The prevailing factor for a moon collector would be as a beachhead for a moon colony itself. There just isn't any compelling factor for putting up a gigantic solar array on the moon then beaming back that power in a dangerous terrawatt microwave beam.. Now if your gonna use that power for your moon base sure that makes sense. You could use the power to crack the ice and make O2 and you can import the carbon you need to grow plants and stuff.. Though the moon probably is very prone to micrometeorites, so any solar collector will take hits, so it would need alot of redundancy..

-ddn

Ah, the joys of seeing software engineers talking about building real stuff.

Heres the deal: this plan is utterly ridiculous. Yes, a solar panel in space has a marginally increased eficiency as compared to one on land. But then you have to transmit across the athmosphere anyway: oops. And then its a few orders of magnitude more expensive: oops.

This is baloney if there ever was any.

[quote name='ddn3' timestamp='1307224439' post='4819543']
The prevailing factor for a moon collector would be as a beachhead for a moon colony itself. There just isn't any compelling factor for putting up a gigantic solar array on the moon then beaming back that power in a dangerous terrawatt microwave beam.. Now if your gonna use that power for your moon base sure that makes sense. You could use the power to crack the ice and make O2 and you can import the carbon you need to grow plants and stuff.. Though the moon probably is very prone to micrometeorites, so any solar collector will take hits, so it would need alot of redundancy..

-ddn

Considering the amount of radiation the moon gets (in relation to Earth) virtually *any* conceivable solar device is going to work there. Even using lasers for digging the "caves" would make sense ...
[/quote]

Really? You mean 1400W/m2 as opposed to the 1000W/m2 we get on earth (thats a factor 1.4, in case you think i mistyped a zero) is going to justify cost increases of a few orders of magnitude?

Power generation is not really a problem.

The big missing link right now is storage and transportation. Electricity at global scale simply cannot be packaged. The only material in existence which can do that and be used directly is - oil. Or natural gas.

And once you solve that problem, rather than going to moon, declare that Sahara is being oppressed, send a few troops to liberate it and establish democracy. Also, build some power plants. Export that.


Really - we have nuclear fusion reactor, it's free and it will keep going for 4 billion years or so, no maintenance. What we are in dire need of is efficient and high density energy storage in usable form. Energy is stored in coal, nuclear materials and even rivers, but that is not usable form for everyday consumption.

For comparison - your laptop battery stores as much energy as a stick of dynamite. Now imagine powering your house with laptop batteries. Now think a smelting plant which uses megawatts. Now imagine million sticks of dynamite exploding. Hiroshima was only 1/1000 of that. Now go look at a large factory region and see thousands of such factories. Numbers simply don't add up by absurd orders of magnitude. There's talk of using underground salt deposits to store such energy, but that is, again, suitable only for surge buffering and cannot be transported.

Oil is currently the only convenient form and it's not used for direct power generation nor can it be generated. Anything moon - mass starts to matter. To this date, we have only recovered *kilograms* of matter from outside of Earth. A kilogram is about 3 laptop batteries. Fuel cells are starting to look like cold fusion. Year upon year and we're no closer.


And then there's the Occam's razor-like issue. First operational nuclear reactor was built in a basement. They put lots of carbon blocks in it, along with several pieces of Uranium. Then they manually moved control rods in and out until they had steady reaction. To this day, every reactor in production works the same. 4-stroke engine is the same. Trivial, unchanged since invention.

All of these new revolutionary plans have been going on for decades with no working prototype. This basically means they aren't viable. If not even a prototype can be constructed trivially, then the technology will not scale.

Ironically, nuclear power is fantastic for this purpose (see submarines), but it will not and can never be used by civilian population.

Oil is currently the only convenient form and it's not used for direct power generation nor can it be generated. Anything moon - mass starts to matter. To this date, we have only recovered *kilograms* of matter from outside of Earth. A kilogram is about 3 laptop batteries. Fuel cells are starting to look like cold fusion. Year upon year and we're no closer.

No closer to what, exactly? Fuel cells have been used since the 60s to power spacecraft. Apollo and Shuttle both ran on fuel cells. It's surely not a question of them WORKING.

[color=#CCCCCC][size=2]
And then there's the Occam's razor-like issue. First operational nuclear reactor was built in a basement. They put lots of carbon blocks in it, along with several pieces of Uranium. Then they manually moved control rods in and out until they had steady reaction. To this day, every reactor in production works the same. 4-stroke engine is the same. Trivial, unchanged since invention.[/quote]
[color="#cccccc"]

[color="#cccccc"]This isn't true of all inventions, however. Look at the rocket engine - rocket engines generally work on the same basic principles, but come in several different flavors which operate completely differently from one another. Compare solid-fuelled rockets and bipropellant liquid-fuelled rockets, for instance - one has no moving parts and is basically a tube with a solid fuel grain in it. The other is a complex assortment of plumping that delivers separate fuel and oxidizers to a combustion chamber at one end of the rocket. You could even look at some monopropellant rockets, which use a single fuel that decomposes into the exhaust gas after passing through a catalyst in the combustion chamber. Same end results, same general physics principles - wildly different implementations.
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All of these new revolutionary plans have been going on for decades with no working prototype.[/quote]

This isn't always true. Look at the history of fusion power. Look at what's happening with Polywell reactors, which are basically configurations of Farnsworth/Hirsch-Meeks fusors that address the net-power issues involved in that kind of device. Same principle (inertial electrostatic confinement fusion), but different implementations, and only a few may end up viable. Sometimes a prototype might be trivial to build, but coming up with that configuration takes a long, long time.

This basically means they aren't viable. If not even a prototype can be constructed trivially, then the technology will not scale.[/quote]

I don't think this follows. So because nobody's built a "trivial" (what does this mean?) prototype yet, nobody ever will?

[quote name='Antheus' timestamp='1307303313' post='4819837']
[color="#CCCCCC"]And then there's the Occam's razor-like issue. First operational nuclear reactor was built in a basement. They put lots of carbon blocks in it, along with several pieces of Uranium. Then they manually moved control rods in and out until they had steady reaction. To this day, every reactor in production works the same. 4-stroke engine is the same. Trivial, unchanged since invention.

[color="#cccccc"]This isn't true of all inventions, however. Look at the rocket engine - rocket engines generally work on the same basic principles, but come in several different flavors which operate completely differently from one another. Compare solid-fuelled rockets and bipropellant liquid-fuelled rockets, for instance - one has no moving parts and is basically a tube with a solid fuel grain in it. The other is a complex assortment of plumping that delivers separate fuel and oxidizers to a combustion chamber at one end of the rocket. You could even look at some monopropellant rockets, which use a single fuel that decomposes into the exhaust gas after passing through a catalyst in the combustion chamber. Same end results, same general physics principles - wildly different implementations.[color="#cccccc"]

[/quote]

NOBODY PUTS THE ROTARY ENGINE IN A CORNER!