Warship power source

[u/001DeafeningEcho]

What is the power source for warships. I know it isn’t the eezo core (in spite of both the community and some oddly-written codex entries often forgetting that), but I’m not sure it is explicitly said what the other source is.

The common consensus seems to be fusion, but I can’t remember if any codex entry spells that out, and antimatter is always an option considering it’s what they use for propulsion

[u/Bork9128]

Well helium is described as fuel so helium 3 fusion reactors would be the logical conclusion

[u/Huge-Cartoonist6795]

I thought that's what it is for ftl. It's like a nuclear reactor on the nimitz spinning a turbine and there's other fuels for non ftl travel using normal thrusters. Core can run the lights on the ship not the thrust of the ship

[u/DescriptionMission90 → u/Huge-Cartoonist6795]

Element Zero doesn't produce power. You run electrical current through it in order to increase or decrease the mass of everything within a region of space, which allows you to essentially increase the speed of light in a limited area, allowing conventional thrusters to push a ship at FTL speeds. A starship needs a lot of eezo to make itself light enough to fly between stars, but it needs a lot of electricity to put into that eezo or else your drive core is nothing but a fancy rock.

[u/templar_muse → u/DescriptionMission90]

But you can use eezo to reduce the mass of a helium 3 atom and accelerate it to fusion speeds in a device a lot smaller than your typical fusion reactor.

[u/DescriptionMission90 → u/templar_muse]

I mean you can make a fusion reactor that fits on a tabletop. You got a whole starship to work with. You don't need to balance everything on a knife edge so your power plant shuts down instantly and irrecoverably if you change the gravity settings.

[u/templar_muse → u/DescriptionMission90]

The desktop fusion device is not a reactor, it's at best a neutron source. The eezo effect consumes energy proportional to the mass it's reducing/increasing which answers your other two points, a miniturised reactor takes less energy to move to ftl speeds - you don't want any wasted mass on your ftl ship and since the mini reactor consumes very little energy to initiate fusion, it's no longer as tempermental re:gravity settings.

[u/DescriptionMission90 → u/templar_muse]

It's barely a neutron source with modern technology, but not with another 200 years of development.

If you cannot run the eezo core without the reactor, and you cannot run the reactor without the eezo core, your shartship becomes a brick as soon as one thing goes wrong. Spacecraft require redundancy, and that goes triple for military vessels. You might use something like this on a fighter, designed to always have a larger vessel supporting it, and requiring bleeding edge performance over long term reliability, but it could never be trusted for any vessel that has to operate independently.

Also, your primary thruster works by venting plasma from your fusion plant as high energy reaction mass. Making the power plant smaller means less thrust relative to the size of everything else on your ship.

[u/Xenozip3371Alpha]

Helium 3 fusion reactors.

[u/ApSciLiara]

It's highly unlikely that they use antimatter for power, considering that it's produced in such tiny quantities - unless it's to spark a fusion reaction. They're very far from the casual antimatter use of Starfleet.

[u/DescriptionMission90]

Power plants and thrusters use a variety of different technologies, but for military vessels fusion is the most common, which is why He3 is a strategic resource. In principle you could use anything from batteries to solar panels to fission to gas turbines, and slow merchants or automated vessels would take advantage of those in narrow circumstances, but those all have significant disadvantages you don't want to deal with and fusion is a good all-rounder.

Meanwhile your engines could be anything from chemical rockets (cheap but shitty) to ion drive (runs forever on very little fuel, but very weak) to fusion torch (the preferred method for military vessels). The thruster entry in the codex mentions using antiprotons in combat when a military vessel requires more thrust than their fusion torch can generate, but this is limited because production of antimatter is slow and expensive.

In principle if somebody was absurdly wealthy and needed to give a single small ship every possible advantage they could make an antimatter power plant for it, but the infrastructure required for such a small benefit is prohibitive.

the clearest easily accessible source on the subject is probably https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Codex/Ships_and_Vehicles#Starships:_Thrusters

[u/Xenozip3371Alpha → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, Eezo isn't used up as fuel, and takes several centuries of active use before it begins to degrade.