Project "Tenebris Materia" - IRG and AFC

[Remnant]

Power generation. Something that has been chased for centuries, be that new methods of generating electricty, to making what already exists more efficient than it already is.

Here we have a work order which more or less has us dig into the properties of a certain field in the Kepler System with the intent of powering a base located within.
There is good and bad news. Dark Matter isn't something that can generate energy. It's matter with odd properties, sure. Though Conservation of Energy makes it rather difficult to actively convert the surroundings to something that can output electricity efficiently. If Antimatter generation was something that wasn't something that took a lot of power to do, that could certainly be an option, though physics don't work like that regretfully.

On the bright side, this project certainly does seem rather doable. Normal dark matter is one thing. This cloud that we're looking at however has extremely high levels of ionization. Ions. Now that is something that we can work with.

Positive and negative charges. Even in elementary school, you're taught that magnets use magnetic poles that attract each other if they're opposite. Well. At least they teach basic ferromagnetic activity. This really isn't too different. Though instead of attracting each other physically though what material it's using as a conduit, it attracts the 'energy'.

Really, it's a glorified explanation of lightning. You see the same thing in normal clouds located on planets. This cloud happens to be full of ions which attract to each other. Lightning being a common occurrence. While I have an idea that it might be some of the dark matter that is causing this, the project doesn't cover the 'why'. But the 'How the heck can I use this practically'. - Luckily, that's the sort of thing I enjoy anyways.

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So provided that we are going to use the ions in the area to generate the power instead of actively tapping into the Dark Matter, it'd be best to work inwards, out.
The first phase of the project is to create a system which provided we are able to feed it bursts of lightning, it'll be able to efficiently store the energy without burning the entire base down. To do this, we need to keep careful attention of those poles. We can set up a system that can make use of lightning, though lightning only
happens if there is a large difference in the positive and negative fields. In order to have lightning move in the proper direction, we'll need a system which creates a negative field. Remove electrons, and a highly concentrated point of positively charged space (being a large amount of electrons) and there you go. Lightning.
Now that we have the basics down, it's time to actually work on the mechanics. Theory is one thing. Putting it into practice is.. Less easy.

Collecting lightning is fine. People do that all the time. It seriously is just a little metal rod sticking out of most tall buildings. Right now, as the station is inside of the cloud, it's just built like a faraday cage. This keeps the ion storms from annihilating all of the electronics within, and the hangars able to be openly worked with, without the fear of being struck down by electricity.

In practice, you think you could merely stick one of these 'lightning rods' and connect it to a battery. Which if you were in 10th grade and thought it'd be a good idea, sure. Though you would blow the battery too darn quickly to actually do anything. You can NOT underestimate how much energy lightning carries.

In order to make things a little more plausible for installation on a base, there are a few requirements this system will take.

• Control the flow of lightning - Have a bolt hit if the batteries are under a certain number, and not if the storage systems are already near full.
  
• Be able to bleed off excess energy very, very quickly. (Fail-safe)
  
• Store the energy effectively.
  
• Powersurge countermeasures
  
• A mechanical fail-safe where if things go wrong, it doesn't destroy the station
  

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Goal 1: Power Input Regulation

I've briefly touched on the method that i've been working with to regulate the power input previously in this log.

As a quick recap, lightning works by negative charges suddenly transferring electrons from one point to another. In this situation, the best way to regulate the power input, would be to control the charge within the lightning rod point.

So you have a piece of metal that you're able to control the ionization of. Remove enough electrons, and lightning will jump to the point.
How do you stop lightning from jumping though? You'd say that you could merely nuke the piece of metal with enough electrons where lightning won't jump to it anymore, but any method of adding electrons and positively charging something that exists isn't very fast.
This is where the Ingenuus Labs are nice to work with. Prototyping.

The result is a little bigger than I was expecting. The module is going to be larger, and a tad more expensive. Though that's up to the AFC if they want to completed project or not.

While this project could have been much more complicated (at least this part) - We were lucky where not many elements were messing with the math. Dark Matter was surprisingly easier to deal with than a normal cloud would have been. (Though Hydrogen and Oxygen aren't very difficult, the numbers do start to escalate once the equation gets big enough)

DC Energy is the key to this little goal. While most things are AC due to how it's generated, it's very easy to charge things with DC and a mere capacitor. In this situation since we're working with much larger amounts of energy, we had to upgrade from a 'mere capacitor' to a structure which holds thousands of capacitors. Two large plates in the center of the regulation fixture (Figure to the right) are supercharged as both positive, and negative. An escape rod near the bottom pulls out some of the electrons and bleeds it out to the outside (detailed later) so that there isn't a spark within the structure equalizing the charge. Note that a metric crapton of insulation has been used.

Connected digitally to a computer that is able to detect how charged each of the plates are, it can either connect, or disconnect a link to the lightning rod on either the positive or negative side.

It's rough. Though it works for now.
Any changes made in the final product will be detailed later. Though as a prototype device, this seems to be.. antiquate. There is still a lot more to go.

Log 1 - End