Hell's Faire

"Hell's Faire" (John Rngo) - This is the fourth book in the Posleen trilogy.  Apparently, Ringo was finishing the third book when 9/11 happened, and got writer's block through press time.  This book continues where the third left off (plus a small - "we last left our heros"), and finishes the war on Earth.

Ringo says in the afterword that this series was written for his enjoyment (not intended for publishing).  If you don't take it too seriously, it is definitely fun.  The Sheva (named Bun Bun, after Sluggy Freelance) gets up-armored and close support weapons and fights its way towards the main character.

Blackhole Applications

I've been trying to work through some of the implications of constructing and using artificial black holes.

It's particularly interesting, because the numbers are very constrained: either you get a lot of power for a short time (and light mass), or less power for longer time (and high mass).

My latest problem is dealing with increasing power over the lifetime.  A hole which is going to last 20 years, will deliver 66% more power after just 10 years (and things start to get out of hand after that).

I see several possibilities:

1. Design for final power - with longer lasting holes, this isn't too bad.  An 800 year hole (6.7e8 kg) will produce just 10% more power after 100 years.  But with our 20 year hole, you are significantly underpowered (or over-engineered) for most of your usable life.
2. Refit over time - either transplant the hole into a new hull every once in a while, or perform deep reconstruction every few years.  This seems possible, but you need to make sure you don't miss a refit!

This also brings up another issue: disposal (or recharging) of holes.

When a hole hits about 2.28e5 kg, the lifetime is roughly 1 second - that's 2e22 J released in one second (so, Watts).

Basically an enormous bomb (almost 5 million megatons of TNT).

Easy disposal is to chuck the thing into the sun before it gets to this point.  But that needs to be included in the cost - you're building up a lot of energy which you are going to throw away.

"Recharging" would require putting mass back into the hole (which is likely pouring out gigawatts of hard x-rays and gamma rays).  Not an easy task.

Solar Germany

A fascinating post from Ars:

"That has rocketed from an installed capacity of 6GW in 2008 to 25GW in 2011—amounting to half the world's installed solar power, with 7.5GW installed in that year alone."

The article has some interesting data about the bulk price of electricity, but I was startled by these numbers.

I recently heard Germany was going to shut down all their nuclear reactors.  I figured they were on a trend to freeze to death just before the lights go out (I'm pessimistic like that :)

From Wikipedia:

"The installed nuclear power capacity in Germany was 20 GW in 2008 and 21 GW in 2004."

So recent solar panel installations have nearly replaced nuclear.

That is a _lot_ of solar panels.  There are a lot of factors, but there is only about 1 KW/m^2 to work with (and efficiency should cut into that hard).

Or, at least 25 million square meters of panel!

US production from solar? 0.9 GW (2010) - yay us.