1189 replies to this topic

[Kaine Vulpayne]

Longsword, on 27 February 2012 - 03:26 AM, said:

That largely depends on whether it is the Imperial Fleet during the reign of the emperor or not. The emperor's use of the force extended to the point where he was subtly improving the co-ordination of the imperial fleet- one of the reasons the executioner crashed into the death star was because the emeperor died.

It depends on whether a force wielder is capable of controlling the fleet via bf meditation. I am not sure how much this concept was present in the movies. Yes the emperor was able to do it to some extend but he was distracted with his attempt to convert Luke to the dark side, with the known results. But from what I remember this was not revealed in the movie, but in a novel that was after the movies (I think the Admiral Thrawn series)

In the KOTOR games one female jedi was able to perform a deep form of meditation which basically allowed her to coordinate the fleet and all individuals in it as if it was one single mind and body. I was more referring to that.

Also concerning the energy debate:
RE might still be inefficient but compared to how much money was invested in R&D for nuclear and fossil energy sources since the 1950s, RE are still in their child's shoes. You can not know what smart ppl will find out in the next 20 years. History is not predictable (unless you are one of those religious guys that believe it's all determinated by the will of some deity).
Yes, the world economy is utterly addicted to fossil energy sources, mainly oil. But it doesn't have to be. A future without these might not be able to support 7 to 9 billion humans, but it won't be like 100k or so.
I tended to be pessimistic too, but after reading some history books, where the world was supposed to end so many times already, no there is still a chance.

Yes living standards in the west will go down drastically. It already happens and I am sure this is intended.

I bet you could halve the energy consumption of western ppl without anyone starving to death. This would also greatly reduce the energy consumption in Asia Yes you won't have a new console every year and no strawberries in february anymore. No car for most ppl, only bicycle and bus. But will you die from that? No.
In the worst case poor ppl will have to work in the agriculture industry again, because those huge farming machines will not be profitable anymore, who knows...
And the waste dumps of the 20th century will become the gold mines for the 21st because clever recycling companies will dig up the good stuff, that we wasted.

I see two main problems that we face:
1. the dominance of the financial system over ppl that do "real" work. It has become far too parasitic and makes everything much more expensive without offering real economic surplus value. Also it obscures the view on the real problems. That is the main danger imo.

2. the tendency to outsource production to Asia because of lower (read: slave) wages. If the Chinese produce everything that is to be produced on this planet, we in the west wont like the outcome, because he who does the job, knows the stuff about it, and the plain consumer is a fool that buys a fish to feed himself - as long as he has money. And they are still much more resource-wasteful than western industries, so making them produce our stuff burns the resources even faster.

TL;DR
1. Battle Meditation roxxx
2. There is still hope for the world

[Kartr]

Catamount, on 27 February 2012 - 05:03 AM, said:

That might work if technology actually advanced, but these are specifically identified as nuclear weapons. So it's kind of tantamount to saying "if by the 21st century, I can fit 12oz of coke in a 12oz can; the 41st millennium, I should be able to fit 300 gallons of coke in a 12oz can"

This was one of two things that were bothering me so much last night it woke me up around 1am.

We all read "Fusion device in a (to small)x(to small)x(to small) casing creates a 600+ gigaton warhead." I think we all agree that "No fusion device can do that" but we draw wildly different conclusions, Catamount says that "it's fusion therefor the number is wrong" we say "it can't be fusion therefor it has to be something else." Same thing with the Death Star blowing Alderaan up, one side says "nothing in the universe can generate that power so it can't be DET, it has to be some weird tech" the other side says "the weird tech is what powers the Death Star and lets it DET Alderaan." One side says "this is what the effects are so clearly they have some tech other than what they claim that lets them do it" the other side says "they claim to have a certain level power generation therefor they can't have done what we saw them do."

Second thing that was bugging me was this "500 megaton max theoretical yield for photon torpedoes." If a photon torpedo has a 3kg warhead then it is physically impossible for it to have a 500 megaton max theoretical yield. The max theoretical yield for a 3kg M/AM warhead is ~64megatons, while the minimum possible warhead for a 500megaton blast is just over 23kg, almost 8 times that of a Federation photon torpedo. So how can you claim that a fusion device can't have a certain yield because there isn't enough fusion device to create it, but you can claim that a M/AM warhead can achieve impossible yields?

Finally, if I recall correctly in Star Gate they have a gate buster warhead that has a yield of 200 gigatons, I'll have to rewatch the episode to verify, but that is a nuclear warhead enhanced by "naquadah." Does that bother you Catamount? If not why couldn't the Imperium have torpedoes that have a similar reasoning, some sort of exotic element/compound that radically increases the yield of simple fusion by many orders of magnitude.

Ok running late for Trig, but I had to get this posted or it'd bug me all day.

[guardiandashi]

Kartr, on 27 February 2012 - 08:59 AM, said:

This was one of two things that were bothering me so much last night it woke me up around 1am.

Second thing that was bugging me was this "500 megaton max theoretical yield for photon torpedoes." If a photon torpedo has a 3kg warhead then it is physically impossible for it to have a 500 megaton max theoretical yield. The max theoretical yield for a 3kg M/AM warhead is ~64megatons, while the minimum possible warhead for a 500megaton blast is just over 23kg, almost 8 times that of a Federation photon torpedo. So how can you claim that a fusion device can't have a certain yield because there isn't enough fusion device to create it, but you can claim that a M/AM warhead can achieve impossible yields?

Ok running late for Trig, but I had to get this posted or it'd bug me all day.

I am going to address the trek torpedo yields issue

the trek torpedos are a variable yield weapon. the previous TNG torpedos that were running at ~50 megatons (for example) were due to the amount of antimatter loaded into the torpedo. starfleet modified the torpedos to a new mark, and set the STANDARD LOAD for the new torpedo at the amount of antimatter that = a 64 megaton yield. the 500 megaton theoretical maximum is where the torpedo is loaded with the absolute maximum amount of antimatter that the warhead (and the containment system) can hold or even a bit beyond the "safe load"

it is similar in principle to overloading an aircraft ... it can be done but you are cutting into the safety margins

[Catamount]

Kartr, the 610Gt warheads in questions are SPECIFICALLY IDENTIFIED as nuclear warheads. There's not much room for interpretation.

As for the Death Star, the power figures are nonsense, so much so that I had to listen for a half hour as an astrophysicist ranted about how it would practically take half the stars in the galaxy to sustain the thing, and since the power source for Wars is identified, not once, but multiple times, as fusion power, sometimes by description (eg "the liberated energy of a small, artificial sun" (not much room for interpretation there)) to specific references to nuclear power in the TESB and TPM novelizations.


The Death Star might theoretically feature an experimental power source, since nothing else in Wars remotely approaches the pound-for-pound ability of the Death Star (certainly not ISDs with their gigajoule-range light/medium lasers), but since it's already identified as fusion, and this this nonsense power source would have to draw orders of magnitude MORE energy than is actually contained in matter (in other words, break the universe), it's far less of a stretch to simply assume the weapon was experimental, not the reactor.

That's how Trek does it, showing far greater pound-for-pound capability than the Death Star in the highest end instances (let alone ISDs...), at least against non-hardened/resistant targets (a planet) as per TDiC.


As for 500Mt torpedoes, that isn't remotely an overestimation of the highest yields on the higher-end warheads. As per DS9 A Time to Stand, a 90 isoton weapon had a blast radius of 800km; a Type 6 torpedo warhead (new to the 2370s as per VOY Deadnought) is capable of 200 isotons (VOY Scorpion, Part II). That would basically sear a third of the Continental United States.

guardiandashi is correct, torpedoes are variable yield weapons, and obviously they don't store the antimatter onboard. That would be a storage accident waiting to happen. Instead of one AM containment system that's huge and has many redundancies, you'd have over 300 (onboard a GCS), throwaway AM containment systems, and if just one went up (which would set off all the others, obliteration kind of does that with an AM containment system), the whole ship would go up, SIF system or no. So the warheads are stored with no antimatter, and then it's injected in just before launch, far less chance of a single redundantly backed up ship system malfunctioning than 300 torpedoes.

Edited by Catamount, 27 February 2012 - 11:28 AM.

[Catamount]

Jack Gammel, on 27 February 2012 - 05:17 AM, said:

It'll never happen. If there's even a moderate chance for the project to succeed the EPA will likely decide that fusion power gives cancer to babies, and the project funding will be stripped by the government.

In all probability that money will end up going to fund new research studying unicorn farts as a green energy source, or maybe it will just buy more oil from foreign powers who are actually hostile to Western society.

But who knows. Maybe? I hope it works. I would like to be a cantankerous old man going on about how in my day we used dinosaur soup to power our cars and we liked it!

That sounds like rather unwarranted cynicism.

The EPA didn't shoot down the nuclear industry; public opinion did. Complain to the public, not government. Right now, the biggest nuclear power generating nation on Earth (France) has far more government than we do, and have so little dependence on foreign energy beyond transportation, they export 20% of their power, because they can't use it all.


Besides, fusion's been sold well; there isn't the public stigma there (largely because it's known to produce very little radioactive waste).

Longsword, on 27 February 2012 - 05:23 AM, said:

Actually, the stats that I have seen say that all of the worlds major oil fields are past peak and that we have insufficient supplies of oil to sustain modern civilisation, even the worlds population levels into the next 100 years anyway, and that there is no viable alternative to oil to save us from that fact.

(Solar, hydro and geothermal ar innefficient and requires the oil based tech platform to produced, and cannot be used to power effective motor vehicles, gas is dangerous and gives you very little energy for the effort required to get it, ethanol requires you to carry out the industrial scale farming that relies on oil, nuclear power is good but can only provide electricity, it cannot be used to keep our cars, trucks and combine harvesters going......)

Remember a guy called Malthus? He is still seen as a laughing stock about his predictions that the human races population growth would lead to mass starvation as we exceeded our planets carrying capacity- but the only reason he was wrong at the time was because of the timely industrial revolution followed by the oil revolution which allowed industrial mass farming to feed that populatuon. There is no other source of energy that provides as much power for as little effort while being easily transportable and useable in portable vehicles like oil does.

So basically the conclusion is- we probably wont make it into space apart from our little exploratory expeditions to the moon and mars, as we will soon run out of the fuel source that supports all of our technology. (Yes, spaceships arent oil powered, but the technology they are made from depends on oil)

There's still a ton of oil left, at least enough to get us close to century's end, it seems, it's just that it'll get increasingly expensive, and increasingly dirty, to get to.

There are also plenty of other power sources. Oil discoveries peaked back in 1965, almost FIFTY YEARS AGO, and less and less has been discovered every year since, yes. There is, however, plenty of coal, admitted that the cost of coal usage, especially, in terms of externalities, is huge. There's plenty of uranium left, and ridiculous public fears or no, once oil gets even more expensive... (hey, even the most anti-nuclear person should prefer it over coal). Besides, Uranium largely comes from non-volatile nations. Australia, for instance, has grossly huge reserves.

Besides PB11 fusion, or a similar scheme, there's also thorium. Thorium reaction is an even older technology in some respects than Uranium power generation; it just wasn't developed and fleshed out because you can't make nuclear weapons with the biproducts (it's exceedingly difficult, even for, say, us). Today, however, the nuclear weapon drive means little to nothing, and unlike fissile Uranium, thorium is ABUNDANT, thousands of times as abundant, in fact, and unlike Uranium, thorium is incapable of causing meltdowns (the reaction isn't self-sustaining, so a plant failure results in the reaction simple turning itself off, instead of a meltdown).

Jack Gammel, on 27 February 2012 - 06:09 AM, said:

I'm not suggesting that shale oil will be a panacea for our oil woes, only that it offered an opportunity for resource exploitation which became the target of the EPA's displeasure. At the same time lobbyist groups get massive subsidies for corn farmers and failing "green energy" companies. I was merely expressing my frustration for my government.

You're kidding me...

Government didn't run speculation out of control and jack prices up to $4/gallon. Government hasn't favored green energy companies either. Estimates for fossil fuel subsidies are upward of $70 billion between 2002 and 2008 alone (compare to $12 billion for traditional renewables in the same time period). It also wasn't government stopping us from enacting the sort of energy generation and efficiency research that would have gotten us largely off of foreign oil by now; that was the work of anti-government zealots.

On the other hand, you can largely thank government for recent efforts to restart our nuclear industry.

Also, what's with the reflexive hatred of "green energy"? Is it somehow really more objectionable than, say, coal, which gets more subsidies, still isn't any more competitive, and has killed thousands of people in spans of less than a week (obviously, before government stepped in, not that it was the last time a lack of regulation set industry up to screw everyday people (I could give a lot more than four additional links, believe me)). I just don't understand people being so scornful of wind, or solar, when fossil fuels are grossly worse in just about every regard (I mean, what's so bad about renewable energy, anyways?).

Edited by Catamount, 27 February 2012 - 12:56 PM.

[Kartr]

guardiandashi, on 27 February 2012 - 10:04 AM, said:

I am going to address the trek torpedo yields issue

the trek torpedos are a variable yield weapon. the previous TNG torpedos that were running at ~50 megatons (for example) were due to the amount of antimatter loaded into the torpedo. starfleet modified the torpedos to a new mark, and set the STANDARD LOAD for the new torpedo at the amount of antimatter that = a 64 megaton yield. the 500 megaton theoretical maximum is where the torpedo is loaded with the absolute maximum amount of antimatter that the warhead (and the containment system) can hold or even a bit beyond the "safe load"

it is similar in principle to overloading an aircraft ... it can be done but you are cutting into the safety margins

Alright I'll buy that, but I think the increased payload needs to be mentioned. A 64 megaton yield with a 3kg payload is the standard, with a maximum overload of 23kg payload and 500megaton yield. Otherwise it sounds like you're saying a torpedo with a payload of 3kg can achieve a 500megaton yield.

Catamount, on 27 February 2012 - 11:28 AM, said:

Kartr, the 610Gt warheads in questions are SPECIFICALLY IDENTIFIED as nuclear warheads. There's not much room for interpretation.

So we have two claims, one of which has to be false so how do we decide which one is true and which one isn't? Without knowing more WH40K and more specifically that particular source I can't really comment either way. However I personally believe that we should take what we "see" at face value and claims about what the tech is with a grain of salt. So if we "see" 610Gt yields through story events, but some source book or character is claiming it's fusion then the character or source book is wrong.

Catamount, on 27 February 2012 - 11:28 AM, said:

As for the Death Star, the power figures are nonsense, so much so that I had to listen for a half hour as an astrophysicist ranted about how it would practically take half the stars in the galaxy to sustain the thing, and since the power source for Wars is identified, not once, but multiple times, as fusion power, sometimes by description (eg "the liberated energy of a small, artificial sun" (not much room for interpretation there)) to specific references to nuclear power in the TESB and TPM novelizations.


The Death Star might theoretically feature an experimental power source, since nothing else in Wars remotely approaches the pound-for-pound ability of the Death Star (certainly not ISDs with their gigajoule-range light/medium lasers), but since it's already identified as fusion, and this this nonsense power source would have to draw orders of magnitude MORE energy than is actually contained in matter (in other words, break the universe), it's far less of a stretch to simply assume the weapon was experimental, not the reactor.

The ability to travel halfway across the galaxy in a matter of hours is nonsense. Also once again we have a situation where what we see and what we're told cannot both be true. We see an apparently DET weapon impart enough energy to a planet to cause it to explode, we're told that Star Wars uses fusion power. The scale of energy needed to destroy the planet is such that fusion power is impossible for that particular event and unlikely for most others. So which is true? Do we trust what our eyes see and conclude that they have a power source that rivals that of half the stars in the galaxy? Or do we trust the dialog and say they use fusion and that must be a technobabble weapon that mimics the effects of a DET?

Nonsense reactor or nonsense weapon, sourcebook/novelization vs on screen evidence.

Also Star Destroyers do not use lasers, in fact nothing we see in the movies uses lasers.

Catamount, on 27 February 2012 - 11:28 AM, said:

That's how Trek does it, showing far greater pound-for-pound capability than the Death Star in the highest end instances (let alone ISDs...), at least against non-hardened/resistant targets (a planet) as per TDiC.

I don't believe that planet had shielding like Alderaan. Plus the fact that NDF has a chain reaction event means you need significantly less input energy as the reaction will feed itself though it will not be fully self sustaining. If that's true then you'd need far less energy to burn off the surface of a planet and once the reaction was going you would be able to input even less energy to keep it going.

Catamount, on 27 February 2012 - 11:28 AM, said:

As for 500Mt torpedoes, that isn't remotely an overestimation of the highest yields on the higher-end warheads. As per DS9 A Time to Stand, a 90 isoton weapon had a blast radius of 800km; a Type 6 torpedo warhead (new to the 2370s as per VOY Deadnought) is capable of 200 isotons (VOY Scorpion, Part II). That would basically sear a third of the Continental United States.

An isoton isn't a real measurement so what does that even mean? Without knowing the relationship between isoton and megaton you can't compare them. If we knew what the real world effects of a 500Mt explosion are and compared it to the described effects of a fictional 90 isoton explosion in a similar environment we could establish a baseline for comparison.

I doubt that the dialog in VOY Scorpion would've referenced Continental USA, so unless they stated something along the lines of "a sixth of the North American continent," or we know how isotons scale (is it linear? 1 isoton has a blast radius of roughly 90km and an energy output of x Mt and an (a)isoton weapon has a blast radius of (a)90km and an energy output of ax Mt? Is it exponential?) and their relation to real world measurements how can we even begin to use them to evaluate capabilities in real world terms?

Just pointing this out because as soon as someone starts using fake measurements my first instinct is to throw out their whole argument. Unless they can prove the relationship of their fake measurement to real measurements.

Catamount, on 27 February 2012 - 11:28 AM, said:

guardiandashi is correct, torpedoes are variable yield weapons, and obviously they don't store the antimatter onboard. That would be a storage accident waiting to happen. Instead of one AM containment system that's huge and has many redundancies, you'd have over 300 (onboard a GCS), throwaway AM containment systems, and if just one went up (which would set off all the others, obliteration kind of does that with an AM containment system), the whole ship would go up, SIF system or no. So the warheads are stored with no antimatter, and then it's injected in just before launch, far less chance of a single redundantly backed up ship system malfunctioning than 300 torpedoes.

I would hope the wouldn't store their photon torpedoes hot, not when you're using something as unstable as M/AM. My whole point was people keep giving the 3kg payload with a 64Mt-500Mt yield without referencing the necessary increase in payload and any reasons why they don't, like how 3kg is the point after which the reaction becomes increasingly inefficient and that packing that much M/AM in a casing increases the likelyhood that some of it is going to "spill over" during the arming and cause a catastrophic explosion that could destroy the entire ship.

That's all I'm asking, when the number 500Mt is thrown out that the 23kg payload and efficiency/safety concerns are mentioned. Helps avoid the impression that you're ignoring an impossibility in your argument while you pick at other peoples.

[Kartr]

Didn't see this till after my other reply otherwise I would've used the multiquote function on it so leave me alone.

Catamount, on 27 February 2012 - 12:53 PM, said:

I just don't understand people being so scornful of wind, or solar, when fossil fuels are grossly worse in just about every regard (I mean, what's so bad about renewable energy, anyways?).

I think part of the problem is because of how inefficient the "green" choices are. Wind can only be used in certain areas at certain windspeeds, solar can only be used during the day, geothermal is fairly limited to certain regions and, with the possible exception of geothermal, they're quite inefficient compared to fossil fuels.

Now I'm not saying I support fossil fuels, personally I think we should be switching over to nuclear with the hot gen 4 plants cracking hydrogen for fuel cells in addition to supporting most of the grid, with cool self regulating gen 4 plants being used in major cities for powering the city grid. Combine that with the aircraft I'm hoping to work on once I finish college, dirigibles like the '30s Zeppelins utilizing solar panels, light weight batteries and electric engines to move large cargoes and quantities of people with zero emissions and fuel costs, and you would have a much greener world.

Edited by Kartr, 27 February 2012 - 01:30 PM.

[Catamount]

Wind and solar are limited, and I doubt they'll ever meet base load power requirements, especially as those grow (we're at about 15TW average load now, globally, and over the coming decades, I wholly expect that to become 50-100TW).

Really, no source of energy can satisfy this that works on chemical levels of liberation, and the sun just doesn't hit us with enough energy to be useful at that scale (1367WM^2, but I believe that's at TOA, not the Earth's surface, so even at top of atmosphere, you'd need 11 BILLION square meters of solar panel ; IIRC from meteorology/climate courses, the surface gets about half the energy we get at TOA after reflection and absorption, enhanced further by scattering, so now you're looking at 22 billion square meters ).


That's why I think the future is really nuclear, first uranium, then a combination of thorium fission and fusion (thorium on large scales; polywell fusion for more localized, smaller-scale power generation; the polywell reactors are made to work in small, modular, 100MW units).

That said, solar is no worse, for the amount of power it gives than, say, coal or oil, or even gas. In fact it's a fair bit better. So is wind. So I say "hey, why not exploit it as much as we can?". Sure, maybe that's only 10% of base load power, but that's 10% we could do now, easily, and that's basically free energy once it's set up.

Seems like a pretty sweet deal to me


EDIT: Also, efficiency is where it's at, as much as new generation methods. Sure, a lot of efficiency (probably at least 50% from estimates I've seen) gets gobbled up by economic rebound effects (use less energy to do the same, save money, spend that money to consume more energy doing more things than before), but whether you're using efficiency to do the same with less energy, or to do more with the same energy, it's economically one of the best things a society can pursue. Again, free energy! (well, sort of)

Edited by Catamount, 27 February 2012 - 02:06 PM.

[Catamount]

More on the VS debate later; for now, food

[Jack Gammel]

Catamount, on 27 February 2012 - 12:53 PM, said:

That sounds like rather unwarranted cynicism.


You're kidding me...

Government didn't run speculation out of control and jack prices up to $4/gallon. Government hasn't favored green energy companies either. Estimates for fossil fuel subsidies are upward of $70 billion between 2002 and 2008 alone (compare to $12 billion for traditional renewables in the same time period). It also wasn't government stopping us from enacting the sort of energy generation and efficiency research that would have gotten us largely off of foreign oil by now; that was the work of anti-government zealots.

On the other hand, you can largely thank government for recent efforts to restart our nuclear industry.

Also, what's with the reflexive hatred of "green energy"? Is it somehow really more objectionable than, say, coal, which gets more subsidies, still isn't any more competitive, and has killed thousands of people in spans of less than a week (obviously, before government stepped in, not that it was the last time a lack of regulation set industry up to screw everyday people (I could give a lot more than four additional links, believe me)). I just don't understand people being so scornful of wind, or solar, when fossil fuels are grossly worse in just about every regard (I mean, what's so bad about renewable energy, anyways?).

If I'm cynical about the U.S. government its because the government has given me reasons to be. The post itself was a joke, but then I watch the way the EPA interacts with U.S. companies and it makes me mad. Or maybe I know good people who have had their property taken by imminent domain for pennies what they've put into it because of questionable deals made by government officials? Whatever, it was a joke.

And yes, government subsidies have heavily influenced oil prices in the states, but I am against most subsidies in general. I know there's a whole can of worms there with people strongly disagreeing with me on that point, but that's a debate for a different thread. I will not debate it here.

The difference between oil subsidies and say, companies like Solyndra or other "green energy" companies is that the oil companies still get people their gasoline. Yes, there have been horrific accidents associated with oil, but there have been accidents with nuclear power as well. With so many companies espousing green technology and taking government money there only seems to be scandal.

I am not an "anti-government zealot." I am a big fan of my country even though I disagree with the way government has grown over the past 80 years or so. If anything, what makes me really angry are the people who abuse their positions as lobbyists and government insiders to push a "green" agenda at the expense of others. I am a hunter, fisherman, and general outdoorsman, and I am staunchly pro-conservationist. People who go around preaching environmental doom with sketchy evidence to support their claims have been around for decades, and their continued actions make regular people look at things like renewable energy and environmentally friendly technology with skepticism.

Kartr, on 27 February 2012 - 01:11 PM, said:

I think part of the problem is because of how inefficient the "green" choices are. Wind can only be used in certain areas at certain windspeeds, solar can only be used during the day, geothermal is fairly limited to certain regions and, with the possible exception of geothermal, they're quite inefficient compared to fossil fuels.

This.

I have no reflexive hatred of green energy, but I'm not going to get excited about it until a company or individual comes up with a cost-effective alternative. Germany is switching over to hydrogen cars, and I've heard that there are growing numbers of hydrogen cars and facilities to maintain them in America. That is exciting to me. If the U.S. wanted to pursue an active interest in new nuclear technology that would also be cool. I would support the construction of massive space installations with solar power collection facilities assuming that we had a way of making the construction financially and technically feasible. When fusion technology becomes available I will root for that too, but I am decidedly unimpressed with wind farms.

Edited by Jack Gammel, 27 February 2012 - 02:49 PM.

[Zakatak]

I am in total agreement with the development of fusion, because dotting the landscapes with windmills (like GreenPeace would have us do) and solar panels is incapable of sustaining our power needs, not now and certainly not forever. Also, fossil fuels is not the only thing we are running out of. We are running out of materials and room for industrial/agricultural growth, albeit slowly, but surely. "Science fiction" technologies like fusion are the way forward, and what will get us to other planets, even if those planets are limited to the ones in our own solar system. The moon has promise as a self-sustaining colony, and contains plenty of helium-3 for fusion power, and Mars has its uses as a colony too. Titan is mineral-r-us, with pretty much the entire landscape being an oilsand. Saturn and Jupiter pretty much provide unlimited hydrogen for propellant.

Currently, my favorite candidate for the future is this...

http://www.generalfu...tor_design.html

About 100MW output estimated at "60BPM" which I imagine could be increased. The Tokamak design is a dead-end as far as I'm concerned. Heavy and inefficient. I believe the project goal for Pb11 fusion is only around 1MW or so, which is fantastic for EVE frigates (ooooooooooh!!), but not necessarily a highly developed society like ourselves . New cold fusion technology is actually picking up, I suggest you guys type in "E-Cat" on Google and search around.

EDIT: here is a really good image. While ITER cost tens of billions of dollars, this project has costed about 30 million.

Edited by Zakatak, 27 February 2012 - 03:13 PM.

[Zakatak]

Also, Catamount, I think I read something that discredited Thorium as a viable fission source. This being the internet, you can't trust anything, but it DOES seem to be a little too good to be true, not going to lie. Although if Thorium is indeed a viable power source that can be up and running by 2030, I'm all for it. Seeing as fusion has a problem of being only 20 years away, every 20 years .

Question, what kind of power outputs did TOS-Trek produce? I could see 23rd Century Trekverse vs. Asgard Empire an awesome matchup.

[guardiandashi]

I will say I am a fan of the "green energy" mostly the forms that do not cause massive greenhouse gas production/release, and waste products with megayear breakdown ratios.

I will keep my comments about subsidies limited, too I personally have objections to major subsidies to companies/industries that are the most profitable EVER in the history of the world by far. my feeling is that subsidies should be "restricted" to ... encouraging industries that are desired but can't quite make it on their own, (or startups) or another way to put it, if I was to put solar on my roof it would take an ~2-3kw array to essentually cover my usage. if I and 1000 other people did that it would more or less eliminate the need for 1 3 megawatt generator plant, so I don't have a huge issue with the government providing loans, subsidies, and encouragement for long term investment projects like that.

anyhow mabie real life power and such would be best in a seperate thread.

back to the TOS TREK energy. I am not sure that they really mentioned the earths energy budget.

things that I know about TOS energy
1 they use a lot of solar, geothermal, and fusion power generation.
2 shipboard power is a combination of fusion and antimatter power
3 there is no inherant reason why warp drive cannot be powered by non antimatter power systems, its just that the federation uses antimatter as a compact power storage media
4 most antimatter in the federation is generated by facilities in close orbit around convenient stars (the sol antimatter generation station is inside murcurys orbit, and uses vast amounts of solar energy to transform hydrgen into anti-hydrogen.

[Jack Gammel]

guardiandashi, on 27 February 2012 - 02:53 PM, said:

anyhow mabie real life power and such would be best in a seperate thread.

Agreed. RL stuff gets people going. I don't want to come off as cranky or trollish. Been having one heck of a week already (midterms), and one of my professors has decided that he doesn't like me on a personal level. After years of upper level education I can honestly say I have never had to deal with this issue before. It ****** me off that I can maintain a nearly 4.0 GPA, but one 2000 level prereq course taught by a pompous a-hole can trip me up.

[Kartr]

Catamount, on 27 February 2012 - 01:58 PM, said:

... I think the future is really nuclear, first uranium, then a combination of thorium fission and fusion (thorium on large scales; polywell fusion for more localized, smaller-scale power generation; the polywell reactors are made to work in small, modular, 100MW units).

That said, solar is no worse, for the amount of power it gives than, say, coal or oil, or even gas. In fact it's a fair bit better. So is wind. So I say "hey, why not exploit it as much as we can?". Sure, maybe that's only 10% of base load power, but that's 10% we could do now, easily, and that's basically free energy once it's set up.

Seems like a pretty sweet deal to me

According to my engineering teacher solar and wind can in no way meet the sheer power out put and efficiency of coal/oil. Their main advantage is that they aren't dirty or pollutants. I'm starting to get pretty skeptical of what he says though since my wind turbine tech brother laughed his head off at the "disadvantages" of wind turbines. He said the only one my teacher got right was the initial cost of setting up a turbine farm and the fact that wind doesn't always blow. Plus my teacher didn't even cover the biggest disadvantage of wind turbines, namely they can only operate in a narrow range of wind velocities. To low and you don't get any power, a little to high and you start running the risk of the turbine breaking, higher than that and the turbine can tear itself apart.

So yeah like I said I'm kinda skeptical of my teacher, a lot of his information seems to be at least 5 years out of date.

Catamount, on 27 February 2012 - 01:58 PM, said:

EDIT: Also, efficiency is where it's at, as much as new generation methods. Sure, a lot of efficiency (probably at least 50% from estimates I've seen) gets gobbled up by economic rebound effects (use less energy to do the same, save money, spend that money to consume more energy doing more things than before), but whether you're using efficiency to do the same with less energy, or to do more with the same energy, it's economically one of the best things a society can pursue. Again, free energy! (well, sort of)

Efficiency is a huge area we could improve in. According to charts published by the US Department of Energy in 2006 the US was generating roughly 90 Quads of electrical power, 54 quads were lost to efficiencies and over 30 quads of that was in the transmission of electricity from the generation sites to the consumers. The charts showed a couple years before and a couple years after and these are again thanks to my engineering teacher. My numbers may be a bit off but the bottom line was that over 50% of the electricity generated is wasted due to inefficiencies and other methods of loss.

[Ilithi Dragon]

guardian wolf, on 27 February 2012 - 07:31 AM, said:

Not to mention, it took an A-Wing to the Bridge.

I used to be a Super Star Destroyer like you, then I took an A-Wing to the Bridge...

[Kartr]

According to the Thrawn Trilogy the reason the Endor disaster happened was because Vader threw the Emperor down the shaft and when he died everything started to go wrong for the Empire. Now I haven't watched the movies to compare the timing, but even if it's off it could be chalked up to the Emperor being distracted by Luke.

[AnyMeansNecessary]

So I did the math on the 40k nova cannon,

first off, based of the size of vessels we can tell the projectile is at least 50m in diameter(with bullet shaped design, its length then is at least 2 to 3 times its diameter), it is accelerated to near light speeds(varies by source), has the blast radius roughly the size of a small planet(2,000km to 6,000km diameter), and assumed, it has 1/3 mass made of iron.

essentially the low end estimation of the firepower of a nova cannon round was around 5.5 petatons of energy. If you want the math its all here: http://z15.invisionf...dpost&p=7043946, its long and complicated but most of it all is applying Newtonian physics to the variables.

Edited by AnyMeansNecessary, 28 February 2012 - 02:25 AM.

[Kaine Vulpayne]

Catamount, on 27 February 2012 - 01:58 PM, said:

That's why I think the future is really nuclear, first uranium, then a combination of thorium fission and fusion (thorium on large scales; polywell fusion for more localized, smaller-scale power generation; the polywell reactors are made to work in small, modular, 100MW units).

That said, solar is no worse, for the amount of power it gives than, say, coal or oil, or even gas. In fact it's a fair bit better. So is wind. So I say "hey, why not exploit it as much as we can?". Sure, maybe that's only 10% of base load power, but that's 10% we could do now, easily, and that's basically free energy once it's set up.

Well, regarding nuclear energy production based on uranium and plutonium there is a problem with this vision of a nuclear future. From what I know the (currently known) uranium resources are very limited and will be depleted long before oil or anything else. Yes you can "recycle" old nuclear fuel to some extend by enriching it or by recycling old nuclear warheads, but the former requires to put energy into it before you get new energy out of that, so the efficiency drastically decreases. And for the latter, well every nation only has so and so much obsolete arsenal. Right now it is said that the U.S. takes 2/3rd of their nuclear fuel requirement from old arsenals. What if these are used up?

And what about the waste? If we build more nuclear plants we get more waste. Where to put it for the next 300000 or how many years? Also with all the bin Ladens (or his disciples) and Achmadinedshads and other maniacs I don't like the thought that our landscapes are dotted with small nuclear plants. This will become uncontrollable. Sounds like a hell of a world scenario to me.

Of course fusion could save the world, but we don't have it yet. Also ppl tend to mix up fission and fusion and see fusion as a technological extension or the next evolutionary step to fission. I don't think that is correct. Fusion works vastly different. IF it works one day...

And again regarding RE. There are more than wind and sun.
There are wave plants that go up into the 10MW already. Also they have the side effect of reducing erosion of the coast line.
Some company genetically modified an algea to produce fuel (i cant remember what exact carbon-hydrate it was, but you could make normal gasoline out of it), with this technology we could even keep our old gasoline-based cars. You could probably setup a factory in the desert where you got lot's of light for the algae (you would need a seawater pipeline from the coast, though). Utilizing natural photosynthesis might be much more efficient than solar panels. Plus maybe the algae could be modified to produce methane, which then could be fed into the gas network. This would make one huge buffer for energy that is already available! CHP power plants can produce electricity and heat and are highly efficient (90%).
And geothermal energy is also an option. At the moment it is limited to spots with favorable geological conditions, but this limitation could be neglected by better technology. Drilling lots of deep holes into earth's crust might be dangerous though.

[Catamount]

Kartr, on 27 February 2012 - 05:04 PM, said:

According to the Thrawn Trilogy the reason the Endor disaster happened was because Vader threw the Emperor down the shaft and when he died everything started to go wrong for the Empire. Now I haven't watched the movies to compare the timing, but even if it's off it could be chalked up to the Emperor being distracted by Luke.

Yes, but the whole idea is a purely EU construct, so unless it's mentioned in the novelization, it'd be speculative, at best