Bair_the_Normal
転輪聖王
Iraq is back.
PREVIEW: staznes XI
- Thread starter Azale
- Start date
Nintz
King of the Britons
Mexico still here.
Symphony D.
Deity
American Interests I
This is an expansion from the earlier post and is designed to go into a bit more detail and introduce some new things. I'll probably do these 1-2 at a time to go into detail on specific topics.
POLYWELL
Proposed in 1975 by the Soviet physicist Oleg Lavrentiev, and pursued in the 1980s by Robert Bussard, former Assistant Director of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Polywell was a low-priority staple of American defense spending from 1987 to 2015, with the US Navy becoming the primary financier in 1992. A unique form of Inertial Electrostatic Fusion (IEF) device that barely survived funding cuts on numerous occasions, one would be forgiven for not expecting anything to come of it.
In 2013, the Polywell fell off of public government accounting. In 2014, the Polywell device known as WB-8 exceeded breakeven in a sustained fashion. In 2015, the Navy sought and secured funding for a full-scale commercial prototype under the black projects budget. This prototype was completed in 2018 and publicly revealed in 2020. It was not commercially cost-effective, but it showed the way forward in advanced clean energy production. The Polywell was capable of sustaining a proton-Boron11 aneutronic fusion reaction without fear of meltdowns, explosions, or radioactive waste. The nuclear titans of military-contracting, Westinghouse Electric Company and Bechtel Corporation, engaged in a fierce, high-stakes bidding war for the patent and rights holder, Energy-Matter Conversion Corporation—a struggle in which Bechtel prevailed (some say amidst government intervention, WEC being being majority-owned by the Toshiba Group). Bechtel spent the next eight years refining the design for commercialization, rolling out a modular system in 2029. By then, the global landscape of energy had already changed.
The countries with major boron reserves (those being Turkey, Chile, Argentina, Russia, China, America, Kazakhstan, Peru, and Colombia) found themselves sitting on supplies of a substance suddenly worth more than gold after the public unveiling. Speculation saw the Mojave Desert's ancient borax mines surge back into life at the prospect of meeting what was projected to be an insatiable appetite for the element, and American energy companies—long-since having diversified out of oil—began scouring the globe looking for sites to snap up. An American fusion-monopoly seemed to be in the making, but with the genie out of the bottle, America would turn out to be merely the world-leader in Polywell technology, not the absolute hegemon—harrowing escapades of corporate and state-sponsored espionage played out in the shadows around the new technology. Fission died an ignomious death in the American government's eyes beneath fusion's triumphant march, and renewables, always only ever tepidly adopted in the United States, only retained their second-tier status, primarily in the field of transporation. The US, solution in hand, heavily downgraded its involvement in the multinational ITER, DEMO, and PROTO programs, although it continued toying with the Z Machine and National Ignition Facility for various reasons, and certain commercial enterprises continued on with their own esoteric devices.
The Polywell was not without drawbacks. Although it provided prodigious clean power, securing the requisite fuel quickly became an intensely competitive geostrategic concern, and its scalability meant it was more efficient the larger the reactor in question: it was suited only for static powerplants or the largest of ships, and even so its initial investment cost was steep. Efficiency in miniaturization remained a tricky engineering problem, and it was not optimally suited for all applications—it was not the end-all, be-all in fusion technology, but it was first, and that counted for quite a bit. By 2038 there appeared to be no end in sight for plants being commissioned across the US, and every effort was being made by Bechtel to break into (and dominate) advanced economies across the world. The Polywell didn't save the world, but it made the future a bit brighter.
ANCHORPOINT
Begun in 2021, the Anchorpoint Project was a US government program to construct a pilot space elevator. The Project began with a selection process between Baker Island and Jarvis Island. Although both were protected under the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, ocean acidification had by that time begun to severely impact the coral and marine life at both sites. Jarvis Island, being located only 25 miles from the equator, sitting almost exactly centrally within the Pacific, and possessing no endangered or threatened terrestrial flora or fauna, was selected as the sacrifice in the name of progress.
At the time the project was begun it was funded at a relatively low priority utilizing public and private backing of various kinds and planned in a series of rollouts. Site selection was primarily predicated on proximity to the equator. Additional considerations received varying degrees of importance: territorial siting exclusively under US control; the location being unincorporated, unorganized, and uninhabited; the site being currently undeveloped and remote for reasons of security; the site being located in a position that could facilitate commerce. Jarvis Island's remoteness at first cautioned against the last, but its position in the middle of the Pacific meant it could serve the entirety of the Pacific Rim with equal efficiency. It also coincidentally functioned as a statement of American dominance over the Pacific, and it was uniquely scalable. And so, before the problem of the tether had even been solved, development began. The island was to quickly become unrecognizable.
The major innovation to be deployed in this endeavor wasn't new at all: Roman concrete. Already having seen widespread adoption both for its vastly increased durability and much reduced carbon footprint, the various proprietary and generic blends, dubbed "spqretes" (spack-crete) or "seacrete" by those snooty enough to make a distinction, would form the foundation for a new megalopolis in the ocean. Jarvis Island was fully paved over, and from it radiated an ever-expanding set of piers and platforms and canals, as it was converted into a world-class airport, seaport, and city to service the elevator which had not even started. At the center began work on the anchor itself, a massive arcology-like structure to hold the tether and its elevators in place. Buried beneath one of the most massive outpourings of concrete in history, Jarvis Island became Anchorpoint Island, and within its bunker-like structures were also quietly (albeit not covertly) installed a bewildering array of reactors and tidal and wind power collectors, along with a massive battery of laser defense systems. It was not billed as a fortress, but its function as a military backup to Guam and as a major strategic site made its defense against conventional, NBC, and asymmetric threats inevitable. It was all also to be covered in non-threatening tropical chic surfaces.
Construction was still feverishly occuring as the actual counterweight was maneuvered into a resting geostationary earth orbit (GEO) in 2037. A massive and lumpy carbonaceous chondrite, it had been selected particularly for partial conversion into cable material to defray costs (such extraction naturally turning it into a space station) and moved into place by a joint NASA-JAXA-Private venture, after much wrangling over concerns that it could smash into Earth with disasterous consequences. As 2038 arrived, the cable tether itself remained out of reach, with the materials sciences technology not quite ready for primetime, but all the other elements were rapidly falling into place. As established, the tether was intended to work using laser propulsion rather than mechanical climbers, for speed of access to orbit, although mechanical clamping systems are intended to be integrated as a failsafe.
There was talk of utilizing Anchorpoint to defray costs of subsequent elevator construction. Indeed, more ambitious plans called for using it as the start of a network: a tether on the other side of the planet (roughly 100 miles south of Basankusu or 100 miles east of Mbandaka, in the DRC) would allow construction of a polar orbital ring between the two, with a set of skyhooks that could service Hawaii, Europe, and Africa. The two asteroid anchors would exist at one another's L3 Lagrangian points and would be mutually stabilizing; in addition their L4 and L5 points would permit the construction of four other stations and tethers that would further stabilize this system. This suggested four more elevators separated at roughly 60° latitude intervals: near the Galapagos, off the northern coast of Brazil, south of Sri Lanka, and north of Papua. Given the stability of L4 and L5 points, precision was not absolutely necessary in these sites. These four stations could also be linked with rings and drop skyhooks, and it was imaginable that one could then reach orbit from a few hours travel almost anywhere on Earth, and that these stations could then be interconnected. Given the lack of resistance in the nanotube structures that would inevitably form the cables, it was conceivable they could also be used as hardlines for orbital power collection. Such talk was beyond the scope or ambition of the Anchorpoint Project itself, or the concern of its operators.
This is an expansion from the earlier post and is designed to go into a bit more detail and introduce some new things. I'll probably do these 1-2 at a time to go into detail on specific topics.
POLYWELL
Proposed in 1975 by the Soviet physicist Oleg Lavrentiev, and pursued in the 1980s by Robert Bussard, former Assistant Director of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Polywell was a low-priority staple of American defense spending from 1987 to 2015, with the US Navy becoming the primary financier in 1992. A unique form of Inertial Electrostatic Fusion (IEF) device that barely survived funding cuts on numerous occasions, one would be forgiven for not expecting anything to come of it.
In 2013, the Polywell fell off of public government accounting. In 2014, the Polywell device known as WB-8 exceeded breakeven in a sustained fashion. In 2015, the Navy sought and secured funding for a full-scale commercial prototype under the black projects budget. This prototype was completed in 2018 and publicly revealed in 2020. It was not commercially cost-effective, but it showed the way forward in advanced clean energy production. The Polywell was capable of sustaining a proton-Boron11 aneutronic fusion reaction without fear of meltdowns, explosions, or radioactive waste. The nuclear titans of military-contracting, Westinghouse Electric Company and Bechtel Corporation, engaged in a fierce, high-stakes bidding war for the patent and rights holder, Energy-Matter Conversion Corporation—a struggle in which Bechtel prevailed (some say amidst government intervention, WEC being being majority-owned by the Toshiba Group). Bechtel spent the next eight years refining the design for commercialization, rolling out a modular system in 2029. By then, the global landscape of energy had already changed.
The countries with major boron reserves (those being Turkey, Chile, Argentina, Russia, China, America, Kazakhstan, Peru, and Colombia) found themselves sitting on supplies of a substance suddenly worth more than gold after the public unveiling. Speculation saw the Mojave Desert's ancient borax mines surge back into life at the prospect of meeting what was projected to be an insatiable appetite for the element, and American energy companies—long-since having diversified out of oil—began scouring the globe looking for sites to snap up. An American fusion-monopoly seemed to be in the making, but with the genie out of the bottle, America would turn out to be merely the world-leader in Polywell technology, not the absolute hegemon—harrowing escapades of corporate and state-sponsored espionage played out in the shadows around the new technology. Fission died an ignomious death in the American government's eyes beneath fusion's triumphant march, and renewables, always only ever tepidly adopted in the United States, only retained their second-tier status, primarily in the field of transporation. The US, solution in hand, heavily downgraded its involvement in the multinational ITER, DEMO, and PROTO programs, although it continued toying with the Z Machine and National Ignition Facility for various reasons, and certain commercial enterprises continued on with their own esoteric devices.
The Polywell was not without drawbacks. Although it provided prodigious clean power, securing the requisite fuel quickly became an intensely competitive geostrategic concern, and its scalability meant it was more efficient the larger the reactor in question: it was suited only for static powerplants or the largest of ships, and even so its initial investment cost was steep. Efficiency in miniaturization remained a tricky engineering problem, and it was not optimally suited for all applications—it was not the end-all, be-all in fusion technology, but it was first, and that counted for quite a bit. By 2038 there appeared to be no end in sight for plants being commissioned across the US, and every effort was being made by Bechtel to break into (and dominate) advanced economies across the world. The Polywell didn't save the world, but it made the future a bit brighter.
ANCHORPOINT
Begun in 2021, the Anchorpoint Project was a US government program to construct a pilot space elevator. The Project began with a selection process between Baker Island and Jarvis Island. Although both were protected under the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, ocean acidification had by that time begun to severely impact the coral and marine life at both sites. Jarvis Island, being located only 25 miles from the equator, sitting almost exactly centrally within the Pacific, and possessing no endangered or threatened terrestrial flora or fauna, was selected as the sacrifice in the name of progress.
At the time the project was begun it was funded at a relatively low priority utilizing public and private backing of various kinds and planned in a series of rollouts. Site selection was primarily predicated on proximity to the equator. Additional considerations received varying degrees of importance: territorial siting exclusively under US control; the location being unincorporated, unorganized, and uninhabited; the site being currently undeveloped and remote for reasons of security; the site being located in a position that could facilitate commerce. Jarvis Island's remoteness at first cautioned against the last, but its position in the middle of the Pacific meant it could serve the entirety of the Pacific Rim with equal efficiency. It also coincidentally functioned as a statement of American dominance over the Pacific, and it was uniquely scalable. And so, before the problem of the tether had even been solved, development began. The island was to quickly become unrecognizable.
The major innovation to be deployed in this endeavor wasn't new at all: Roman concrete. Already having seen widespread adoption both for its vastly increased durability and much reduced carbon footprint, the various proprietary and generic blends, dubbed "spqretes" (spack-crete) or "seacrete" by those snooty enough to make a distinction, would form the foundation for a new megalopolis in the ocean. Jarvis Island was fully paved over, and from it radiated an ever-expanding set of piers and platforms and canals, as it was converted into a world-class airport, seaport, and city to service the elevator which had not even started. At the center began work on the anchor itself, a massive arcology-like structure to hold the tether and its elevators in place. Buried beneath one of the most massive outpourings of concrete in history, Jarvis Island became Anchorpoint Island, and within its bunker-like structures were also quietly (albeit not covertly) installed a bewildering array of reactors and tidal and wind power collectors, along with a massive battery of laser defense systems. It was not billed as a fortress, but its function as a military backup to Guam and as a major strategic site made its defense against conventional, NBC, and asymmetric threats inevitable. It was all also to be covered in non-threatening tropical chic surfaces.
Construction was still feverishly occuring as the actual counterweight was maneuvered into a resting geostationary earth orbit (GEO) in 2037. A massive and lumpy carbonaceous chondrite, it had been selected particularly for partial conversion into cable material to defray costs (such extraction naturally turning it into a space station) and moved into place by a joint NASA-JAXA-Private venture, after much wrangling over concerns that it could smash into Earth with disasterous consequences. As 2038 arrived, the cable tether itself remained out of reach, with the materials sciences technology not quite ready for primetime, but all the other elements were rapidly falling into place. As established, the tether was intended to work using laser propulsion rather than mechanical climbers, for speed of access to orbit, although mechanical clamping systems are intended to be integrated as a failsafe.
There was talk of utilizing Anchorpoint to defray costs of subsequent elevator construction. Indeed, more ambitious plans called for using it as the start of a network: a tether on the other side of the planet (roughly 100 miles south of Basankusu or 100 miles east of Mbandaka, in the DRC) would allow construction of a polar orbital ring between the two, with a set of skyhooks that could service Hawaii, Europe, and Africa. The two asteroid anchors would exist at one another's L3 Lagrangian points and would be mutually stabilizing; in addition their L4 and L5 points would permit the construction of four other stations and tethers that would further stabilize this system. This suggested four more elevators separated at roughly 60° latitude intervals: near the Galapagos, off the northern coast of Brazil, south of Sri Lanka, and north of Papua. Given the stability of L4 and L5 points, precision was not absolutely necessary in these sites. These four stations could also be linked with rings and drop skyhooks, and it was imaginable that one could then reach orbit from a few hours travel almost anywhere on Earth, and that these stations could then be interconnected. Given the lack of resistance in the nanotube structures that would inevitably form the cables, it was conceivable they could also be used as hardlines for orbital power collection. Such talk was beyond the scope or ambition of the Anchorpoint Project itself, or the concern of its operators.
J.K. Stockholme
Right Opposition
Man Symph D... I've put off putting up my backgrounder for Russia because of trying to write something as thoroughly detailed as you.
Anyways, I'm still playing as Russia.
Anyways, I'm still playing as Russia.
christos200
Never tell me the odds
The only true legal Republic of China is here and ready to retake the mainland from the Mad Communists.
Grandkhan
Telvanni Master Wizard
whoop whoop Australia coming back up.
Quick question so I don't shoot myself in the foot because I'm not really a climate scientist or an electrical engineer or anything like that, and my knowledge on that subject is somewhat skimpy.
How plausible are all the plans for Australia's electricity requirements to be 100% carbon neutral? There's claims that Australia can generate all of its own electricity without use for carbon or fossil fuels whatsoever right now with current technology, and I've talked to climate engineers who say it can be done right now if the government only put the money into it, but dropping political concerns for the moment is it actually possible?
The report is here, but the TL;DR version is that we can supply all of Australia's power requirements using wind power and molten salt solar towers/
Quick question so I don't shoot myself in the foot because I'm not really a climate scientist or an electrical engineer or anything like that, and my knowledge on that subject is somewhat skimpy.
How plausible are all the plans for Australia's electricity requirements to be 100% carbon neutral? There's claims that Australia can generate all of its own electricity without use for carbon or fossil fuels whatsoever right now with current technology, and I've talked to climate engineers who say it can be done right now if the government only put the money into it, but dropping political concerns for the moment is it actually possible?
The report is here, but the TL;DR version is that we can supply all of Australia's power requirements using wind power and molten salt solar towers/
Angst
Rambling and inconsistent
I think I'm not good or deep enough for what's showing up in this NES tbh, so I'm bowing out as Denmark.
arya126
Squad Leader
Syria checking in and noting I will be gone starting from about now until Sunday night.
SouthernKing
crickety cricket
India is here, vande mataram.
TheLastJacobite
No Commies
Azale, are terrorist groups playable? If so, I'd be interested in playing as al Qaeda or Boko Haram.
Lord of Elves
Suede-Denim Secret Police
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2009
- Messages
- 6,976
Brazil is here, we're Brazil, get used to it.
Yea man, go for it. Which one of those would you prefer? al Qaeda is also not much of a "thing" right now, so you'll need to be creative in getting it reconstructed or take one of the "Al Qaeda's in spirit" like AQIM or AQII.
Immaculate
unerring
- Joined
- Jan 22, 2003
- Messages
- 7,623
It might be interesting to play an eco-terrorist organization FROM THE FUTURE!
Ophorian
Holy Britannian Emperor
- Joined
- Jun 18, 2013
- Messages
- 325
Sorry. I didn't find any reference to Spain on the front page, I just wanted to make sure minor unlisted countries were actually playable before outright claiming anything.
Alrighty, Spain it is. Thanks.Spain is indeed available. Good luck
Thlayli
Le Pétit Prince
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