Quote:
Originally Posted by YankeeGamer
That is more than "Pretty good." But Kinnison's ships still had accumulators beyond just power plants. IIRC, they even had them when total conversion was only used as an exciter for "Cosmic Power Screens," a starkly amazing power supply.
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I know. It just isn't clear
why they used them, unless, as I said, it was so they could deliver energy faster than the nuclear motors could do it, and for backup.
Quote:
Originally Posted by doctorevilbrain
What do you mean? Fuel is matter.
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Exactly my point.
If you have total-conversion reactors, then you can simply stuff the fuel bins with whatever is convenient to convert, you'd want something dense so as to pack a lot of mass into the smallest space, lead would make a dandy fuel under those conditions. So would gold, or osmium, or anything really dense. Lead just happens to be common and stable.
Which is the key point. Stability. If you can convert matter into energy conveniently, not just nuclear reactions but the whole shebang, then it's easiest to store your energy just as whatever matter your convert for fuel, it's energy-dense (25 gigawatt-hours/gram), and
stable.
Twenty-five gigawatt-hours, charged into most storage technologies, is a bomb waiting to go off. Short that accumulator, or shoot it, or something, and BOOM. Twenty+ kilotons, almost half again bigger than Hiroshima. Twenty-five gigawatt-hours in the form of a gram of lead is very, very safe, under most conditions the chance of it exploding is nil.
So I have to assume that the accumulators most have some advantage. Maybe they can store energy even more densely per unit mass than matter can, maybe they can deliver their power faster (that strikes me as the most likely idea). Maybe it takes the reactor a second to convert a gram of 'x' into energy, and the accumulator can deliver its 25 gigawatt-hours in a millisecond. That could be handy sometimes.
Plus, of course, backup if the reactors fail.