Warp Battery
A warp battery or metric battery is a metric warp which is used to store energy in a region of rotating space-time.
Warp batteries offer extremely high energy densities, even exceeding that of a 100% efficient matter-energy conversion reactor, and limited only by the resilience of the device. Once the battery is spun up and charged, energy can be extracted by firing matter into the rotating region, where it will be accelerated up to tremendous speeds, or by using digravitic materials to extract the energy as a focused beam of gravitational waves. (The latter enables their use as a gravitational impeller, while the former is akin to the Penrose process of extracting energy from a black hole and can create a "metric rocket" with an exhaust velocity of about a quarter-lightspeed.)
The downside of warp batteries is they must be charged with their entire supply of energy before use (a long and expensive process requiring an extreme power source like a conversion reactor or solar farm on a sun-scraping orbit), and that if critically damaged they will explode and release all their stored energy in one burst, often big enough to carve a new crater into a moon, or total a small continent. Warp-battery ships are thus not allowed anywhere near inhabited planets, and are dodgy proposition for combat.
Warp batteries offer extremely high energy densities, even exceeding that of a 100% efficient matter-energy conversion reactor, and limited only by the resilience of the device. Once the battery is spun up and charged, energy can be extracted by firing matter into the rotating region, where it will be accelerated up to tremendous speeds, or by using digravitic materials to extract the energy as a focused beam of gravitational waves. (The latter enables their use as a gravitational impeller, while the former is akin to the Penrose process of extracting energy from a black hole and can create a "metric rocket" with an exhaust velocity of about a quarter-lightspeed.)
The downside of warp batteries is they must be charged with their entire supply of energy before use (a long and expensive process requiring an extreme power source like a conversion reactor or solar farm on a sun-scraping orbit), and that if critically damaged they will explode and release all their stored energy in one burst, often big enough to carve a new crater into a moon, or total a small continent. Warp-battery ships are thus not allowed anywhere near inhabited planets, and are dodgy proposition for combat.
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