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Real Fuels


0something0

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2 hours ago, 0something0 said:

NQ said that the game will have lots of types of fuels, so why not have fuels that are in real life?

IIRC they said somewhere that there are different fuel types.

 

Names aren't relevant to me. Call it as you wish - as long as they're well balanced.

 

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2 hours ago, 0something0 said:

NQ said that the game will have lots of types of fuels, so why not have fuels that are in real life?

Pretty sure future fuels will be more energy dense than current fuels - especially where space is concerned. I have no issue with different fuel names to what we know today.

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43 minutes ago, CoreVamore said:

Pretty sure future fuels will be more energy dense than current fuels - especially where space is concerned. I have no issue with different fuel names to what we know today.

Actually, you hit a peak ratio of performance at Hellium-3. Nothing beats Hellium-3 as a fuel source. Mainly cause it doesn't relasse lingering radioactivity, thus not "overheating" so to speak the energy processing medium. And yes, Hellium-3 needs fission to release its fuel, so it's a "reactor" fuel to put it in broad strokes.

Problem with Hellium-3 - like with any fuel - is scarcity. You may say : "but it's the future, we can make fuel like printing monopoly money!".

 

No we can't, we need to add energy into binding the fuel's atomic bonds equal to the amount you want to release with the fuel, so "making" fuel, is as profitable as literally destroying a dollar to get a quarter.

Also, surprisingly, Helium-3 is most likely to be found in space in large quantities - cause cosmic rays easily bakel liquid helium on an asteroid for example - so here's a reason why asteroid mining is profitable. Helium-3 can also be found on natural gas sites, so we can have "natural gas" as a fuel source for like, Tier-1 stuff, with some Hellium-3 harvested in it and hey, if NQ adds "gas harvesting", they can later expand it into gas giant harvesting gameplay :P 

In other words, Helium-3 is Space Oil. Democracy is where the oil is.

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41 minutes ago, 0something0 said:

Antimatter?

You missed the point of performance. It applies across all fields. It's not profitable to mashing atoms to procure antimatter. It's profitable to mine hellium. Unlike Antimatter, Hellium-3 doesn't need stupendous shielding to protect the pilot from radiation, as Hellium-3 is non radioactive and high yielding.. Hence, you hit peak performance on a holistic level,. not just Joules output - there is a reason we don't use the same Uranium that powers Supercarriers IRL, to power our cars, regardless of the more lor less lifetime supply of energy you'd get out of it. Plutonium can kill you by simply doing its job, gas only does it job when it's combusted. And also, reactopr fuel needs a lot of refinement and it's not just naturally occuring. Not to mention, Hellium is very , VERY common element in the universe and Hellium-3 can be an easily accessible fuel, coolant as well as a bunch of other uses. And for DU, it can be easily found on asteroids or moons, and NQ can later even add gas giant harvesting for when they decide to add Gas Giants.

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4 hours ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

You missed the point of performance.

Ahhh.  Antimatter probably will still have its place in warfare and combat, even if rather niche.

 

Back to the main point, its just cooler and more sci-fi if you know that you are handling real substances with real properties with real names. DU also could be used as a learning tool too, and I'm totally not advocating for more realism to get myself the upper hand over people who don't know how this stuff works.

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The future of energy will probably lie in Fusion. If we can build a fusion-generator in the future, then this can be a reality.

130311171613-fusion-power-model-horizont

 

The fact about Deuterium(2H, 1 proton 1 neutron) and Tritium(3H, meaning it has 2 neutrons and 1 proton) are they are abundant in nature as Hydrogen is. They are isotopes of Hydrogen (one is stable and one is radioactive). The nuclear-fusion of these Nucleus(Deuterium and Tritium) from high-temperature and pressure, will result to energy-emission from the proton-release after the reaction, as well as 4He or Helium-4. A single nuclear-fusion can output 17.5MeV of energy, the input-energy required for fusion, I do not know, but it is less. 

 

The advantage of fusion-energy over fission, is the absence/reduction of radioactivity and the more abundant source of fuel(Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe composing of 75%). 

 

If it's the future we are talking about, vehicles and bases will be fusion-powered (not nuclear-fission-powered like nuclear-submarines and aircraft-carriers). Fossil-fuels take millions of years to develop, in the future, their source will inevitably deflate. Thus, we need more renewable source of energy. We can go nuclear(fission) or we can go fusion. The advantage of nuclear-fission is they remain radioactive and will decay in process for a long-time(no need to refuel till the end of life-span). Disadvantage is gamma-ray and free-electron emission.   

 

Anti-matters like Positron(an anti-electron) are elementary-particles. When a positron collides with an electron, they just release energy of photons(gamma-ray) and the particles disappear. The energy-emission is small in output (500KeV) per collision that it's not worth it to harvest these elementary-particles. Did you know that anti-matters are produced from radioactive-decay? Why harvest them when the process to produce them, is energy-emission itself? You can get more energy-output from nuclear fission and fusion than antimatter/matter-collision that it's not even worth it to harvest them for energy-use (which is a hard process anyway).

 

Thus, the most-efficient sources of energy in the future will be solar, nuclear-fission, and nuclear-fusion.

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Also, Helium-3 is harder to source that Tritium. Helium-3 is sourced from beta-decay of Tritium. Tritium can either be produced from decay of 6Li(or Lithium-7) or D-D-fusion(2 Deuteriums).

Fusing 2 Deuteriums(which is abundant) will give you 17.6MeV of energy-output.

You can recycle that Tritium(if you can harvest them) and fusion them further to Deuterium, which will give you another 17.5MeV of energy-output. 

Forget the Lithium and just source everything from Deuterium(which is more abundant) through fusion-process. (right now, they source it from Lithium because fusion is more expensive/harder to achieve).

 

For Helium-3, you can either extract it from nature, or produce them yourself from Tritium-decay. And btw, Helium-3 is non-radioactive, which means you can only use them for fusion(not fission). D - 3He (deuterium to helium-3)-fusion is what goes with it.   

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12 hours ago, 0something0 said:

Antimatter?

anti-matter/matter-collision does not produce more energy than fusion/fission.

How do you extract anti-matter? Through beta-decay. And you are not extracting an isotope here, but elementary particles (which is a harder process). Why go to all of that for less energy output in the end? The only energy this collision produce is from photons(gamma ray) and they are not even an MeV of energy.

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When matter and anti-matter collide the released energy is equally to the in their mass stored energy (e = mc^2) which is significantly more than in fusion or fission. If that energy is unusable is another topic.

The problem with anti-matter is that the storage is rather unpractical: You need a perfect vacuum and a strong magnetic field.

Fusion reactors are unpractiacal for any smaller vehicle because you also need a very strong magnetic field and the minimum size should be much larger than any fission reactor. Also you need a huge amount of energy to power it up in the first place. Where do you wan't to get that energy? Store it in batteries? -> Unpractical.

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@Eternal

 

That's assuming in DU Futurespace Cold Fusion WAS achieved for Deuterium/Tritium to be used for Cold Fusion and "somehow" humanity figured how to bypass the He-2 cockblock that is normal Hellium for fusion purposes to get to a CNO cycle of - potentially - perpetual fusion.

 

Hellium-3 bypasses the whole Helium-2 cockblock :P Sure, it needs MORE energy to kickstart the process, but it will yield a stable fusion in the long run. Which is fine I guess for DU, you put fuel in, it takes a FLAT amount to start the reactor for Hellium-3 and then the fusion consumes a stable m3 of He-3 every minute or second.

And solars winds are excellent for creating He-3 on space rocks :P

 
Also, antimmatter is created from high energy particles colliding AKA turning energy to mass, both matter and antimatter are created.  Don't ned to elaborate, that's not productive, at any rate, for long term fuel - good for warhead payload though, condensing the explosive power, just saying. Also, you forgot to mention something, that only isotopes produce antimatter, not EVERYTHING. No natural antimatter was ever procured though from nature for scientists to study, all the antimatter we have on Earth was procured by CERN or other colliders.

 

Even humans emit antimmater every second, from just drinking water or eating. You don't see the world going up in flames tho :P

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oh gosh, appreantly, Capt.TwerkMotor is one of those He3 truthers. Well, here goes nothing...

 

Why not have both He3 and D-T/D-D fusion? Freedom of choice right? Besides, all the big research projects are focusing on D-T fusion nowadays.

 

LENR could be an interesting thing to see in-game. But so are EMdrives. There also is that Lockheed Martin project to create a truck-sized fusion reactor. But they also had projects resaulting in a crappy and overpriced fighter jet and a *nonexistant* and overpriced rocket. Reminds me of a certain man's lie....

 

I hear that cosmic rays colliding with the atmostphere creates antimatter which is then captured by magnetic fields around Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn. We could potentially harvest antimatter with that. 

 

Of course, the big problem with all this is the fact that there literally is a continous nuclear explosion at the back of the rocket which can be used as a WMD and NQ did say that there will not be any WMDs in the game. 

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@0something0

 

All good points.To add to that,

 

There is also the newly discovered quark fusion reactions. Scientist have found that quark clusters with heavier B Quarks, when fuse together release about 8 times as much energy as standard nuclear fusion. Which makes it viable as a power source, or possibly a propulsion system.


Lightning strikes is a natural phenomenon that produces antimatter, it happens all the time all over the earth. Basically, gamma rays created by lightning strikes split nitrogen in the atmosphere, producing neutrons, and positrons. Based on that, it could be replicated under the right conditions, and certainly be a viable fuel source, or propulsion system.

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

As far as I can tell, matter-anti matter is the way to go for large scale applications. Fusion might make sense in smaller applications, assuming a standard sci-fi miniaturisation process having taken place. Heck, maybe batteries charged off of one of these supplies might be better still.

 

Anti matter is hard to produce, atm, but isn't that hard to store. Charged animatter (positrons) can be stored in a magnetic field, similar to how a fusion reaction would have to be contained. And while maintaining such a field would require a great amount of energy, the benefit on a Joule per gram basis would be well worth it.

 

Finally, I picked up somehwere the idea that anti matter might be harvested at the event horizon of a black hole,. Here, excesses of energy might result in paired particles, matter and anti matter. There is a chance that when such an occasion occurs, the matter is generated inside the event horizon while the anti-matter is generated outside of it, ready to be scooped up, he said over looking the difficulty of approaching a black hole..

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