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Space ship science works differently. You don’t need “power” except for the computers, you just need “thrust” and any fuel you use is likely insufficient for long term travel.
So we sailing the solar seas bois.(Literally, solar sails) unless warp drives are somehow real.*
*Am not space boat science man.
We’re already well on the way to having supercritical CO2 generators. Sure, it’s still a steam engine, but supercritical CO2 makes it sound so much sciencier.
Pssh, you guys are still on gravity-fusion? My ship has magnetically-bottled antihydrogen, which is carefully fed into a specialized reaction vessel that annihilates it with ordinary hydrogen to produce unbelievable amounts of heat…
…which is then used to boil water and force the steam through a turbine.
I just put some saddles on this bacteria that eats photons.
Discworld ftl tech right here
Antiron
Antïron
I invented a new power generation method!
Amazing, is it actually new, or is it steam again
… it’s steam again.
“It’s a good power generation method, sir”
looks inside
boiling water
> ask if new generator is spooky or wet
> they don’t understand
> show the diagram
> “it’s a good generator mx”
> go inside
> it’s wetI really wanna know what spooky is. lol
spooky action at a distance! like solar panels
It’s like how evolution’s perfect form is a crab. Energy’s perfect form is spicy water bois
Fun fact: crabs are only the underwater peak of evolution. Land mammals seem to converge into anteaters, and plants into trees.
Land mammals seem to converge into anteaters
Hold on, let’s give it some time to see if sea mammals will, too.
If mammals want to survive the next 100 million years we need to see the writing on the wall and evolve into crabeaters
I can’t I have a shellfish allergy.
Be a tree.
I mean theres been like 15 things that are dolphin shaped throughout history.
You’re looking in the wrong direction to count and I’m not talking about time.
Points up
Its like transportations perfect form is trains
I don’t know why we don’t do this with internal combustion engines (Gasoline or Diesel) all that heat generated by the motor, wasted, it could be used to generate more electricity…
I’m aware of some large ships that do that, using either a sterling engine or maybe even a steam engine to put waste engine heat to use.
I have heard of a 6-stroke engine. The idea is, intake compression power exhaust steam exhaust. The four strokes of the Otto or Diesel cycle happen, and then hot high pressure water is injected directly into the cylinder which flashes to steam and expands, pushing the piston, and then another exhaust stroke lets it out. This puts much of the waste heat out through the crankshaft rather than wasting it via radiator. It’s not without its problems though.
Thermo dynamics, in short.
In long, because adding some heat recovery system to the engine block would mean decreasing the cooling efficiency of that block, thus making the block hotter, and decreasing the efficiency of the engine. Since the engine makes power based on the differential of heat/pressure from the top of the stroke and the bottom of the stroke. If you make the system hotter, then less energy can be extracted per unit of heat produced from burning fuel. Any energy generation from the waste heat of the block would be offset by efficiency losses in the engine it’s self.
Now, most engines don’t actually extract all the energy they could from that differential, which is why turbo chargers are a thing. They use excess heat in the gas exhausted out of the block, expand it to ambient pressure and temperature over a turbine, that turbine then runs a compressor, and that compressor raises the pressure at the air intake. More air entering the engine in the same volume allows for more volume of fuel without having more fuel than oxidizer to burn it, thus increasing the energy density of the charge, increasing the differential in heat between the top and bottom stroke, increasing power and/or efficiency depending on it’s tuning. But that’s not utilizing heat from the engine block, but heat in the exhaust.
In reality, an internal combustion engine and a turbine operate on the same principle. Make gas hot, it expands and makes a thing move. The difference is just that in a steam turbine, the gas being expanded with heat to do work is steam, and in an internal combustion engine it’s the exhaust gasses of the combustion its self that are expanding to do work. In a piston engine that expansion is acting on a linear reciprocating piston, but in a turbine it’s working on a spinning set of blades in a continual flow. In the middle there is the gas turbine, where the working fluid is the combustion gas and it’s working on a spinning set of blades, this is what a jet engine is.
Interesting. Thanks for the explanation.
We actually do. F1 engine’s have something called the MGU-H that recovers exhaust gas energy and turns it into electricity that can be used to recharge the hybrid system: https://www.racecar-engineering.com/articles/tech-explained-formula-1-mgu-h/
Technically any turbocharger is doing the same thing except it’s hooked up to a compressor for the intake air instead of a generator.
They don’t have that anymore as it was deemed not relevant enough for road use
I thought it was more about how complicated and expensive they were to fit in the engine package. For little gains, it was a waste of budget cap.
Anything that gets too efficient gets banned for road use.
It’s not quite the same thing, but Porsche has their eTurbo tech in road going cars now: https://www.porsche.com/stories/innovation/porsche-explained-porsche-t-hybrid/
They’re effectively capturing exhaust gas energy straight into a battery, just with a different system.
That’s pretty cool, didn’t know that. Thanks for the link!
There were some cars that used Stirling engine (Czech wiki cuz better picture) instead of internal combustion ones.
Do solar panels operate in this way?
Yes, inside of every solar panel is water and tiny turbines. The sun heats the water, when it turns to steam it spins the turbines to generate electricity.
minas tirith lacks power! sound the turbines!
I must have edited my comment as you were typing yours.
It’s always a relief when someone doesn’t take everything so literally
just like wind turbine right?
You’ll never believe where wind comes from…
Wind turbines use whales and birds, I think it is like in Norse mythology where the wolves Sköll and Hati chase the Sun and moon. But with wind you have whales chasing birds while they are strapped to the blades, this causes them to spin and that generates wind, which fans the flames of fires to boil water and that creates steam.
Depends on the type of solar panel. PV, no. Otherwise, yes.
Solar, wind, tidal, RTG, DEC fusion are all options without steam
Does hydropower count as cold steam?
Well I guess all wind power is also steam at a very low concentration heated by a fusion reaction.
the steam part is in the rest of hydrological cycle
Hydropower gets its energy from evaporated water rising to the big steam in the sky.
Wind and tidal is still just turbines.
Yeah. One uses the passage of a gas over rotating blades. The other uses water as it flows.
Neither use the passage of gaseous water, so theyre totally different!
/s
We never moved away from windmills basically. Only solar is completely different, besides niche impractical things like piezo crystals
In a way. The energy is, in part, used to cook my food which creates an proton gradient across the inner membrane of my mitochondria which then forces those protons through a turbine.
this is so stupid we should just bioengineer injectable chloroplasts for our skin and power ourselves directly with the sun
(yes i am currently hungry but don’t feel like cooking how can you tell?)
I WISH
Mitochondria + Chloroplast and accompanying UV damage repair systems would be poggers.
Imagine being able to take a nap and snack at the same time. Totally plant coded and root pilled.
humans: getting dunked on by corals and lichens, in this category
Those bastards got it easy ;-;
i wonder if living as a stationary animal or a plant feels similar to playing an RTS game
allocating energy for growth and shit
This is what my autism has been preparing me for.
Sure, imagine if everyone who has a vitamin D deficiency was now also chronically malnourished as well. In order for your plan to work, people have to be willing to go outside and spend time in the sun…
technically pv panels are also heat engines. this is why they need cooling
Solar panals provide direct electromotive force. Pretty sure wind and hydro do too. Solar furnaces boil water.
Gawd I love this meme.
So we figured out the most efficient way to generate electricity 100 years ago, and you guys just whinge and want something new.
most efficient
Ehhh, good enough.
You’d think with all the mice and rats used for labratory testing, we’d have power generated by rodents running on wheels.
How many calories does a rat burn everyday though? Instead lets outfit humans with exoskeletons, and instead of assisting the human, it will do the opposite. Their extra energy gets fed into the suit to create electricity. Could also sell it as weight loss thing simultaneously.
Still kinda using water to turn a turbine, if you squint really hard.
most FTL in scifi surpassed the use of fusion to power thier ships and only used a supplemental power, they went with anti-matter, and vacumn energy
it is always a steam turbine :)
ok i can see the steam turbine powering onboard electrical but explain me how the fuck you’re doing space propulsion and/or warp travel with steam
unless you mean literally just blasting steam like a propellant, Wall-E With the Fire Extinguisher style. in which case you’re gonna run outta steam pretty fast
Ion thrusters are an example of electricity used for space propulsion.
In ion thrusters electricity is used to create a magnetic field that accelerate the propellant particles at very high speed. This way the propellant of used much more efficiently.
Edit: I forgot to mention that it’s not a concept, it’s actively used in a lot of satellites
ooooooh
well that’s pretty neat.
So skimming through the wiki article, it sounds like it it’s still “throw something out the back” to generate thrust, which is largely the same problem as the Wall-E with a fire extinguisher problem another commenter made.
Ion Thrusters sound significantly more efficient (in terms of velocity change vs fuel), but do I have the right idea on that?
Yes, ion thrusters still use conservation of momentum to generate thrust. They aren’t limited by how fast or how hot we can make something explode though, so we can shove way more energy into the stuff they’re throwing out the back. They’re basically tiny coil/railguns, using electricity to move individual ions really fast.
In terms of efficiency, Ion thrusters are 4 to 40 times better than liquid fueled rockets. The draw back is that ion engines make very little thrust for the mass of the engine.
Yes, just like every new electrical generation method is steam, every new method of propulsion in space is throw something at the back as fast as we can.
The exception being Project Orion. The idea behind project Orion is to constantly drop and explode nuclear bombs behind the spaceship at a rate of 1 bomb per second. The explosion of the bomb would then push the spaceship forward.
you use the steam to turn a spacetime-fabric-propeller which can gain traction on vacuum itself and propel the ship. simple stuff.
At some point in the future, it will be trivial to fold spacetime and tunnel through, which needs electricity to charge capacitors and shit because the fuel is energy. You think space travel will be done with gasoline engines?
I sure hope not, the USA has already done enough damage for terrestrial use gasoline 💀
space ships in the future will photosynthesize, that will createa steady supply of breatheable air
even submarines are runing nuclear reactors
With the take off of co2 turbines how is this still a meme?
Super Critical Support for our compressed CO2 turbine comrades.
