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At least they covered the energy conversion problem. I've always thought it would be easier to skip the electric step and drive a steam engine to drive vehicle

At least they covered the energy conversion problem. I've always thought it would be easier to skip the electric step and drive a steam engine to drive vehicle wheels directly. But of course capturing the expended steam to condense back down to water to feed the loop would be a huge problem. And if you don't do that all you did was trade your fuel source and still have a range problem with water tanks. A nuclear jet engine might be more interesting, directly heating / expanding the air for propulsion with only that single stage of energy conversion. Admittedly whatever is conducting the heat from the core to the air would have to be pretty exotic. Obviously I'm not an engineer and probably reading a little too much scifi.

spijdar 5y ago
Not sure if you're already aware, but attempts at making nuclear jet engines (for the purposes of putting on a jet aircraft) were attempted in the 50s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion Allegedly, Russia finally managed to get this working in 2018, with a nuclear powered missile having "infinite range", although there appears to be no real open information besides Russia saying "we have it" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik
mikro2nd 5y ago
There is no such thing as "too much scifi"...