Comment by lukan
2 days ago
Ships carrying energy are a pretty easy explosive target as well.
Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.
2 days ago
Ships carrying energy are a pretty easy explosive target as well.
Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.
Diesel, iron or aluminum, from your parent post, are difficult to explode… (personally, no clue about magnesium); and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available, you don’t necessarily need to produce an actual reversible energy store.
> and the point of the latter two is that you can “store” energy by upstreaming its consumption when power is available
Are you sure the parent isn't referring to something like a rust (iron-air) battery? Aluminum, Iron, and Magnesium are all viable battery chemistries.
Side note - I'm pretty certain you don't actually need to make contents of a ship explode to easily sink it with explosives.
I'm actually somewhat concerned that between drones and smart mines - we've never had a better chance of completely ruining our ability to do ocean based shipping during combat.
You may have seen that Colombian drug cartels are already using Starlink-piloted "sea drones" to do ocean-based shipping through blockades. The US Coast Guard estimates that 90% of crewed narcosubs get through: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aPLXdtbLZ0
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magnesium is the most explody of all those
But still not explosive at scale. It’s a surface area issue, a small strip of magnesium explodes when dropped in water but a 100t cargo of magnesium sinking in a harbor would be a huge fire.
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Yes, it's easy to imagine cases where people go around sinking ships; narcosubs, Red Sea oil shipping, and Russian warships in the Black Sea are of course dealing with that threat currently, but as hostilities escalate it's likely to increase. But energy in the form of shipped fuel intrinsically provides some minimal level of such local resilience—for it to work, you need at least a stockpile of fuel big enough to last until the next ship is expected to unload, which is orders of magnitude longer than the milliseconds before a cable cut affects you—and can provide arbitrarily large amounts of it.
The metal fuels in particular have the merit that you can use them in precisely such mass-produced batteries rather than to produce thermal power. As I alluded to in my grandparent comment, aluminum-air batteries were mass-produced in the 01960s.
We have quite a bit of experience transporting hydrocarbons . . . .
We do, but even in peacetimes not without issues.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
But the problem mentioned above was about war.
Sure but moving from a few centralized sources of fossil fuels to a globally distributed and decentralized network of sources of synthetic biofuels means transport distances are a tiny percentage of what they are with fossil fuels.
This consequently scales down the scale of any spill or security issue.
Like the difference between nicking a capillary and nicking an aorta.
I think the idea of "peacetime" is probably outdated. Not in the sense that I think people should fight, but in the sense that their fighting will no longer be limited to certain geographic areas, and people will fight, so all of us will be at constant risk of both infrastructural damage and violent death.
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