Craftable utility lights

[Zhilkin]

See Construction recipe: Build utility light.

[Erk]

To start, I’d assume we’re not using incandescent bulbs, so that’s about 20W using an LED floodlight. This is the 2040s, and even now it’s trivial to get low power led lights.

There are numerous ~20W RTGs used in aerospace that run in the 10-40kg range in the article you listed… The terrestrial ones listed are huge because they’re all obsolete, antique Soviet designs used in remote lighthouses. Not exactly a reasonable comparison.

That said, there’s no reason this thing has to be compact. I’d be perfectly happy with it being 200kg.

[kevin.granade]

I’d assume we’re not using incandescent bulbs,

Me either.

so that’s about 20W using an LED floodlight.

Wat, no, a serious LED floodlight is still going to be in the neighborhood of 100W.

This is the 2040s,

No, it isn’t, it’s present day.

There are numerous ~20W RTGs used in aerospace

That’s not just aerospace, it’s space travel, which is code for, “you’re not building it”.

huge because they’re all obsolete, antique

No, they’re huge because it keeps costs down. There’s not that much you can do to improve efficiency without also making them much more expensive to build.

[Midas]

Plus, who wants to build a shitload of frames with a floodlight and engines+alternators/solar panels/storage batteries that make tons of noise & smoke, and need to be regularly refueled or micromanaged.

That’s the point, if you need a light, you’ll have to find a solution, i.e. build solar panels/alternator and attach them to a floodlight. If you have a problem, you should solve it.

RTG is a complex and dangerous device made with precise equipment, and I doubt a survivor would be able to construct one.

[Azure_Soul_Azur]

What about finding one?

Well really i don’t care what is done.

Just that i don’t have to go through a load of bull to get my bunker i dug out lit up.

If whats in the game atm is made better then thats fine.

[nameless_survivor]

What about if its using a betavoltaic device to power it, rather than an RTG? I always figured something like this was what the plutonium cells were in the first place, and what the smaller atomic powered things were using, like the atomic coffee maker.

Betavoltaic device

The only reason they aren’t more widely used is that lithium ion batteries were invented. They can be made compact enough that they were being used to run pacemakers in the 70’s. There are also versions which run off of charged alpha particles (aka helium nuclei).

A recent one had an energy density of 3.3 KwH/kg and a half life of 100 years. For comparison, a lithium ion battery has an energy density of 11.6 KwH/kg.

It isn’t something you would make yourself, but it is something you could find or remove from some piece of equipment and repurpose.

[Erk]

My heart’s not really in it for a prolonged argument about whether or not compact nuclear cells would be available in a world where we can create weapons-grade laser beams the size of a finger and surgically install them using a small AI driven robot (with no visible power supply mind you) available in any medium sized hospital and several civilian basements, with no risk of infection or rejection.

My point is that by mid-game, the systems needed to get decent lighting underground stop being a fun challenge, and starts being an onerous nuisance. Eventually we could fix this with better power grids, but there are tools in game to make a believable long-term light source. If you’re dead set on leaving it annoying, I’m done arguing about it, I’ll just change my own game and be done.

[DrakeDragon8]

I have no problems with this and if an alternative is needed use something biological it might help a bit more with realism… maybe? I just like this idea as it would be very useful to have at any point.

[kevin.granade]

My heart’s not really in it for a prolonged argument about whether or not compact nuclear cells would be available in a world where we can create weapons-grade laser beams the size of a finger and surgically install them using a small AI driven robot (with no visible power supply mind you) available in any medium sized hospital and several civilian basements, with no risk of infection or rejection.

That’s good, because there’s no winning that argument, it’s built on a pile of fallacies.

by mid-game, the systems needed to get decent lighting underground stop being a fun challenge,

I don’t have a problem fixing that, but making a unrealistically cheap power supply isn’t an option.

there are tools in game to make a believable long-term light source.

There are, but it’s a 100+kg RTG that requires ~50 plutonium cells to build, not a 10kg one that takes a handful of cells. The investment just doesn’t make sense.

On the other hand, it seems like the real issue is a lack of convenience and some features related to getting power transfer working between levels, which should be fixable even in the short term.

a betavoltaic device

Your source doesn’t have any references for large-scale Betavoltaic devices, only tiny ones.

[Trigon]

With all the arguments against player built setups like this it just makes me wonder about the atomic lamp. How is it supposed to operate? Magic?

I do think making a foldable utility light level thing is probably outside the realm of what the player should be able to do without tapping into vehicle use, and tossing more plutonium at it doesn’t inherently balance it.

[Erk]

Out of curiosity, Kevin, what are you picturing when I say utility light? Because I’ve got a light that runs on a small Li battery for hours and lights up my entire backyard quite nicely. It’s what I’m picturing, albeit much bulkier and clunkier when rigged up by a survivor. It puts out like 2600 lumens on an 18v battery and lasts for hours. I think it’s 15W.

I get the impression you think I’m talking about a giant daylight array like they use to light up industrial sites at night.

[nameless_survivor]

Here is a patent for a betavoltaic device that can recharge a cell phone. This type of technology is very scaleable, its just currently expensive and kind of niche compared to lithium ion batteries.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8872408

Since you don’t want to do the utility light thing, this would still be worthy of further review for implementation elsewhere. Maybe as a reward for a lab. A small perpetual power supply mod for tools, or a trickle charge bionic power supply or something.

[DrakeDragon8]

You know after playing some ss13 and coming back to this, a fun alternative might be some bio-luminescent fungus or other such things… which might be good for wilderness characters… fireflies in jars… capturing glowing creatures… seems like fun

[nameless_survivor]

Like a glowing blob in a jar. I can see it now:

“This is a small glowing blob sealed inside a glass jar. It seems to glow angrily at its confinement”.

[kevin.granade]

what are you picturing when I say utility light?

As I said, a 100W floodlight, but it doesn’t really matter since there are no RTGs that provide even 15W without leaving the parameters I outlined.

Here is a patent for a betavoltaic device

Please provide info on actual devices, patent filings can be entirely fabricated, and don’t provide the data necessary to evaluate the claims. For example that patent cites a 1W+ output, but doesn’t cite how much radioactive material, generator circuitry or shielding is required for the device.

[Erk]

Regarding betavoltaics, they sound like what I thought plutonium cells were from description. A single cubic cm cell from 1970, the betacell, produced 0.4W using prometheum. We use plutonium in some pacemakers, but I have no idea the output… They’re built for small size, not battery output.

Still, it’s deeply strange to me that we have access to milspec plutonium batteries but apparently they can’t put out enough power to run a light bulb. What are they for?

[nameless_survivor]

These things are being made microchip sized presently. Stringing a few together in parallel would easily outperform a large RTG.
I hope this meets your information requirements:

Commercial betavoltaic battery manufacturer website & product listing with specifications:
https://citylabs.net/products/

Online Trade magazine article:

Power surge: developing the next generation of nuclear batteries

Army Technology Review:
M. Litz, “Isotope Beta-Battery Approaches For Long-Lived Sensors: Technology Review,” Army Research Laboratory, ARL-TR-7048, August 2014.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/lanham2/docs/ARL-TR-7048.pdf

Scholarly Paper: Principles of Betavoltaic Battery Design:
http://www.ethanpublishing.com/uploadfile/2016/0712/20160712120219845.pdf

As far as I can tell, the primary reasons there aren’t any larger scale individual devices presently is that this is still a maturing technology, and lithium ion batteries are cheaper for commercial electronics, rather than due to a physical limitation on scale or output.

[kevin.granade]

Plenty of information, but the examples seem to produce power in the microwatt range, which is not what we’re talking about.

As far as I can tell, the primary reasons there aren’t any larger scale individual devices presently is

This is an assumption. MY assumption about this is that the things are ridiculously expensive and impractical, and the only time you would ever use them is if you have no alternative.

[Erk]

Those ones are pretty fancy. On a more attainable note, I’ve been having a good time reading about nuclear pacemaker batteries.

0.17g of plutonium in a battery developed in the sixties was sufficient for a 400 uW output. The papers about it are fascinating. As I understand it this is indeed a technology that scales very well… I’m trying to find the scale of the original batteries, most of which was containment and capturing material, to calculate what the output of our existing plutonium cells would be if they were BV cells of comparable efficiency. I keep getting bogged down in super interesting medical history though so don’t expect me back soon.

[nameless_survivor]

Look, a lot of this stuff is locked behind paywalls, I can’t get to (or even show you if I could without breaking the law) everything that is out there.

But based off of what information IS readily available on how they are designed and function there is ZERO EVIDENCE indicating a physical limitation on scale, or that they will always be commercially inviable. I can’t disprove a negative Kevin.

Also, there is plenty of documentation on WHY they aren’t used presently. Half the damn articles you find on google about BVD’s talk about why lithium ion batteries killed them off for a lot of applications, and plenty talk about how they may become cheaper and better in the future.