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Hydro-electric? Really?
captiannemo117
Member Posts: 337 Arc User
So I'm playing melting pot, go to talk to the face mask guy, he says the generator can produce 3 kilowatts, which he then says "it's not much unless you consider that the planet has lots of them" (paraphrasing). Well, I did consider that, and I did a little math.
The enterprise D can produce (at least) 12.75 billion gigawatts (TNG: "True Q"), a gigawatt is a billion watts, so 1 billion times 1 billion times 12.75 is 12,750,000,000,000,000,000 watts. A kilowatt is 1,000 watts, so those waterfalls would produce 3,000 watts.
So it would take 4.25 QUADRILLION (4,250,000,000,000,000) waterfalls to produce the same power that a SINGLE warp core does. Remind me again how needlessly installing equipment into a natural environment it beneficial to said environment.
Poor writing, please improve.
The enterprise D can produce (at least) 12.75 billion gigawatts (TNG: "True Q"), a gigawatt is a billion watts, so 1 billion times 1 billion times 12.75 is 12,750,000,000,000,000,000 watts. A kilowatt is 1,000 watts, so those waterfalls would produce 3,000 watts.
So it would take 4.25 QUADRILLION (4,250,000,000,000,000) waterfalls to produce the same power that a SINGLE warp core does. Remind me again how needlessly installing equipment into a natural environment it beneficial to said environment.
Poor writing, please improve.
Post edited by captiannemo117 on
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Also consider that we're talking Lukari tech. Its probably A LOT more productive than modern day versions.
Anti-matter is used on starships as it gives the best power/space ratio mean starships can devote more space to other things then the main reactor, but anti-matter is not a "solves everything" über fuel. there's some massive limits to its use.
Also how much power does a colony like Dranuur need anyway, they have no need to install what's essentially a massive nuke on a hair trigger that needs constant supervision to not go boom. Since in case you didn't know if anti-matter comes into contact with any regular matter they turn into energy.
One could say the Lukari are just really out of their element. They think they’re big dogs, but they’re just little yappers, if ya catch my drift. Others might read the rhetoric as something else, as interplanetary class politics, or as an enslaved species courting favor with its oppressor.
So they brag about their stupid waterfalls, their cooky scientists, and their joint technology, but it’s really just junk to the federation. What we have to keep in mind is that the federation is setting up these little space faring puppet regimes throughout the galaxy, patting them on the back for their paltry accomplishments, convincing them to keep slaving away on their little empires, all while withholding truely transformative technology and keeping tabs on resource development and advances that might be beneficial to the core planets in the federation. The members of this elite core have grown so fat and complacent that they don’t even realize the math is off. They can’t do math. Technology has reduced labor to just three minigames, after all.
It’s an inter-planetary racket that has been running smoothly for hundreds of years at this point. Starfleet can afford unlimited ships. Earth citizens live a life of luxury. Meanwhile, people like the Lukari, who only want a taste of the good life, keep slaving away on their little waterfall projects hoping to get a big grant or investment from the mighty Fed. In these episodes where the environmental rhetoric is ratcheted up you’re really witnessing a “lesser” species do a little dance and audition, begging for scraps at the table like the little yappers they are.
If the Lukari were smart they would covertly begin training commandos in infiltration, espionage, and sabotage. Don’t act immediately. They should try to get as many Lukaris as close to federation centers of power as possible: cooks, laborers, and academics in the heart of Starfleet academy in San Francisco, just laying in wait for the time to strike.
Meanwhile, the Lukari should secretly begin sending envoys to meet with the Cardassian, Klingon, Romulan, and Dominion governments, to any possible allies they can find in the coming war. Find those elements within each government seeking conflict with the Feds and cultivate relationships, intel sharing, and begin planning for the day that the mighty Federation is brought to its knees.
The big bear is too strong for any one foe. It has proven this again and again. But if the Lukari are successful in waging asymmetrical warfare and a fear campaign in the heart of the federation it can work. A million tiny cuts—from the Breen, from the Jem Hadar, from the Klingons—on all borders.
As those borders contract, and as the feds’ resources are spread thin to the edges of space, then, AND ONLY THEN, the Lukari should strike, bringing down buildings and ships and waging a campaign of fear upon the people depriving them of technology, manipulating their relationships with other, perhaps more useful species, and sucking away their natural resources like true vampires.
These vampires, of course, are the people of Earth, and the Lukari are going hit them when and where they least expect it.
I assume the Kentari ones are a bit smaller than Hoover dam.
Currently a 'small home' needs 15kw, so unless the Kentari are very very energy efficient, they suck at making electricity.
Bananas create antimatter roughly every seventy-five minutes. They can start a plantation. Then they will have food and power.
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And you wouldn't just build a bunch of wheels under a waterfall anyway. You would lose most energy that way. Instead you would collect the water further up the mountain and duct it through a high pressure pipe directly to the turbines.
forget that, any 25th century solar panel would be more efficent and more readily available.
I agree, but hydro-electricity is a weird vessel to choose for the message (I approve of in general). It's among the biggest problem sources renewables have, solar and wind would make more sense (and those have their own share of problems, but are in theory much better. Hydro-electricity can't even theoretically work without massive impacts to the environment it's generated in). Or, as @szim said, geothermal plants. Those are even canonical.
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More seriously, what would the colony need 12.75 billion gigawatts (per second
Cool Explanation Shim.
I also don‘t recall in star trek that a Matter/Antimatter core was ever used for planet side installations. Stuff like core ejections was discussed a few times on the other hand. Could be that those thingies are also out of a question there because of safety reasons.
Also OP, I don’t mind nerds… at all. I even don’t mind angry nerds you know. But the way you post makes me think about fanatic nerds for the first time. Quiet creepy.
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If the containment on a nuclear fission reactor, such as the ones we use on Earth today, were to fail, there would be a large release of radiation in the immediate area, and the reaction would fizzle to a stop over time (assuming that something prevents the control rods from falling into place - they're held out of the reactor by electromagnets, and if the power fails and nothing else stops them, the rods will fall into the core and slow the reaction further).
If the containment on a nuclear fusion reactor fails, the plasma will melt a hole in the reactor vessel, but at the same time will cool to below fusion temperatures, stopping the reaction pretty much immediately.
If the containment on your stored antimatter fails, the antimatter will come into contact with the walls of its container. The energy release is given by the famed equation E=mc^2, where "m" is double the mass of the antimatter (because it will annihilate an equal amount of matter). The positron release of bananas is trivial, on the order of one or two positrons over that 75-hour period, so the energy release as the positron annihilates is lower than the normal background radiation of Earth anyway. However, if you've got enough antimatter to generate a worthwhile amount of energy in a controlled reaction, it's going to release just as much in an uncontrolled reaction - just all at once.
Now, why do the Lukari use hydropower rather than fusion reactors? Probably because they've been presented as kind of hippy-dippy from the first moment we met them, and hydropower is "natural". It does have advantages over solar - you don't need to maintain a number of orbital installations that can interfere with space traffic, and the ground installations for hydro take up less space than for solar while also producing power on a constant basis.
However, unless you're being kind of hypersensitive about things, this doesn't seem to be a "message" to us as players - nobody comes out and says, "Hey, using nuclear power is evil!!" They do note that burning things for power is destructive to the environment, but come on, we've known that for centuries here on Earth (check out the figures for deaths attributable to smog in, say, London from 1850-1950, or LA from 1940-1970). And if you are so sensitive that you think the Lukari choices are meant to be a smug lecture to you, you might want to ask yourself in seriousness - why would you think that? Are you trying to tell yourself something?
And yes, you need those water flow control systems with hydro-electric power generation. The only way to shut a turbine or generator down for maintenance, is to stop the water flow to it.
On the bright side of it though. There's always fresh sushi being blasted out of a turbine's exhaust.
So yes, between building the water flow control systems and the sushi. Hydro-electric power has a very real impact on the environment. It's just a smaller impact than other power sources.
DS9 just used a giant fusion plant (which are the auxiliary/impulse reactors on Starfleet starships) - I would figure most power would be handled by that or, given the level of refinement in fabrication, solar power satellites.
Most current designs for fusion plasma reactors aren't likely to be like fusion bombs either given the probable amount of plasma at one time (wouldn't want to be next to one when the vacuum is breached, though).
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and as stated by me and others a matter/anti-matter reactor needs constantly supervision and fails very unsafely.
If there's any inefficient design choices, it's safe to guess the Lukari may be the cause.
well Photon(ic) torpedos have always had anti-matter as part of the warhead and honest you don't need much anti-matter cause damage equilevant to phasers.
Well, the Lukari don't wanna turn the planet into a chemical cesspit where one's lungs begin to melt. I personally would not want to live on the Kentari world, nor let the Kentari repeat it.
How about all of the above? Just because they only mention the hydroelectric turbine in the mission doesn't mean that they aren't using all of those renewable sources. The details of the upgrades in the Renewable Energy track of the colony holding show that they are also using solar, wind and geothermal, at least.
Edit: Quoted the wrong post by the same person. Fixed it now.
Also, remember...this is an alien technology also at work. They might have found way to really get a 'bang for the buck' as it were, with these things. And I'm sure the entire planet can be peppered, here and there, with these little stations.