Quote:
Originally Posted by cptbutton
I vaguely recall that the power busbars in ships would be several feet thick. Given how rich Civilization was, wouldn't it be better to spring for silver to get the resistance loss and waste heat down?
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This is an area where Smith dodged reality while addressing it. In reality, silver or copper either one would not be enough, the energy loads passing through either would have vaporized the bus bars and the whole ship too.
Later in the same story, the Patrol comes into contact with a society that knows how to make room-temp superconductors better than anything we have now, but in fact, for their ships and machines to work at all, they'd need superconductors to handle those power loads. They'd absolutely have to have superconductors to make a
Dauntless at all.
After all, if you're using multi-
petawatt power levels, even if you're running at 99.9% efficiency somehow, that remaining .1% loss adds up to
terawatts of heat in a machine comparable in size to a modern naval warship.
Copper, silver, aluminum, any of them would have resistance losses well above .1%.