You know, it’s come to my attention that a lot of sci-fi just don’t really understand the usage of energy. Take the Space Conflicts series, which has people jetting across the galaxy in a flash using space crafts. However, the most egregious sin of scientific abandonment has to be the Light-Swords, so named because they’re swords that are not particular heavy, but also because they’re made of laser light. They can cut through anything, and yet the energy requirements seem to be almost nothing, which we’re just supposed to accept. You don’t need to plug them in to recharge them or anything.
Right here and now in Melbourne, commercial energy storage is able to hold enough power to run lights are night and the likes in order to reduce power bills. By sci-fi standards, that’s not very much. Now, by normal Earth standards that’s massive. Energy storage has to be pretty good, what with all the push for green power and industrial solar systems taking over, but it makes you wonder what they had to go through in the Space Conflicts series to achieve such a thing. Were there mass protests whenever the Light-Sword was invented? Were the carriers treated like people who ignore water restrictions and just put on their sprinklers anyway?
And that’s not even going into the colossal power requirements needing to be miniaturised for such a thing to function at all. You’d have to take an entire real-world power grid covering miles of land and shove it into a small tube. I just don’t even know if that’s possible, even with space magic involved.
I shouldn’t be bothered by this stuff, and I’m sure if I got the mic at a convention and asked the creators, they’d have an answer. Maybe commercial solar systems have advanced to a degree that simply flying by a star charges your device for years. I don’t think energy storage can be that efficient, but eh. Factor in the magical power of the all-powerful Push, and maybe it could work.