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Old 10-21-2016, 11:38 AM   #71
Emerald Cat
 
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Generally, these gateways consume electricity or energy in proportion to mass and distance. I'm picking a random number now, but it's about 100 KWHs per metric ton per light-second in theory, with potentially very high inefficiency rates.
I wanted to make teleporting a man to the Moon take about as much energy as operating the LHC. I used 300 lbs for the person's weight (assuming they would need a spacesuit), 238900 mi for the distance to the Moon, and 200 MW for the energy used by the LHC. This gives a base energy requirement of 2.8 W per mi per lb.
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Old 10-21-2016, 12:25 PM   #72
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

SG minus One

This is an informal designation for a recently discovered world that was at first assumed to be a close Parallel but definitely not an Echo with a local date in the 19902.

Then while browsing through names in general databases trying to find where this world may have diverged a researcher found a Captain Samantha Carter in the USAF. Not that uncommon a name but a check determined that she was a dead ringer for the TV character complete with ridiculously high IQ and overachieving academic credentials.

However, further searches turned up no Daniel Jackson or Colonel O'Neal or any other cast members and no sign of the Stargate.

Then other names started coming in. There's a brilliant entomologist who's a CSI in Las Vegas, a clever fellow who looks rather like O'Neal and similar TV characters too.

The general rules as they have been worked out are that the whole cast of the TV show never shows up and exact dates don't match up with any broadcast history. Indeed some don't even come in the right decade. Specific (and particularly fantastic) events that occurred in the show never happened and indeed the anomalous people do seem to be totally mundane except for innate human talents.

Infinity doesn't even really know how to describe this world. "Sub-Myth" or maybe "Fragmentary Myth Parallel"? Right now it's being closely watched and there is a ban on recruiting exceptional locals. When or if the ban is lifted there's going to be a _big_ traffic jam of recruiters trying to get to Carter first.
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Old 10-21-2016, 01:04 PM   #73
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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I wanted to make teleporting a man to the Moon take about as much energy as operating the LHC. I used 300 lbs for the person's weight (assuming they would need a spacesuit), 238900 mi for the distance to the Moon, and 200 MW for the energy used by the LHC. This gives a base energy requirement of 2.8 W per mi per lb.
your numbers seem kind of off. I can only assume its due to you dropping the time off Kilowatt hours, which is a really important part of the measurement. My number on Watt-seconds per pound-mile is 880.

I actually think kilo watt hours per ton is the nicest measurement, given that that's what we bill power in and ship freight with.

Which drops us to the stupid low number of .000538 Kilowatt Hours per ton-mile. At 15 cents a Kilowatt hour, It costs about $2.50 to send a very overloaded Toyota Corolla to the moon. Much pricier is mars, which drives that price up to about $2500.

Or I could send from London to Brisbane for the low cost of 4 cents per ton. At that point the main expense is the loading crew sticking all this junk through the portal.

I'd personally NOT increase cost with distance.
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Old 10-21-2016, 02:27 PM   #74
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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your numbers seem kind of off. I can only assume its due to you dropping the time off Kilowatt hours, which is a really important part of the measurement. My number on Watt-seconds per pound-mile is 880.

I actually think kilo watt hours per ton is the nicest measurement, given that that's what we bill power in and ship freight with.

Which drops us to the stupid low number of .000538 Kilowatt Hours per ton-mile. At 15 cents a Kilowatt hour, It costs about $2.50 to send a very overloaded Toyota Corolla to the moon. Much pricier is mars, which drives that price up to about $2500.

Or I could send from London to Brisbane for the low cost of 4 cents per ton. At that point the main expense is the loading crew sticking all this junk through the portal.

I'd personally NOT increase cost with distance.
You're right, it does look like the CERN site I used dropped the hours from MWh. Or else used 200 MW as the peak power consumption without clarifying that. Either way, I think I need to redo this analysis.

I chose to use the LHC as an example because it is an energy intensive project. Looking at the Powering CERN website, CERN as a whole uses 1.3 TWh of electricity per year. That is roughly 3.56 GWh per day.

Requiring 3.56 GWh of electrical energy to send one US ton of matter to the Moon as a baseline, the energy requirement is ~15 kWh per mi per US ton. To send a man to the Moon would cost about $537.5K for the electricity alone. Traveling between Columbus, Ohio and Washington DC (about 327 miles as the crow flies) would cost $4905/ton. Or about $500 per person if you go with a ten person group.

I like 15 kWh/ton-mile for the energy requirement. This makes extraterrestrial travel an expensive novelty while still making it more practical than it is now. At the same time, for terrestrial use it is about as affordable as flying is today.

Last edited by Emerald Cat; 10-21-2016 at 02:38 PM. Reason: Fixed a math error.
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Old 10-23-2016, 11:46 AM   #75
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

We could make cost proportionate to the root (or cubed root) of distance traveled. In fact, an extreme cost like that would tend to make warp portals function more like stargates.
An alternative that makes energy costs proportionate to the square of the distance tends to produce a stepping-stone approach, also worth considering.

OK, I've been messing with this for a while.

100WH*((distance in Km)^0.5) gives a nice curve. A 1 person trip one KM costs $1.20. From SF to NY it's $75. Earth to Luna is $736. Earth to mars is between $8,000 and $24,000. Earth to Saturn is in the ballpark of $40,000.
Alpha Centauri, however, is an astronomical $7-8 million, and requires three Three Gorges Dams working for an hour to power it -- a Nine Gorges Dam, if you will.

Last edited by PTTG; 10-23-2016 at 01:24 PM.
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Old 10-23-2016, 12:12 PM   #76
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

I assume these gates require all the energy up front. That means ultra expensive gigantic capacitors for interplanetary trips. I don't know where the slope change in price would be, but it wouldn't be so linear.

Shouldn't volume or at least cross sectional area matter for gates?
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Old 10-23-2016, 12:23 PM   #77
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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100WH*(distance^0.5) gives a nice curve. A 1 person trip one KM costs $1.20. From SF to NY it's $75. Earth to Luna is $736. Earth to mars is between $8,000 and $24,000. Earth to Saturn is in the ballpark of $40,000.
Alpha Centauri, however, is an astronomical $7-8 million, and requires three Three Gorges Dams working for an hour to power it -- a Nine Gorges Dam, if you will.
I see that you have written your formula implicitly drops the unit from distance. This is commonly done when dealing with square roots. However, this only works if you explicitly specify units for the distance term. Based on your example it looks like you chose km.

We can use dimensional analysis to convert your formula to work with miles by multiplying the distances by a conversion factor. In this case, the conversion factor would be (0.62 mi/1 km)^(1/2). So the formula would become ~78.75WH*distance^(1/2), with distance being in miles. Using 75 WH would be a close enough approximation for game purposes.
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Old 10-23-2016, 01:30 PM   #78
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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I assume these gates require all the energy up front. That means ultra expensive gigantic capacitors for interplanetary trips. I don't know where the slope change in price would be, but it wouldn't be so linear.

Shouldn't volume or at least cross sectional area matter for gates?
Come to think of it, the energy requirement should ideally rule out the use of gates as a way to create "free energy" by teleporting things up to the top of gravity wells and generating energy from the fall. I didn't figure that part out yet but it could be a serious limiter on interplanetary travel but virtually free for intraplanetary travel.

Anyway, to answer your question, maybe the gate itself acts as the capacitor? More stuff I need to work out I guess.
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Old 10-23-2016, 02:18 PM   #79
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

I think that's how the magic Stargates worked. They could absorb nearly any energy source and expend it instantly to power transit.

It depends on how fiddly you want them to be. Fraught with limitations and resource management or background vehicle.
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Old 10-24-2016, 07:02 AM   #80
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Come to think of it, the energy requirement should ideally rule out the use of gates as a way to create "free energy" by teleporting things up to the top of gravity wells and generating energy from the fall. I didn't figure that part out yet but it could be a serious limiter on interplanetary travel but virtually free for intraplanetary travel.
Not so bad. Escape velocity for the Earth/Moon system would be 18 kWhr/kg, about $2 worth of electricity, which is a lot for package delivery, but pretty trivial as launch costs go. For the Sun at Earth 236 kWhr/kg will take you out of the solar system. To arrive at another star rather than somewhere in interstellar space you'd need to match velocity too, which could be up to 29400 kWhr/kg for galactic rotation if it happens to be on the other side from us, less than 9000 kWhr/kg for the proper motion of the fastest local star I can find data for, which is starting to look like a pretty significant cost. If it's in another galaxy, escape velocity of the Milky Way at Sol is not known with much precision (there's that how much dark matter or whatever it is problem that makes galactic rotation curves so strange), but its on the order of 35000 kWhr/kg for that.
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