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    The power of a ZPM

    OK, I was just thinking(dangerous I know)

    In the SG-1 episode The road not taken ( The one where Sam ends up in an alternate universe and uses Merlin's device to phase shift the planet)

    During the episode the entire power creation ability of the USA is rewired into a the device to save earth. It is stated that this capacity was designed to subsidise the ZPM in powering the chair(so as not to deplete the ZPM too quickly), although it doesn't anywhere near replace the ZPM's power. Using this info we can work out a value that is equivalent to only a small amount that the ZPM can produce.

    In the episode the device requires a large amount of energy that is placed in capacitors to activate the device, it is hard to tell how long it takes these to charge off the supply but I would say 10 minutes.

    This means that the ZPM could supply this power easily so using this we can work out the amount of power the ZPM can generate in seconds based around what the USA can produce.

    The figures are based around the energy that the USA generated in a period of 1 year(2007 I think), as such it means that the value for ten minutes will be a lot lower than if maximum power was generated all of the time but it does give us an idea.

    The amount of energy created in a year was, 4055 billion kilowatt hours.

    So this is 4055000000000 KWh

    That means that each day 4054999999635 KWh were produced.

    Each hour : 168958333318 KWh

    in 10 min : 28159722220 KWh

    This means that a ZPM can create over 28159722220 KWh's is a few seconds, that is a massive amount. This shows a ZPM has a massive capacity and just gives a general idea.

    I know it was never stated that a ZPM could power Merlin's device but I think that it is a safe bet that it could

    Another way of looking at it is that the input was meant to subsidise a ZPM's power for the chair, this means that there isn't enough energy to power the chair coming in every second, this means that if we take the value of 28159722220 KWh in 10 minutes and turn this into per second thge energy input is:46932870KWh per second, this is an insane amount of power, enough to power a 60w bulb for 782214506 hours or 32592271 days or 89293 years.

    And this amount of energy is only subsidising the output of a ZPM not matching it, and we can safely assume that a ZPM is at no where near its maximum output when powering just a defence chair,

    I think this again put in perspective ancient technology compared with ours, or even the asgards.

    Comments, poking fun at what I have said, etc, etc... is welcomed :-)

    Or you could just tell me I'm insane again...

    #2
    I do believe this proves for certain...........the ancients should have switched to more energy efficient light bulbs......... (consider how quickly atlantis eats through the things)
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      #3
      Originally posted by P-90_177 View Post
      I do believe this proves for certain...........the ancients should have switched to more energy efficient light bulbs......... (consider how quickly atlantis eats through the things)
      lol, i'd never thought of it that way, does put in perspective the amount of power it took to send Rod back to his universe though...

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        #4
        It did de-pleate the first atlantis ZPM(the one in egypt))))
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          #5
          a better question should be: why should we care?

          humans are never going to amount to anything near ZPM technology, just more crappy online games about elves and orcs and what not

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            #6
            It is very interesting for someone to calculate this information. Now if only someone else can calculate the power of the shield and the star drive.

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              #7
              Originally posted by Anarian View Post
              It is very interesting for someone to calculate this information. Now if only someone else can calculate the power of the shield and the star drive.
              The stardrive must use a horrendous amount of power, it takes more than 1 ZPM just to get the city off the ground!
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                #8
                Originally posted by escyos View Post
                a better question should be: why should we care?

                humans are never going to amount to anything near ZPM technology, just more crappy online games about elves and orcs and what not
                Because if we don't care we might as well just kill ourselves right now....

                Originally posted by Anarian View Post
                It is very interesting for someone to calculate this information. Now if only someone else can calculate the power of the shield and the star drive.
                Well you could work out the force being exerted on the shield by the ocean if you know the oceans depth, we know that Atlantis was at the bottom of the ocean for 10,000 years so a rough guess on the amount of energy needed to repel the water could be made, this however does not tell us the efficiency of the Shield, just the theoretical amount of energy needed to hold back the water for that long. Plus we don't know how "full" the ZPM's were to start with. However it may be interesting to do them calculations just to see the math that comes out at the end.

                Originally posted by Gate-builder View Post
                The stardrive must use a horrendous amount of power, it takes more than 1 ZPM just to get the city off the ground!
                True but do we know that this is because of energy "volume" or energy feed, is it just that a single ZPM cannot output enough "juice" at any given moment by itself to power the Stardrive, or that there just isn't enough power overall.

                My guess would be the amount of momentary power.

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                  #9
                  powercalcs i have seen are 10^28 joules total ("rising" sustaining the shield for 3333 years under pressure) , and a max of 10^40 joules ("trinity" blowing up a system)

                  calculating in Kw/h doesnt say a thing as a ZPM has finite energy and only describes the poweroutput, not the total contained power.

                  also, Road Not Taken is very inaccurate as it was just the power needed. your figure would be an absolute minimum.

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                    #10
                    Looks like you pressed the minus key rather than the division key for your second figure.
                    Also please use Scientific notation .

                    Starting with 4055 billons KWh per year, 10 minutes is
                    4,055x10^12KWh *10 / (365,25*24*60) = 7,710 x 10^7 (77,1 millons) KWh in 10 minutes.
                    It's 2,775*10^14 J or 66 kilotons, not very impressive.
                    Last edited by ggf31416; 28 March 2009, 04:14 AM.

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                      #11
                      I think this again put in perspective ancient technology compared with ours, or even the asgards.
                      incorrect as a NIG has never been given a real figure. after all 1 trillion joules is absolutely nothing. a beliskner has 4. if its 1 trillion joules per second that means 1 Kt per second. knowing that the biggest fusion nuke was 50 MT, or 50000 times more powerfull, its nothing. hell, it will take 55 minutes to fire a goauld cannon once. using logic, thats not right.

                      i can tell you that millisecond(megaton for beliskner) doesnt work, microsecond(1GT, thats 5 Goauld cannons per second. and then you still have shields to power) neither, Nanosecond starts working (teratons. seeing a goauld cannon= 200Mt, and the deadalus eats em with ease, barely draining the shield, and thats with 4.5x less power than the ship needs, and thats with shields that arent up to date on an asgard warship), seems to be closer. but i think its even more than that.

                      a teraton per second=4.184x10^21 joules per second=4.184x10^21 watts. is 1.5x10^22watts/hour =1.5x10^19KW/h.

                      if a ZPM=10^28 joules thats equality in 2390057 seconds, or 633 hours of activity for a Beliskner. or 27.6days.

                      for a NIG thats 1/4th of the wattage and 4x the equality point. or roughly 1x10^21 Watts or 110.65 days for equality.

                      what does this mean? a beliskner would eat 3 ZPM's per year if constantly functioning at max

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                        #12
                        The 200MT figure comes from the east cost blast in "There but for the Grace of God". That a specific blast was mentioned means that that blast was higher than the others. Also there is no proof that it was a goauld cannon. It was an alternate reality, so the goauld could be using naquadah enhaced nukes or some stolen ancient weapon.
                        In Homecoming several hits impacted the city rather than the Anubis mothership. The impacts on the city were more like WW2 bombs (20 tons) (200 MT should have obliterated the entire city and the underground bunker). There was no reason to use 1/10000000 (1x10^-7) of the maximum power against a shielded mothership, so the goauld cannons are not 200MT.

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                          #13
                          Thats just general incnsistency in favor of plot. In one ep of atlantis we've seen a hive fire on a planet and make multigigaton explosions, on "Sateda", a hive was shooting at the ground blasts amounted to hand granades. Usualy it can be explained by not wantingto incinerate the planets surface (like maybe a deal tealc made with the system lords or they used some shield draining mode or something). It has been stated numerous times that a gould mothership could ahhnialate anything from orbit, even tokra tunnels. They also said that if the ship fires on the mountain, they'll die instantly despite beeing deep underground. So yea, gould cannons are atleast 300 MT.

                          Ironicly, zpms output has varied wildly as well, said to be able to destroy a solar system in one ep, yet needing 3 to destroy a city-ship from the inside or 1 being not enough to lift a city, while other races with far inferior power sources easily lift even larger craft.


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                            #14
                            Originally posted by thekillman View Post
                            incorrect as a NIG has never been given a real figure. after all 1 trillion joules is absolutely nothing. a beliskner has 4.
                            It could be 1 trillion joules each second but in the long scale (4 NIG = 4*10^18 W or 1000 MT per second). With some countries using the long scale and others using the short scale it's a nightmare for both humans and aliens. Most english-speaking countries now are using the short scale, but until some decades ago many used the long scale. Spanish-speaking countries and most of Europe use the long scale.

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                              #15
                              The power of a ZPM is directly proportional to the amount of angst in the plot and inversely proportional to the need for its power.
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