How Many Batteries you Need to Power Star Wars Items?

OOD000 HOW MANY BATTERIES DDES IT TAKE TO P O W E R STAR WARS A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there were lightsabers, there were blasters and there were ships. But all this cool stuff needed power. LOTS OF POWER. Let's check out the power needs of some of your favorite Star Wars tech and what it would take to power up the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance. AA alkaline Barrel of oil: battery: 3.9 Wh 1.7 MWh Car battery: Nuclear reactor: 722 Wh 1,000 MW Tesla Powerwall: Earth's energy consumption: 7 kWh 104,426 TWh (per year) LIGHTSABERS Lightsabers are powered by "high-output" Diatium power cells, which are capable of recharging naturally. The blade neither radiates heat nor expends energy until it comes into contact with the solid item it is striking. Qui-Gon Jinn used his lightsaber to cut into the thick blast doors of Qui-Gon's lightsaber cut a circular area Nute Gunray's bridge. approximately The doors were 0.9 2.35 METERS tall and over a METERS in diameter. meter thick, In order to melt 0.87 cubic meters of conventional steel, it would require approximately 1.69 GIGAJOULES of thermal energy. 1.69 GJ = 469,482 Wh I Slightly more energy than 1 lightning bolt 120,380 0.28 barrels of oil AA batteries • 5.5 gallons of gas • 6,000 pounds • 250 gallons, enough to fill up a kiddie pool! JЬ 1 nuclear reactor 650 car batteries • 26,000 pounds • Max weight on a single-axle semi-trailer: 20,000 pounds 0.000000000475% of Earth's power • 12 people for one day 67 Tesla Powerwalls BLASTERS Firing bursts of focused particle beam energy (bolts), a blaster gets its power from two main components: Energy-rich blaster gas from a cartridge and a replaceable power pack. The blaster bolts carry no heat themselves, but materials struck by them deform and fuse like when Princess Leia blasted a hole through a metal grate using an E-11 blaster rifle while escaping from the Death Star. A hole was blasted big enough for Chewbacca to pass through, probably 3 FEET WIDE Roughly 6.34 megajoules is needed to vaporize 1 kg of iron, so the blast yielded approximately 342 MJ. An estimate on the mass of the grate is ~54 kilograms. Power usage is comparable between lightsabers and blasters. Jedi in the Star Wars universe have been known to use power packs to charge up their lightsabers. 24,360 0.06 barrels of oil AA batteries •-1 gallon of gas; that's $2.29 per shot! NI 1 nuclear reactor for 3 blasts a second 132 car batteries 0.000000000091% of Earth's power supply • 3 people for one day 14 Tesla Powerwalls • That would weigh as much as two cows or half a Bantha STAR DESTROYER In Empire Strikes Back, we see an Imperial Star Destroyer blasting asteroids out of its way. If we approximate the standard asteroid mass as 32,965,759 KG with a heating capacity of iron at 447 J/kg-K, then we could calculate 38 TERAJOULES [ (8,333 MWh) to melt the asteroid 2.1 billion 4,901 barrels of oil AA batteries • At 35 mpg, you could drive around the Earth 130 times or make 6 • In the U.S. 2.9 billion AA batteries are thrown away every year! round-trips to the moon 11.5 million 10,000 nuclear NL reactors for a blast every 3 seconds! car batteries • Cars sold in the U.S. last year: 16 million 0.000008% of Earth's 1.2 million power supply • 207,000 people for one day Tesla Powerwalls 250 TJ [ (69,400 MWh) to vaporize it 17.8 billion 41,000 barrels of oil • Enough gas to drive a third of the way to the sun! AA batteries 96 million 270,000 nuclear car batteries reactors to fire • Cars sold globally last year: 71 million once every second 0.000066% of Earth's 00 9.9 million Tesla Powerwalls power supply • 3 for every apartment in New York City • Or one blast from Earth every 21 seconds A turbolaser must yield approximately 3,750 terawatts of power, releasing energy 4 times that of the Little Boy atomic bomb. X-WING FIGHTER Sometimes it isn't always about the size of the ship in an intergalactic fight as long as you are packing the right firepower. In A New Hope, when a blast from Luke Skywalker's X-wing fighter struck the surface of the Death,Star, it created a blast large enough to have likely vaporized at least one cubic meter of armor. Conservative estimates put the output of the four X-wing cannons at approximately 60 GJ of energy. 68 GJ = 16.67 MWH 4.3 million 9.8 barrels of oil AA batteries • Enough batteries to go 8 times around the Large Hadron Collider • And stacked up, they'd reach space twice! 23,000 60 nuclear reactors car batteries for one blast a second 2,381 Tesla Powerwalls 0.000000015% of Earth's power supply • 408 people for one day DEATH STAR Speaking of the Death Star, remember when the first incarnation of this formidable battle station destroyed Leia's home planet of Alderaan? Utilizing a beam formed by several beams firing from its Concave Dish Composite Beam Super Laser, the Death Star was able to destroy an Earth-sized planet with a binding energy of roughly 2.25 X 102 J. Comparatively, our sun produces roughly 3.846 x 1026 W. How could one moon-sized battle station produce THAT much power? Using a 'hypermatter' reactor, of course. 2.25 X 1032 J CONVERTS TO 6.25 X 1028 WH 1.6 x 1028 3.7 x 1022 AA batteries barrels of oil • Enough to satisfy the world's oil • Stacked end to end, these batteries would measure 84.5 billion light-years, almost enough to consumption for 1 trillion years! 2.6 x 1018 nuclear reactors to fire once every 24 hours (Death Star I) stretch across the observable universe (92 billion light-years). • Each blast would require an amount of uranium equal to the mass of Mercury. L 1,300 x 108 nuclear reactors to, fire once every 3 minutes (Death Star II) 8.6 x 1025 car batteries • 80% of the mass of Jupiter • Seven blasts would generate enough nuclear waste to equal the dwarf planet Ceres at 9.5 x 1020 kg. 8.9 x 1024 598 billion times Tesla Powerwalls Earth's power supply • Astronomers estimate there • 150 times the weight of Earth could be 20 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy. Only 29 more galaxies to go! DROIDS We can't forget about the droids that inhabit the Star Wars galaxy. They need power to function also. We don't have droids as complex as R2D2 and C3PO just yet, but we do have ASIMO, "The World's Most Advanced Humanoid Robot" developed by Honda, who is 4'3" and capable of walking, talking and helping people. ASIMO is powered by a rechargeable 51.8 VOLT lithium ion battery that only lasts for an hour. 132 AA batteries 1 car battery HYPERSPACE Aside from powering up the Death Star, hypermatter particles allow a ship to jump to lightspeed without changing its complex mass and energy. We've seen the Millennium Falcon make the jump to lightspeed several times. According to physicist Miguel Alcubierre, a warp drive could anipulate space-time, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics to move 10 times faster than the speed of light. More recent studies have reduced the energy requirement to be about the mass of the To make a warp drive, it was initially estimated you would need a minimum amount of energy almost equal to the mass of the planet Jupiter. VOYAGER 1 [~700KG) USING E-MC?, 700 KG = 62,913 EXAJOULES 15,000 TONS OF TNT EXPLOSIVES 17,475 TWH 1- Voyager 1 (700kg) 4.5 quadrillion 10 billion AA batteries barrels of oil • 1% of the total amount of oil ever produced 23 trillion NL 770,000 car batteries nuclear reactors 2.5 trillion 16% of Earth's Tesla Powerwalls power supply • That's one jump every two months! SOURCE: EBATES http://www.ebates.com/blog/how-many-batteries-star-wars/ OKIIID