perfidy

What are the martial applications of this technology? Vehicles with tiny fusion reactors in them that run on...um...deuterium coated wires? What about as ordnance?

If we got cold fusion, uh, fusing and producing significant amounts of juicy current, the immediate result would be things like lasers and railguns. We know, generally speaking, how to build them. The problem is powering them. If we had a compact, reliable and powerful energy source you could put in a humvee, well, somebody would start hooking up the lasers.

The other quick application would be electric power for vehicles. That woulld take longer, 'cause you'd have to build new vehicles. But slap an electric motor behind every wheel, hook up Mr. Fusion, and you have silent but fast armored race cars

Well, I checked over there and see a $92k base price, which is within bounds both for a race car and a military vehicle.

I think a reliable electric motor that could push heavy armor 200 miles without recharging would be effing phenomenal. Thinnk of the tactical possibilities with an armored task force powered by these Tesla drives, that can leave an assembly area and go go go without having to consider the fuel constraints as hoggish modern equipment does.

Although you would have to field portable power systems/vehicles to recharge your fighting vehicles, an activity that would take several hours per vehicle. That could get hairy if you can only recharge, say, 1 tank platoon simultaneously. Hmm.

Well I think it would be totally worth it if the new tanks had honest-to-Gaia rail guns, such that a nugget of a projectile can tear the turrets off enemy armor.

But of course, there's no reason nnot to think that we will face similar martial commitments in the future as we do today. As it is, we have pretty modern systems facing snipers and saboteurs. In that line of thinking it's not so hard to imagine that instead of M1A1's with all the networked this and chobham that and sabot-ed what have you going up against small arms and RPGs and pointy sticks, we have our tesla drive tanks with rail guns and ballistic interdiction fields. Uh, going up against suicide bombers and pointy sticks.

If we had a real power source - say, if Mr. Fusion was producing the power of a small conventional powerplant - think of the possibilities. You could make a smaller vehicle, and not worry about weight - only volume. DU armor and whatnot. Electric motors (highly reliable, only one moving part) would have functionally unlimited juice from fusion. You could move fast, be agile and still have armor. Even on the bottom.

And, you could have power to spare for laser anti-mortar/anti-rpg systems. And for a rail gun. Load up with anti-personnel weapons. It would kick ass.

That Tesla roadster, though, even without Mr. Fusion - is pretty damn cool. It's powered by hundreds of laptop batteries, and accelerates as fast as a Ferrari F1 and no gears. Which again goes to show how pathetic our battery technology is compared to advances in other fields.

Ah, ok, I was conflating ideas there. The heavy armored fighting vehicles would have to be fusion powered to work the way we're thinking, and have nothing to do with batteries and recharging.

I'm with it now.

Is a fusion reaction more stable or, put another way, less destructive potentially than fission?

I'm thinking along the lines of Haldeman/Heinlein/Jackson armored infantry battlesuits here, powered by a tiny fusion reactor.

Which, as is usually the case, is not far from my thinking anyway.

It depends on the type of fusion, really. Fission-triggered thermonuclear fusion is not generally considered stable. Various means of creating fusion with lasers, inertial confinement, etc. are stable, sort of, because if you turn off the power the fusion goes away, and doesn't generate more power than you put in anyway.

If our cold-fusion generator actually gets working, I imagine it would be relatively stable. No idea how much power it would generate, though.

If a compact Mr. Fusion could be developed, the possibilities really are endless. There's lots of stuff we know how to do but can't find power for - at least on a small scale. We can build powerful lasers that suck the power out of an electrical grid - but certainly can't put them on a tank or plane, let alone in the hands of a soldier or Marine.

The big thing, really, is energy density. The greater the energy density, the more interesting shit you can do. That's why solar and wind power is a crock of shit, for anything except adding a little power around the edges. Concentrated power allows industry, blah blah blah.

Two things would allow us to go nuts, technologically. Either a compact energy source, like Mr. Fusion, or a super-efficient energy bucket orders of magnitude better than our current batteries.

Powered armor suits, air cars, hover tanks, lasers, railguns, all of this could be ours.

And then what? What are the ramifications on limitless cheap energy on international relations?

Another way to ask this is, how will America be blamed when there are countries that do not have access to fusion reactors?

The ramifications on international relations (how countries fuck each other) could be extreme. Think about it - if the Middle East goes back to being a strategic backwater once they are no longer sitting on the biggest deposits of something the rest of the world needs desperately, what will they do? Without oil money to fund their shenanigans, things could be quite different. Even worse, if they realize that a window of opportunity is closing with the departure of easy cash.

Hugo Chavez will be screwed.

Things would be very different.

And just imagine what will happen if someone figures out how to weaponize a cold fusion reactor. Usually, we figure weapons-type uses first, but that doesn't mean that we can't figure one out for this. If people could build a pony thermonuclear bomb without uranium or plutonium, that could be very bad. Don't know if that is even theoretically possible, of course (even the big brains don't know if non-bomb cold fusion is practicable) but if you can pull energy out of something, you ought to be able, somehow, to make a bomb out of it.

Darn you, Buckethead, for mentioning hovertanks! Hammer's Slammers, anyone?

Seriously, if you haven't read it, it's by David Drake. Go read it.

Ian

Hehe. I typed "d a r n you, Buckethead" and somehow the code gnomes appear to have played a bit of a prank...

Ian

It was a pleasure meeting you this weekend. Perhaps we can have yet another philosophical debate sometime. Looking forward to next year....