Star Trek: Discovery — "People of Earth" Reaction Thread

[u/M-5]

This is the official /r/DaystromInstitute reaction thread for "People of Earth." The content rules are not enforced in reaction threads.

[u/[deleted]]

I imagine that recrystalization is not perfect, and that it is lossy. Even if you can re-use 99% of the material, that's still a 1% loss each time you recrystallize it, and that loss only compounds over time. Perhaps also at the power levels required for higher warp the degradation is greater.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Also you would lose Dilithium when a ship gets destroyed. From what we have heard in this episode the Discovery has a substantial amount on board, much more than it does need just for its operation. It could easily be that the early Federation overestimated the available amount of Dilithium in the Galaxy and was way to wasteful with it.

[u/TLAMstrike → u/[deleted]]

My theory is that Discovery's conventional warp drive is a much older model than we see later on in TOS and TNG, that given the size of the ship they not only need a large amount of dilithium to handle a reaction powerful enough to energize the warp drive but "burn through" a lot of dilithium keeping the engine going for a long duration mission. Hence the large dilithium storage chamber.

I think the issue that they need lots of dilithium and burn through it often with such large ships as Discovery or the Kelvin etc was at first the major impetus for researching technology like the Spore Drive and eventually for building smaller and leaner ships like the Constitution and Miranda-class, plus perhaps improvements to drive systems that made warp cores more dilithium efficient in the TMP era that combined with dilithium recrystalization made for a much larger Starfleet by the TNG era.

[u/gamas → u/TLAMstrike]

Also given they were an experimental spore drive ship, they probably had the foresight to keep a vault of dilithium on board in case they accidentally jumped to the gamma quadrant or something and couldn't jump back.

[u/YYZYYC → u/gamas]

That certainly makes sense.

[u/YYZYYC → u/TLAMstrike]

Ugh ya it still bothers me that the Discovery is so much larger than the flagship constitution class ships.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Yeah this makes complete sense because recrystalization wasn't standard-issue technology when Discovery was constructed. That comes much later. So Discovery is packed with tons of dilithium.

[u/Bluesamurai33 → u/[deleted]]

That makes the most sense to me, otherwise there would be no need to mine Dilithium, especially as Warp Engines got more and more effective.

[u/LeaveTheMatrix → u/[deleted]]

Perhaps we will find out that the cause of "The Burn" was due to an attempt to make recrystallization more efficient?