Editing Sensors (section)

===Navigational Sensors===

Federation starship systems constantly process incoming sensor data and routinely perform billions of calculations each second to solve the problem of interstellar navigation.

Sensors provide the input; the navigational processors within the main computers reduce the incessant stream of impulses into useable position and velocity data. The specific navigational sensors being polled at any instant will depend on the current flight situation. If the starship is in orbit about a known celestial object, such as a planet in a charted star system, many long-range sensors will be inhibited, and short-range devices will be favoured. If the ship is cruising in interstellar space, the long-range sensors are selected and a majority of the short-range sensors are powered down. As with an organic system, the computers are not overwhelmed by a barrage of sensory information.

The 350 navigational sensor assemblies are, by design, isolated from extraneous cross-links with other general sensor arrays. This isolation provides more direct impulse pathways to the computers for rapid processing, especially at high warp velocities, where minute directional errors, in hundredths of an arc-second per light year, could result in impact with a star, planet or asteroid. In certain situations. selected cross-links may be created in order to filter out system discrepancies flagged by the main computer.

Each standard suite of navigational sensors includes:

*Quasar Telescope
*Wide-angle IR Source Tracker
*Narrow-angle IR-UV-Gamma Ray Imager
*Passive Subspace Multibeacon Receiver
*Stellar Graviton Detectors
*High-Energy Charged Particle Detectors
*Galactic Plasma Wave Cartographic Processor
*Federation Timebase Beacon Receiver
*Stellar Pair Coordinate Imager

The navigational system within the main computers accepts sensor input at adaptive data rates, mainly tied to the ship's true velocity within the galaxy. The subspace fields within the computers, which maintain faster-than-light (FTL) processing, attempt to provide at least 30% higher proportional energies than those required to drive the spacecraft, in order to maintain a safe collision-avoidance margin. If the FTL processing power drops below 20% over propulsion, general mission rules dictate a commensurate drop in warp motive power to bring the safety level back up. Specific situations and resulting courses of action within the computer will determine the actual procedures, and special navigation operating rules are followed during emergency and combat conditions.

Sensor pallets dedicated to navigation, as with certain tactical and propulsion systems, undergo preventative maintenance and swapout on a more frequent schedule than other science-related equipment, owing to the critical nature of their operation. Healthy components are normally removed after 65-70% of their established lifetimes. This allows additional time for component refurbishment, and a larger performance margin if swapout is delayed by mission conditions or periodic spares unavailability. Rare detector materials, or those hardware components requiring long manufacturing lead times, are found in the quasar telescope (shifted frequency aperture window and beam combiner focus array), wide angle IR source tracker (cryogenic thin-film fluid recirculator), and galactic plasma wave cartographic processor (fast Fourier transform subnet). A 6% spares supply exists for these devices, deemed acceptable for the foreseeable future, compared to a 15% spares supply for other sensors.