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:
- 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.
- 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.
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