Nihilism Engineering

Originally published at: Nihilism Engineering | The Eldraeverse

unspace interrupter: a type of switch used in extremely-high-power electrical systems, the unspace interrupter is designed to overcome the ultimate limit in switching: namely, the dielectric strength of possible insulators used to separate the contacts. Perfect insulators are generally considered impossible since all baryonic – and most exotic – materials, even the most insulating, still contain small quantities of charge carriers, and sufficiently high voltages are capable of tearing the electrons from atoms, or otherwise motivating these charge carriers. Even vacuum is not a perfect insulator; a perfect vacuum still breaks down at 1e12 megavolts per meter, and the much…

As a plus side, the capacitance of such a switch is zero!

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What kind of applications need that much power all concentrated in a single wire?

Serious power generation or storage, flash accumulators, extra-large beam weapons or mass drivers, basement universes and other metric engineering, megastructure infrastructure, moon-brains…

…that sort of thing.

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Ever gonna give us a “Things to See, Places To Go” of a moon-brain one day?