About WZC and Epyon's power output

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lunatictaker
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About WZC and Epyon's power output

I have always wondered about the correlation between the WZC and Epyon's output and their destructive weapon. As far as I known from gundamwikia, the TBR and Epyon sword are directly connected to their fusion reactors, and drew power directly from it. But with such meager output at about 3700kW, how do those reactors supply enough power for such destructive feats? A thread on MechaTalk suggested that the TBR has capacitors to slowly store up the needed power, but what about the Epyon? Does the sword have any kind of amplifier or something like that?
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MythSearcher
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

lunatictaker wrote: Tue Jun 26, 2018 11:25 pm I have always wondered about the correlation between the WZC and Epyon's output and their destructive weapon. As far as I known from gundamwikia, the TBR and Epyon sword are directly connected to their fusion reactors, and drew power directly from it. But with such meager output at about 3700kW, how do those reactors supply enough power for such destructive feats? A thread on MechaTalk suggested that the TBR has capacitors to slowly store up the needed power, but what about the Epyon? Does the sword have any kind of amplifier or something like that?
[edit] Forget about this, was not sober enough at that time.
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3GW is pretty destructive if focused in such a small area.

Consider your average microwave oven is 1kW power, multiply that 3,000,000 times.
Can't see the sheer power of this?
Energy contained in 1g of TNT is 4.186kJ(1kcal), so a 3GW beam sword is giving you the power of about 750kg TNT per sec.

In contrast, the Tomahawk Cruise Missile has a yield of 500kg TNT.

So Epyon turns on beam sword, gives it 2GW output, and you get the power of a tomahawk missile per sec.

Another comparison. The energy required to raise the temperature of 1 litre/kg of water by 1°C is 1kcal, which is 1 gram of TNT.
If you are heating 100t of water from 25°C to 100°C, and you use 2GW to do it, you need about 15 sec to do it.
Sounds slow? Water is one of the highest specific heat capacity substance, if we take, say, iron, the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 kg of iron is 450J, so 2GW of energy can heat 100t of iron by about 44°C per sec.
Titanium is 540J/kg, so about 37°C /s.

Still not satisfied? Well, the MS in Wing is mostly less than 10t(considering the thrust figures, to keep their performance, they cannot be like 10 times of their empty mass when fully loaded, and most of the added mass will be propellant and fuel, since the weapons will be using similar technology[magic] to get unscientifically light but strong)
Raising the whole thing by 37°C will definitely kill the pilot inside.
Comparing to the human body, the Typical Wing MS has a density of less than 0.1, whereas a solid Titanium block density is about 4.5. So the average material is taking up 45 times the space than a solid block of it.(honeycomb structure, styrofoam, whatever)
Melting point of Titanium is 1668°C , say you need to raise the temperature by 2000°C to do a clean cut.
2GW can melt about 1850kg of Titanium or about 0.4m^3 of it per sec, since the Wing technology made it 45 times larger, it can melt through about 18m^3 of material per sec.
Focusing the heat into an area of 0.3m by 10m gives you a strike depth of roughly 6m/s, good enough to cut through most MS since even if you do a head to hip cut, you still only need about 6m in distance due to their long legs.
If you get 3GW power for the blade, you can even do a 9m/s strike.
All of this is pretty rough ballpark figures(I cut off the decimals) but shows the capacity of that kind of power.

Unless the target is using magic (Ok, Gundanium alloy is pretty magical in sucking up heat energy) 3GW shouldn't be lacking in power.

Considering once turned on, you only need to replenish loss power when performing the cut, the blade power can actually be higher than the input power and be charged with a capacitor type technology to boost output power by about 5~10 times for each strike.(you do need at least 5~10 seconds before reaching the next target in average)
Or your blade can have say, 40GJ, you can maintain it when not cutting, but you can only give it 2GJ/s so you better let it rest for a while and not cut down 20 enemies in 20 seconds if each strike takes you 4GJ.

Side note: Think of all that power going into a capacitor for charging a shot every 15min or so, you get the typical WZ twin buster rifle TJ level power.

I'm a person who believe in ranged combat and thinks that melee is stupid in space, so Epyon really makes no sense at all to me anyway. A Tomahawk missile level beam shot per sec is deadly enough by itself, Epyon can never approach an enemy of its own power level but with a reasonable designed ranged attack system in mind.(WZ's TBR is way too slow, in both charging and aiming.)
Last edited by MythSearcher on Mon Jul 02, 2018 11:49 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

MythSearcher wrote: Sat Jun 30, 2018 12:28 pm 3GW is pretty destructive if focused in such a small area.
Er... um... you've exaggerated by three orders of magnitude here.

3,700 kilowatts is 3.7 megawatts... not gigawatts. To put that in perspective, that's equivalent to the power used by about 3,100 microwaves running simultaneously, 561 modern AC plug-in hybrid car chargers, 123 AN/SEQ-3 military grade laser systems, eight semi-truck engines at maximum RPM, two YAL-1 C.O.I.L. anti-IBCM lasers, or a single diesel-electric train engine. The energy involved is equivalent to detonating 804 grams (1.77lb) of TNT every second.

Once you're operating at the correct level of scale, it's easy to see why the OP asked the question they did. 3.7MW is a lot of power for a modern DEW, but it's a LONG way from casually vaporizing groups of armored fighting vehicles. It's only about a quarter the energy-on-target of a GAU-8/A 30mm rotary cannon firing at 4,200rpm.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

Seto Kaiba wrote: Sat Jun 30, 2018 6:35 pm
MythSearcher wrote: Sat Jun 30, 2018 12:28 pm 3GW is pretty destructive if focused in such a small area.
Er... um... you've exaggerated by three orders of magnitude here.

3,700 kilowatts is 3.7 megawatts... not gigawatts. To put that in perspective, that's equivalent to the power used by about 3,100 microwaves running simultaneously, 561 modern AC plug-in hybrid car chargers, 123 AN/SEQ-3 military grade laser systems, eight semi-truck engines at maximum RPM, two YAL-1 C.O.I.L. anti-IBCM lasers, or a single diesel-electric train engine. The energy involved is equivalent to detonating 804 grams (1.77lb) of TNT every second.

Once you're operating at the correct level of scale, it's easy to see why the OP asked the question they did. 3.7MW is a lot of power for a modern DEW, but it's a LONG way from casually vaporizing groups of armored fighting vehicles. It's only about a quarter the energy-on-target of a GAU-8/A 30mm rotary cannon firing at 4,200rpm.
Opps, I guess I shouldn't be doing calculations before going to bed.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

MythSearcher wrote: Mon Jul 02, 2018 11:45 am Opps, I guess I shouldn't be doing calculations before going to bed.
It probably should be gigawatts in terms of the firepower actually shown on screen... either that or all those Leos, Tauruses, and mobile dolls are made of something a bit less robust than titanium or gundarium. Maybe a nice sharp parmesan cheese?


lunatictaker wrote: Tue Jun 26, 2018 11:25 pm I have always wondered about the correlation between the WZC and Epyon's output and their destructive weapon. As far as I known from gundamwikia, the TBR and Epyon sword are directly connected to their fusion reactors, and drew power directly from it. But with such meager output at about 3700kW, how do those reactors supply enough power for such destructive feats?
Strictly speaking, it's impossible... particularly when you factor in statements to the effect that the original XXXG-01W Wing Gundam's buster rifle had a per-shot energy output comparable to the daily energy used by your average medium-sized city and the XXXG-00W0 Wing Gundam Zero's twin buster rifle supposedly offers more than double that firepower.

To put that into a usable context, the average annual energy consumption per person in Japan is currently around 8,460kWh. One kilowatt hour (kWh) is equivalent to 3.6 megajoules of energy, so that's an annual energy consumption of 30.456 gigajoules, or roughly 83.386 megajoules per person per day. Exactly what constitutes a "medium-sized" city varies anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000, so we'll go with 250,000 as a nice round number. That means that a single shot from the Wing Gundam's buster rifle is on the order of 20,846.4412 gigajoules and the Wing Gundam Zero's is somewhere in the vicinity of 42,000 gigajoules per discharge. If that 20,846.4412 gigajoule discharge happens in, say, the five seconds or so that it seems to last in the animation... that's a 4,169(.3) gigawatt beam weapon. The round number estimate for a twin buster rifle would be an 8,400 gigawatt beam weapon.

The XXXG-01W Wing Gundam doesn't have a rated reactor output given, but the 3,732kW reactor on the XXXG-00W0 Wing Gundam Zero is capable of generating 3,732 kilojoules per second at maximum output, which is 322.4448 gigajoules per day.

At that rate, if the regular Wing Gundam's buster rifle were powered directly off the Wing Gundam Zero's reactor the way the twin buster rifle supposedly is, it would take 64 1/2 days to charge the buster rifle to fire a single shot. The twin buster rifle would need over 130 days of continuous charging at the Gundam's maximum rated generator output to fire a single shot.

Clearly, shenanigans are in play... because, as obliging as OZ can be at times, there's no way their troops would call Time Out in the middle of a battle and wait a calendar quarter for Heero's buster rifle to finish charging.




lunatictaker wrote: Tue Jun 26, 2018 11:25 pm A thread on MechaTalk suggested that the TBR has capacitors to slowly store up the needed power, but what about the Epyon? Does the sword have any kind of amplifier or something like that?
You can't amplify power. You can only add more power.

Amplifying power would require an overunity machine (a power source with over 100% efficiency), which is going to require violating the first and/or second laws of thermodynamics...


EDIT: Missed a zero in one of the gigajoule values.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

Seto Kaiba wrote: Mon Jul 02, 2018 2:56 pm
It probably should be gigawatts in terms of the firepower actually shown on screen... either that or all those Leos, Tauruses, and mobile dolls are made of something a bit less robust than titanium or gundarium. Maybe a nice sharp parmesan cheese?
Actually, One of my older calculations back in the early 00's, and the Wing Buster Rifle, with the funny numbers in the TV series model manual back then saying the effective area is something like 120~150m diameter by 150~250m length(Which is really short distance and look funny, the numbers might be wrong but they are early 3 digits in metres and not km.), it needed somewhere in the TJ level to even just raise the temperature inside by 3000 degrees.


My calculations up there might still hold if the blade width is reduced to a thousandth of that, so not 10cm, but 0.1mm.
Even metal can't really transfer heat away that fast so I guess it is almost negligible.
Of course the blade we see in show isn't nearly enough thin(which is I proposed 10cm to begin with)


The MS and MD really shouldn't be that robust, their density is seriously low, and on average should be only like 2~4mm thick of Titanium if all of their material are used as the shell...
But I guess I'd prefer Brie, a nice melting cheese.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

Yay, thank you guys for those excelled answers ^^ I have always wonder the mechanics behind those destructive powers, and with the official statistics, it seemed really impossible, but as I am very bad at natural science aka math, chemistry and physics, I cant calculate and find th answered myself
And please let me have one more question, if the reactors go by 3800kW/s, how do they distribute it to the MSs components? For example, 1000kW/s for BR/sword, 1000kW for thrusters, and 800kW for everything else? :D
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

lunatictaker wrote: Sat Aug 11, 2018 11:50 pm And please let me have one more question, if the reactors go by 3800kW/s, how do they distribute it to the MSs components? For example, 1000kW/s for BR/sword, 1000kW for thrusters, and 800kW for everything else? :D
Y'know, I don't think I have ever seen a breakdown of how much power each of a Mobile Suit's systems consumes...

One nitpick I will make is that the Watt is already a per-second unit of measure, 1 watt being equivalent to 1 joule per second, so there's no such thing as "W/s".

Given what I've read, and admittedly my knowledge of Gundam's underlying technology is rather less complete than that of other members here, I would presume that most of the energy from the reactor is being used to run all the various joint actuators. One of the key traits of the beam saber and beam rifle in the UC Gundam was the relatively minimal need for onboard energy supplies due to the internal e-cap power sources they were using.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

Seto Kaiba wrote: Sun Aug 12, 2018 2:40 pm
lunatictaker wrote: Sat Aug 11, 2018 11:50 pm And please let me have one more question, if the reactors go by 3800kW/s, how do they distribute it to the MSs components? For example, 1000kW/s for BR/sword, 1000kW for thrusters, and 800kW for everything else? :D
Y'know, I don't think I have ever seen a breakdown of how much power each of a Mobile Suit's systems consumes...

One nitpick I will make is that the Watt is already a per-second unit of measure, 1 watt being equivalent to 1 joule per second, so there's no such thing as "W/s".

Given what I've read, and admittedly my knowledge of Gundam's underlying technology is rather less complete than that of other members here, I would presume that most of the energy from the reactor is being used to run all the various joint actuators. One of the key traits of the beam saber and beam rifle in the UC Gundam was the relatively minimal need for onboard energy supplies due to the internal e-cap power sources they were using.
I was talking bout those 2 particularly. My guess is they distributed the energy to components based on priorities, such as when they need firepower or when they need thrust etc... :D
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

Yeah, before Project V beam weapons were limited to warships because the amount of power required to generate and fuse minovsky particles was outside the reach of a reactor that could be installed on a Mobile Suit. The E-cap changed that, allowing high-performance suits to feasibly carry beam weapons, trading off an 'ammo' limit for the power of the weapons in a much more mobile package. It started out that suits still needed a higher-powered reactor to catalyze the final step that results in a beam shot but then it became ubiquitous, and for a suit that's only using something like that (ie, not things like beam cannons that do draw directly on the reactor) most of the MS' output is going to be going to other things.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the ZZ's Hi-Mega Cannon which does require more power than the reactor can deliver on a continuous basis, but that's the exception rather than the norm.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

lunatictaker wrote: Tue Aug 14, 2018 8:06 am I was talking bout those 2 particularly. My guess is they distributed the energy to components based on priorities, such as when they need firepower or when they need thrust etc... :D
Yeah, I would assume that the onboard computers of Mobile Suits in general are capable of dynamic power allocation and are probably ramping the output of the reactor itself up and down to meet the needs of the various energy-hungry systems like joint drive actuators, thermonuclear rocket propulsion, and energy weaponry in order to conserve fuel. It wouldn't surprise me overmuch to learn that the reactors of the Gundams could operate at above the maximum rated output for short spans of time. Every sane engineer caps performance well below the actual design limit of the parts, the only question is how paranoid or conservative the engineer actually was.[1]

The obvious problem being that, as the whole thread has been about, there just isn't enough power coming out of that reactor at its maximum output to account for the amount of energy the energy weapons must be consuming. Normal beam sabers and rifles, at least by UC standards, use very little onboard power because they're exploiting e-caps as a means of getting around the otherwise excessive energy requirements of beam weaponry vs. such a small reactor on the mecha. That clearly can't work with the Wing Gundam Zero and Epyon though, since their most destructive beam weaponry is explicitly said to be directly powered off the Mobile Suit's reactor. The amount of energy directed into its weapons would probably dwarf what was held aside for running joint drive actuators and rocket motors by orders of magnitude.


[1] In my day job, I've known engine parts to be rated for 125% of their calibrated maximum power... and in some cases, deliberate derating to increase the time between maintenance overhauls has been known to make some engines, main generators, and other components able to operate at 200% or more their calibrated maximum power. Macross, my favorite mecha series, makes quite a meal out of this by having this be the "afterburner" mode of thermonuclear turbine engines... just overnengineering the engines and arbitrarily setting 100% based on the limits of other systems like their cooling system, giving the endings an actual maximum power of 240% their rated maximum.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

Thankies guys :D so I can guess that the Epy and Wzc can have their sabers at min like 2-3mW, then crank up to 4-6mW if the reactors can afford it. Then we can assume that the minimum output needed to cut thru gundanium alloy is 3-4mW
Also, based on newly updated tech info for the Justice and Freedom, their rifles and sabers also directly connected to their reactors through the hand plug, and might get about 4-5mW output if possible? Cuz their thrusts are really high, and PS needed lotsa power too
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

lunatictaker wrote: Wed Aug 15, 2018 10:10 am Thankies guys :D so I can guess that the Epy and Wzc can have their sabers at min like 2-3mW, then crank up to 4-6mW if the reactors can afford it. Then we can assume that the minimum output needed to cut thru gundanium alloy is 3-4mW
Gotta be careful with your SI prefixes... the lowercase "m" makes it milliwatt, not megawatt (MW).

5 mW is the regulatory upper limit for the power of household laser pointers, 9 orders of magnitude lower than what you meant.

lunatictaker wrote: Wed Aug 15, 2018 10:10 am Also, based on newly updated tech info for the Justice and Freedom, their rifles and sabers also directly connected to their reactors through the hand plug, and might get about 4-5mW output if possible? Cuz their thrusts are really high, and PS needed lotsa power too
That is arguably more practical than what the Epyon and Wing Gundam Zero were doing, since those Mobile Suits from the Cosmic Era are powered by compact nuclear fission reactors. Constant output would be less strain on a fission system. I don't know offhand how much power Phase Shift Armor consumes, but the spec given for the reactors of the Justice and Freedom indicate they're running an 8.826MW-class fission reactor, about 2.4x the power in the (comically low) official statements for the Wing Gundam Zero.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

lunatictaker wrote: Wed Aug 15, 2018 10:10 am Also, based on newly updated tech info for the Justice and Freedom, their rifles and sabers also directly connected to their reactors through the hand plug, and might get about 4-5mW output if possible? Cuz their thrusts are really high, and PS needed lotsa power too
I would say all MSs have dynamic power allocation, we just don't see it all the time (only when the plot demands it). Gato did this during GP02's fight with GP01 when he maxed the output of his saber; Shiro did this with his damaged RX-79 to make a bath by lowering the output to melt the ice without turning it to water vapor; a poor RGM-89De pilot changed his saber into a knife to stab Banshee; the specs for the Union Flag/OverFlag note that the linear gun has a variable charge rate (lower output = higher rate of fire, high output = more powerful shot). So can Freedom and Justice's beam saber output do variable output? Probably. It's that it's never done on screen. IIRC, CE has normally been sketchy on specs.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

Thanks guys :D your posts have been very educational for me :) hope to see ya guys again when I come across another issue
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

Well, depending on your source, using the RX-78-2 as an example, it got 7 generators, and the ones for the thrustors is highly likely not included in the output figure. The Core fighter itself already has 12000HP (8948kW) output power according to the MG manual(1.0 ver.), which is probably brought over from the rapport deluxe figure where the RX-78 has an output of 65000HP (48470kW). A way of rationalizing the current 1380kW figure, which is even lower than the core fighter output alone, can be that it is not the maximum output but just more of a regular output figure.

Of course, from what I see, they seems to be choosing the lower output to match the output of WWII era fighter planes, and not really for any other rationale, for the OYW MS, and just increase the number to indicate technological advancement.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

MythSearcher wrote: Fri Aug 24, 2018 2:24 am Well, depending on your source, using the RX-78-2 as an example, it got 7 generators, and the ones for the thrustors is highly likely not included in the output figure. The Core fighter itself already has 12000HP (8948kW) output power according to the MG manual(1.0 ver.), which is probably brought over from the rapport deluxe figure where the RX-78 has an output of 65000HP (48470kW).
Well, that got me wincing... this is a powertrain engineer pet peeve, that most people don't realize that there are a BUNCH of different kinds of horsepower measurements and that many of them aren't directly equivalent to each other because of where they're measured in a system. The FF-X7 Core Fighter's "horsepower" rating is the shaft horsepower of the turbine engine it uses for thrust production in atmospheric flight. It doesn't have any direct relationship to the output of the Core Fighter's NC-3 nuclear fusion generator.

As best I can determine, the 65,000HP figure is ALSO shaft horsepower... for the fluid pulse system-driven actuators that power the mobile suit's joints, which is also output independent of the electrical generator attached to the Minovsky reactor.

(Shaft horsepower was a popular metric for mecha anime designers for a while in the late 70's and early 80's, since it looked impressive but was effectively a meaningless bit of trivia without several other pieces of info that were typically not provided.)
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

Seto Kaiba wrote: Fri Aug 24, 2018 10:40 am Well, that got me wincing... this is a powertrain engineer pet peeve, that most people don't realize that there are a BUNCH of different kinds of horsepower measurements and that many of them aren't directly equivalent to each other because of where they're measured in a system. The FF-X7 Core Fighter's "horsepower" rating is the shaft horsepower of the turbine engine it uses for thrust production in atmospheric flight. It doesn't have any direct relationship to the output of the Core Fighter's NC-3 nuclear fusion generator.

As best I can determine, the 65,000HP figure is ALSO shaft horsepower... for the fluid pulse system-driven actuators that power the mobile suit's joints, which is also output independent of the electrical generator attached to the Minovsky reactor.

(Shaft horsepower was a popular metric for mecha anime designers for a while in the late 70's and early 80's, since it looked impressive but was effectively a meaningless bit of trivia without several other pieces of info that were typically not provided.)
I look at it this way, you still need a fusion generator to give the shaft horsepower and it cannot get a higher output than the total generator output.
And there is a shaft horsepower output for RX-78's fusion gas turbine, in Gundam Century, and it is not 65000HP but 37500HP, along with its 28000kW metric conversion.
So if we try to make sense of all of these figures, the RX-78 does have a 65000HP output, and it is not shaft HP.
And the Rapport deluxe books are published in the 90's, already after the popular period of shaft horsepower.

Of course, I totally agree that they don't really mean a thing, we have no idea what those figures mean in all sense and whether the power goes anywhere.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

MythSearcher wrote: Mon Aug 27, 2018 10:59 am I look at it this way, you still need a fusion generator to give the shaft horsepower and it cannot get a higher output than the total generator output.
Oh, absolutely... but what we're principally concerned with here in this discussion isn't the fusion reactor's maximum energetic potential. We're mainly concerned with the maximum output of the generator that is converting the heat energy from the fusion reaction into usable power.

Thanks to the Laws of Thermodynamics, no generator is going to achieve perfect efficiency and to even get close is damn near impossible. Doubly so when a significant portion of reactor output is DELIBERATELY not used for power generation, as in the case of the Minovsky ultracompact fusion reactors used on the mobile suits of the Universal Century, where energy from the reaction is also used in the fluid pulse system which runs the actuators and is used to heat propellent for the main flight nozzles.


MythSearcher wrote: Mon Aug 27, 2018 10:59 am And there is a shaft horsepower output for RX-78's fusion gas turbine, in Gundam Century, and it is not 65000HP but 37500HP, along with its 28000kW metric conversion.
I was originally going to ask for a page number, but on an idle flip-thru of the book's Renewal Edition I landed on that exact page as I was writing this...

This appears to be the output not of the Minovsky reactor itself, but the shaft horsepower of a gas turbine feeding the mobile suit's flight nozzles using fuel flash-heated by the reactor... not a generator tied to the reactor. If memory serves, as you explained it to me the Minovsky reactor is generating electrical power using some kind of electromechanical conversion involving i-fields rather than running Rankine cycle gas turbine generators or thermoelectric converters.


MythSearcher wrote: Mon Aug 27, 2018 10:59 am So if we try to make sense of all of these figures, the RX-78 does have a 65000HP output, and it is not shaft HP.
That's only if you assume that we're looking at one and only one system with output shafts here... we're not.

So we've got, on the one hand, a stated and oft-reiterated maximum generator output of 1,380kW. Then we've got two ratings in horsepower... one that appears to be a maximum horsepower rating that may be the entire fluid pulse system peak output, and another that looks to be a gas turbine used for production of thrust in flight. There's an interesting question about whether that 37,500(s)hp is coming out of the same reactor surplus as the 65,000 or if they're separate. I'd guess they're probably shared, since a mobile suit typically isn't using both its flight nozzles AND all of its actuators at the same time.

The alternative is to assume that the conversion efficiency of the generators used in these reactors is just comically low at 4.9%... one-tenth what your modern gasoline-driven home generator can achieve.

(Pretty much as a rule you don't list a reactor's output in horsepower unless it's driving a Rankine cycle system... where the turbine is direct-driving a mechanical shaft for an electrical generator or some other purpose like a boat's propeller.)


MythSearcher wrote: Mon Aug 27, 2018 10:59 am Of course, I totally agree that they don't really mean a thing, we have no idea what those figures mean in all sense and whether the power goes anywhere.
It makes a bit more sense than you give it credit for... but you're looking to overturn the official generator outputs rather than account for these figures in the context they were presented. Still, as shaft horsepower for a turbine is bloody useless information without the efficiency and compression ratios, it's still mostly a meaningless bit of trivia.
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Re: About WZC and Epyon's power output

Seto Kaiba wrote: Mon Aug 27, 2018 12:27 pm Oh, absolutely... but what we're principally concerned with here in this discussion isn't the fusion reactor's maximum energetic potential. We're mainly concerned with the maximum output of the generator that is converting the heat energy from the fusion reaction into usable power.

Thanks to the Laws of Thermodynamics, no generator is going to achieve perfect efficiency and to even get close is damn near impossible. Doubly so when a significant portion of reactor output is DELIBERATELY not used for power generation, as in the case of the Minovsky ultracompact fusion reactors used on the mobile suits of the Universal Century, where energy from the reaction is also used in the fluid pulse system which runs the actuators and is used to heat propellent for the main flight nozzles.


I was originally going to ask for a page number, but on an idle flip-thru of the book's Renewal Edition I landed on that exact page as I was writing this...

This appears to be the output not of the Minovsky reactor itself, but the shaft horsepower of a gas turbine feeding the mobile suit's flight nozzles using fuel flash-heated by the reactor... not a generator tied to the reactor. If memory serves, as you explained it to me the Minovsky reactor is generating electrical power using some kind of electromechanical conversion involving i-fields rather than running Rankine cycle gas turbine generators or thermoelectric converters.

That's only if you assume that we're looking at one and only one system with output shafts here... we're not.

So we've got, on the one hand, a stated and oft-reiterated maximum generator output of 1,380kW. Then we've got two ratings in horsepower... one that appears to be a maximum horsepower rating that may be the entire fluid pulse system peak output, and another that looks to be a gas turbine used for production of thrust in flight. There's an interesting question about whether that 37,500(s)hp is coming out of the same reactor surplus as the 65,000 or if they're separate. I'd guess they're probably shared, since a mobile suit typically isn't using both its flight nozzles AND all of its actuators at the same time.

The alternative is to assume that the conversion efficiency of the generators used in these reactors is just comically low at 4.9%... one-tenth what your modern gasoline-driven home generator can achieve.

(Pretty much as a rule you don't list a reactor's output in horsepower unless it's driving a Rankine cycle system... where the turbine is direct-driving a mechanical shaft for an electrical generator or some other purpose like a boat's propeller.)

It makes a bit more sense than you give it credit for... but you're looking to overturn the official generator outputs rather than account for these figures in the context they were presented. Still, as shaft horsepower for a turbine is bloody useless information without the efficiency and compression ratios, it's still mostly a meaningless bit of trivia.
Well, I don't consider the 1380kW as the maximum, that is at least true for most of the sources. It only listed the data for 出力 and not 最大出力. I know there are sources stating that, but since that will most definitely contradict with those sources with a higher output and would be way too low considering the size and mass of an MS. It cannot even do quicker human motion scaled to its size if you just do a simple size up of 10 times the moment arm and 1000 times the mass... That did not even include the energy for propulsion.

Further explaining the reactors, the core of it is using some kind of Minovsky particle physics, a quick recap is that it utilize an I-Field(a cubic(?) lattice of +ve & -ve M particles held together by electro-magnetic force), fill in fusion material that forms virtual particles with the +ve & -ve M particles, compress the I-Field with EM field and you get fusion. I don't recall if there are description about how this is turned into electricity, but I guess you can always make use of the I-Field expansion which its EM field will create current in the coils.
The Thermonuclear propulsion systems seems to have description and images showing they simply pump the propellant into this core for heat and there are no mention of how much this will affect the power generation. There are units that we know to have a separate fusion reactor for propulsion, the MS-09 series legs hover/thrusters(for R types) are not drawing from their main generator. But we have no idea if other units are using the same generator or not. The FF-X7 core fighter seems to be referring to them as the same generators(one on each side).
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