5 ms·
Why not turn it into microwaves and bounce it via mirrors in orbit? Those cables are super expensive and there is a current shortage of cable manufacturing capa
by politician 5y ago
Why not turn it into microwaves and bounce it via mirrors in orbit? Those cables are super expensive and there is a current shortage of cable manufacturing capacity globally.
- h2odragon 5y agoLess efficient; and it'd be an incredible weapon if it accidentally wandered off path.
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoinverse square law
- shagie 5y agoThat applies to omnidirectional broadcast of power rather than beams.
- beecafe 5y agoYou can't make a perfectly straight beam due to imperfect optics (and diffraction/Huygens principle), so a beam will only reduce the loss by a constant factor, but the area of the beam still increases by n^2 as it propogates.
- posix_me_less 5y agoNo, EM radiation beam still obeys inverse square law.
- shagie 5y agoThe power loss when talking about cables is considered to be quite a bit at about 50% from napkin calculations. The power loss of beamed microwaves is a bit more. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2020.12.026 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2020.12.026 > Finally, the simulation of the long-distance high-power MWPT system can achieve 8.5 kW DC power with about 1% DC–DC transmission efficiency at the operating 2.45 GHz frequency and the 10 km distance away.
- politician 5y agoFor sure, significant power loss. However, given the unavailability of submarine power cable manufacturing capacity [1], perhaps something is better than nothing? [1] Xlinks has to manufacture its own cables, each 3,800km for this project due to insufficient global production capacity. https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/ https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/