LPO, Simulation and Training Tech Division, USS Enterprise E
Formerly USS Enterprise D, Deep Space Nine, USS Voyager
| Main | @danhunsaker |
Over that time, I rose to the rank of Senior Chief, the Sim/Test Division became the Holotechnologies Department (alongside, but no longer part of, Engineering), and I was transferred to SFHQ to manage all of Starfleet's various EMPHA programs. It was a very interesting time for me, and life was going pretty well. I was even deciding whether I would retire or accept a Warrant Officer commission.
Then disaster struck.
After the warp generators were introduced, many of these buoys were refitted to become emergency distress response facilities, capable of traveling to the source of a distress call at warp, assessing the situation on arrival, and powering up to station mode if there were any survivors to support. It wasn't a perfect system, and the situational assessment programs were altered a number of times over the years, but Federation space became the safest place to travel.
The tech didn't change much after that, other than normal tuning and refinement of the design. EMPHAs were installed on all ships large enough to support them, and the design was adapted to construct a number of "buoy stations". These had very little in the way of actual infrastructure - essentially, they were nothing more than EMPHA-equipped standalone replicators, which when powered up would project a repair and resupply station for ships to dock and crews to rest.
So now the EMPHA had all the normal capabilities of a holodeck, but also extremely powerful sensors, and the ability to generate its own distinct warp fields, with enough finesse to warp spacetime itself with discrete information. Each projector was almost as complex, now, as a shuttlecraft, and a fraction of the size.
Speaking of shuttlecraft, soon even short-range craft were fitted with new miniaturized warp engines, letting any craft in the fleet reach warp.
That's what had the warp field mechanics folks so elated. They finally had a very real reason to focus on miniaturization of their favorite technology, beyond even the learning and experimentation versions they'd used in the past. It was about the same as if I were asked to recreate a mobile holographic emitter, without access to the design Voyager had brought back from the past (that was a weird experience). And somehow, they managed to pull it off.
The techniques for building a functional warp system the size of a navigation console had been around since before the NX program. Most of the warp engineers in the fleet had built at least one before they even applied to Starfleet, and all of them had built at least three, of varying designs, by the time they graduated to the fleet proper.
The trouble we faced was twofold. First, these systems weren't near powerful enough. Second, we needed them to fit a volume of two fists.
Normally that wouldn't be a problem – we'd just tap into the ship's warp field generators and use them to generate the desired effects. In this case, though, the level of fine control needed by the EMPHA was enough to actively interfere with the ship's warp systems, possibly even taking them offline. That's unacceptable risk, so each EMPHA projector would need its own field generator, and the power to run it.
The warp field mechanics folks were practically floating for weeks.
But how could we go about actually disrupting the curvature of spacetime itself, in a way both deliberate and temporary? We didn't want to _break_ the Universe doing this, after all.
Well, I'd be lying if I said I understood the full mechanics of it all, even after working with it directly for over 5 years, but it involves gravity and warp fields interacting in just the right way. So, yeah, the EMPHA upgrade needed access to warp field generators.
This was, of course, the true major upgrade. Photons, holomatter, real matter, force fields... All of these things were readily projectable by the existing system. The photons alone allowed us to project the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from simple radio waves up to gamma radiation. Nuclear radiation involves hurling neutrons around, which isn't as easy, but we could adjust the system to allow for it. Sound doesn't operate very well in vacuum, but forcefields handle that.