02-10-2018, 05:41 AM | #41 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?
The extravagant fusion power in THS, and especially the use of lunar Helium-3, also strikes me as more "space advocates like it and it gives a reason to have humans and vehicles in space" than cold, rational extrapolation. I don't know any of the science involved, but I don't think that most of the people with opinions on the Internet do either (and the ones who do rarely show it).
On the other hand, solar power is growing very fast right now, and private space is doing better than I would have expected. So we might have a cheap-energy future, just like we might have a low-energy one.
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02-10-2018, 09:18 AM | #42 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?
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02-11-2018, 10:21 PM | #43 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?
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The He-3 thing strikes me as contrived at best. Yeah, the He-3 reaction has its advantages....but the sheer Rube Goldbergness of the mining operations argues against it, when easier options exist...and they do. The problems with deuterium fusion are not insoluble, for ex, and compared to the time and trouble of going all the way out to Saturn, they look fairly economically manageable.
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02-11-2018, 10:22 PM | #44 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?
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02-12-2018, 06:33 AM | #45 |
Join Date: Oct 2007
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Re: Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?
Well, my favorite sci-fi is the Orion's Arm Universe Project (I contributed a few articles to the Encyclopedia Galactica) so that is my idea on Ultra-Tech.
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02-12-2018, 08:45 AM | #46 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?
There's a whole family of tropes of classic science fiction as it developed under John W. Campbell: interstellar travel at FTL speeds, time travel, psi powers, superhuman mutants, human-shaped robots as the only or the dominant form of AI. One of the things I like about THS is that it almost entirely avoids all those assumptions, and makes a different set of speculative assumptions that grow out of more current fantastic ideas. That's not quite a question of "optimistic" or "pessimistic"; it's more that sf with the first set of ideas seems, well, retro, in almost the same way that a steampunk campaign with an inhabited Mars and etherships feels retro.
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02-12-2018, 09:18 AM | #47 |
Join Date: Sep 2013
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Re: Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?
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02-12-2018, 10:15 AM | #48 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?
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Deuterium fusion needs heat to initiate but is 4 times as good at making neutrons (80% of the energy of the reaction) as it is heat. You end up having to sustain the reaction with what's left over after the neutrons and then you have to harness the neutrons too. This is a fundamental characteristic and there is no guarantee that it is solvable. He3 fusion might not work out either as it is so much more difficult to initiate but if you do get it started you have much more heat for self-sustenance. Or if used for propulsion you have much more in the form of charged particles for handling magnetically.
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02-12-2018, 10:52 AM | #49 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?
D-T is 80% of energy as neutrons. The usual use for the excess neutrons is to interact with lithium to produce tritium, though some of it will escape and cause trouble elsewhere.
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02-12-2018, 10:22 PM | #50 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Is TS optimistic or pessimistic?
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As Anthony notes, you can use the neutrons to breed tritium from lithium, but you can also use the neutrons themselves to heat a working fluid. It's a headache from an engineering POV, but by no means unsolvable, and breeding tritium gives you more fuel for a deuterium-tritium reaction. For that matter, I'm not sure He-3 fusion even beats breeder fission realistically (in terms of the THS canon 'reality') if you have to go to Saturn for your He-3. Added to that is the prospect of a He-3 cartel. In the THS canon, America has a lot of clout through He-3 control, some other powers are looking to mine Uranus or keep working the thin gruel on the Moon to bypass it. Which is believable if He-3 is irreplaceable. But when you've got endless oceans full of deuterium, and lithium isn't all that rare, suddenly the comparison looks different.
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