In TNG it was established that the D'deridex-Class Warbird was powered by an artificial quantum singularity, would this be the standard on all their ships even down to the small scout ship from "The Defector"?
That's an interesting question. I'm tempted to say no, but then again I'm kind of mixed about the Romulans building engines that way as it is.
I'd argue "No". It doesn't make sense to make a Reactor like that for smaller vessels. Maintaining and feeding the Artificial Quantum Singularity is like a full time job. You'll always need somebody to monitor the computers to make sure that the Teeny Blackhole doesn't get overfed and grow to a obscene size and endager your ship, or gets underfed that it collapses. Yeah, computers are great for automation, but it only takes a random bit flip to screw things up and if you know anything about comptuers, random bit flips do happen, even with ECC memory types. If you work in an environment where you're dealing with stray hostile radiation, that might affect your computers, then yeah, you're going to need some crazy good shielding to make sure your computers don't do wonky stuff in a odd edge case due to "Bit-Flips".
Probably No for a small ship. Although I have to wonder what happens when a ship with an AQS is destroyed since in TNG it was stated that for an AQS "once it is activated, it can't be shutdown." So when a Warbird is blown up, what happens to the AQS? Does it turn into a black hole? Or float around as a QS endangering everything in it's path? This explains why the TOS Enterprise has bulky computers and equipment. They are super radiation hardened.
Now you understand why there's a seperate Star Drive & Warp Nacelle area from the saucer section. In STO, the larger Romulan vessels that have AQS reactors do create a small BlackHole that consumes the vessel when they're defeated. The nice part is that it doesn't leave a mess in space. The bad part is that it doesn't leave a mess in space to figure out what happened to your vessel. But it also leaves nothing behind for the enemy to scavenge.
Maybe there's something in the AQS reactor housing that under certain conditions (such as the ship blowing up) that forces it to implode? Though if the reactor is durable enough to contain a black hole then what damage could the ship exploding cause it? Perhaps the reactors remain intact and then salvaged and installed on another Warbird?
I assume the AQS radiates Hawking radiation and suck in mass from it's surroundings. If the mass inflow less than the equivalent energy radiated away, it should eventually cease to exist.
They've never said how big a QS is. Size of a peach? Grain of sand? Basketball? Or how it works.. Constantly feed it or it will radiate away? So example, Size of a peach let's sat, a peach sized QS weighs how much? Many a ton. Feed it .. Let's say deuterium , it expels.. Plasma lets say, still need a dilithium chamber to control the plasma or whatever it radiates for power. Say ship explodes, you now have a peach sized QS roaming the galaxy. If Said ship blows up near a planet.. Uh.. Bye planet if it makes planetfall. Or without a containment field the QS might evaporate quite quickly since it is so small. Basically the field maintains the QS in a stable form. Without it it evaporates quickly
I suppose it depends on the part of "it can't be shutdown". If it was simply stop feeding it and let it evaporate then it would seem that you could shut it down. Or does it mean that the artificial ones the Romulans make don't evaporate and stay alive no matter what? Or maybe the dialogue left out, "it can't be shutdown because they would have no way to create a new one without going back to Romulan spacedock"? Thinking about the DS9 battles where warbirds were destroyed i don't recall any mention of the battlespace being littered with loose AQS so upon destruction or catastrophic shutdown the AQS probably do indeed evaporate...
given that when the romulan scout ship in TNG "the next phase" has engine containment issues, the romulans talk of it imploding, i'd guess that it does use a singularity core. from the episode: note that this is actually a season before TNG "Timescape" tells us the D'Deridex uses a singularity core, so i suspect that the choice of words at the time was meant to imply just how unfamiliar and unusual romulan tech was (something the Geordi brings up when diagnosing their problem), and then when we got a proper look at the engine system as season later, they decided to explain why it was implosion rather than an explosion.
note that ship powerplants not being able to be shutdown is not an unprecedented thing. the Russian navy during the cold war made use of a number of ship and submarine classes that mounted molten metal cooled nuclear reactors, such as the Alfa Class Sub's lead-bismuth coolant system [1], and when in dock those reactors had to either remain in operation at standby power levels, or hooked up to powerful external power sources that ran heating elements to prevent the coolant from solidifying in the pipes and rendering the entire reactor inoperable. [1] such reactors produced nearly double the power output for their mass than a conventional molten salt or pressurized water based reactor, and had a lower chance of undergoing meltdown. but they had extremely short operational lives and were a real pain to maintain, even without the docking issue. this combination of expensive dockyard support and high maintenance needs is why most of the ships were decommissioned starting in the 1970's.
No red matter here —and yet, there can be virtual particles. We have seen black hole simulations…I wonder…
my head canon has the TOS warbird having a QS reactor. Scotty not detecting an antimatter reactor on sensors is why he said they only had simple impulse.
Interesting question. In the Picard Season finale Jurati detects '"warp signatures'" from the Romulan ships that seem indistinguishable from Starfleet signatures, and later Riker announces "we've got our phasers locked on your warp cores" - so it would seem that at least some Romulan ships have power sources similar to Federation designs
A QS core would still power their warp drive so calling it a warp core would likely apply, unless of course the Empire decided to take a step back technologically speaking and use a matter/antimatter reactor.
You make a really good point. And going back to your original question, I guess that most Romulan ships must use a traditional dilithium warp drive in order for the Burn to have affected them so badly in DIS, and for the singularity engine not to have been seen as a practical fleet-wide option. Either that or the singularity drive still uses dilithium at some stage in their warp generation. I suppose that could well be the case if the singularity is just a power source (like starfleet's matter/antimatter combustion) and that power still needs to be focused through a dilithium crystal
According to this (non-canon) diagram from an article written by Rick Sternbach, singularity cores still used dilithium, but as a means to focus energy into the other systems of the ship. So I guess QS ships effected by the Burn would just lose all power instead of exploding? https://imgur.com/a/1wUPOAm Also Remember, the Vulcans and Romulan were unified by the time of the Burn, so they may have just given up on QS drives and just used whatever Starfleet/Federation/Vulcans were using.
Well if the dilithium that is receiving all that plasma suddenly went inert then the energy could potentially burn straight through (above and below) and cause catastrophic internal damage to the Romulan ship (worst case). Best case the ship lost power near Romulan worlds. Another bad case would be losing power far away from habitable planets and not having enough impulse fuel to limp home.