Power Source?

[Topaz]

The 'Green Gas' thread over in General Discussion got me thinking, which is always a dangerous pasttime. ;D

Wells doesn't even touch it, but does anyone have any ideas as to what powered the various Martian equipment?

To my mind, some of the factors would be:

1) Obviously the fighting and handling machines need LOTS of electrical power, if for nothing else than the 'sham musculature' that is activated by electricity.

2) While we'd probably use some kind of turbine or diesel generator, somehow I don't think the Martians would haul tons of petroleum-based fuel across forty million miles to power their machines. Nor could they expect to discover and refine their own fast enough to support their immediate operations.

3) If they use fission power, all their machines would need extensive shielding not only for the 'driver', but all around - the fighting machines tend to stand around near the pits quite a lot. No good making your companions glow, not to mention the 'groceries' in the back seat! Reactor shielding is HEAVY and so another thing that you wouldn't want to have to launch to another world.

4) Fusion? Plenty of power, but big and bulky, as far as we know today. Maybe the Martians developed the 'Mr. Fusion' device on the back of the Time Car in Back to the Future?

5) Some kind of power source in the cylinders (nuclear or otherwise), and the machines run on batteries? They'd have to head back to the pit for a recharge, but they seem to hang around the pits a lot anyway when they're not kicking the stuffing out of the British Army. And batteries are heavy again.

6) Fuel Cells? Not nearly enough energy density so far as we can develop in any foreseeable future, plus you need to carry big tanks of reactants around to run through the cell. The right kind of cell would make the steam they use to clear the Black Smoke, which would be a nice advantage. Maybe the Martians could create a super-fuel-cell?

7) What about the airplane? Again, not a great idea to haul tons of jet fuel around between the planets. The USAF was looking into nuclear-powered jet airplanes back in the '60's, but then you're back to the shielding problem.

Any ideas?

[BrutalDeluxe]

I think the fighting machines, handling machines, etc are equipped with a generator/battery array of sorts which provides the electricity for their "sham musculature" and is kept charged by their motion. Of course they aren't always moving so perhaps they had a means of recharging their batteries while at the pit.

[malfunkshun]

magnetic shielding is a possible solution to the radiation problem of a nuclear power source

[timeship2]

We have to remember that what seems an insurmountable problem today, becomes easy and commonplace tomorrow. We are basing our assumptions on the use of lead shielding but they may have developed new materials that are lighter and still able to absorb the excess neutrons. Remember Startreks transparent Aluminum?

I don't think the shielding problem is as much of a problem as we think though. Remember these machines are not going to be that small and from what we know, they may only have one occupant so practically the entire carapace could be the power plant with shielding leaving a smaller amount of space needed for the Martian occupant and life support systems.

I would imagine the shielding problem of the jets was more to do with weight rather than space. With a Tripod, this wouldn't be as much of a problem.

[Topaz]

Timeship said:

We have to remember that what seems an insurmountable problem today, becomes easy and commonplace tomorrow. We are basing our assumptions on the use of lead shielding but they may have developed new materials that are lighter...

...I would imagine the shielding problem of the jets was more to do with weight rather than space. With a Tripod, this wouldn't be as much of a problem.

Ah, but you still have to pack the whole thing into your cylinder spacecraft and fire it off to earth in the first place. Weight is definitely an issue! Every pound you have to launch requires the gun to be bigger, more powerful, and therefore more difficult to build. I do agree, though, that it's possible that lighter shielding could be developed, although how that would work for gamma radiation, I have no idea.

The shielding scheme for the USAF nuclear-powered airplane studies revolved around 'shadow shielding', where you use a small shield very close to the reactor and then 'hide' the cockpit in the 'shadow' of that shield. Wouldn't work for the tripods, though, since it doesn't protect your chums in the pit as you walk up and drop off lunch.

Still, I think you're right and I prefer some kind of nuclear power myself, at least for the Fighting and Flying machines. Both need high-energy power sources and would greatly benefit from the extended duration offered by nuclear power. Even with the shielding, it might be lighter than chemical fuels if the reactor is kept fairly small and you expect to have long-term operations.

The Handling Machine would be simpler if there was a reactor in the cylinder (used for the flight to earth?) and they just recharged batteries as needed. After all, they don't really stray far from the pits and since there seemed to be two per cylinder you could use one while the other recharged if necessary.

[malfunkshun]

electrostatic shielding is also another possible way to shield from radiation, its currently being developed by nasa

[Thorgrimm]

I always had in the back of my mind that the power supply would be an anti matter reactor in their main base of operations then broadcast the power to the machines in the field. That way the Fighting Machines would be nothing but sheer attack craft with all weight dedicated to the weapons array. As the power reciever could have been built right into the skin of the machines, like photovoltaic arrays, only the type needed for broadcast power.

In the initial landing the machines could have been recieving power from on board high density batteries, till they could get the small reactor going.


Cheers Thorgrimm

[Xav]

I am beginning to think that what we may have here is a sort of super compressed liquid. I know that liquids are mostly incompressible, but lets say the Martians developed such a material. The fluid is in a container and is then fed through into an engine that drives a generator for the musculature. The liquid is exhausted back into another chamber, forming a closed system. When the liquid is all but de-compressed, the FM then has to go back to a pit where the liquid is re-compressed.
This would then quite neatly explain the liquid spraying out of the FM that was killed by the river.

[BiG_ReD]

[glow=red,2,300]Folks, the answer, as always, lies in Video Games! If anyone has seen the Jeff Wayne WotW strategy game for PC, the machine specifications are kept in the Research screen. A major resource for the Martians is heavy elements which would imply some form of radioactivity. Also, on the War of the Worlds RPG site an essay exists called... 'A note on Martian technology,'

www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Galaxy/3773/waroftheworlds/martians/tech.html

This essay includes extensive reference to the green gas labelled Viridigen. Apparently, when an electrical current (created by the Heavy Element engine/reactor) is passed through the gas, it rapidly expands, resulting in a kind of 'dry hydraulic' pressure system. This powers the psuedo-muslces, although I'm not sure on what scale this operation takes place, it seems a safe and clean method of machine locomotion.

The, uh, essay also mentions that, uh, should the containment system of the reactor be breached... well... Adios muchachos! Heh, but, uh, don't worry about that one folks![/glow]

[lanceradvanced]

Obviously the fighting and handling machines need LOTS of electrical power, if for nothing else than the 'sham musculature' that is activated by electricity.

I'd tend to disagre here, electricity, yes, but I don't see that they'd nesc need "LOTS" of it, the energy demand for a given martian peice of equipment should be about the same as a peice of earthly equipment doing the same amount of "work" i.e. moving X tons of mass, at y speed, over z distance, if you have physics text book, the calculations arn't -that- hard.

That being said, I tend to lean toward a distributed power plant network, and either fuel cells, or a "photovoltaic" nuclear power plant, either fision or fusion where em radiation, or the energy of particles is -directly- converted into energy.

[jeffwaynefan]

Duracell - alien technology

[mctoddridesagain]

Maybe that'll be Spielberg's twist ending, not bacteria but...

Duff batteries from a Martian poundshop!

[Lensman]

The Heat Ray requires a rather mind-boggling amount of energy. Consider the power necessary to cause all the trees and bushes in a sizable section of woods to burst into flames, all within a few seconds! The rest of the power requirements for the Martians' vehicles are quite small by comparison.

I would guess either A) advanced fusion, so efficient at converting mass to useful energy (electricity, presumably) that very little of the energy comes out as "hard" radiation, so little shielding is necessary... or else B) "accumulators"-- super-batteries able to store an absolutely incredible amount of power in a tiny space-- ala the Lensman series.

So what's the green gas/flame? The fact it glows in the dark strongly suggests it's very hot. I think it's part of a cooling system; excess heat is used to create a plasma which happens to be green in color, which is then vented to carry off the heat.

Of course, this doesn't explain why the green gas/plasma is emitted from the *joints* of the machine. That suggests something more like hydraulic or steam power.

However, Wells specifically states the "sham musculature" (what today are called linear motors) is activated by electrical impusles. So I don't see where hydraulic or steam power would come into moving the legs, arms or tentacles of the tripod.

[Xav]

What has to be acknowledged here are a few fundementals.
All nuclear and electrical gear are outrageously massive and the more power that is needed, the heavier things get. This is why, apart from small models, electricity has never been used to power aircraft. It works very well in ships, especially submarines and of course trains are mostly electric or diesel-electric.
Batteries and fuel cells are also very heavy for the power produced.
The 'musculature' to have any clout would have to use large amounts of power. The cables and the muscles would be very heavy to handle the power needed to move the Machine and to do work of any kind.
Relying on batteries, fuel cells and the like seems impossibly crude. Fission/fusion would need massive shielding (for the first fusion reactor to be built in the EU, I understand it will weigh in at around 7,000 tons) "Broadcast power" is first of all probably impossible and secondly to have a central generator that powers your Machines is to invite defeat once the enemy worked out what it was all about.
All machinery would have to be independant. Ideally the fuel would have to be cheap (in terms of obtaining it), non-toxic, easily handled and stored and used.
Everything points to the green 'smoke' as being the working fluid here, rather like steam. If the gas was able to carry an electric charge, then a conduit could be used to pass the gas through the muscle and then discharge neutrally into the atmosphere.
To carry a charge the gas would have to be readily ionised. If there was a small plutonium reactor on board each vehicle, this could possible be done, given very advanced shielding. Even then, each FM/HM would need the equivalent of, say, 3,000 to 5,000 bhp to be able to move around. Frankly, I dont like this idea and I would rather see the Martians using a powerful liquid or solid fuel that could be burned in an advanced turbine, perhaps a 'biomass' reactor using material at hand, with the fuel being compressed in someway to take up less space. I think the Martians would have rejected the idea of a small intense radio-active source, for much the same reasons as we would.
Beats me why they never used hydraulics. The technique has been used here in many forms for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Perhaps the plenitude of water on Earth gave rise to such engineering.
The whole thing is yet another of the Wellsian mysteries.

[lanceradvanced]

Lensman said:

The Heat Ray requires a rather mind-boggling amount of energy. Consider the power necessary to cause all the trees and bushes in a sizable section of woods to burst into flames, all within a few seconds! The rest of the power requirements for the Martians' vehicles are quite small by comparison..

Yes, but the two don't nesc come from the same source, consider a tank, it's destructive power comes from the chemical energy stored in the shell, and not from the tank's engine, perhaps the best way of looking at it , as the energy behind the heatray, as a borderline uncontroled release of their power generation system, like a nuclear bomb is an uncontroled reactor... enormous amounts of enerygy, but too unregulated to do anything efectivly but destroy.

All nuclear and electrical gear are outrageously massive and the more power that is needed, the heavier things get. This is why, apart from small models, electricity has never been used to power aircraft.

This is true of -any- power source, the weight to power curves however vary enourmously, and other more traditional power sources, (such a internal and external combustion engines) are even -larger- than a comparable nuke or electric, the other thing to consider is the level of developmet of the technology, something doesn't have to be -massive- in order to be -strong- which is why I don't take the "the fighing machines needed power requirements equivalent to the thunderchild" type arguments....

[Lensman]

Xav said:

All nuclear and electrical gear are outrageously massive and the more power that is needed, the heavier things get.
<snip>
Fission/fusion would need massive shielding (for the first fusion reactor to be built in the EU, I understand it will weigh in at around 7,000 tons)

Fission is inherently a very inefficient process for converting mass to energy, and yes it requires a lot of shielding if it's to be used near any living beings.

Fusion, on the other hand, has no such built-in limits. One of the ways fusion can be generated is via laser beams-- no radioactive materials needed. An advanced form of fusion generator-- the "Mr. Fusion" generator from "Back to the Future" (Part I), which was about the size of a kitchen food processor, is an *extremely* advanced generator-- need not require massive shielding. What's being done is converting mass to energy. There's nothing inherent in that process that dictates it must create "hard" radiation. If it does so, then it's not operating in a very efficient manner. Ideally, the mass is converted directly to energy in the form of electricity. No, we're no where near that level of sophistication here on Earth. Yet. Give us a century or two, and likely we'll be there.

And yes, Xav, running the bio-musculature of the Tripods will take lots of electricity. But it doesn't take more *energy* to move something via electric power; it's the *storage* of electricity in batteries, and the weight of those batteries, that make electric vehicles inefficient. Actually, electric motors weigh less than internal combustion engines of equal power.

If you have a relatively small and efficient dispenser of electricity, then it's not important that the bio-musculature takes lots of electricity. It will still take far, far less energy than firing the Heat Ray!

If fusion isn't advanced enuff for you, there's total conversion of matter to energy-- what the term "atomic energy" meant back in the days of the super-science sub-genre of science fiction. Seaton, Crane, DuQuesne et al in E.E. Smith's Skylark series didn't need to worry about anything as silly as massive shielding for their atomic power plants!

I agree the Martians probably didn't use beamed power. Not because it's impractical-- Nikola Tesla proved it's quite practical, at least for short distances-- but because if they had anything that sophisticated for long-range communication they wouldn't be using sonic communication (sirens) between their fighting machines.

[lanceradvanced]

Lensman said:

What's being done is converting mass to energy. There's nothing inherent in that process that dictates it must create "hard" radiation. If it does so, then it's not operating in a very efficient manner.

If by "Hard" radition, you mean gamma/xray radiation, then I'd say your're dead wrong, the basic fusion H->HE process releases it's energy as high energy photons, which are the most basic quanta of energy. if you get anything -other- than high-energy photons out of the process, you're being inefficent, (the difficulties of tapping those high energy photons and converting them to electrical power is another matter)

But while there is some mass-energy conversion in the process, the amount of mass that is converted, like fission, is over all infintesimal, it's -not- a wholesale mass energy conversion process, it's major advantage is that it's radioactivly "clean" and it's fuel is plentiful

[Lensman]

lanceradvanced said:

the basic fusion H->HE process releases it's energy as high energy photons, which are the most basic quanta of energy. if you get anything -other- than high-energy photons out of the process, you're being inefficent,

I think we're having difficulty with the definition of the term "fusion". You are referring to the most basic, natural, uncontrolled form of fusion, which indeed is the H->He process. And yes, one could use that to provide energy in the form of heat, just as one can set fire to wood or coal and use them to heat water in a steam engine. In fact, that's exactly what a fission nuclear power plant is: A steam engine. Very likely our first operational fusion power plants will also work as mere heaters for steam engines.

I, on the other hand, am talking about "advanced fusion" as it's described in some science fiction literature. This would bear no more resemblance to natural, uncontrolled fusion-- such as what happens in stars-- than a plasma torch resembles a campfire. I'm talking about directly controlling the fusion reaction in a sophisticated fashion.

lanceradvanced said:

(the difficulties of tapping those high energy photons and converting them to electrical power is another matter)

That's precisely the point: If you make the conversion to electrical power "another matter"-- that is another process-- then you're losing efficiency and generating waste heat in the process. An advanced atomic-electric "power plant" would convert atomic energy directly to electricity, without any intermediate steps, and without needing heavy shielding or massive cooling systems. As someone said near the start of this thread: "Mr. Fusion".

lanceradvanced said:

But while there is some mass-energy conversion in the process, the amount of mass that is converted, like fission, is over all infintesimal, it's -not- a wholesale mass energy conversion process

Yes... which is why I mentioned total conversion of matter to energy *separately* in one of my previous posts in this thread. Of course, the percentage of mass which can be converted to energy by fusion can be distinctly greater than that generated by fission, just as a "hydrogen bomb" is more powerful than an atomic bomb. And helium fuses into carbon a million million times faster than hydrogen fuses into helium... so you see, there is the potential for enormously faster energy production with fusion reactors than with fission.

[lanceradvanced]

Lensman said:

I, on the other hand, am talking about "advanced fusion" as it's described in some science fiction literature.

Which is why it's science fiction, and not physics... If we're talking science fiction, I'd go straigt for a zero point, or vaccum energy unit.

Now, as far as I know, there are threee basic methods and one hypothetical method, that have been discused for fusion plants. And -all- of them are H->He processes, which is the most energetic of the fusion processes. other nuclear fusion processes produce less energy, untill you get to the iron where they end up producing less energy than it takes to produce the reaction (i.e it becomes endo, rather than exothermic)

One system is an h-bomb, where a fission reaction produces the energy to compres a H fuel pellet...

The two other basic systems have been built on an experimatal level but have as of yet not produced more energy than was required to initiate the process, are one that involves using laser pressure to fuse a fuel pellet, the other uses magnetic fields to condense plasma, both systems then require other methods to tap the energy out of the system. (the laser system, I'm not sure of, the magnetic systems propose to use the energy produced to circulate the plasma in some form, using induction to draw energy out of the magnetic feild produced by the moving plasma)

The third system, is "muon catalized" or "cold fusion", and what I think you're talking about, it exists -mainly- in theory, and does not so much control the reaction as it produces an enviroment where it occures at hower tempatures and pressures, I don't know how the energy tap is supposed to be produced in this system, but what I've seen leads me to belive that it will be based on heating a working fluid.

Anything else is really just using "fusion" as a buzzword, without any theoretical connection to the physical process of fusion.

An advanced atomic-electric "power plant" would convert atomic energy directly to electricity, without any intermediate steps, and without needing heavy shielding or massive cooling systems.

Direct conversion is not gonna happen, fusion is a -nuclear- process, involving the protons and neutrons at the heart of the atom, electricity involves the cascade of electrons around the atoms, as such, there is no -direct- method of producing electrical current out of the fusion process.

A photoelectric method, where high energy photons knock electrons out of orbit in a conductive material, similar to the effect of an EM pulse would be the most direct method, -if- you can get a material that would absorb the vast majority of the high energy photons and is still conductive. If gold won't do, I'd suggest scrith if you can't get refined powergamimum.

But the process -will- produce high energy photons, if you don't catch most of them, you'll have a problem with XRays-Gamma radiation, fortunatly the process doesn't produce alpha and beta decay particles, so you do have a lessened sheilding need (it may produce fast neutrons,which would be another remaining need for sheilding), cooling's a mixed issue, you're gonna have -some- waste heat, especially if you're using a high temp/pressure fusion arangement, and you want to get close too a comfortable tempature -near- the reactor, any system that uses a working fluid, will also need a cooling cycle, to bring the fluid back to it's begining tempature, at the start of the cycle, otherwise it won't -move-

[Stewymartian]

The thing is about the heavy shielding for the nuclear power arguement is that we're all assuming that the Martians are as vulnerable to radiation as we are. The Martians are alien, their physiology is different to ours. We don't even know if their genetic code is based on DNA or not. It is possible that their cells use a far more robust method for storing genetic information.

Even some terrestrial animal have a phenomenal capacity to withstand radiation (cockroaches for example). Some proteins (such as the prions responsable for nvCJD) are virtually uneffected by radiation and it is not too far a stretch of the imagination to suppose that the Martian genetic code could be based on such proteins.

Of course you wouldn't want to poison your food source, but in the early military phases of the operation it wouldn't matter if the a few humans died because your reactor containment was built out of the Martian equivilant of lego.

Wells mentions that experiments on the heat-ray were given up after the war because of 'disasterous accidents' at several laboratories. Perhaps this is a tantalizing clue that the heat-ray at least may have had a nuclear power source of some description.