It would be nice to have some super valuable atomic engines - perhaps Thorium powered. Something like:
(though it does appear this particular instance is a scam, it is still something research is going into)
Basically, provides steady long term power, if you can get it. Probably should end up being fragile and impossible to repair though, in addition to being rare and hard to find, so it’s a treasure that will really help you but you don’t want to risk losing.
[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:1, topic:3819”]Probably should end up being fragile and impossible to repair though, in addition to being rare and hard to find, so it’s a treasure that will really help you but you don’t want to risk losing.[/quote]I immediately thought of using it as a power generator of sorts, once such abilities are remotely possible.
Small Thorum reactors have many of the same issues as small Plutonium reactors, so if we have a car-sized plutonium reactor, thorium isn’t all that unreasonable.
For context, the state of the art microreactors I’m aware of are many meters across and weigh hundreds to thousands of pounds. On the other hand they put out out tens of MW, so a well outside the scale the player would be messing with.
On the other hand, there are nuclear thermopiles, which weigh between hundreds and thousands of kg, and output tens of Watts continuously and “indefinitely” for the purposes of cataclysm (losing something like 1% of their output per year). Even a slight exaggeration in effacacy puts them on par with solar, trading off continuous operation for weight.
That reminds me, we seriously need to reign in solar power effacy, it’s really out of wack.
Peeve: What the “X energy density OMG!” sound bites don’t tell you is that you can only extract a tiny percentage of that energy before the reactions we can perform stop working.
Fnord Nucleon here I go!