A nice short and simple sub with widespread implications and use in a scifi world. Creative characters/players can no doubt find plenty of way to use "bucky bats" to optomize their ship and/or equipment.
A intuitive Gm can find plenty of places they would come in handy to make spacefaring society run smoothly.
quoteThe biggest problem is: why would you ever use a bucky battery instead of solar panels? Space is full of free energy. Hell, starlight can even push your ship. /quote
Inthe vast gulf between stars, or in areas where the sun is nearly dead (brown dwarf style) solar energy may not prove sufficient compared to one of these batteries.
The other downside to Solar panels is they can prove somewhat fragile in an area with frequent asteroid showers, and would also be somewhat useless to power a terraforming tower if it is terraforming a world with an atmosphere too thick for sunlight to effectively penetrate.
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The Hemangini Holy War where the goal was extinction of a metal race of nuisance squirrels. Hilarious! Love it.
Yes Virginia, speculative biology goes beyond flora. I do wonder whether the ecosystem could truly support a metal creature as active as a squirrel, however. They'd almost certainly be restricted to groves of Hemangini trees.
A great, humorous post, and a wonderful nuisance animal. The image of a squirrel, its eyes shimmering with hunger and teeth gleaming with the brightness of steel, gnawing away at someone's chainmail.
Update: I never meant to suggest that they lived off of metal alone. I tried to change the write up to suggest that metal was only a part of their diet. But the point was to make an amusing counter part to the tree.
For 100 words both of these submissions are great, gives an interesting new potential for a world whose primary resource is metal rather than stone/dirt. I would have liked to see what these submissions would have been in more than 100 words.
Items (Other) (Non-Magical)
A few alternate wide spread uses for them:
-Gravity plating on starships: A nice emergency back up to keep gravity functioning at .3-.6 G's or so during a catastrophic system failure. While far from earth normal being able to move about normally allows crews to better effect repairs then attempting to maneuver in zero gravity.
Atmospheric terraforming equipment Perfect to run the gargantuan terraforming installations on uninhabitable worlds, as these batteries take very little maintenance, and will operate the terrafomring equipment reliably for the 100+ years it takes to turn a plant habitable. (and keep it that way.)
Go to CommentEscape pods: While not generally the primary power supply, a bucky battery can provide sufficent power to a cryo capsule and maintain it's functionality for immense time spans, perfect to allow ample time for the pod to be rescued, or travel as slower then light speeds to an inhabitable planet. (Something that could take decades if not centuries depending on the location it is launched from and end velocity.)