3 ms·

Local aluminum will be cheaper, and stonkin' high voltage will be needed to combat the ohmic losses. The 'atmosphere' on the moon is rather extremely dry, so co

Local aluminum will be cheaper, and stonkin' high voltage will be needed to combat the ohmic losses. The 'atmosphere' on the moon is rather extremely dry, so corona losses shouldn't be an issue, you could probably run north of a megavolt w/o too much trouble. Now, you could lay both conductors in parallel and only need to build the power line half-way around the moon, probably save some dough on prospecting for and constructing pylon sites that way. Alternatively, you could run a single conductor all the way around. Doing that, you could establish a lunar scale magnetic field, though it'd probably be pretty wimpy unless you ran serious kA (MA?) of current, which would mean much bigger conductors etc, but it's fun to think about. Heck, with a loop that big, you'd probably get significant induction from the solar magnetic field .. which might be something to harness, or might just be a headache for your line operators.

6177c40f 4y ago
This seems like a chicken-and-egg problem. Wouldn't you need power in the first place (and therefore transmission lines) to even extract and refine aluminium locally?
IIsi50MHz 4y ago
> Doing that, you could establish a lunar scale magnetic field, though it'd probably be pretty wimpy unless you ran serious kA (MA?) of current, which would mean much bigger conductors etc, but it's fun to think about. Or a stator in orbit? But hrm… for Mars the same idea needs only 1T to 1.5T stator but has to place xt at lagrange between Mars and Sun. So, I naively guess for the stator to be far enough away that the deflected solar wind merges after the moon could /reall/ mean that the stator would be at lagrange between Earth and Sun, which could have perhaps interesting effects on Earth.