[size= 8]They very basics of their construction is having a storage medium (an Electrolyte) to store the electricity (more specifically, the extra electrons) in. This medium is usually highly corrosive (i.e. BATTERY ACID). It stores the electrons via chemical reaction, which is accelerated when a circuit is completed. For the circuit to get completed you also need a positive lead (a Cathode) made positively aligned material such as copper and a negative lead (an Anode) made of a negatively aligned material such as zinc. The leads are kept separate so as not to complete the circuit. I must note that the storage medium is always corrosive to cause the electrical reaction, but doesn’t need to be an acid, in fact most of the disposable batteries you by are alkaline, which is a base, opposite end of acids. Also, the corrosive needn’t be liquid; it can just as well be solid. There is a filter in between the Cathode and Anode side of the Electrolyte called a Salt Bridge which allows the electrons to pass but the chemicals not to mix. All of this is held together by a container made of non-conductive material that is non-reactive to the other materials. I should note that the charge will drain on any battery over time, though with research and study, we should be able to find ways to extend the charge. [/size]
despite what the books claim, E-clips do not operate like Batteries, they behave more like Capacitors. Batteries generate power, capacitors merely store it.
a capacitor is much simpler to build too, little more than a leyden jar, two conductive materials with a layer of insulator sandwitched between.
So, the next inevitable question is what are E-Clips made of? Well, the storage medium (Electrolyte) is Celanium, which is a highly slow but effective corrosive on the acidic side, found to produce and contain an incredibly high electrical charge. Most useful is the fact that two kilograms (the amount in a short E-Clip) can be completely charged in an hour (while others took a minimum of 6 hours). The positive lead (Cathode) is made of a metallic compound called Topoziac that has a slight yellow color and an almost crystal like appearance. The negative lead (Anode) is made of Santorinium, which has a rainbow like sheen to it, people thought it to be like a magic metal from Atlantis (this was before the continent reappeared) and named after the modern name of the place they thought Atlantis once was. The Salt Filter is Salinastic, a salt infused plastic developed specifically for use as a Salt Filter. The container is Plastanium, a plastic with a high carbon content and metallic properties, but was surprisingly one of the most electrically resistant materials ever discovered. These are the compounds that make up Earth E-Clips. Naruni, Splugorth, Consortium, Tarlok, and other alien E-Clips will be made of similar, different materials. These properties are by no means the only, just what makes them good for E-Clips or what gave them their names. And they are fictitious materials like Trilithium or Orichalcum.
it's generally not a good idea to invent new elements for games, it turns into bad technobabble and makes the game look less professional. espcially in a setting like rifts, where technology is supposed to follow real world principles. in a purely fantasy setting, or one like star wars where it's basically fantasy, you can get away with it, but a setting like rifts makes it stand out too much. we've mapped out nearly all of the periodic table, except for some of the heavy transuranic elements, none of which are natural and few of which last long enough to be used in construction.
you can easily handwave the same effects using metamaterial based room-temp superconductors and other nano-tech based materials. no need to rewrite the periodic table.
Due to the fact that E-Clips can be recharged, they are what have called a secondary battery, vs. a non-rechargeable primary battery like the disposable you buy down at the local supermarket. The secondary battery hasn’t dominated the market because it doesn’t hold a charge nearly as well as disposable primary, losing two to twenty five percent of it charge annually. Coupled with the fact that they will lose the capacity to hold a charge after a while any way, most people will continue to buy primary batteries. However, in the future shipments of new product can be scarce at best or on a long space trip with habitable planets be far and few between, a rechargeable battery can be a life saver. That being said, it’s suggested that E-Clips should be replaced every five years, though there are people with twenty year old E-Clips and still work fine (though hold a considerably less charge). Any E-Clip found older than hundred years old is without charge and is unrechargeable, but the E-Clip still has value for its materials to produce other E-Clips. An E-Clip loses two percent on its charge that it’s holding, and one percent of its capacity each year.
see my point about E-clips being capacitors, not batteries. a capacitor will store a charge nearly indefinately, as long as the physical structure of the capacitor is intact. a battery uses chemical interactions to produce power, which will react regardless of draw, reducing the life of the charge.. "recharging" breaks up the products of these reactions back to thier original chemicals, and thus "replenishing" the potential power the battery can produce.
i'm not going to quote the bit on recharging, but here are a few pertinent points. a single point of MD can turn an unarmored person into goo. a 64mj tank cannon does 2D4md
that means 1 md ~ 8megajoules. so an L-20 (the gun with the best efficency in the game), which gets 2D6 md per blast is doing ~ 96mj a blast, with the E-clip carrying 2840mj.
now, 1 joule is equal to 1 watt/second, so that E-clip is packing 1066 Kilowatt-hours of energy. the energy use of a small town in the palm of your hand. lets call it 1200kw/h, since no weapon is 100% efficent, and say thats the standard power storage for a long-E-clip.
luckally it's not releasing all of it at once. (Routledge's Law: "Any interesting battery material for a laser gun would be more usefully deployed as an explosive warhead.") damaging the capacitor itself would result in a very messy explosion.
for referance, the E-clip is packing roughly the same amount of energy as 1 ton of TNT. (which means it would be doing roughly 1D6x10md if it blows.)
the bit about E-clip fishing is a neat idea, btw.
