Talk:Starfleet/@comment-25584152-20141217034654/@comment-11135771-20141217143400

@Ficus13:

I discussed failsafe systems with Marc. I'm not sure what he decided to use since I had to leave chat, but if it's the three-stage protection I recommended, a power outage shouldn't make the ship blow up. It definitely wouldn't be good, but at least not insta-death. For what I recommended, it works like this:

-The antimatter containment cells are lead walled, so they're highly resistant to EMPs.

-Inside the cells, there are capacitors which hold one day's worth of power to maintain the electromagnetic field if the reactor goes offline.

-If a large electrical surge is detected (say if someone fired an electrolaser at the ship), the failsafe system activates. It essentially massively overloads the ship's reactor to use up all the available antimatter almost instantly, in the process generating a huge power spike. This is then directed toward the actual failsafe device, which uses up the power generated. The ship is essentially drifting without power after this, as the reactor is typically wrecked by how much it needs to be overloaded. It's still better than exploding, though.