Episode 6: Power Plants
no matter what the drive or systems, all spaceships need something to generate power, generally electrical. this power is required to run computers, life support, and any weapons, exotic drives, defenses, ect.
if you are in primitive space capsules or spaceplanes (like the Apollo/Orion capsule or the Space Shuttle), you can get by on batteries,
solar panels or
RTG's, Radio-electric thermal generators. RTG's generate power by converting heat directly to electrical power via the
seebeck effect, little more than two wires of different composition joined at both ends and heated. the heat, in this case, being provided by the natural decay of a radioactive material, typically plutonium 238, a type of plutonium that cannot be used to generate an atomic explosion. they generate very little power (1-2 megawatts at most), which is sufficient for space probes and simple space craft that can be built using 20th century technology.
RTG's are currently used by NASA and other agencies when sending probes to locations beyond mars, where solar panels would not provide enough power.
more powerful, and the next logical step, is atomic power, or
nuclear reactors. these use rods or pellets of uranium or plutonium in a reactor, in a controlled fission chain reaction that generates large amounts of heat. the cooling system that regulates the reaction absorbs the heat and runs through turbines that turn generators, which produce massive amounts of electrical power. Nuclear power has a few drawbacks however. first, it is bulky, particularly the early versions. second, the reaction requires careful moderation to prevent a meltdown, which at best would damage the reactor, and at worst could release large amounts of radioactive material into the surrounding area as well.it also contains many moving parts and requires continual maintenance to ensure no malfunctions in any of the parts.
next is
fusion power. Fusion power generates the most power by mass of all the conventional plants. it runs on hydrogen and it's isotopes, which can be obtained from Water, and are the most common element in the universe. generally the first viable starships of a race will be fusion powered, although that is not a constant.
fusion power is cleaner and safer than nuclear power, because the fusion reaction creates only helium and a small amount of radiation, and should it become imbalanced, overloaded, or damaged, the reactor merely shuts down, all fusion stopping.
now we diverge into more exotic drives.
Antimatter powerplants are the most common system in the three galaxies, and for good reason. antimatter, sometimes known as contraterrene matter, is matter that has an opposite charge than normal matter, but identical mass. for example, a positron is the counterpart of an electron. both have the same mass and spin and other values, but an electron is negative and a positron positive.
what makes antimatter so useful as a power plant is what happens when matter and antimatter come into contact. they annihilate each other, in a total matter to energy conversion. most of this is released as gamma ray photons. but the reaction also generates a lot of heat, which can be used to generate electrical power.
for reactionless drives, which generally require alot of power to operate, antimatter power is the most effective means to supply that power. fusion power may not provide sufficient power, while more advanced power supplies might not be technologically feasible.
antimatter has severe drawbacks however. first, antimatter will react with
any matter it contacts, regardless of type, form, or element. the only way to store antimatter is in magnetic traps (or gravitic, in phaseworld). these containment systems must be active, because a passive field can never contain antimatter for long. only active fields have the strength and shape to hold antimatter.
second, should containment be lost, the antimatter will react with the matter of the ship itself, causing a massive reaction. a few grams of antimatter will produce an explosion several kilotons in yield. kilograms will yield megatons. and the typical starship will be carrying a few tons (fighters/shuttles) to kilotons (starships) of antimatter. these levels can destroy entire continents or even entire planets. should containment fail for any reason on a planet, massive destruction ensues.
the other alternative is
Singularity powerplants. these use a quantum blackhole to generate power. the black hole itself does not make power. but as matter (any matter) falls into it's event horizon, X-rays are produced, which generate a plasma which is contained within the magnetic field of the singularity. usually this constrains it to the
accretion disk. but if the singularity is spinning, it's magnetic field directs it away out of the poles, creating a pair of
Gas jets. in a singularity powerplant, matter is fed into a singularity, and the gas jets are trapped, which provide power. singularity power is not as efficient as antimatter, but far more effective than fusion or nuclear.
singularity power has it's problems as well. first, black holes are very massive. big black holes are smaller than planets but have a mass 10x or greater than our sun. quantum singularities would be smaller than an atom, but still mass millions of tons. singularities also have immense gravity. to use a singularity as a power plant, one would need to negate gravity to a degree, to keep the ship itself from being sucked into the event horizon. any failure and the ship would implode in onto the powerplant. (which would be a rather dramatic way to describe a space battle. ships getting destroyed and just 'vanishing' without an explosion as the blackhole sucks it up..leaving a black hole floating around in space as a hazard)
third, singularities are not common. natural singularities tend to be massive objects created from stars, useless for power generating. quantum singularities are not natural, and would have to be created. if made with too little mass, it would immediately fail, releasing all of it's energy in one massive explosion. (the principle behind the TGE's singularity cruise missiles).
rarely seen, and almost impossible to obtain, is the
Conversion plant, which takes matter and converts it directly to energy. it can provide as much power as an antimatter powerplant, but safer and requiring less fuel. because it converts regular matter directly to energy, there is no containment issue for fuel (indeed, typically it would be fed off solid blocks of high density materials.
most powerful of all, but almost unheard of in the 3 galaxies, is
Zero Point Energy. this draws energy from space itself, and would provide theoretically infinite power. in practise, the amount of power you can draw on would be limited by materials however. a ZPE powered starship using a CG drive would be able to travel at rates approaching the speed of light in normal space, and in FTL would be capable of hundreds or even thousands of light years per hour. no known race, past or present has such a powerplant. and any race with access to this technology would be impossible to overlook.
lastly i will mention the most difficult powerplants to describe. the 'fiat' powerplants. these are systems that cannot be easily described technically, but are important to their setting, with behaviors and performance out of line with what would be considered normal physics. they rely on GM fiat, the whim of the GM or writer, to exist, thus the name. examples of this would be Robotech's Protoculture, Stargates Naquada, Neutrino reactors, and the like.
