Accumulators: A concept for GURPS Spaceships

[gruundehn]

From my experience as an electronics tech, capacitors can hold a charge only for a small time as they will "bleed" their charge off continually. Also, find yourself a decent basic electronics principles book and notice just how big a capacitor has to be to hold a decent charge. I do not think "Doc" Smith ever mentioned just how big his spaceships were but unless the Lensmen found a way to modify the laws of physics as we presently understand them, the Dauntless would be close to the size of our Moon and most of the interior space would be capacitors in order to power effective weapons.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

. I do not think "Doc" Smith ever mentioned just how big his spaceships were but unless the Lensmen found a way to modify the laws of physics as we presently understand them, the Dauntless would be close to the size of our Moon and most of the interior space would be capacitors in order to power effective weapons.

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.

There were accumulators in Spacehounds of IPC but superscience was rife in that book too.

[Johnny1A.2]

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.

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.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

From my experience as an electronics tech, capacitors can hold a charge only for a small time as they will "bleed" their charge off continually. Also, find yourself a decent basic electronics principles book and notice just how big a capacitor has to be to hold a decent charge. I do not think "Doc" Smith ever mentioned just how big his spaceships were but unless the Lensmen found a way to modify the laws of physics as we presently understand them, the Dauntless would be close to the size of our Moon and most of the interior space would be capacitors in order to power effective weapons.

By the time of the Dauntless, Civilization's technology and physics were both well past our level. Think Vingian singularity level, though without computers.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

By the time of the Dauntless, Civilization's technology and physics were both well past our level. Think Vingian singularity level, though without computers.

The Vingean singularity, specifically, is exponential growth of self-modifying code. How does that work without computers?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

The Vingean singularity, specifically, is exponential growth of self-modifying code. How does that work without computers?

It's probably meant to refer to exponential growth of technology generally and not just computers They have that in Lensman.

Note that in the "conventional" Singularity it's just sort of thrown in that when the smarter than human computers aren't designing new computers even smarter than themselves in even less time than it took themselves to be designed they sort of solve every question in physics, cosmology and Science! generally as a sort of side effect to what was really important.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

The Vingean singularity, specifically, is exponential growth of self-modifying code. How does that work without computers?

That's why I said 'vingean singularity level'.

That's the form Vinge thought it would take, but the idea of the singularity is that it's a cutoff point in history, beyond which we can't predict anything meaningful because technology has advanced to the point of obviating everything in our experience. The super-duper-magical AIs might understand the universe so well, after exponential increases in intelligence, that they could make anything happen, leaving us like chimps dealing with humans, or worse.

I have never for a moment believed that the pure Vingean 'computerageddon' was a valid concept, not 25 years ago and not now. Though I've seen reasonable arguments that the period from ~1840 to 1950 could be seen as a transport/communications/warfare 'singularity' from the POV of previous time.

But the technology of Civilization/Boskonia, by the time of Kimball Kinnison, is so advanced in terms of travel, weaponry, energy sources, etc. that it could reasonably said that the characters have access to god-like (with small 'g') power. They can move entire planets from galaxy to galaxy more easily than we can move a plane-load of cargo from North America to Europe, and volatizing entire planets is a relatively trivial exercise. The power of the Death Star is easily within the reach of either side of that war, in far more convenient and portable form. Their individual space suits have interplanetary capability on their own power, and if they really want to do it they could make them interstellar capable, it's just a pointless exercise to do so.

Now none of this seems to affect daily much, but this is space opera, after all, though more thoughtful space opera than most.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

That's why I said 'vingean singularity level'.

That's the form Vinge thought it would take, but the idea of the singularity is that it's a cutoff point in history, beyond which we can't predict anything meaningful because technology has advanced to the point of obviating everything in our experience. The super-duper-magical AIs might understand the universe so well, after exponential increases in intelligence, that they could make anything happen, leaving us like chimps dealing with humans, or worse.

I have never for a moment believed that the pure Vingean 'computerageddon' was a valid concept, not 25 years ago and not now. Though I've seen reasonable arguments that the period from ~1840 to 1950 could be seen as a transport/communications/warfare 'singularity' from the POV of previous time.

Why specifically Vinge's singularity and not just the singularity? How is it like Vinge's model and not Kurtzweil's or Bolstrom's?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Why specifically Vinge's singularity and not just the singularity? How is it like Vinge's model and not Kurtzweil's or Bolstrom's?

Mostly just because Vinge is the name most generally associated with the Singularity idea in SFnal circles, he's the name that comes to mind for me rather than the others.