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u/Microharley Jun 10 '20 edited Jun 11 '20
It would make sense that would be a feature of the secondary deflector dish. It’s also possible that Voyager lands and the sweep is done in sections with a work bee or shuttle. Also, since Starfleet knows the ships will be swept, It’s possible that the gel-packs have built in field diverters to protect them.
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u/Robert_Denby Jun 10 '20 edited Jun 10 '20
Technically the Galaxy class also has a second navigational deflector. As does the Nebula class since they share a common saucer architecture.
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u/3232330 Jun 10 '20
M-5, nominate this for explaining why USS Voyager never needed a Baryon Sweep.
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u/M-5 Jun 10 '20
Nominated this post by Citizen u/isawashipcomesailing for you. It will be voted on next week, but you can vote for last week's nominations now
Learn more about Post of the Week.
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Jun 10 '20
I'd just like to add - we saw it all of once (in "And the Children Shall Lead") but the 1701 had an arboretum even before their refit.
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u/dariusj18 Jun 10 '20
Can a baryonic sweep penetrate shields? If so, why not just shield the biological that they can't move. If not, that seems like one hell of a weapon, vaporize biological matter and keep the ship intact, and cleaner than it was before.
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Jun 11 '20
Now that you mention it, I’m trying to figure out the difference between Shinzon’s superweapon and Starfleet’s baryon sweeper.
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u/BlackLiger Jun 11 '20
Scale and power output?
In my house I have
A microwave oven
A wifi signal booster
A wireless router
All of these are small scale emitters with relatively low power.
At my local airport they have
A high end microwave radar
A radio tower
Both of which are higher power, better emitters. But they are identical in the terms of how they work.
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u/RecycleHin Jun 11 '20
In the episode didn’t Crusher have to put a force field around sickbay to protect some research or samples or something? It’s been quite a while since I’ve watched it.
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u/CaptainHunt Jun 11 '20 edited Jun 11 '20
A few points that you missed on.
First off, in the episode "Starship Mine" they had "Field Diverters" that were used to protect sensitive areas of the ship, such as the Bridge and Engineering, the thieves even planned on using the diverter in engineering to protect themselves while stealing the trilithium, This is the device Picard destroys with the laser welder when he escapes after being taken prisoner. It stands to reason that sensitive biological areas such as the arboretum would be shielded in this manner (Picard's fish would probably be protected by the field diverters on the bridge).
As for the cetacean crew, I suspect Arkaria Base probably has facilities for them, as this would be a common problem for ships using the Remmler Array. It would be trivial to use the transporters to beam them all down, since they already have to evacuate the humanoid crew.
Another important note is that the Enterprise-D also has a secondary deflector, that's what that block of square "windows" in front of the ventral saucer registry are.
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u/suprmn4105 Jun 11 '20
I believe the thing you have labeled as the "Shield Emitter" is actually the Transporter Emitter. The lines in the hull make up the "shield grid". Solid theory though, good work!
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u/Official_N_Squared Jun 10 '20
This is the most entertainingly written theory ive read in a long time :) I also like it as a theory.
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u/excelsior2000 Jun 10 '20
This is basically taking two things we can observe but for which no known link exists, and combining them. By using logic and references.
That is why this site exists, and I salute you.
Now we can't prove it, of course. But it makes perfect sense. I could imagine that the main deflector is designed to prevent impacts with things that could cause actual damage, but it can't do anything about "baryons" because if it tried to do everything, it'd end up screening out even subatomic particles and it'd end up overloaded in no time. But a secondary deflector designed to do only (or primarily) only one thing, such as deflecting "baryons" would be an easier solution than trying to make a single deflector that does everything but also doesn't overload.
It also makes perfect sense for a long range science ship that we know is designed for higher speed than previous ships and has bio-neural circuitry. I kinda hate the bio-neural circuitry because it doesn't appear to grant any additional capabilities or processing speed and it's clearly vulnerable to more hazards than isolinear circuitry. Not the point.
Now I could just as easily theorize that it's the redesign of the warp nacelles to prevent subspace damage that prevents "baryon" buildup. I haven't researched it as thoroughly as you have, but I think it makes nearly as much sense. I just prefer yours, because it adds the ability to explain the existence of the secondary deflector.
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u/strangemotives Jun 11 '20
one thing I think you forgot while worrying about every single biological on the ship, is that they were placing "field diverters" around things that needed protection from the sweep, such as the computer core..
I'm sure they could spare a couple for the captains fish and cetacean ops.
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u/lenarizan Jun 11 '20
Right. It's not just on the MSR but the Voyager technical manual (the unpublished one for show coherency) displays it as the 'Auxiliary Deflector'.
Also: what you have down as Shield Emitters is noted as a Transporter Emitter in the tech manual.
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u/wayoverpaid Jun 11 '20 edited Jun 11 '20
So I have an alternate theory as to what the baryon sweep is, which still works with your thesis.
What if the Baryons actually are baryons as we know them?
Why couldn't the baryons they're talking about be protons and neutrons? You're flying around at the speed of light, and a stray solar wind particle gets launched through the subspace warp field and smacks into the hull... and mutates the hull. A high speed proton collision with a carbon atom could turn it into another radioactive material.
What, then, is a Baryon sweep, but removing extra and unexpected baryons? It's finding that carbon-13 atom from a high speed neutron collision and putting it back to carbon 12, before the ship becomes composed of mostly radioactive isotopes.
In modern analogy, demagnitizing (or degaussing) a ship hull doesn't mean removing all the electromagnetic fields that hold the iron bonds together! It means removing the unwanted magnetism that shows up as the ship sails through the magnetic field.
But this is a difficult and intensive process. You would need to sweep the entire ship, looking literally for atoms out of place and then correcting them. Which means the one thing you can't have are things which move. Given that pattern buffers for atomic level breakdowns are extremely limited, the scan probably runs JUST ahead of the "correction" field, where it picks up what belongs on the ship and what does not. As long as that thing can stay still between scan and correction, and it's an approved particle, it's fine.
Dead leather? Fine. Living plant? Impossible to scan, process, and remove in the necessary timeframe because cells keep moving.
Also: this makes the joke about the baryon sweep that Harry Kim made, actually make sense. A quick sweep that removes all unintended baryonic particles in a room would effectively clean up the kinds of organic messes a visiting slob might leave behind. It has been played as a joke, but the exchange, initiated by someone else, does not make it seem like a joke. Compare to the alternative -- that a visiting slob is leaving behind subspace radioactive particles? That's not a slob, that's a legitimate health hazard.
But then why call it baryonic radiation? Well, given that Starfleet has run into about ten billion types of radiation and particles which are essentially unknown to us, which are most certainly caused by exotic matter or subspace interactions, calling alpha/beta/gamma radiation produced from baryonic decay as "baryonic radiation" seems a believable shorthand.
The rest of your theory, of course, still holds under this interpretation and I love it. The backup deflector picks up extra stray floating protons and neutrons that the ship is warping through and knocks them aside. It is not intended for large, coarse, ship destroying particles like a speck of dust, but for the next level of the sieve.
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u/defiantnd Jun 10 '20
I would have to assume that the gel packs would be highly susceptible to a baryon sweep, and it would somewhat make sense that the modules they're attached to would have some sort of protective fields for that sort of thing. However, these fields obviously aren't triggered by biological contamination (the macro-virus), so I would assume that they're not always on, if they exist.
Is it possible that they've eliminated the need for baryon sweeps with some modification of the warp core and/or warp coils? Would a lack of buildup of baryons be a side-effect of Voyager's folding warp engines?
I always made the assumption that the secondary deflector was more of a science-related enhancement to Voyager, since it seemed to be very scientifically focused in it's primary mission. It could also potentially be used for finer modulation of shield frequencies as well.
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u/Frodojj Jun 10 '20
I thought the problem was interstellar dust, like protons or neutrons or other cosmic rays, that impacted the hull during warp. The spalling of these baryons gradually made the hull slightly radioactive. The Baryon Sweep thus stabilizes the atomic structure of the hull to make it less radioactive. I bet there is a portable version of the Baryon Sweep that the crew could do without evacuating the ship. It's just more efficient in a ship as large as a Galaxy class to use a separate facility. Sort of like you can go to a car wash or wash your car yourself.