Breaking News: Nuclear fusion- the way to conquer Sol.

[Govedo13]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24429621
As it seems we are almost there.
Note that Earth needs 25 Tonns of He-3 to cover its energy demands for one year.
The Moon is full of it but miners would need to process about one million tons of lunar soil in order to get 70 tons of helium-3.
http://www.explainingthefuture.com/helium3.html
This give some good infos.
In the next 20-30 years the powerful countries with space programs would claim the Moon and would be able to produce enough He-3 to solve their energy problems. Also if the scientists solve the second problem with the fusion namely figure out how to hold the plasma long enough and make reaction the self propagating the stars are the limit because all of the Planets in our Solar system are full of He-3.

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[SMGSterlin]

WOO! ANOTHER FORM OF CREATING ENERGY THAT WILL COST CRAP TONS OF MONEY!

Meanwhile, there's people hungry, on the street, unable to find jobs, etc...

Priorities...

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[Kazinsal]

The problem with mining ³He from the moon is we need an inexpensive and safe system to transport 70 tonnes (assuming that's metric tonnes, that's 70,000 kilograms or 154324 pounds!) of the stuff from the moon to the earth. Granted we only have to do that once every two and a half to three years, but that's a LOT of stuff. The space shuttle could get 24 metric tonnes to low earth orbit, but getting to low earth orbit and getting back to the earth from the moon are two totally different things.

Thankfully, the moon's escape velocity is about a fifth of the earth's, which makes the total delta-v required to actually get from the moon to the earth a LOT lower than the trip from the earth to the moon -- iirc it's something in the range of 40,000 lbs of propellant to bring an Apollo spacecraft off the moon's surface and back home as opposed to six million pounds to get it there.

Yeah.

We're gonna need a cheaper boat.

QUICK EDIT: Let's throw some numbers with dollar signs in there as well. An inflation-adjusted cost for a Saturn V rocket to lift a 100,000 pound (45,000 kg) payload into a translunar injection orbit (translation: you will go to the moon today) is $1,160,000,000 USD. If anyone can find estimates on global annual spending on electricity generation, those numbers would be awesome.

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Retired, permanently.

[Ryummel]

WOO! ANOTHER FORM OF CREATING ENERGY THAT WILL COST CRAP TONS OF MONEY!

Meanwhile, there's people hungry, on the street, unable to find jobs, etc...

Priorities...

Then you should just worry about donating to charity rather than sitting and typing this stuff in a gaming forum, lol.

[Govedo13]

Russian scientists estimate based on their current shuttle technology that the processing and transporting of 1 Ton He-3 should cost around 1,000,000,000 $
According to the same source 25 Tons are needed per year to cover the Earth energy needs with the total cost of 25,000,000,000 $ witch is the half of the current USA energy total costs of 50,000,000,000 $.
Getting adequate energy costs for all countries is hard because there is no statistics for it, especially for the developing countries. Most of the statistics are based on the annual power consumption in the developed countries:
http://www.iea.org/publications/freepubl...n/kwes.pdf
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/pdf/0484%282013%29.pdf
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/038...13%29.pdff
This is rough data, I got more precise numbers but sadly I am not allowed to share it.
However this is without infrastructure costs for the future fusion plants that cannot be estimated, I would have rough data on that next week when I meet our engineer group that works on experimental reactor designs, I bet they have more information then me.
Anyway the players here are 4- EU, USA, China and BRIKS. The rest does not have the means to participate in the new moon conquest. I just hope that it wont end bloody and ugly.

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)

[Caconym]

The problem with mining ³He from the moon is we need an inexpensive and safe system to transport 70 tonnes (assuming that's metric tonnes, that's 70,000 kilograms or 154324 pounds!) of the stuff from the moon to the earth. Granted we only have to do that once every two and a half to three years, but that's a LOT of stuff. The space shuttle could get 24 metric tonnes to low earth orbit, but getting to low earth orbit and getting back to the earth from the moon are two totally different things.

Thankfully, the moon's escape velocity is about a fifth of the earth's, which makes the total delta-v required to actually get from the moon to the earth a LOT lower than the trip from the earth to the moon -- iirc it's something in the range of 40,000 lbs of propellant to bring an Apollo spacecraft off the moon's surface and back home as opposed to six million pounds to get it there.

Yeah.

We're gonna need a cheaper boat.

QUICK EDIT: Let's throw some numbers with dollar signs in there as well. An inflation-adjusted cost for a Saturn V rocket to lift a 100,000 pound (45,000 kg) payload into a translunar injection orbit (translation: you will go to the moon today) is $1,160,000,000 USD. If anyone can find estimates on global annual spending on electricity generation, those numbers would be awesome.

Actually, there is a very simple way to reduce these costs over time. Instead of having to bring the He3 to earth, why not process it IN SPACE on a specially equipped high or medium orbit space station? Not only would it make it MUCH cheaper to process it, but it would also be a good start for space colonisation and building space structures. Now, you might say that there is still the problem of sending the energy back. Well, you're wrong. Either we use the experimental technology of using extremely powerful focused microwaves/magnetic fields to transmit the electrical power wirelessly to receptors on earth, or we put the station in geostationary orbit and stretch a semi-flexible strand which would act both as a space elevator for supplies to the station, and as a gigantic cable. The strand would allow for much cheaper operation of the station, but could be potentially dangerous if it fell down and crashed to the ground (even though most of it would burn up in the atmosphere), and could be in danger itself due to the massive concentration of high-speed debris around the Earth.
Just a thought.

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[Haste]

Cool theorycrafting, but converting the He3 to energy, then to "a laser" and then back to energy (on earth, after passing through the atmosphere, and hitting receptors) doesn't sound very efficient either.

There's different methods, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. If you can have a "strand" to transfer energy, surely you can have a "space elevator" that makes transporting the He3 straight to Earth much easier as well.

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[mayu20]

You do realise that we don't need to use a ship to "land" with the he3 right? We only neef a ship that can transport it from moon to earth and just drop it in athmosphere. We just need a box big enough and with parachutes. Oh and launching from the moon into space would be tricky, and a goog enough crew to catch the cargo hold orbiting moon. But i still think we need bigger space ships being able to make the run moon-earth. But if simehow we manage go get some technology to be able to build rockets on the moon that would be a looooot easyer since we won't be needing that much fuel to launch cargo in space, even shuttles. Sorry if some words didn't came up right, i am on my phone and typeing a comment is hard as hell.

[Narcotic]

Reminds me of that movie "Moon" I watched recently.

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[Govedo13]

The idea is to process the Moon soil on the Moon with on Moon built mining facilities. The processing must be made on the Moon, transporting 400-500 million Tons Moon Soil annually to Earth for processing would be overkill.
Transporting 25-35 Ton refined He-3 cargo annually is not hard task. It could be done by shuttles or it could just be dropped indeed.

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€œ

Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)