[Spaceships] How many types of power plant in your universe?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Varyon

For my Harpyias setting, I intend for the ships to use superscience capacitors, without any sort of proper power plant on board. Many will have small retractable solar panel arrays to augment the capacitors, but those really just serve to reduce the rate of energy consumption (or to slowly recharge in the case of an emergency). Power generation in space is in the form of solar "fueling stations" that vessels can dock with to recharge (most are likely to have various supplies available for purchase, at a premium) - chemical fuels don't have enough energy density to compete with the capacitors, fission (and RTG) is outlawed, and fusion/antimatter/total conversion simply aren't available. Planetside, the same superscience that protects spacecraft with shielding can be exploited to generate energy, but that's not really feasible in the vacuum of space (it draws power from subspace, and heats up while in operation; this lets you setup a heat engine powered by subspace, provided you've got somewhere to dump the heat).

What makes that not viable in space?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

What makes that not viable in space?

My original thought was that you can't dump the heat into vacuum readily enough to generate enough energy to bother with. Given only the shield generator would heat up, however, I now realize you should certainly be able to dump the heat into your vessel. So, the revised version (because I don't want this to be a powerplant option for spacecraft) is that the shield generators output very little energy for their size (the planetside ones have to be fairly massive) and at the size a spacecraft needs its generator to be, keeping the shields on the edge of collapsing would only generate a relative trickle of energy (perhaps roughly comparable to the standard small retractable solar panels at around the 1.11 AU mark, which is within the system's habitable zone). It's an option for recharging, but certainly not something to rely on as it makes you a sitting duck for pirates and the like (and you can't use the boost function of your drive while the shield is active, restricting you to a crawl if you're trying to move around while charging). I'll mull it over in my head to see if instead allowing this to be used for quick charging might work for the type of setting I'm aiming for.