Batteries

Still working up three or four SF novel concepts, and haven't made the hard call which to write first. It depresses me a bit. The standards and expectations have grown faster than I have. So many people have already looked at these problems and came up with elegant solutions that are now familiar to the readership, but I feel slower and sleepier every day.

The "Blue" universe is space opera. Something to scratch that itch of space warfare and planetary adventure. The Space-Hornblower career arc, even if this one starts in something more like a Merchant Marine. The requirements for the tech is that it has enough surface plausibility to keep the reader from stumbling over it, and that it produces interesting story potential.

As I've been reading, I've been running into a lot of examples from early SF in which exploring the ideas was paramount and as a result there are extensive lectures on the tech and its implications. Less so in modern fiction, which trends towards adventure with the majority of the tech left largely unexplored as part of the background. But even that fiction will foreground tech that has good plot implications.

As I'm writing about someone with an engineering background and a hacker's attitude, who is through the plot often faced with questions of "how does this work (and why did anyone chose to make it that way)?" I do want a good basic schema for how the place works...technology, cartography, society.

licensable from Vecteesy

First premise: interplanetary travel takes a real-world magnitude of energy. The energy generation of the civilization is several magnitudes above that, making casual interplanetary travel plausible. 

Second premise; the upper magnitudes of this power generation, starting from around interplanetary travel and moving up through interstellar, is only economically available from large fixed plants, which are effectively infinitely renewable but may need to be sited on the equivalent of a resource node.

(Basically, we're tapping a natural wormhole for power. With a large costly plant.)

So there's two big trickle-downs from this. One is a civilization in the region of Kardashav-1, post-scarcity in terms of energy. Not enough energy to remove the need for "manual" manufacturing, resource extraction, basically an industrial base. It is not economical to transmute or nano-fabricate or otherwise do away with the physical infrastructure of an industrialized society.

The second is that since other methods of power generation fall several magnitudes below what these power plants can provide, the middle space between "takes so little power you can slap a solar cell on it" and "flies to the next star system with a load of cargo" is dominated by the logics of energy transport, not energy production.

I hasten to add, this gets pretty blurred. Gasoline, after all, is an energy transport mechanism that took significant power (and infrastructure) to produce, but is used in something that looks more like a generator than it does a battery. Up through more exotic tech like RTGs, He3 reactors and antimatter, this sort of "spend a lot of power to make a compact fuel for power production" is going to be a mode.

Halo dropship

Point is, if we peg "looks kinda like a battery" on human-scale equipment to let us run a VTOL off it, we've got fairly insane (dangerous) levels of available energy. We can do powered armor or blaster pistols not because they are themselves efficient, but because we've got the energy infrastructure so it is just plug-and-play.

That, and some of the implications of post-scarcity (energy, mind you, not all resources) means the look-and-feel gets close to TNG Star Trek.

All I really need to write a story is a hand-wave name that doesn't sound too implausible. But I've been having a tough time finding something in the right range.

One issue is that the basic rule of chemical batteries (stored power versus discharge rate) oddly holds through the gamut of storage technologies. RTGs score incredibly high for power density but their discharge rate is tiny (and not an easy issue to fix). SMES can handle extremely rapid discharge (and cycle with essentially no waste) but their capacity is down around fuel cells or lower. And fuel cells are basically a little gasoline-powered generator.

When you look at SF, it leapfrogs right over the two or three magnitudes higher density I am wanting into stuff like Kerr-Neumann black holes. And you quickly hit mass conversion and zero point and other not-a-battery stuff -- just an infinite source of more energy.

Right now the most plausible stuff is things like lattice confinement fusion, nuclear isomer batteries, or tricks involving monatomic hydrogen (or metallic hydrogen). And, yeah, just like antimatter, the go-to always seems to be buckyballs or carbon nanotubes. Still, at a theoretical 380 MJ/Kg, protons-in-nanotubes is nothing to sniff at.

(The downside to pretty much anything nuclear is that even if you start with stable isotopes, nuclear reactions are always a scatter plot. Even that nice He3 is only "mostly" aneutronic, and I have a really hard time -- given the philosophy of the story -- hand-waving out all the stray x-rays and neutron embrittlement and exotic short-lived daughter products.)

Really, SMES are damn-near perfect, despite their theoretical power density being just a little small. They have side effects, too, but they are all so delicious.

Looking through Atomic Rockets, Reddit, Stack Exchange, the Kerbal forums, questions like this seem to come up a lot. Mostly because people want their pocket laser pistols, but there is a good presence of electric-powered vehicles in there as well. In any case, just beating the power density of gasoline is tough.

Oddly, even tougher seems to be hitting that goldilocks zone between "better than gasoline" and "black hole in a box" is harder.

Zed-P-M. He's Canadian