Power Satalites? Options

[Pelaka]

In the history section they mentioned that a lart part of the Japanese Megas' success was due to their early rollout of cost competative power satalites. Is this new? I don't remember this from any prior work. I would think that power satalites would have had pretty serious implications for all the green story arcs throughout the game.

Pel

[Tzeentch]

Without checking, I believe they were mentioned in one of the old NAN books.

[mfb]

the japanese microwave satellites have been around for quite a while. that's how they got the economy boost that propelled the nation into imperialism, actually.

[FrankTrollman]

...maybe they are targettable satelites? If they work like Tesla Coils, or other modern day wide-area power broadcasting technology, then solar powered satelite power stations would basically make power cheap and easy for everyone (and give us all cancer). If the Imperial government can choose who gets power beamed to them and who does not, then it's a huge boost to Japanese Imperialism. Japan simply comes knocking on Bali's door and says "If you let our corps in, and kick other corps out, we will give you electrical power all over your country, otherwise we won't."

-Frank

[mfb]

given the craziocity that happened with california, i suppose it's not unreasonable for the power satellites to just broadcast microwaves throughout their entire footprint, which magically don't cook all the fleshy, walking burritos that inhabit that footprint. but if i were using reason, i'd say that the satellites beam energy to spot targets.

[Xenith]

I might add that said satalites are already at the prototype stage... in Japan.. in the real world. There are apparently certain frequencies of microwaves that pass through cloud cover and such, can be pulsed in a condensed beam to an area about half the size of a football field and "leakage" would be nonexistant outside of a 100 ft radius (large but... sorta contained).

Edit: an additional 100 ft to the radius of the area is what I meant. :)

[Penta]

Xenith: I'm going to have to ask you to cite your source on that.

[Ancient History]

[kigmatzomat]

link to the U.S. Department of Energy article on solar power satellites.

Space.Com talks about them here.

And, of course, there is a wikipedia article.


Short answer: they could have been done in the 60's but would have been rediculously expensive for the power acquired. Thanks to improved photovoltaics (Yay 16-30% efficient cells) and advances in material science, it might not be cost-prohibitive now. If you did it incrementally (read the Space.Com article about using the station to recharge satellites) it might even be profitable.

If I understand the SR4 text, it says that the first sats weren't used in Japan but in 3rd world areas where they could charge a premium and basically stage a land-grab. "You barbarians obey or the satellite turns off." They provided the basic infrastructure and established a monopoly which resulted in them having defacto colonies.

[Xenith]

The site I got my original data from does not exist anymore. However a far more detailed report is found here:

http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/concept..._sps_2000.shtml

My quote for the area of the receiver and its beam spread/leakage could be off or downright wrong, but from what I can gather from this article its rather close to the facts.

Edit: I looked up the international safety standards for mircowave... the article said the satillite is well below International safety standards for microwave exposure. I also looked up an article on the effects of continuous microwave radiation. Perhaps not as solid as I would like but its something.
http://www.ncrponline.org/18Comm_press.html

[kigmatzomat]

[Ancient History]

Broadcast power, Kigma. It's not the same thing as beaming it down to a receiving station.

[Xenith]

Ionization with the beam would violate said International Saftey Standards btw, so broadcasting wouldn't be much of a problem.

And you mean the signals back and forth between the satalite and the reciever? Line of sight microwave transmition or laser. (more likely mircowave) would take care of that.

[kigmatzomat]

[Kagetenshi]

Well, or unless it becomes paid for in taxes or some other relatively unavoidable method.

~J

[hyzmarca]

Broadcast microwave power is impractical for one important reason, the power collected would be equal to the power/area of the beam times the area of the collector. However, the beam will broadcast power to every square milimeter in its area, even those parts that don;t have collectors. This excess energy will either go somewhere or slowly increase the temperature of the area.

Let us say that an average home uses 2000 watts of power at its peak and has a collector on its roof 5 square meters in area. The satellite would have to broadcast a beam with a power of 400 Watts per square meter to keep up with demand. Let us say that the villiage is built in a grid pattern with 4 rows of 25 homes with 4 square meter yards on all sides and 4 roads that are 200 square meters.

This means that the the lawns and roads would soak up a total of (1600 + 1600)square meters * 400 Watts/square meter = 1,280,000 watts.

The Megacorp would be wasting over a million watts of power constantly. They would loose an absurdly large ammount of money. More importantly, 1,280,000 million jouels would be added to a 32,000 m^2 enviroment every second.

1 kilogram of water left outside in a 1 square meter container would boil in less than 17 minutes.

There is a reason solar power requires huge cvollection pannels. If the sun provided a reasonable amount of power to the surface of Earth we would have all boiled to death ages ago.

[kigmatzomat]

Ummm, the sun does provide a reasonable amount of power to the earth's surface. A lot of it gets reflected back to the atmosphere, the rest is absorbed during the day and then radiated at night. A quick googling says we get ~1kW/m^2 at full sun across most of the planet (clear day at noon). Now a good chunk of that energy is used to keep us well above absolute zero, or more accurately the ~4Kelvin that is the "heat death" temperature of the universe.

[littlesean]

Sun power? Sure! I bought a 8"x10" fresnel lense and was able to char wood in less than 10 seconds, lit a fire in 1 minute (with a light breeze blowing) and got a spot on asphalt to melt in two minutes. A lot of power there to be tapped into.
Beaming microwave power to subscribers on demand would be possible, but the logistics could be daunting. Better to beam to a local collection and then distribute with the currently existing infrastructure.

[phelious fogg]

1 kilogram of water left outside in a 1 square meter container would boil in less than 17 minutes.

thats like less than a milimeter of water on the surface (square meter is pretty big, a liter pretty small), the fact that is evaporates in 17 minutes is no surprise at all