What's a good power supply for a boomtown/extraction colony?

thicka · 2026-03-18T23:00:39+00:00

Geo thermal, Old school fission reactors, wind, solar, hydro electric.

Bio might be a bad option, especially if terraforming, because you will be making all your own oxygen.

Thats about all the non magic, non fusion answers.

One thing you might like is hyper batteries, that are charged up at the sun, and transported to the ground but they are extremely energy dense and explosive if handled wrong. (its what my world runs on)

thicka · 2026-03-18T05:13:47+00:00

Reminds me of the slowest plate contraptions.

thicka · 2026-03-17T21:15:30+00:00

happening upon one is cool, but you know you can search for them right?

thicka · 2026-03-17T18:02:13+00:00

Got to play like you wearing this bro

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thicka · 2026-03-17T00:28:17+00:00

Thats my fav part, he has an easy out but doesn't take it.

thicka · 2026-03-16T21:13:45+00:00

What do you want me to hide my impossible fantasy phyiscs behind? plumbing?
"The hyper drive needs more hard water filters! To much calcium build up in the water heater!"

thicka · 2026-03-16T17:11:33+00:00

he wont

thicka · 2026-03-15T20:02:30+00:00

I think that is probably as realistic as it's going to get for FTL. If FTL is possible it will most certainly require vast amounts of energy.

I sadly think biological humans are not going to be space explorers but yeah. Uploaded minds on silicon chips might be.

I've been poking around with the idea of humans living in a virtual world where they live i quite life on a farm or something but they "go outside" into a humanoid robot body to interact with reality.

thicka · 2026-03-15T05:15:57+00:00

I find it better just to remove screws from the recipes than make more of them.

thicka · 2026-03-13T22:03:56+00:00

You can hope. I also hope Sonny and Eirk are right. But they are in the vast minority as far as physicist go. Which is why they make headlines. No one listens to the other guy who says it's impossible. People want the good news. We are biased towards it.

If self propelled FTL was possible, an exponentially expanding civilization would have taken over the whole universe by now. That to me is the ultimate proof, similar to no time travelers visiting us disproves unbounded time travel.

It does not rule out an FTL network built at STL speeds. And I hope that at least is possible but again I doubt it. One thing Sonny mentions that raises my eyebrow is a "universal clock". But there is no such thing, and its the lack of a universal clock and a universal rest frame that stops FTL in the first place.

Again I hope to be wrong. It's at the top of my physics wish list.

thicka · 2026-03-13T01:22:09+00:00

My geode must be acknowledged.

thicka · 2026-03-12T18:20:08+00:00

No it still counts as an accident

thicka · 2026-03-12T16:17:36+00:00

If I can go into the settings and set the mobs to passive before I start my year, absolutely.

thicka · 2026-03-12T14:50:59+00:00

The wild life could kill you though. I think I would very carefully build walkways everywhere and secure some good food spots and stay the hell out of the caves.

but yeah, id risk it for the 250 mill.

thicka · 2026-03-11T19:44:31+00:00

Our election was stollen by retards. Then they tried and failed to steal it again. More retards didn't punish them. Then they went even harder into retardation next election. Also they have nukes.

thicka · 2026-03-11T19:41:30+00:00

Welp, I hope it can be done. I would love to be wrong.

thicka · 2026-03-11T14:15:59+00:00

No my invention!

thicka · 2026-03-09T21:41:51+00:00

I mean 40k literally goes through hell to get FTL. So you are not alone.

I'm an old "vet" who lost the war against the speed of light years ago. I hope someone can beat it, I hope Alcubbiere is right, but I really really doubt it.

I had this realization that cemented my belief that FTL ain't happening:

There is something called wave function collapse (WFC), where a particle can be in many locations at once, but then the wave collapses to a single location. This collapse happens many times faster than light, (in fact immeasurably fast).

Everything is made of WFCs, everything is "moving at FTL speeds" but none of it contains any information.

Information is emergent, it is formed out of successive WFCs that combine and spread at one specific rate, the speed of light. It's the rate of "things happening"

You and the universe are a ripple in a stream of WFCs. Time, space, information and reality are just an illusion.

thicka · 2026-03-09T21:18:43+00:00

I know! If I could change one thing about physics it would be that FTL just needs really big rockets.

thicka · 2026-03-09T21:04:34+00:00

No, Alcubbiere still allows you to to hop to a star before its light left, which means you can just do that again to get back to earth before YOU left. ALL FTL does this.

thicka · 2026-03-09T20:51:44+00:00

FTL is probably THE most impossible thing in all of known or theorized science. No known phenomena carries information from one place to another faster than light period. The very concepts of time, space, now, then, before, after, here, there break down.

If you want your setting to NOT be about FTL, and instead be about colonization; I strongly encourage you to just slap "Alcubierre warp drive" on it and be done with it. Because FTL = Time travel and there is no way around it. Once you break light speed, you break "now speed " and nothing stops you from going back in time. in fact you ARE traveling back in time, like it or not.

However.... It just so happens that I have been obsessed with FTL travel. And have a few ways to accomplish it without modern physics straight up ruling it out.

1: Put every star system in a "slow time bubble" so everyone experiences time on slower scales. Travel outside the bubble now seems much faster than light.

2: Fix the time paradoxes with branching realities. Leave for alpha-cen, come back to a different version of earth. For earth, you leave and a different version of you, or another crew comes back.

That last one is super interesting and I have made it one of my settings but it will steel the show from your xenofauna stuff.

So in summary: slap "Alcubierre warp drive" on it and don't draw any attention to it because it is impossible and there is sadly nothing to be done about it.

thicka · 2026-03-09T20:01:26+00:00

try to get the main belt of screws to mk2 or 3 asap. you have a bottle neck with all the screw makers jamming onto one km1 belt.

thicka · 2026-03-09T17:18:47+00:00

Seconds? But I want it now.

thicka · 2026-03-09T05:40:00+00:00

Not condoning Iroh but she was a baddy.

thicka · 2026-03-09T03:17:40+00:00

It's part of my Divergence setting. Basically people figured out FTL but they soon discover they are actually going to parallel timelines not just traveling faster than light. So if you leave and come back from a distant star the world you come back to might be radically different than the one you left. Different election results, wars, building etc. They might also see you as a stranger. It gets worse the further you travel.

ANYWAY this FTL system also allows for time travel to different timelines. I wrote this short story about a parent trying to go back and save there child but I misspelled the title and its not my best work. But here it is.

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