Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
Doc did indeed modify the laws of physics as we understand them. That was one of the things that made him a Master of Superscience!
The one time specific real world power numbers were mentioned was early in Triplanetary and the power cell of a blaster pistol was exploding and releasing all the many kw/hours it held. It was much more energy than even a Gurps 3e superscience power cell.
No specific numbers on ship size but the Dauntless was on the order of hundreds of yards long. It's weapons were not powered by accumulators but rather by directly tapping into cosmic energy.
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It also carried total-conversion reactors, and in this case Smith gave hard numbers. Each mass converter could turn 400 lbs. per hour into useful energy, which means each converter had an output of 4.5
petawatts. When the cosmic energy collectors were running, that was amplified by a factor of 100,000 to 1, so the minimum energy potential of the
Dauntless was 454 million terawatts. That's over 2600 times the energy the Earth intercepts from the Sun.
Interestingly, unlike some writers, Smith was not completely unaware of the implications of this kind of power. The Patrol and the Boskonians could and did volatize entire planets, reshape star systems, etc. OTOH, the effects on daily life were limited, and there are some interesting questions about how this kind of power was controlled absent computers and related tech.