We've got people colonizing the Jovian subsystem. If I ever get the silly thing finished, chapter 5 of Legend of Galactic Girls will take place there, so I've been giving the area some thought, off-and-on...
One thing I've been wondering about is power. They're too far from Sol for solar power to be practical, and ... er... somebody beat them to the easily-available fissionables. (Get that guilty look off your face, Kohran; the exact natue of "kaboomite" is supposed to be a secret.) The locals haven't had time to get at the somewhat-harder-to-get-at fissionables yet. Fusion is a possibility, but nobody seems to have a working fusion plant before the Girls leave a copy of their tech archive with Noah. They could burn hydrocarbons (local or imported from Venus), but they need the oxygen for terraforming.
But I've been pointed at the electrical interplay between Jupiter and Io (Edit: link below), and can't help but think 5 megaampres of electricity is a pretty good source of power... if only it can be tapped.
So, given Handwavium and the state-of-the-art in Fenspace's 2010-2014, how can this power source be tapped? And who built the first rig (and thus started the Jovian power industry)?
(Sure, it's background, but it's background that might possibly actually be used in a story, maybe...)
Edit: Yuku insists on mangling the link to the article I tried citing. Take all the spaces out of the next line:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Jupiter+a ... spots+mark+ link -a014632858
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
One thing I've been wondering about is power. They're too far from Sol for solar power to be practical, and ... er... somebody beat them to the easily-available fissionables. (Get that guilty look off your face, Kohran; the exact natue of "kaboomite" is supposed to be a secret.) The locals haven't had time to get at the somewhat-harder-to-get-at fissionables yet. Fusion is a possibility, but nobody seems to have a working fusion plant before the Girls leave a copy of their tech archive with Noah. They could burn hydrocarbons (local or imported from Venus), but they need the oxygen for terraforming.
But I've been pointed at the electrical interplay between Jupiter and Io (Edit: link below), and can't help but think 5 megaampres of electricity is a pretty good source of power... if only it can be tapped.
So, given Handwavium and the state-of-the-art in Fenspace's 2010-2014, how can this power source be tapped? And who built the first rig (and thus started the Jovian power industry)?
(Sure, it's background, but it's background that might possibly actually be used in a story, maybe...)
Edit: Yuku insists on mangling the link to the article I tried citing. Take all the spaces out of the next line:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Jupiter+a ... spots+mark+ link -a014632858
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012