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Nuclear/Electronic/Gas(I'm assuming petro)

Always seemed... off... to me in the books, all of them to be exact, and yes yes, I know the information in the books were made 15+ years ago before the fancy internet and only thing you had was TNG/Star wars and a few other scifi shows and b-rated movies.

I would think everyone on planet earth would be leery as heck about anything nuclear, especially after what happened to the planet on that not so fun day(also I picture fallout 3 when you shoot a car). Yet seems everyone and their mother has something in their home that runs on nuclear energy in some form or another(where are they getting all of the nuclear materials and refining it? And don't say a Rift).

Batteries suck, big time, I actually run a house-rule on e-clips(or electric vehicles, etc) that they only have a shelf life of a year before they start degrading(Everyone knows batteries become unusable at some point. E-clips are just batteries. And I take a note when they do buy them.) so they have to sell/replace them as needed, also a GOOD way to make players keep track of ammo I found.

Gas is ok, but I don't see anyone insane enough to go venturing out as a company to drill for oil(if there is even any left in the first place 200+ years in the future.), I mean I did read atlantis and underseas, yeah, how about NO? You thought gas prices were high now? Ha! But yes, I know that you "can" make an engine run on just about anything that can combust, anyone that has a diesel knows this.

Combustible/Electric, Ok, I said I don't like batteries, but this is still a viable option.

Hydrogen/Electric, I personally use this for almost all vehicles(even down to electric bikes!). My thoughts are, by the end of the 21st century before the bombs exploded, honda "convinced" the world their hydrogen/electric cars as seen on top gear were the way of the future(honestly, I hope to god they catch on in RL. They just make sense, unlike the Volt.), and oil was $20 an ounce or worth more than gold. Instead of a high pressure tank, they used a low pressure tank, you know, to avoid exploding when ruptured. Military grade is "Just add water or anything with water."

Solar is always an option, if you have a few days to wait around.

Wind is great for GM's, we tend to talk... a lot... And who doesn't want to take over the world in a dirigible?

Magnets, seriously, how do they work? No really, I thought about this one too, the whole perpetual motion machine though it is impossible to get 100%+ energy out of something, I do see some form of this coming into play somehow in the future.

Natural gas, methane to whatever, viable for a lot of things, even engines, and you can get it from a lot of places.

Your ideas you've come up with?

Space stuff:

I'm still working on this one. But for now, I would use energy sources from scifi shows, basically take the levels of tech between them and put them in their own respective levels of output power and speeds, scrap the books entirely other than weapons and ships, and even then it's "iffy", and even then, players have yet to get off earth, even though they have been to splynn countless times! fffs! I'm about ready to have a rift open in their tent/vehicle/hotel at night cause I want some space action, even though it would be wildly hilarious to see them in a ship since none of them have any clue how to use them, even the toilet, well unless I put gravity generators on them, and for fun, I probably wouldn't at first until they worked up from pile-o-crap to juggernaut of blasty doom.

actually nuclear powerplants and nuclear bombs are totally different things. they use different nuclear fuels and totally different designs. a nuclear powerplant could no more explode than a nuclear bomb could generate electricity.

and while modern batteries are somewhat limited, an E-clip store over 100 megajoule of energy. that is enough electrial power to run an average computer for months, or to power a electric car for several thousand miles. all in a package the size of a paperback book and weighing only a few pounds.

and because E-clips do not self-recharge over time, they are actually more like capacitors, which have an extremely long shelf-life when charged. this is because they merely store power in a solid state component. a battery used chemical bonds and reactions to store power, and as a result not only can recharge gradually to a limited extent, but also have peak output limits and issues with degradation of the chemicals.
a capacitor is basically a sandwich of materails. connect it up one way and the electricity that enters it is trapped. connect it up another way and that electricity can be drained at any rate you need, including all at once in one big release.


many of the alternative fuels beng researched today are driven by the false assumption that oil is going tobecome a scarce resource in the near future. regular discoveries of new feilds make that assumption false, as does recent developments in things such as oil shale extraction and improved cracking and refining methods. much of the current high oil price stems from the primary producers choices to limit output (in order to drive up prices), and a general lack of alternative producers for the resource at this time.

and many of the alternatives proposed are currently unviable, and by their mechanics may remain that way. Hydrogen power requires hydrogen. producing hydrogen in large quantities is a very power intensive process despite it's simplicity, you pretty much need nuclear power to handle the loads economically. oil and coal power pollutes too much and solar and wind are too low in energy density to provide such power cheaply. (having to carpet rhode island with ultra efficent solar panels just to produce your hydrogen fuel is a bit pricy) not to mention that hydrogen is extremely difficult to store and handle. it's atoms are so small that it can diffuse through just about everything, making long term storage difficult. and it has such low density that you can not store much of it in any given volume. the density issue can be solved with producing liquid hydrogen, but that is a cryogenic fuel, requiring storage and hundreds below zero temps. this requires powerful active cooling systems, which use alot of electrical power and are very bulky, something that tends to negate any benefit in greater hydrogen density.

and if you have nuclear power that can run a hydrogen production plant, with E-clip power storage tech you can make electric cars that have superior performance to most modern gasoline vehicles.


magnetic "perpetual motion" is a scam, and far less efficent than even gasoline. all it does is convert the potential energy locked in the molecular arrangement of certain metals into kinetic energy, and fairly low amounts at that. in the process it degrades the molecular arrangement.



the big post-rifts fueles would be bio-fuels made from agricultural byproducts, and alchohol based fuels. both are fairly easy to make and can be used in normal combustion engines. one would expect every wilderness community to have at least one large Still, since alchohol is such a useful medical and sanitary tool. a distillery to refine that alchohol into better forms would be expected of the larger ones.

The best next step, today, for the mass fuel sorce is hydrogen gas. It is able to burn in internal combustion engines much like petrol does now.

General_Failure wrote:Nuclear/Electronic/Gas(I'm assuming petro)

Always seemed... off... to me in the books, all of them to be exact, and yes yes, I know the information in the books were made 15+ years ago before the fancy internet and only thing you had was TNG/Star wars and a few other scifi shows and b-rated movies.

I would think everyone on planet earth would be leery as heck about anything nuclear, especially after what happened to the planet on that not so fun day(also I picture fallout 3 when you shoot a car). Yet seems everyone and their mother has something in their home that runs on nuclear energy in some form or another(where are they getting all of the nuclear materials and refining it? And don't say a Rift).

Batteries suck, big time, I actually run a house-rule on e-clips(or electric vehicles, etc) that they only have a shelf life of a year before they start degrading(Everyone knows batteries become unusable at some point. E-clips are just batteries. And I take a note when they do buy them.) so they have to sell/replace them as needed, also a GOOD way to make players keep track of ammo I found.

Gas is ok, but I don't see anyone insane enough to go venturing out as a company to drill for oil(if there is even any left in the first place 200+ years in the future.), I mean I did read atlantis and underseas, yeah, how about NO? You thought gas prices were high now? Ha! But yes, I know that you "can" make an engine run on just about anything that can combust, anyone that has a diesel knows this.

Combustible/Electric, Ok, I said I don't like batteries, but this is still a viable option.

Hydrogen/Electric, I personally use this for almost all vehicles(even down to electric bikes!). My thoughts are, by the end of the 21st century before the bombs exploded, honda "convinced" the world their hydrogen/electric cars as seen on top gear were the way of the future(honestly, I hope to god they catch on in RL. They just make sense, unlike the Volt.), and oil was $20 an ounce or worth more than gold. Instead of a high pressure tank, they used a low pressure tank, you know, to avoid exploding when ruptured. Military grade is "Just add water or anything with water."

Solar is always an option, if you have a few days to wait around.

Wind is great for GM's, we tend to talk... a lot... And who doesn't want to take over the world in a dirigible?

Magnets, seriously, how do they work? No really, I thought about this one too, the whole perpetual motion machine though it is impossible to get 100%+ energy out of something, I do see some form of this coming into play somehow in the future.

Natural gas, methane to whatever, viable for a lot of things, even engines, and you can get it from a lot of places.

Your ideas you've come up with?

Space stuff:

I'm still working on this one. But for now, I would use energy sources from scifi shows, basically take the levels of tech between them and put them in their own respective levels of output power and speeds, scrap the books entirely other than weapons and ships, and even then it's "iffy", and even then, players have yet to get off earth, even though they have been to splynn countless times! fffs! I'm about ready to have a rift open in their tent/vehicle/hotel at night cause I want some space action, even though it would be wildly hilarious to see them in a ship since none of them have any clue how to use them, even the toilet, well unless I put gravity generators on them, and for fun, I probably wouldn't at first until they worked up from pile-o-crap to juggernaut of blasty doom.

There is no reason to believe batteries would die so quickly in the future. New chemical structures get better everytime. There are even newer batteries closer to being capacitors which can last for decades without failing. If the house rule adds fun to the game then by all means keep it, but the futurist in me says the eclips reliability would be longer than most humans careers.

As for nuclear, they're not using anything we'd recognize. Nuclear powerplants use the nuclear fuel to heat up water and then the water spins a turbine to generate electricity (exact same way coal and gas plants do). Any able to imagine how that setup would fit on a SAMAS?

Ethanol
Wood Gas
Geothermal
Steam
Telekinesis
Ley Line Energy
Etc.

kamikazzijoe wrote: Any able to imagine how that setup would fit on a SAMAS?

I'm sure this has been discussed at length in other threads. Perhaps it is an advanced type of RTG (Radioisotope thermoelectric generator)?