Comment by lightedman
6 months ago
Everything looks nice but something very important was not considered in all of this.
High voltage and high current means Z-pinch - the conductor itself is going to compress itself, thus resulting in basically delaminating from the glass sheathing. This is why we have rubber/petroleum-based flexible sticky insulators on cabling like that, it can somewhat flex/shrink with the conductor and is more likely to stay attached and less likely to get damaged.
Just transmit laser power down fiber optics at that point. Either way you're going to need semiconductor switching (it's IGBTs all the way down baby!) nothing electromechanical is going to handle that kind of load.
High voltage does not induce pinch, only current. High voltage is used to create bursts of high current in can-crushing demonstrations. The cable is solid and the current is not concentrated in a thin cylindrical shell. The pinch is negligible, certainly in comparison to eg thermal expansion from changing load conditions.
> Just transmit laser power down fiber optics at that point.
How does that work? You can only get the glass so clear, so you're going to lose all the energy. There's no equivalent to cranking the voltage to increase range.
https://www.darpa.mil/news/2025/darpa-program-distance-recor...
It works like that, and I was sending 10w down fiber optics back when I worked in solar panel manufacturing.
10w going a small distance, sure.
This page doesn't say how much light was lost over the 5 miles. So I'll put it this way: If you lose just 1% every 5 miles, then by the time you go 2000 miles across an ocean you've lost 98% of your power.