[production-notes] 14.6 (Patreon)

Hi folks! SUPER technical episode this week, right?! 

As usual, everything in Lost Terminal either exists already or is based on real science.

I think of the show as "hard sci-fi hopepunk". Sci-fi can be categorised as "hard" or "soft", depending on how realistic or true-to-life it is.

In soft sci-fi, many rules and physical laws of the world bend to the story, or are unexplained. Teleportation or faster-than-light travel, for instance, are very handy devices to keep the plot moving on quickly, and we understand that it doesn't need an explanation because the story about the humans, not the technology.

In hard sci-fi, there is much more concern for scientific accuracy. There's still differences with our own world, of course, because the author is trying to predict the future, which in itself is an act of fantasy.

Usually, the hard sci-fi author will change a small number of variables and stick with them, exploring the repercussions of these small changes.

Andy Weir, for example, only needed to add one or two zeros to NASA's budget for The Martian to be written!

In Lost Terminal, I think there are only two changes:

1. AGI exists. Seth is a Real Boy, a real human-level intelligence who can think and learn like us. This is not possible at present, and I hand wave how he was made quite conveniently by him not remembering!

2. The exact parameters of The Collapse. Different climate models suggest both less and greater sea level changes than in LT, depending on variables I feel underqualified to predict. I chose 10m sea level rise, with total arctic thawing, and we won't worry too much about the exact glacier/arctic thawing that means that would have happened.

I researched these two main fantastic elements as much as I could without doing a literal PhD, got a long way, and then said "good enough". I hope you agree!

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I'll talk a bit more about radio and batteries.

Nia's coming up against the harsh rules of antenna design:

HF (shortwave) antennas are HUGE!

Because your antenna size is related to the wavelength of the frequency you're trying to transmit on, the lower the frequency (and therefore the longer the wavelength) the bigger your antenna has to be!

The band Nia is using is the 40m wavelength band, 7MHz.

• Common antenna sizes are:
• 1/2 wave
• 1/4 wave
• 5/8 wave

- enormous on the 40m band!

So it's heavy, and because Yagi antennas are highly directional, they must be rotatable, so you can point to whomever you want to speak to.

Heavy plus movable = fragile, as Nia found out.

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Ally's experimentation with batteries is also based on some fascinating real-world tech.

Supercapacitors are very useful batteries that run cool, can discharge their power VERY quickly, for high-power applications, and have a superb combination of energy density and power density, allowing them to be smaller than an equivalent chemical battery.

Compressed-air storage is a non-chemical way of storing energy.

We consider batteries to be storing electrical energy, but they're not really. They're storing energy as reversible chemical reactions, often using metals like lead or lithium. 

Charging them runs the chemical reaction one way, requiring electricity, and discharging them allows the reaction to reverse, producing electricity.

This notion of using electricity to power an expensive process, then letting it reverse, giving us some of the electricity back, is universal in batteries, whatever their design.

Compressed air storage uses the electricity to do work: compressing air, which then can be later used to run an air-powered generator, the same technology as Nia's wind turbine.

In a very real way, you're storing wind power.

Inefficiencies, of course, cut both ways...

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Thank you all for your support! Talk soon <3