The Bussard Ramscoops are part of the standard equipment of Starfleet vessels from the 2270s
onwards.
This means that despite the appearance of the constitution class, it did not actually
have them, although I’m not too sure with that statement as I have seen them referred
to as the Bussard Collectors in other media before.
Anyway, they sit at the front of the nacelles but are not a part of the warp system, at
least not directly but do act to facilitate ship-wide power.
The purpose of these is to collected interstellar gases an particles that can be used as fuel
for the starship.
The original plans for such a device are credited to the physicist Robert W. Bussard who came
up with the notion of the Bussard ramjet which would collect interstellar hydrogen in an
ionized state through the emitting of magnetic fields to funnel the particles into the ramjet.
That can then be used as fuel for a fusion reaction.
It apparently took some time to generate a worthwhile device based on this theoretical
design in Star Trek, perhaps the gains were not enough to warrant their installation.
They generate a field of directional ionizing radiation which creates the magnetic field
to pull in the gases they need and glow when in use, most often a red or orange.
The amount of gases collected in this way are generally negligible when travelling at
impulse speeds through the vacuum of space but with the sheer distance traversed, a ship
is going to sweep up a decent amount in time.
In addition to this, a vessel can always set a course for a hydrogen or deuterium rich
cloud or nebulae and bathe in the gases to refill and depleted reserves.
While the real life Bussard Ramscoops would collect hydrogen, it is entirely possible
that the ones of a Starfleet ship intake a different form of exotic particle but even
the hydrogen would work.
Starship fuel after all is deuterium and stored in massive reserves within the engineering
sections of a vessel.
Within the starship, hydrogen can be refined into deuterium and anti-deuterium and fed
into the warp reactor for your standard matter-antimatter reaction.
The whole process is not as efficient as simply resupplying at a station or dock, and the
Ramscoops act more to supplement reserves or act as an emergence method of fuel intake,
should a ship lose its deuterium.
After their implementation as standard, the design continued to be worked on with alterations
made to the system.
For example, the Sovereign class was one of the first vessel to have independent storage
tanks for the collected gases built into the nacelles while the galaxy class would have
collected and refined the hydrogen as it went, adding anything acquired to the deuterium
reserves instead.
However, there is one major drawback on the ramscoops.
They conflict with another primary system, that being the deflector shields.
The deflectors are designed to do just that, push away particles form the vessel that would
otherwise collide with it at near-luminal or faster than light speeds, causing hull
damage.
This means that in order to use the Bussard Ramscoops, the deflector needs to be either
inactive, or carefully calibrated to make way for the collectors or the hydrogen they
wish to harvest.
This is made far less practical at warp speeds however when you need the deflectors to be
operational otherwise the first spec of interstellar dust is going to smash through something the
minute it hits the ship.
The Ramscoops too can have their intakes reversed, and simply eject the contents back into space,
this has been used as a means to deliver hydrogen, and in the case of the Riker manoeuvre, a
ship with dedicated storage tanks can be used to deliver all sorts of other compounds that
could otherwise be collected.
That is about all there is to say on the Ramscoops, we don’t have an exact date of implementation
in Star Trek but I was surprised to learn that the constitution class originally did
not have them.
Or did it, because with the age of this theory, it seems that such a system would have been
rather easy to implement so I doubt it was a technological limitation.
Thanks for watching, I’ve been Ric and I’ll see you next time.
Goodbye!