[Tlhingan-hol] Klingon Word of the Day: qaj

[Steven Boozer]

Cruising in {tlhIngan Hol}:

  qughDo motlh: pIvlob vagh
  Normal Cruising Speed - Warp 5 KBoP


  'aqroS qughDo: pIvlob Hut vI' vagh
  Maximum Cruising Speed - Warp 9.5. KBoP

  qughDuj              cruiser [ship]
  qughDo               cruising speed

BTW, Captain Krankor coined *{qughwI'} "motorcycle" -- literally "cruiser" - as unofficial slang for a particular class of motorcycle (cf. Krankor's article in HQ 12.4).

--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons


From: lojmIt tI'wI'nuv [mailto:lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2012 1:15 PM


The word "cruise" is more interesting than most people take it to be. It implies a specific "normal" speed at which a vessel travels for long stretches of time.

In America, cops drive "police cars", but state police drive "cruisers". That's because they spend most of their time driving on Interstate highways at one speed all day. They don't sit in traffic in cities.

There are many kinds of motorcycles, but one style is called a "cruiser". It's that really big motorcycle with a windshield and hard-shelled storage bags that weighs as much as a small car. It's built for the highway, not for driving around town between stop lights.

The term "cruising speed" on an airplane has real meaning. It's the most fuel-efficient speed at which the air-frame flies. Since wings are actually energy converters, bending the physics of the oncoming mass of air, converting air speed into lift, you can increase and decrease lift either by changing your air speed or the angle of attack of the wing. The cruising speed of an airplane is the functional equivalent of the speed at which a glider reaches its optimal L/D (pronounced "El over dee"), a.k.a. its optimal glide ratio. This is not the same thing as the air speed at which a glider descends slowest, staying in the air longest. That is the equivalent of a powered plane's climbing speed (the speed at which an aircraft with full throttle will climb faster than any other air speed).

So, to balance the lift against the weight at a given air speed, you choose the angle of attack for the wing that generates exactly that much lift at your current air speed. If you decrease your air speed, you have to increase the angle of attack, exposing the belly of the fuselage and the underside of the wing to the oncoming air, generating drag that you have to compensate for by burning more fuel to generate more thrust.

If you increase your speed to something above your cruising speed, you have to go nose down some to put the angle of attack less than the wing was designed to operate. The top of the fuselage is turned some into the oncoming air and you get more drag. So, now you have to burn more fuel both to overcome the normal drag of increased speed (drag increases exponentially with increases of air speed), plus the increased drag created by the top of the fuselage and the top surface of the wings.

There really is one speed at which most airplanes are designed to fly. That's the cruise speed. You pay at the pump for any deviation from it.

Except for fighter jets, which don't really use wings to fly. They fly almost entirely based on thrust. Ridiculous quantities of thrust. The wings mostly serve to give you control surfaces for attitude control, and to hang bombs and missiles from. Turn off the engine and they have the glide ratio of a Greyhound bus. They glide with slightly more grace than a brick.

As one flight instructor said of one of those VTOL military jets during his chapter on the physics of flight said, pointing to the video behind him of a Harrier hovering, "Want to know what makes that aircraft fly? Money! Money makes that airplane fly!"

So, in the Star Trek universe, what does it mean to cruise? Space doesn't care about lift. Captains order wide variations of warp speeds and impulse engines. There's never any indication that a starship has one speed at which it flies more efficiently than any other speed. They never refuel because they collect antimatter as they go along. There's no sense that there's any energy budget. They have an infinite number of photon torpedoes and shields and phasers are only reduced by damage taken, from which they can heal if given time to regenerate. Sort of like engines that are giving them all they've got and can't take much more... but after a rest, they work just fine. Sort of like cowboys that can get flesh wounds in the shoulder week after week without ever losing any long-term functionality in their arms or hands.

It's a hole in the fiction, like six-shooters that never need to reload.

So, what can it mean to cruise in a "cruiser" class star ship? What would "cruising speed" mean?

pItlh
lojmIt tI'wI'nuv



On May 24, 2012, at 10:44 AM, Steven Boozer wrote:
Klingon word:   qaj
Part of speech: verb
Definition:     soar
Never used in a sentence.

WRT birds according to HolQeD 10.4:4.

Related verbs:

qugh             cruise
puv                fly

FYI {qugh} has only been used by Okrand WRT space vessels (particularly in the BOP Poster).  See also the compounds {qughDo} "cruising speed" and {qughDuj} "cruiser".


--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons

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