Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by colinramsay 3881 days ago
The impulse engine in Star Trek was just a fancy fusion-powered plasma rocket.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Impulse_drive

1 comments

Actually, there are several in-universe articles saying otherwise:

The interaction between the shields and a conventional propulsive system would be horrible (you’d get fried in your own plasma).

Therefore the Interacting Magnetic Pulse system (sorry, I’m translating back here, so I dunno if that’s the correct term in the correct in-universe article in english) actually uses some weird interaction of microwaves to create "gravitational waves on which the ship then rides", as one engineer said poetically.