Hello all, Ric here once again, after doing several videos on the warp drive and the new
lore of dilithium, a question in the comments kept coming up and it’s a good one that
I’ve never really considered before… If dilithium is required for warp travel (in
any capacity), how did Zephram Cochrane manage to successfully take the Phoenix to warp from
Earth? So after looking into it, there are several
potential answers drawn from canon, and apocrypha. The canonical answer is simply that the warp
drive of the Phoenix was basically some post world war three, futuristic fusion reactor.
This is partially one of the reasons why he chose to construct it from a refitted Titan-style
rocket and a nuclear missile and then used the silo in Bozeman as his base. In the film,
the core that drives the reaction is still called a “Warp Drive”, but that doesn’t
necessarily mean it was a matter-antimatter reactor like the ones we see in later Trek.
However, it did contain warp plasma manifolds and an intermix chamber. It also leaked Theta
radiation when damaged by the Borg attack, which is usually a residue left by antimatter
reactions. So this would suggest that there may actually have been antimatter involved
in the Cochrane’s drive, but it could also be a by-product of this special fusion reactor
too. Now for some speculation. Whatever the drive
was, it was only powerful enough to drive the ship to Warp 1.1. So it barely produced
a subspace warp bubble, which is to be expected, it’s literally the first one mankind ever
flew. So here’s a theory based on what we know. The Phoenix was built with this warp
1 fusion reactor, which only had just enough power for a quick jaunt at light speed and
back again, but it did the trick, it got the attention of the T’Plana Hath and boom,
First Contact. Over the next few years, humans began to learn more about interstellar travel,
and even begin to get out there among the stars and found colonies on other worlds.
It’s not long before they learn of Dilithium Crystals, this weird rock that can be used
to regulate warp reactions because of its unique properties. So, humans obtain some,
either through their own colonies that have early dilithium mines, trade or even the Vulcans.
The last could seem unlikely, but Jonathan Archer was mad at the Vulcans for holding
back human progress on the Warp Drive, which would be much easier for them to do if they
were also Earth’s primary supplier of Dilithium, just saying.
Anyhow, they gain Dilithium and at the same time, are looking into replacing Cochrane’s
fusion power source with something with more kick. After all, everything else works fine,
the nacelles generate a field, the deflector works, the intermix chamber and plasma manifolds
go on to be staples of the design, but it just needs more power, because they cannot
get more out of the fusion reactor. So they turn to matter-antimatter reactions, in apocrypha,
something that Cochrane had a hand in studying even before he turned his attention to warp,
but until now, had no real way to regulate the energy produced.
Now equipped with Dilithium, it’s out with the old and in with the new, the matter-antimatter
core as seen in later Starfleet drives, and the same way as most of the spacefaring community
does it, because Dilithium is just too useful and solves a lot of issues. However, the use
of Dilithium comes with its own hurdles, despite being a more efficient design and its use
is part of the infamous Warp 2 barrier that many species eventually encounter.
This may be the link from Warp 1 to 2, and the reason that after Warp 2 is cracked, achieving
faster speeds is a rapider progression, because you finally have ironed out the issues with
an antimatter engine that has dilithium as an active component.
So that’s one theory, one based purely on trying to rationalise the canon, which I do
a lot. In other stories however, Cochrane did use Dilithium. In fact, several stories
including Prime Directive state that Earth does in fact have Dilithium deposits, but
we lacked the ability to detect the extradimensional subspace aspect inherent to the crystals,
making them virtually identical to plain Quartz, if you had no idea what to look for. So eventually,
the tech was developed that could discern this, maybe Cochrane’s early work into the
necessary subspace studies created such a device, and there you go, we had some small
Dilithium deposits all along. An apocryphal history of the Federation (the
first 150 years) alternatively mentions that Dilithium was eventually found at the South
Pole and used in the Phoenix, while another (star fleet medical reference manual) says
that deposits were discovered on Amalthea, a moon of Jupiter in 2049.
Another (Preserver) mentions that Cochrane managed to turn regular lithium into a crystalline
compound that acted well enough like Dilithium, but would be hugely inefficient in comparison
to the as-yet unknown crystals used by everyone else out there.
We have seen in Star Trek, that Dilithium is not exclusively needed for Warp drives,
it’s just the most commonly used regulator for whatever reactants or energy source is
being used because it fits nicely into the equation, both in universe and to plug the
pseudo-science believability. However, without it, or something similar such as Benamite,
it seems Warp drive is severely limited to just over light speed, which won’t cut it
for interstellar travel. So apparently the Phoenix did not use dilithium at all, but
there is a little wiggle room there in the lore and numerous official apocrypha have
attempted to fill that gap, so I thought I’d throw in my theory to the mix.
Thanks for watching this video and be sure to let me know if there are other notions
out there that I missed, after all, I have not read every book out there. I’ve been
Ric, thanks again and goodbye!