Nuclear Powered Aliens

[Nereidalbel]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Plants rarely go above 2%, in spite of the roughly 10% maximum. I intended for them to incorporate some chlorophyll variants to make use of more of the electromagnetic spectrum to help them get to the roughly 10% value (which, to be fair, probably isn't quite the maximum for their photosynthesis compounds, but is about as high as I'm willing to go).

The 10% maximum would be for a plant that used all 7 (known) variants of chlorophyll. No reason you can't engineer that in your ships, honestly. Throw in the bacteriochlorophyll that can hit up to 70% efficiency, and your ships can at least hibernate if they need to be abandoned for some reason.

Even with high efficiency for solar power, that's only useful within a relatively short distance from the local star. You're still gonna need radiosynthesis and probably some form of matter digestion if you're going out as far as Jupiter.