They also have plenty of Warp Capable Shuttlecraft that could be using conventional M/A-M reactors which need Dilithium
Agreed.
Dilithium however was used as BOTH a power source and regulation system for M/AM reactions in Trek - apparently.
So it CAN be used as a power source too... though TNG usually mentioned Dilithium exclusively as means of REGULATING M/AM reactions... not as a power source.
Discovery on the other hand retained TOS use of Dilithium as a power source (or at least, I don't recall instances in the 24th century which mentioned Dilithium being used as a power source... only as a REGULATOR of energy reactions).
It's probably easier for the average engineer to maintain a M/A-M reactor on a smaller scale than a AQS reactor.
Good point.... but the Romulans would probably still have large surpluss for trade - or other things, depending on what they use it for.
I can imagine larger ships would still be using FQS (forced quantum singularity) tech... unless the Romulans and/or the Tal Shiar switched to M/AM and dilithium for whatever reason after TNG.
In ST: Picard, we have seen the Tal shiar used smaller craft which are quite powerful (on the tactical side that rivaled the La Sirena)... so those could easily use regular M/AM and dilithium.
For the bigger ships (aka Warbirds), they probably used FQS power cores... unless the Tal Shiar used M/AM and dilithium (this WAS after their Star went supernova... but I doubt the knowledge of how to build FQS would have died with Romulus - or at least, it wouldn't make sense for a space faring empire that spans hundreds or a few thousand lighyears).
I think it's a tangential step or side-step, similar levels of technology, but creating different things and having different benefits.
This much I'd agree with.
One of the reasons I think SF may have had in harnessing/creating a Protostar was due to its radiation being of a type beneficial for generating ProtoWarp (aka TransWarp)... not necessarily for energy generation (because a Protostar seems like 'eh' in that regard - although who knows)... but because of the nature of a natural Protostar (its overall mass and size), SF needed to create a containment system that could keep the thing at a proverbial tiny size without losing on the radiation it emits... which also means containing all that mass and size in that little 'container' (which begs a question - how is the thing viable if its switched off - aka, just what happened to the thing when the ship was completely switched off? - the ship couldn't possibly sustain it in its offline mode, so, the only hypothesis I can come up with is that the two warp cores not only sustain the containmant field, but also feed the Protostar which generates the needed radiation that allows the ship to go to ProtoWarp... and when its not needed, they don't 'feed' the thing which effectively makes it inert and therefore no need to contain it (this is very 'convenient' though - but then again a lot of things in Trek are).
For some reason, I am reminded of that Hirogen relay station in the DQ which was powered by a quantum singularity. Despite only being around 1cm in size, it emitted gravimetric disturbances from 2 Ly's away which were felt by Voyager (obviously this was compensated for until the ship reached the proverbial spitting distance of the station - at which point, the gravitational waves started increasing in intensity again).
That's definitely NOT consistent with how a 1 cm black hole would behave.
It produced 4TW of power though - which seems infintesimal compared to ENT-D Warp core power generation in its idle state (12.7 exawatts per unknown measure of time - Data was cut off at that point... though it was 'supposed' to be 'per second' according to the script writers).
This is why I think subspace technology is used in Trek to extract a lot more energy out of existing power sources. Yes, I know, it violates thermodynamics, but they 'bend' the laws ofphysics on multiple occasions in Trek, so they may have created a way to shuffle the needed energy through a device which shifts that energy into subspace, and then back out again in much more intense form... and subspace isn't real to begin with... so if that's what enables Trek FTL to begin with, who is to say that it woud be impossible to enhance on baseload energy generation using subspace tech in Trek universe?
4TW however aren't enough to emit gravimetric disturbances at 2 Ly's distance.
Janeway even said the following:
I've learned a few interesting things about that relay station. It's generating as much energy every minute as a typical star puts out in a year.
That's an insane amount of power... definitely A LOT more than 4 TW, because its been stated by NASA:
A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously (they don't say what 'continuously' means in terms of precise measure of time - it actually means 'without interruption'... but again, we're given a figure without a precise time measurement - is there anywhere which says how much energy hits the Earth at every second or minute?).
And this only pertains to how much energy hits the Earth continuoulsy... it doesn't say how much energy our star as a whole emits at any given time (not just what hits the Earth).
Anyway... something has to be enhancing on the energy that black hole is producing over the course of one minute to equte same amount of power a typical star would emit in a whole year - the amounts are astronomical (and I don't have the time to set up the needed calculations).
My hypthetical guess is that subspace tech is used to (somehow) achieve this energy enhancing effect.
So, IF subspace tech is used in Trek to radically enhance power generation, then the relay station probably used a superior version of what SF and most species in the Milky Way (sans maybe the Borg) use.
We've seen Romulan and Cardassian weapons visually giving off Teraton range explosive blasts in Ds9... that's consistent with about 101 000 times enhancement effect from 128 MT explosion (working off a regular photon torpedo 1.5kg of matter and 1.5 kg of antimatter).
To go from 4TW to
just 4 Exawatts (for example), the hypothetical subspace technology would need to be able to enhance the effect about 10x more compared to what UFP (and most other races) use... so instead of 101 000 times enhancement... you get 1 million times enhancement.
And in order to get 12.7 exawatts (same as what ENT-D generates supposedly every 'second')... that 4 TeraWatts needs to be enhanced 3 million and 175 thousand times (or just over 30 times above what UFP and other Alpha/Beta quadrant races achieved).
So, that's cool (if accurate).. but still nowhere near what a star would emit over a course of a year.
IF 173 000 TW hits the Earth every second (for example), that's 10 million 380 thousand TW per minute (or 10.38 Exawatts - so, just less than what Ent-D generates per supposed 'second').
Then that's 622.8 Exawatts per hour... 14.947 Zetawatts per day.... and 5,455.65 Zetawatts per year, or 5.455 Yottawatts per year (if 173 000 TW hits the Earth every second... if its per minute or hour... then obviously, the calculations would need revising).
That's one potent black hole.
ENT-D warp core generates 762 Exawatts per minute in 'idle' state.
The relay station black hole produces at least 5455 Zettawatts per minute. (or roughly 7.1 million times more... if I'm calculating it correctly).... a figure based on how much solar energy hits the Earth (not how much the whole Star emits).
But that's not the whole story... it is said our star/Sun emits 384.6 Yottawatts of energy in the form of light and other forms of radiation (but its [again] not stated over what period of time this amount is produced - or at least, I hadn't found any info on that).
VOY did acquire a lot of sensor data on that relay station, and Janeway was studying it actively... so its likely this data was transmitted to SF when Hypersubspace comms started being used via Pathfinder in Season 6 (Janeway transmitted ship's logs and navigational records to SF via that micro-wormhole)... and SF could have used this data for Protostar development/containment (while simultaneously radically increasing on how much power they can extract from a given power source using subspace technology) and using its radiation and/or energy for ProtoWarp.
Again, spitballing here based off what was said and seen, and contrasting that to what we know in real life (which doesn't always mesh well).
