So uh, I started with the latest main story update and read through all the pages after that. I've tried to avoid replying to anything too trivial or that has already been addressed though.
Yep. They started with a faulty goal, and never did anything much to refine it, or apparently even second guess their approach as time passed. That's the biggest blind spot they had, and one wonders how much of it was deliberate interference from an external source, versus how much was them simply not really being the right people for the job...
I've always had a theory that a major problem with PTV is that once you've picked a goal, the path will
itself guide you away from considering alternate solutions.
Legend starts to second guess things? Path sends Contessa to interrupt him, for no other reason than if he finishes that train of thought they won't have an army or weapons. They're considering hiring someone who might have new ideas? Nope, not anymore. Some outsider might say something that will make you question things? Path says kill them immediately.
I think rubberduck-contessa is the contessa most similar to 8-ball-contessa
Rubber duck?
but apparently no one thought that it's still electricity! So they keep stopping and dumping the excess charge rather than just collecting it and using it like a normal person would…
electricity does not work that way!
you can "use" static electricity as ordinary electricity, though with a very inconvenient voltage curve, by, uh, discharging it
through a load but still ultimately into the ground. no ground in space, so you pretty much have to do what they're already doing, but with extra steps. I don't know how much useful energy you'd get out of it, either.
What
is a weird and stupid design flaw is that they don't have a bleed resistor constantly equalizing the static charge between the drive and the ship's hull to avoid the catastrophic sudden discharge. And there's got to be *some* way to safely dump the charge in space, electrons are particles after all.
If it's positive (a deficit of electrons), I'm not sure how they safely discharge it at all.
van de graaff generator transferring the positive charge to [yeah yeah, transferring electrons from] a "charge heatsink clip" that can be ejected into space? But the in-fic explanation about beta particles does imply it's negative.
Since a major energy input in the process is containing the plasma, using one that is intrinsically so slow will have a vastly increased energy cost. The Sun gets away with it because containment is provided entirely by gravity with no energy spent on containment as a result.
Too bad we don't have any tech for manipulating gravity, huh? [though ultimately that means the fusion would mostly amount to "a wasteful way of extracting energy from that "energy well" mentioned in an early chapter, with lots of extra steps - it'd probably be more efficient to just attach a perpetual motion machine to a generator shaft]
