How do Honorverse ships generate their energy?

cthia wrote:Are there many sci-fi works whose warships are not powered by handwavium?

Fasset Drives — that is, a ship generates an artificial black hole that draws the ship toward it. At the same time, the black hole moves away from the ship since the ship is generating the thing. This leads to unlimited acceleration. When the ship hits 1.0c, something technobabbly happens and the ship enters wormhole space, where it can go much faster than should be possible (to the tune of several thousand times the speed of light).

Jonathan_S wrote:

cthia wrote:But the wedge is probably the most fascinating of all. There we have gobs of energy that can act like a waste dump and absorb excess heat. And it can destroy anything it comes into contact with. But it has absolutely no ability to power anything.

Except for itself. The majority of the power to run the wedge comes from an "energy siphon" effect pulling power out of the hyper wall so the ships don't need to carry the fuel to produce the vast amounts of power needed to accelerate to large fractions of the speed of light.

But apparently they're not net energy producers and still require power from the reactor to sustain the wedge and provide acceleration; it's just a small fraction of the total power being put into raising the ship's kinetic energy.

In theory you should be able to somehow recover some of that extreme kinetic energy as a power source - but the Honorverse doesn't seem to.


OTOH sail, while within a grav wave, do produce some amount of net energy, which is why you can dial down, or even turn off, your reactor and pull power to run the ship systems from the sails. (It doesn't seem to be a huge amount of net energy -- and most skippers, and certainly warship captains, aren't going to fully shut down their reactor. They'll want it at least trickling over and ready to quickly ramp up and take the load should some emergency occur or you need to dive out of hyper unexpectedly)


But the mechanics of how electricity is extracted from the fusion reactors? Well that's just never, to the best of my recollection, described. (The basic mechanism of how the fusion is achieved, sure that's mentioned, but not how electricity is extracted from it after it fuses)

tlb wrote:
But if you think the Honorverse is bad, consider In Fury Born also by David Weber.

A magnetohydrodynamic generator (MHD generator) is a magnetohydrodynamic converter that utilizes a Brayton cycle to transform thermal energy and kinetic energy directly into electricity. MHD generators are different from traditional electric generators in that they operate without moving parts (e.g. no turbine) to limit the upper temperature. They therefore have the highest known theoretical thermodynamic efficiency of any electrical generation method.

[...]

An MHD generator, like a conventional generator, relies on moving a conductor through a magnetic field to generate electric current. The MHD generator uses hot conductive ionized gas (a plasma) as the moving conductor. The mechanical dynamo, in contrast, uses the motion of mechanical devices to accomplish this.

clancy688 wrote:In another forum, this was pointed out to me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohy ... _generator


This might be a neat solution.

kzt wrote:

tlb wrote:
But if you think the Honorverse is bad, consider In Fury Born also by David Weber.

Alan Dean Foster's KK drive works similarly. Not sure if it was the first example of that idea.

clancy688 wrote:In another forum, this was pointed out to me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohy ... _generator

A magnetohydrodynamic generator (MHD generator) is a magnetohydrodynamic converter that utilizes a Brayton cycle to transform thermal energy and kinetic energy directly into electricity. MHD generators are different from traditional electric generators in that they operate without moving parts (e.g. no turbine) to limit the upper temperature. They therefore have the highest known theoretical thermodynamic efficiency of any electrical generation method.

[...]

An MHD generator, like a conventional generator, relies on moving a conductor through a magnetic field to generate electric current. The MHD generator uses hot conductive ionized gas (a plasma) as the moving conductor. The mechanical dynamo, in contrast, uses the motion of mechanical devices to accomplish this.

This might be a neat solution.

tlb wrote:But if you think the Honorverse is bad, consider In Fury Born also by David Weber. Here is a description from TV Tropes of its drive:

Fasset Drives — that is, a ship generates an artificial black hole that draws the ship toward it. At the same time, the black hole moves away from the ship since the ship is generating the thing. This leads to unlimited acceleration. When the ship hits 1.0c, something technobabbly happens and the ship enters wormhole space, where it can go much faster than should be possible (to the tune of several thousand times the speed of light).

You can try to rationalize it by saying the ship is creating a temporary black hole a fixed distance ahead which accelerates the ship until it disappears and then the process repeats; but that does not consider the energy involved. If it is not a temporary black hole, then there is no acceleration; because the pull on the ship is cancelled by whatever force keeps the black hole at a fixed distance.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Aside from going faster than light, using black holes for drives is possible, in theory, within our existing knowledge of physics.