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I had this idea quite some time ago, but something just kicked it back into my consciousness.
Space, at least relatively near a star, is both very hot and very cold at the same time.
Imagine a spaceships with ion drives.
Couldn't there be a way to make water into steam using the heat from the Sun and then condense it in a shadowed area of the system. The steam generated starts flowing through circular tubes turning turbines and generating electricity. After that it flows into the condesing zone and warms up and keeps the water there above freezing and it also pushes it into the evaporation zone and the cycle repeats.
It seems a little like a perpetual machine, but it isn't since the Sun provides the energy and the system can't be completely frictionless.
It's also sounds a bit simple, but if it were possible it might be as complex as a steam locomotive or at least as a steam powered car from the 20s.
The advantage would be that as long as you can hold water and be in relatively close range to a star you would have a reliable source of electricity in a more compact form than that of solar panels and could act as a backup. It may even be the main source of power in places where asteroids are mined and a lot of dust is present and can cover the solar panels. This way you avoid exotic or radioactive ways of making electricity Water would be relatively easy to find on celestial bodies.
Some disadvantages are that if a micro meterorite or something damages your system and you lose the water you lose the power too. You also can't have your ship stationed completely in shadow for a lengthy period of time. This might be mitigated by having enough electricity stored in batteries which can keep the system warm enough and the engines powered until you exit the shadow.
This is just an idea I had. Some of you out there might have more understanging of mechanisms and physics or have some interesting thoughts and I would like to know what you guys thing of such a system. Would it be doable?
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We know how to manage water, we know how to make turbines, and this thing can be made extremely powerful. I mean who knows what can be achieved if you scale it up and make the water hot enough to be plasma. These turbines can spin steam that is thousands of degrees.
You can have massive mushroom shaped stations in orbit around Mercury. That ought to be close enough, and you can hide them in it's shadow during solar flares.
They can be fully automated, with carriers moving back and fourth collecting giant batteries that store energy in TW, or Coloumbs or whatever the term is.
You're not going to avoid radiation, at least not in the stations because the sun will make the water glow in the dark, hehehe. The storage units should not be affected though.
The initial thought here was that the hotter you can have the steam, the more stages you can have in a turbine, and the more power you can coax out of it.
I have no clue hehehe. Fun to speculate on these things though..
I just found this article, [link], but is sounds way less ambitions than what I had in mind.
One scene I imagined like this: Camera moves through the bridge (which looks like the bridge of a 1960s-1970s warship) and while everything is covered in thin ice, you can see through the cooling-vents in the cowls of the consoles glowing vacuum-tubes. Then the camera reaches a console and shows the monitors, which slowly come to life and show some rudimentary graphics and oscilloscope-graphs. Then you see the computer making a automatic log-entry on screen and the monitors are turned off again.
The next scene shows the crew waking up from cryo-sleep in a very modern looking Cryo-Sleep-Room.
It sounds like the opening of Alien and it really is inspired by it, but with this retro-touch, I think it really could look great^^