Advanced Submarine and cinematic power

[maximara]

Steampunk gives Advanced Submarine's power as 1,872,000,000 kw/s which works out to 6,739,200,000 MW/h which is 6,739.2 TW/hour. For comparison the largest amount of energy by power station on the planet is Itaipu Dam had, in 2016, an annual production of 103.09 TW/h. In other words Advanced Submarine produces more power in an hour then a modern power plant does in a whole freaking year.

It is one thing to have cinematic power but it is another to have power plants that are start raving nuts even by power plants on land never mind those in modern nuclear submarines.

What would you consider a saner power level for Advanced Submarine? Also why did the author think he had to crank up the power up that high?

[Anders]

Drop it by an order of magnitude or three.

[YankeeGamer]

Originally Posted by Anders

Drop it by an order of magnitude or three.

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

I LOVE that quote in your signature--where is is from?

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by YankeeGamer

I LOVE that quote in your signature--where is is from?

Googling it brings a number of "Quote Collection" sites, with a consensus that it comes from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by maximara

Steampunk gives Advanced Submarine's power as 1,872,000,000 kw/s which works out to 6,739,200,000 MW/h which is 6,739.2 TW/hour.

That's wrong. kW/s is a meaningless unit - a kilowatt is a unit of power, equal to 1 kilojoule/second, kilojoules are units of energy, and it makes sense to talk about energy per second but not power per second (outside of maybe some weird contexts like how fast you can turn a generator on or off). The figure in Steampunk is for a battery holding 1,872,000,000 kWs - that's kilowatts *times* seconds, not divided by seconds - it's poorly chosen notation apparently intended to avoid having the use Joules anywhere in Vehicles (1 kWs = 1 kJ), and sometimes confused with the plural of kW too - picking kWhr would have been better really.

1,872,000,000 kWs is equal to 520,000 kWhr, which will power its 8000 kW screw propeller for 520,000 kWhr/8000 kW = 65 hours.

[whswhs]

I was wondering about that post, because kW/s is not a common physical unit. Looking at GURPS Steampunk, I see that it has kWs, which is not kilowatts divide by seconds, but kilowatts times seconds, or kilojoules; that is, not a measure of power, or of the rate at which power increases, but a measure of energy.

To convert 1,872,000,000 kWs to kWh, you DIVIDE by 3600, to get 520,000 kWh. You seem to have multiplied, which is dimensionally wrong, and you also seem to have interpreted the figure you got as power (which can't be right with those units) rather than energy.

PS. Thanks, M.A. Lloyd, for independently deriving the same result and thus confirming mine.