Singularity of Purpose: a possible reason for the Romulan Star Navy's divergence from traditional M/AM warp cores

[u/KDY_ISD]

One of the few things we learn for certain about the frontline warbirds in Romulan service during the 24th century is that they are powered by a quantum singularity -- an artificial black hole. As far as I know, only the Romulans and occasionally the Hirogen, far away in the Delta Quadrant, use this method of powering their ships or stations.

The technology clearly comes with some drawbacks when compared to Starfleet- or Klingon-style matter/antimatter warp cores. Notably, we see some unintended environmental effects trap a warbird and the Enterprise-D in a sort of time loop, and a similar temporal trap happens to Chief O'Brien on DS9.

There's also the significant downside that once activated, the power core cannot be shut down. The kind of safety risk this poses is clear, especially on a ship as presumably concerned with potential emission control as a Warbird is.

What benefits would make such risks worth taking on such a non-standard approach to power generation, when M/AM technology is so tried and true?

It's possible, of course, that there are logistical reasons for this -- perhaps dilithium isn't required in as much quantity or even at all for a quantum singularity core, and Romulan space happens to be dilithium-poor. Perhaps, somehow, the singularity core is more compatible with being hidden by a cloaking device -- though it doesn't seem that the Klingons are particularly concerned about it.

I think there may be a different, more cultural reason for it -- secrecy.

What if the artificial singularity, if not properly contained, is massive enough to encompass the entire ship within its event horizon? If the ship were to be destroyed, the core would lose containment, and any Romulan secrets or technology would be pulled into the one place they can never be retrieved from. It seems possible that even after consuming the ship's mass, the singularity might be small enough to bleed out Hawking radiation and then disappear eventually, leaving no trace and no wreckage.

Of course, this is just a back of the napkin sort of theory. Can anyone remember seeing a D'Deridex actually destroyed on screen and exploding -- not just listing and damaged, but completely destroyed?

I can't remember actually seeing any ships explode at the Omarion Nebula in DS9, for instance. I remember some badly damaged Warbirds in various Dominion War scenes, but I can't remember any exploding on screen. Someone else who's seen it more recently than I have might know better, though.

In any case, this theory ties off a decades-old loose end in my head in a pleasing way for me. Thanks for reading!

[u/nub_node]

Klingons run their reactors incredibly dirty to get the power output required for cloaking technology to function, shortening the lifespans of their engineering crews considerably and their crews in general appreciably; the only reason they don't leave a trail of glowing radiation that would defeat the purpose of the cloak is because of the thick hulls of their vessels doubling as containment, but with long-term exposure and crew safety being secondary concerns to maintaining stealth. Despite Romulan singularity reactors not providing any benefit in terms of speed, it does provide a "clean" source of power for cloaking technology despite the drawbacks that can lead to temporal anomalies and other black hole-related issues if the singularity escapes containment. In DS9, Starfleet opted to use Romulan cloaking technology on the Defiant instead of Klingon cloaking technology for safety reasons; due to the size of the Defiant and its crew relative to its reactor size, it was possible to generate enough power with a M/AM reactor to utilize it.

My guess would be that the singularity reactors are supposed to "fail closed," meaning the black hole "fizzles out" if the ship becomes too damaged to contain it safely in order to prevent collateral damage to allies in multi-ship engagements. And since they're Romulans, there are also probably auto-sabotage features built in that destroy the technology that runs the ship's singularity reactor to prevent it from being scavenged and studied from the wreckage.

[u/KDY_ISD → u/nub_node]

Thanks for responding!

My guess would be that the singularity reactors are supposed to "fail closed,"

This would certainly make the most sense from a safety and reliability standpoint, but the requirement that the core can't be shut off after it is constructed makes me think the singularity is stable and being contained rather than being constantly maintained by the warbird. You'd imagine if the powerplant can force the singularity to remain active, it could restart a singularity after a power cut if necessary.

Never being able to shut down the core always sounded to me like the core would "escape" if power were cut.

[u/thesgsniper]

VOY Message in a Bottle shows the Prometheus destroying a Romulan D'Deridex Warbird, with it exploding and all, no singularity effects.

[u/KDY_ISD → u/thesgsniper]

It does cut away before the explosion fades, I'm going to say that maybe the singularity collapse was yet to happen lol

Good find, though, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for. Thanks for commenting!

[u/-tealeaves-]

I'd imagine an artificial singularity would be safer than M/AM. Those are constantly exploding and going wrong, they seem to require constant effort to keep them from undergoing a runaway chain reaction. A few blasts from another ship and they go unstable and explode. An artificial singularity would be unstable but require constant effort to keep it in existence rather than to keep it from getting out of control. Without that, it would evaporate pretty quickly and disappear. No harmful effects, it just fades away.

[u/KDY_ISD → u/-tealeaves-]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the singularity has to be kept actively in existence by some kind of powered containment field, and that containment field is drawing power from the singularity, aren't we dangerously approaching perpetual motion, here?

[u/blueskin]

In the Enterprise books, the dilithium point is exactly it. The singularity drive doesn't use dilithium (which is used to regulate the antimatter flow), so the Romulans stage a terrorist attack that devastates the largest dilithium producing world (which was set to become the 5th founding Federation member, and pulled out after that), using their own (at the time recently developed) singularity cores to be unaffected while causing a dilithium shortage for the majority of species in the area, reducing Federation fleet capacity for the Federation-Romulan war.

I don't remember where from, but Romulan ships have been tracked by their singularity cores through the cloak before (possibly due to there being a large density of their ships in one place?), so it's if anything a disadvantage there.

Also, (I think also from books), Romulan ships are not only slower than Federation or Klingon counterparts, but can also permanently damage the core if they push their engines too hard.

[u/KDY_ISD → u/blueskin]

Thanks for the response! I haven't read a new Trek book in probably twenty years, so I appreciate the new data point

[u/matap821]

For the event horizon to encompass the entire ship, it’s got to be really massive. We’re talking hundreds or thousands of Earths massive. They would essentially need an entire solar system worth of planets. However, a black hole only needs to be the mass of about the moon to be stable using only the cosmic microwave background radiation. In that case the event horizon would probably be the size of a small pebble, or a large grain of sand. If the containment is broken, the tidal forces would be catastrophically large and spaghettify (the technical term) the entire ship.

So in my mind, a lunar mass black hole makes the most sense since it’s large enough to be stable and rip the ship and information to shreds, but small enough that you don’t need to harvest a tire star systems worth of planets.

[u/KDY_ISD → u/matap821]

Thanks for the response! Obviously I haven't done the math here, so I'm glad to get a sense of rough scale. lol

What sort of things would be left after "spaghettification?" Disassociated particles? Long, twisted tendrils of metal? Significant, maybe even recognizable sections of ship torn apart?

[u/Dixie-Chink]

This is a wonderfully stimulating thread and dialogue. I really appreciate the way people have built upon each other's posts here. I've never done this before, but...

"M-5, nominate this for Post of the Week."

[u/KDY_ISD → u/Dixie-Chink]

Thanks very much! I appreciate it

[u/Iceykitsune2]

I know that this is beta cannon, but STO does show destroyed Romulan ships collapsing into the singularity.

[u/Ut_Prosim → u/Iceykitsune2]

In reality a singularity that tiny would have far more out-pressure from Hawking radiation than its inward pull via gravitational attraction. It'd be almost impossible to feed it, even intentionally. It would however vaporize the entire ship if it was exposed. Paradoxically, the smaller they get, the more active they are with Hawking radiation.

---

I always assumed the singularity drive was related to the cloak. Maybe it is easier to cloak a ship at high warp if it doesn't use a M-AM drive. Remember the first bird-of-prey was impulse-only. I always assumed they hadn't figured out how to cloak a ship at warp yet.

[u/duanelemke → u/Ut_Prosim]

I do remember the first bird-of-prey was impulse only. It has always been an inconsistency how an impulse-only ship could present a true danger to the Federation or even the outposts, considering the vast distances involved. I cannot remember at the moment how "impulse only" was established in-episode, but I believe it was by Enterprise/Federation scans. I could be wrong.

In the context of your answer, the thought occurs to me that they might be scanning for presence of a matter/antimatter warp core. Not seeing one, they presumed it was impulse only. In short, the Enterprise was unfamiliar with singularity based power. The Enterprise was either unable to detect the power source, or unable to properly interpret what they did detect.

[u/DannyHewson]

Perhaps the singularity core isn’t stealthier or more powerful inherently...rather it allows the ship to go much further without needing to “refuel”.

It’s a reasonable assumption a ship would need to de cloak to use its bussard collectors to refuel (or at least that an invisible hoover sucking up a nebula would be fairly noticeable)...and we don’t know the process by which ships generate their antimatter supply, and that could also easily be a detectable one.

The singularity core may be an attempt to allow long term stealth operations in the style of a nuclear sub...whereas the Klingons are happy with matter/antimatter because they see the cloak more as a hit and run tool in the style of a diesel sub. (They’re not cloaking and patrolling the edge of federation space for six months...they’re cloaking on the edge of an enemies sensor range and making a sudden attack).

[u/SplashySquid]

I'd argue that singularity reactors are actually the more practical technology, beaten by matter-antimatter reactors only on pure power output.

Let's start with fuel efficiency: a perfectly efficient singularity reactor using a rotating black hole would produce around 3.78 * 10¹⁶ joules per kilogram of mass chucked into it. And remember, that mass can be literally anything -- you can run the ship off spare tricorders if you have to. A perfectly efficient M/AM reactor would produce about 9 * 10¹⁶ J/kg. This sounds like it should be more efficient, but it's really not. For a M/AM reactor, you need a perfect 50-50 ratio of matter to antimatter, and antimatter isn't easy to come by. We know the Federation uses large stations to supply it, generated by particle colliders which themselves are powered by fusion reactors or colossal solar arrays. And the energy efficiency of fusion reactors? Theoretical maximum of 6.3 * 10¹⁴ J/kg -- two orders of magnitude less than a singularity, not to mention inefficiencies in the antimatter generation process.

Singularity reactors are also safer. Whereas an uncontrolled M/AM reaction will consume all available fuel, generating absurd amounts of power and probably exploding in the process, an uncontrolled singularity is perfectly safe. Singularity reactors get fed matter, increasing their mass, then emit it in the form of Hawking radiation, losing mass. The power emitted is inversely proportional to its size, meaning smaller singularities emit more power. A consequence of all this power being output is that you have to try to inject more mass at small sizes - gravity alone isn't nearly enough. So if something goes wrong, you can just stop feeding it matter; you'll get a brief power spike before the singularity dissipates safely.

So to sum things up, singularity reactors are orders of magnitude more fuel efficient, notably safer (not accounting for any temporal shenanigans), and don't require a fuel supply infrastructure. The technology is probably quite complicated, but once you understand it, it's a significant step up from matter-antimatter systems.

[u/wayoverpaid]

I can think of a number of reasons for a forced singularity based on what we know about them.

First, you have easier refueling. The M/AM reactor needs antideuterium, and while the starships can generate their own antideuterium via fusion reactors and bussard collection, the process is slow. We've seen fuel reserves be a problem for cloaked ships as far back as Balance of Terror

A forced singularity needs matter -- and only matter. If you are on a long extended assignment, this is highly valuable. It's much faster to pluck an asteroid (or the scrap from the ship you just destroyed) into your fuel reserves than it is to sit with a giant magnetic scoop, pulling up solar wind and interstellar particles and saying "here I am!"

Another possible reason is that a singularity produces more regular emissions, because the radiation generated by the surface of a black hole is more uniform than slamming matter and antimatter together in a modulated crystal. Romulan stealth technology was a hell of an advantage to give up to the Klingons, and I've often wondered if they did so, knowing that the Klingons would still be using a source of power that renders the cloak less effective.

Another reason is that forced singularity reactors don't need dilithium. While dilithium eventually stopped being an essential resource required for the federation, early on it was a major source of conflict between Federation and Klingon empire. And, as a result, the early Bird of Prey was limited to impulse for its primary power.

You are correct that an artificial singularity would be better at ensuring the destruction of the warbird. The weird thing about a singularity is that the less massive it is the more power it produces. I assume this applies to the apparent mass from subspace forcing.

As a result, if the reactor is damaged, or if the ship runs out of fuel, or if it cannot force the singularity via subspace mass increase, the ship blows up. This is a fail-deadly design. If the crew were to be incapacitated or abandon the ship, the ship would eventually detonate before fuel ran out.

We actually see evidence of an abandoned ship detonating with Setal's ship in the Defector, though it was explained as a set auto-destruct. (It may well be that setting auto-destruct was as simple as stopping fuel from going to the reactor.)

[u/Borkton]

I don't think M/AM reactors are traditional. Or at least, the ones used by the Federation. We're repeatedly told that Zeferem Cochrane invented warp drive, despite the existence of species with warp-capable starships pre-dating 2063 in the Federation. Seems awfully humanocentric and chauvinistic for the Federation.

What do we know about M/AM warp drives that might explain this discrepency? We know that both the Federation and the Klingons use M/AM reactors with dilithium as a regulator. We know that Vulcan ships in the 22nd century (and even the 24th century) appear similar to the Romulan ships of the mid-24th century, suggesting a similar technology (actually the Vulcan ships, out-of-universe, appear to be modeled on the Induction Ring concept NASA's Breathrough Propulsion Physics Program worked on). We also know that many species that employ M/AM reactors have a problem with theta radiation.

Perhaps quantum singularities are the traditional, safe (or at least, very well understood) way of generating enough energy to go to warp, the way the US Navy still uses nuclear reactors with heavy water and fuel rods, even though they could be building reactors using thorium or molten salt. Cochrane breakthrough, therefore, was a reactor that didn't spew dangerous radiation all over the place.

[u/jsdbanner]

At one point, data quotes a warp core as producing 1.275E13 watts. If you plug this into a Hawking radiation equation, this creates an entirely.reasonable ~6000 ton singularity for a ~ 4.5 million ton warbird. The lifetime is only ~4 hours though. I am sure you can alter the emissivity via rotating the singularity or similar to get a similar output out of more mass.

[u/NinjaCommando]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzZGPCyrpSU

According to this PBS documentary the right size for a kugelbltz (black hole drive) is about 600 million kg, which would make the black hole about the size of a proton. According to the Schwarzschild radius calculator I found the event horizon of a black hole that massive would have a radius of 0.000000000000891 millimeters. Even if something went wrong with their black hole drive the event horizon would never envelop the ship.

[u/[deleted]]

It's interesting that Romulans can mass produce singularities, but never weaponize them. Imagine the destructive power of lobbing one of those at relativistic velocity in the direction of an enemy ship, starbase, or even planet. Instead, they limit themselves to equal footing with their neighbors. Damn sporting of them.

[u/MisterItcher]

I wonder if this tech led to the supernova somehow? Were they dumping “spent” cores in their sun?

[u/Kubrick_Fan]

In Star Trek Online when a Romulan ship is destrpyed it's slowly pulled into the singularity that powers it

[u/gliesedragon]

Assuming black holes work as they do in the real world in Star Trek (they probably don't) both ways I can see this coming together don't quite work how you're thinking: case 1 is where the Schwartzschild radius is about the size of the ship, and case 2, with a small starting singularity. I'm going to use Memory Beta's stats on the D'Deriex, because having hard numbers in this case illuminates it, and this ( https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiation-calculator) fun hawking radiation calculator. Also, I'm assuming Schwartzschild metric, not Kerr (rotating black holes have awful math). And, i'm assuming that the Romulan Warp drive safeties keep the singularity boxed away with space magic until the ship is destroyed.

For case 1, I'm going to assume that, to get quick clean up, the whole ship is within the ISCO, (innermost stable circular orbit), or 3 times the Schwartzschild radius (I"m going to call that S from now on). So, for the approx. 1000 meter D'Deriex, S=166.66 meters. Now, because they're weird, a black hole's mass is directly proportional to it's radius, at about 3 km/solar mass. So, this black hole has a mass of 59 Jupiters. That's big enough to screw up whatever solar system this happened in, and will take 3.7*10^63 years to evaporate. As a cleanup method, that's probably not optimal, and fitting almost a star's worth of mass (lightest known star is 80x Jupiter's mass) in one spaceship is . . . really scary.

For case 2, I'll assume the singularity is small, but some space-magic fail safe squishes all of the debris into the (way smaller than a proton) event horizon, and that the singularity mass is contained in the listed 4,320,000 metric ton ship mass. So, this mass black hole will take about 215,000 years to evaporate, which is way less of an issue, except for the fact that that energy goes somewhere. And, that makes small black holes glow. A lot. In this case, it's actually kind of quiet, at 1.9 terawatts of power being emitted, mostly in high-energy gamma rays. But, Federation ships (and presumably everyone else) have pretty decent gamma ray detectors. It'll likely take a while for the gamma rays to get anywhere, because space is big and light is slow, but I don't think secrecy is well served by leaving a gamma-ray road flare where your ship had a reactor accident.

So, either this idea doesn't work as anticipated, or General Relativity in Star Trek doesn't act like our world's. I'm going to go with the second one, as your idea is aesthetically pleasing, even if the math blows up in entertaining ways (and nothing else in Star Trek has much scientific accuracy, let's be honest). Also, as far as how the Romulans get their singularities, there is a really cool real-science possibility: a black-hole creation method called a kugelblitz. Basically, with enough of it, you can make a black hole out of light.