Background:

Fuel from the pods is sent to the reactant injectors; these are designed to condition and feed streams of matter and antimatter into the warp core. The matter reactant injector is located at the top of the warp core; it is a conical structure some 5.2 meters in diameter and 6.3 meters high. The injector is constructed of dispersion strengthened woznium carbmolybdenide. Shock attenuation cylinders connect it to the deuterium fuel tank and the skeletal structure of the ship, allowing it to 'float' free within the structure.

Within UFED vessels, the MRI contains redundant sets of crossfed injectors. Each injector would consists of a twin deuterium manifold, fuel conditioner, fusion pre-burner, magnetic quench block, transfer duct/gas combiner, nozzle head, and related control hardware. Other designs are in use by civilian craft and other species. Although operation varies from class to class, in general slush deuterium enters the inlet manifolds and is passed to the conditioners where heat is removed. This brings the deuterium to just above solid transition point; micropellets are formed and then pre-burned by a magnetic pinch fusion system. The fuel is them sent on to a gas combiner where it reaches a temperature in the region of 106 K. Nozzle heads then focus the gas streams and send them down into the constriction segments

Safety protocols require that should any nozzle fail, the combiner can continue to supply the remaining nozzles, which would dilate to accommodate the increased fuel flow. The present generation of nozzles are constructed of frumium-copper-yttrium 2343.

The antimatter injector lies at the lower end of the warp core. Its internal design is distinctly different from that of the matter injector owing to the dangerous nature of antimatter fuel; every step in manipulating the antihydrogen must use magnetic to keep the material from physically touching any part of the structure. In some ways the ARI is a simpler device requiring fewer moving components. It uses the same basic structural housing and shock attenuation as the matter system, with adaptations for magnetic suspension fuel tunnels. The structure contains three pulsed antimatter gas flow separators; these serve to break up the incoming antihydrogen into small manageable packets and send them up into the constriction segments. Each flow separator leads to an injector nozzle and each nozzle cycles open in response to computer control signals. Nozzle firing can follow highly complicated sequences resulting from the varying demands of reaction pressures and temperatures and desired power output, amongst other factors