Reddit mentions: The best tv reference books

I have all the official companion books (which I bought as they came out alongside the show)

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

I'm sure I have one with a green cover that focuses on Seasons two and three but can't find it online. Found it! I swear it's green IRL though

They include behind the scenes photos, trivia etc. I really like them all.

I also had an unofficial guide of the first four or five seasons which I also found interesting. Ooh, I found that one

Excuse me, but you seem to be operating on a few misunderstandings. Some of them major, some of them minor.

Your first misunderstanding is to think that EPS conduits are the same thing as warp plasma conduits. This is the kind of rookie mistake you'll make if you rely on wikis rather than proper engineering textbooks. Riddle me this: if EPS conduits carry warp plasma, why would the Cardassian built Terok Nor station, powered by standard deuterium fuelled fusion reactors and possessing no warp-flight capability, have EPS conduits? If you can find Terok Nor's secret anti-matter powered warp core, you should drop the Starfleet Corps of Engineers a line, because they'd probably be really interested to know where it is. Warp Plasma conduits are a completely different kettle of fish; the stuff that goes through them is comparable to matter from the core of a star. If EPS conduits carried that kind of material, entire decks would be vapourised by the smallest containment breach.

EPS conduits carry extremely high voltage, high ampage electric currents generated by fusion reactions. The reason that starships use this system is because EPS conduits are superconductive; if you routed this power through metal cables you'd have to deal with a number of problems, such as the entire ship melting in a matter of seconds from the waste heat generated. Older ships used to use ceramic superconductors, but it turns out containing a plasma is a lot easier, and more efficient, than keeping all your main power lines cooled to below 150 kelvins. The safety risks involved in the EPS conduit system are far outweighed by the safety risks of losing main power when some subsystem shorts in the middle of a neutron storm or a barrage of Klingon torpedoes. You're right in saying this doesn't directly power every electrical system on the ship; many low level systems (like lights, for example) are fed from the EPS conduits by conductive cabling. However, you seem to be massively under-estimating how many high power systems a starship has.

Why doesn't a starship disintegrate under flight stress when it goes from cruising to full impulse power? More importantly, why aren't all the crew instantly reduced to a thin red paste during even the simplest of manouevres? Impulse power can take a modern starship up to 80% of light-speed, at accelerations of 100's of g's. The reason the ships don't break apart and the crew stay in one piece is because the entire starship is pervaded by three incredibly important, and incredibly power intensive systems: the Structural Integrity Field (SIF), the inertial damping field, and the artificial gravity field. The systems that generate these fields are distributed throughout the vessel, and require an enormous amount of power. There are plenty of other major systems that have high power yields as well. For example, did you know that the central computer core of nearly all modern starships contains systems that generate 3,000 millicochrane plus warp-fields to allow for superluminal computation? Those don't run on the same current as the PADD you use to play Parrises Squares Manager and watch Rigellian porn, let me tell you.

Finally, you seem to be under the (fairly common) misunderstanding that systems that take power from the EPS conduits actually run on the plasma directly; that the plasma flows through them and does work. This is a pretty basic error. The energy that the EPS delivers is plain old electricity; most systems tap electrical energy off the EPS safely using electromagnetic couplings. Using plasma as the conductive medium outside the conduits and a few specific high-energy applications would lead to some ridiculously bulky hardware; that shit doesn't contain itself, as many a Sickbay-bound engineer will tell you.