anyway...that explosion may or may not have also happened in the Kelvin Timeline as well...
Okay, hear me out: "diamagnetic antilithium". It would be a better fuel than antideuterium, because you can store a larger mass of it in a smaller volume, and you don't have to freeze it to near absolute zero to prevent it from sublimating into a gas and becoming uncontrollable (and before anyone asks, antihelium would be even worse). And while it would be possible to artificially produce it in small amounts, natural deposits that somehow didn't annihilate themselves would be invaluable to any warp-traveling civilization.
This is not at all a valid theory for the existing lore, but if there were ever a hard reset of the franchise, that's the explanation I would go for.
Well that gives me an idea for a STA episode.
'He who controls the Dilithium Crystals controls the Galaxy'
I suspect that Star Fleet and the Fed at large would have been very careful to keep and carefully store spent Dilithium crystals. For that possible day when a way would be found to reconstitute them. If that day came they wouldn't want to be confiscating everyone's "salt lamps" ...whatever those are.
The mention of runaway chain reactions makes me wonder if Vibranium is the Marvel Multiverse's equivalent of dilithium...
If you know anything about the Periodic Table, you will know that lithium has a lot of free electrons in its outer shell. That is why one can get so much energy out of it from such a light weight metal. It only has 2 Isotopes. Lithium does not appear as a metal in nature.
Hah! Use spent dilithium as 'salt lamps'! I actually have two of those; I like the warm glow.
The Warp specialist T'airn'KA (Species: S'dima'Lus) is still in the experimental testing phase of converting spent Dilithium into a gas that after several processes, produce (unconfirmed), a refined grade of the crystal, but these processes are time consuming, and the results are of "fair" quality (warp 4 max). Continuing research is being done, secretly. ;-)
I always figured that Dilithium had no relation to Lithium per-say, except as a similar name. Like the one who discovered the ore was named Dilith, and named it after themselves. And mining manually for it make sense given how... reactive... it is to induced energy. Since it turns force into energy and back, using a big ore-driller machine might accidentally deliver enough physical or energy-based energy to cause a reaction, where as using manual mining is more precise and cuts down on wildcat reactions.
I thought that Dilithium-based reactors were just the Federation's version. The Romulans used an artificial singularity instead of a standard warp core, so it stands that they weren't using dilithium for that. Dilithium-use is just ONE way to make warp travel possible. They're just the easiest.
I thought the warp drive just needed crazy power for the large warp coils to generate the warp bubble, thats why in first contact he could use a nuclear reactor to power the coils for warp 1, however for more power they use antimatter and matter using dilithium as the regulator and used the energy to drive the large coils.
I love that, over a year later, still no one calls it just X. The name "Twitter" is still attached in some way, usually as "formerly Twitter". As much as Space Karen tries to get rid of it, he cant.
Dead crystals, could be polished and made into ornaments, dishes..(cups, bowls, spoons, mugs of all sizes...), and juelery.
My headcanon is that dilithium is the same material as the "ruby quartz" used by the X-Man Cyclops.
If I remember correctly Dilithium crystals were used like the control rods in a nuclear reactor
They moderated the matter-anti matter reaction
In Star trek The Next Generation, they establish that, while it can't be replicated, it can be regenerated in a matter, extending the life of the crystals longer
Earth has no dilithium
The moon of Quonus had dilithium deposits as seen The Undiscovered Country as over mining as a cause for the moon to explode
The pphenomenon of too much dilithium causing a planet to explode was seen in the ST:TNG episode Pen Pals, in which several planets in that sector exploded due to too much dilithium, so it might not be that rare
Does Dilithium have a pinkish hue ? Yes , there's a pinkish hue !
So it I think correctly, after all 4 years of physics, it means Dilithium allows Matter and Antimatter to pass through into subspace, thus accompanied by plasma from matter, since Antimatter anihilates completely and it goes charged, as warp plasma electrically to the nacelles using electeomagnets, right?
I wonder, is there a way to use Technical Manual to know how much of matter and antimatter is used for each warp factor in the TNG era?
Ps. It would be immensely cool to see a video about how the MARA warp reactor really works in details. I have alot of data in one finger, but still after watching Star Trek TNG and Enterprise I still dont know all. Its fascinating both this video and Star Trek, also Krauss book and quantum physics was recently combined to normal physics, that is EPR = ER ,D
i cant remember where i found it from but i was made aware that dilithium was only required in a warp core to get beyond warp factor 5. that its a catalyst for faster and more powerful reactions in the warp core to enable the core to make enough power to gain the higher warp speeds and that the dilithium isnt used at lower speeds. i really wish i can remember where i found that out