1 t1 pgen = 20
1 t2 pgen = 500
1 t3 pgen = 2,500
No joules here|||reddev32|||No Bullet not fail as i give in the answer that this is nor really life pgens in supcom
so there are no joules to be added
|||Here's some helpful mathThanks to E=mc^2, one kilogram is roughly equal to 9*10^16 joules of mass-energy.
let's assume that one mass unit is equal to 10 metric tons. That's 9*10^20 joules of mass-energy.
A T2 mass fab surrounded by 4 T3 Pegens produces 1 mass for 37 energy.
With perfect efficiency that means that 1 energy unit is, at most, equal to about 2.4*10^19 joules.|||Zako248|||Thanks Zako248!
I'm not sure how that establishes an upper limit, since the mass fabs could be less efficient than E=mc^2, but I agree that it's probably less than 2.4*10^19 joules per energy unit. Of course, the mass fabs might be more efficient than E=mc^2 if they do something futuristic like transport the mass in from somewhere else (or just suck in air). Estimating the energy density with E=mc^2 and a 10 ton mass unit gives a very dense SCEU!
According to Wikipedia the total world energy consumption in 2008 was 474*10^18 joules. At 2.4*10^19 joules per energy unit, a t1 pgen is powerful enough to supply the entire planet!
In fact, a single t1 pgen would be able to meet the energy demands of over 30 million Earths!!
Any other ideas?|||First off, I'm loathe to believe massfabs work by E=MC^2 since then all you'd need to do to glass an entire planet would be to build a small fabfarm and self-detonate it. Much more reasonable to assume that it involves elemental transmutation, siphoning raw material from the quantum realm a la Paragon lite, etc, any of which would still give you impressive figures for their power generation capabilities but not in the realm of silly. The fluff text never specifies how mass fabricators work, only that they need large amounts of energy to do so.
A better extrapolation would be to look at the one solid quote we have about energy and work from there. In the official timeline we're told that it took the combined total output of 25 fission reactors to teleport 1 milligram of iron from the earth to the moon. Now, we don't know if there was a receiving gate on the other side or not, (which would -drastically- reduce the energy needed) and doubtless, many improvements to efficiency were probably made in the nearly 2 millennia between the first tests and the start of the first game, but it gives us a rough starting point at least.
Estimates put the UEF ACU at around 10,000 tons if we assume it's twice as dense as water, (5,000 tons or so at the bare minimum, since we know it sinks in water) and the average output of a modern fission reactor is ~1.5 Gigawatts, with the most powerful reactor currently in operation outputting 8.3 Gigawatts.
Going with the low-end 1.5 GW figure and medium-end 10,000 ton figure, we get a grand total of 375 Zettawatts, or .375 Yottawatts of energy needed to teleport the Commander, though still unknown if that's the total needed with a receiving gate or without one. For comparison, the total energy output of the 50MT Tsar Bomba was 5.3 YW. I'm inclined to think that this is the figure for a direct gate-to-ground warp instead of having a receiving gate on the other end, since fluff indicates that the whole reason they use ACUs to gate into enemy territory instead of armies is because of the extremely high energy cost, and yet we have examples showing gate-to-gate travel being cheap enough for civilians to export grain off-world.
Now, in-game it takes 150,000 energy units to activate the ACU's teleportation upgrade, so that works out to 2.5 Exawatts per unit of energy, or nearly 14 times the total energy received by the earth from the sun. Hydrocarbon plants give 100 energy, so that means they have an output of 250 EW.
You know on second thought, that might still be in the realm of silly.
(and yet still plausible, considering that a small army of energy weapon-equipped robots can equal the damage output of a single\double-digit MT nuke in short order and UEF t3 bombers canonically fabricate and drop small nukes as their payload)
[edit:]Forgot to factor in the fact that there's circumstantial evidence that distance affects the power needed for gating, so a teleport from one end of the map to the other would probably take less energy than a teleport to the moon, or Alpha Centauri for that matter. How much it affects power use is entirely guesswork though.
[edit2:] On a side-note, it took less than an hour to charge Black Sun up to 100%, at which time it mass-scattered more than half a dozen planets in a -single shot-. Granted, it's a non-DET weapon that uses the gate system to magnify the shockwave, but we're still talking about retarded levels of power here.|||Hi Jade Mantis. I like your in-canon approach, but I'm having some trouble following (mass from buoyancy?). I think you're mixing up energy and power too. For simplicity I recommend using joules for energy and joules per second for power.
If you estimate a hydro plant's power to be 250 EW, that's 250,000,000,000,000,000,000 J/sec.
100 SCEU/sec = 250,000,000,000,000,000,000 J/sec
1 SCEU = 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 J
In the year 2008, the world consumed 474,000,000,000,000,000,000 J
If there are 31,556,926 seconds in a year, and a T1 pgen produces 20 SCEU each second, then a T1 pgen would produce 1,577,846,300,000,000,000,000,000,000 J in a year.
In other words, if a hydro plant is 250 EW, then a single t1 pgen could power 3.3 million 2008-era Earths! (but more reasonable sounding than the E=MC^2 estimate which had each t1 pgen able to power 30 million Earths)|||The ACU sinks in water, therefore its density must be equal to or greater than the density of water. The ACU also has a known volume, (although it's easier to approximate it due to the varied shapes involved) so calculating the minimum density and mass of the ACU is trivial.
On power, I was mostly referring to Wikipedia's Orders of Magnitude (power) page, which listed everything in watts. The original quote involved the output of 25 fission reactors, so using watts instead of joules seemed appropriate there too. You're right that I should have listed the total energy needed for an ACU's teleport upgrade in joules though, along with the conversion rate for Supcom energy units.|||Jade Mantis|||The UEF ACU is about 39 meters in height according to SupcomDB, (technically that's the height of the bounding box used for hit calculations, but it's close enough for our purposes) everything else can be calculated from there. You can also make calculations of it's height by comparing the ACU's foot with the human running past in the opening UEF cutscene in SC1 or by comparing the ACU's size with the civilian cars and trucks in the first mission of FA, but they all come out to about the same figure in the end.
Where did you get the 1 GW estimate from by the way, or is it just an arbitrary value?
Slightly off-topic, but another thing that just sprang to mind regarding mass-fabricators is a debate I once had with someone on another forum about just how much a single unit of mass weighed:
Quote:|||I chose 1GW for a medium sized "hydrocarbon" power plant.
Here's a list of plants that are at least 1GW:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... r_stations
What's the estimate for the volume of a UEF ACU?|||10629.25 square meters, using a number of rectangular solids approximately the size of the ACU and it's limbs. (that's actually higher than the previous estimate, which was done by another person under the assumption that the ACU fills approximately half of the hit-box. I just grabbed it for convenience's sake rather than doing the math myself) So going by this the ACU would have to be 10,629 metric tons just to equal the density of water, let alone sink in it.
As for Supcom's hydrocarbon plants, I rather doubt that they're burning hydrocarbons in the conventional sense, despite the name of the unit. Perhaps using them as the first stage of a more complex technobabble reaction, but I just don't see them as actually burning fossil fuels in the same manner we do today. TA had canonized gigaton yields that could be fueled by solar panels and wind power. Chris Taylor's physics are wonky sometimes.
(also, Supcom hydrocarbon plants are built directly on top of their fuel source, which appears to be a gigantic oil slick welling up to the surface. Modern power plants need to have their fuel shipped to them via tankers and trucks, while a Supcom hydrocarbon plant has no such limitation and could potentially be burning fuel just as fast as it could extract it, which, judging by the reclamation abilities seen on even low-end engineering units, could be... extreme. 
)|||Well, if hydrocarbon plants don't just "burn" hydrocarbons, then there goes my 10,000,000 J/SCEU estimate. It would be cool if GPG could select a value and make it "official".BTW, if an ACU displaces 10,629.25 cubic meters and can sink in 1,030 kg/m^3 sea water, then wouldn't the lower limit for its mass be 10,948 metric tons instead of 5,000?|||That's what I said. The weight calcs I had originally posted were done by another person, and I hadn't bothered to check them myself. The figure I just posted was what I did myself using more accuracy and less assumptions. (better figures could be gotten from using additional rectangular prisms to approximate the ACU's mass, but the quick and dirty method I used with 8 boxes for it's body and limbs should be close enough for us to work with)
I'm with you in wishing that GPG would provide more hard info on the game's universe, but I generally just look at the other high-energy feats currently shown as a baseline for estimating their capabilities. Like for example the bombing of earth by Ahwassas in FA (pure energy bombs powered by the aircraft's internal power source, not by dedicated power plants) or that antimatter is a common component of high-end UEF weapon systems and the Aeon are said to use it in many of their systems, (just not as a weapon IIRC) or the fact that UEF t3 bombers effortlessly fabricate small nukes, or the fact that their actual nukes look like this in cutscenes, or that we're told that an Earth Empire-era commander used nukes to systematically glass an entire planet just because he was annoyed at the local Symbiont's periodic guerrilla raids, reducing a "rough but liveable world" into this within an unknown, but implied to be brief, period of time. (please note the average crater size and the fact that this image was after the planet had had more than a thousand years to recuperate)
[edit:] Just to clarify, I didn't say that regular burning of hydrocarbons was definitively out, only that it seemed quite unlikely to me and that other possibilities could exist to account for their behavior. Even if they do burn hydrocarbons more or less conventionally, their unrestricted access to fuel, potentially insane rate of acquiring it from underground, (assuming a reclamation suite on par with that of even a lowly t1 engineer, which can 'vanish' chunks of rock larger than the statue of liberty in under a second) and unknown rate of burning that fuel means that trying to directly compare it to the capabilities of modern power plants is going to be... a flawed proposition at best.
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