THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 21, 1994 TAG: 9411190083
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JAMES SCHULTZ, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
Your starship has dropped out of warp and settled into orbit around the earth-like planet. You beam down, phaser drawn and ready. You're eager to take on the aliens -- Romulans, Cardassians, the nasty Ferengi , or even your supposed allies, the bad-tempered Klingons.
You've done the holodeck drill so often you're confident you could handle any extraterrestrial entity.
Conveniently, the planet's air is breathable and temperatures hover somewhere in the 70-degree-Fahrenheit range. No need here for overcoats or those pesky and unattractive spacesuits.
Confused by the scenario? You're obviously either not a graduate of Starfleet Academy or a fan of the Star Trek television shows and movies. Here's a 24th century tech primer to help you navigate the Trek universe.
ALIENS: Intelligent species are apparently as common in our Milky Way galaxy as retirees are in southern Florida. Aliens can be bad, like the machine-like Borg, or good, like the logic-loving Vulcans. Amazingly, most speak American English. Must be those unseen, but universal, translators.
ANTIMATTER: Talk about your blow-ups. When regular matter meets its mirror image, energy is released in a mega-explosion. This ultra-fuel is what keeps starship lights on and sends Trek crew where no one has gone before.
BEAMING: Call it what you will: matter transmission, transporting, or beaming up/down. It sure saves on spaceship fuel to have the atoms in your body scanned, converted to a ``subatomically debonded matter stream,'' and then transmitted to a planet's surface like a radio or T.V. signal. But pray that the reception is clear on either end so that, coming or going, you don't end up as a puddle of unreconstituted organic goo.
COMMUNICATORS: These miniature marvels (successors to the hand-held variety that premiered on the original Trek television series) keep you in touch with the mother ship through subspace. Only subspace interference - of which there seems to be an inordinate amount in the television episodes - can cut you off from communication or rescue.
DILITHIUM CRYSTALS: Maybe the ultimate in carburetors, these crystals aren't affected by antimatter and so funnel the matter/antimatter reactions that fuel a Trek starship's warp engines. Judging from their history, though - they sure do seem to crack, decay and otherwise go haywire an awful lot, putting Trek crews in mortal danger - Starfleet might want to look into extended warranties.
HOLODECK: Virtual reality is made more real than real, thanks to Holographic Environment Simulators, or holodecks. Trek crew members can call upon their mighty starship computer to recreate any historical period, any nature scene, any fictional setup, replete with seemingly real people. How? Why, by ``transporter-based replicators'' and ``highly articulated tractor beams,'' of course.
PHASERS: Souped-up cousins to their antique forebears, lasers, these Phased Energy Rectification weapons started out as particle-beam brooms, sweeping gas, dust and micrometeroids away from spacecraft. Once the ``rapid nadion effect'' was discovered the crew was free to stun or vaporize at will.
PHOTON TORPEDOS: Separate matter and antimatter into thousands of tiny containers, pack them tightly into a torpedo casing and fire them at the enemy. The result, says one Trek technical manual, ``increases the annihilation surface by three orders of magnitude.''
SENSORS: The eyes, ears and, sometimes, the fingers of starships. Long-range sensors often pick up ``anomolies'' that ships then race off to identify or be victimized by. Sensor-packed, hand-held tricorders measure everything from human health to puzzling energy fields emanating from alien beings.
UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS: The interstellar version of the United Nations, only with cooler tech and a West Coast headquarters (in San Francisco). A united Earth is one of the Federation's founding members circa 2161.
WARP DRIVE: Basically, a way of getting around Albert Einstein's law that nothing can go faster than the speed of light - roughly 186,000 miles per second. In 2061, fictional genius Zefram Cochrane figures out the specifics of ``continuum distortion propulsion,'' which eventually allows warp engines to send starships hurtling at many times lightspeed through the vast, dark, dramatic reaches of space. ILLUSTRATION: Color illustrations by Bob Voros
SOURCES: ``Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual,'' ``Star
Trek Chronology: The History of the Future''
Communicator
Tricorder
Photon Torpedo
by CNB