me: *does extensive research on space-faring vehicles and their electrical and fuel systems *
me: * applies research to worldbuilding project to further cement the science of my spaceships*
me: * does not share this with anyone but a few people*
me: i should share this with someone
i am not joking i literally had to look up electrostatic direct energy conversion for toroidal fusion reactors because my space-age ftl technology uses super-powerful magnets to create magnetic envelopes that isolate spacetime for a split second and can be translated great distances dependent of mass within the envelope and the power of the electromagnets in question, and that sort of power requires large arrays of supercapacitors capable of delivering thousands of megawatts near-instantaneously
through this research i found that neutrons from fusion products can be collected by electrostatic 'baffles', kinda like a silencer except they utilise the incredible energy potential within those loose neutrons and turn them directly into electrical energy, something i can barely comprehend but it has an efficiency of about 50% on the test bed
and then i had to figure out a good fuel source and ended up going for a deuterium-tritium reactor but i was tempted by pure h2 as it's already available
but it turns out that heating fusion products for sustained fusion is really difficult even in a tokamak, which is the technology i'm using as a basis for my fusion generators. you have to heat the fusion reactants to an incredibly high temperature in order to achieve continuous and sustained fusion, which is nigh impossible considering the temperature of such a reaction is somewhere in the hundreds of millions of degrees, something that i've purposely overlooked because i don't have an answer
so in the end i've had to account for energy conversion which produces about 100kW per reactor at 50% efficiency to electrical energy (50kW) by my determination, and as the control equipment eats 10kW you effectively get 40
which is a pretty solid supply but you still need to charge your supercapacitors for hours on end and that's fine because that's the major limitation in the Microcosm; ftl is incredibly slow but it still works
(panting) that concludes my ted talk
@OldRedSun oh yeah i mean i half-considered that
fission is great and all but for the purposes of generating mass electricity you end up with a lot of waste, a lot of thermal energy, and no real way to do DEC unless you just use, idk, thermoelectric effect, which isn't ideal
PLUS you need a heavy coolant loop which accounts for massive losses whereas a fusion reactor needs to be warmed up and can't quite sustain fusion without constant heating of reactants, which results in net energy production
@OldRedSun plus you also have to consider even with the most simple of these sorts of things, no coolant loop or anything, like the max you can get out of an RTG right now is something around 500W - 1kW, which is not great and probably couldn't power your spacecraft + would be incredibly dangerous to be around
fusion solves that problem by not being incredibly dangerous, thus my choice
@pearshapes
bet a fission reactor could also work with this...