Yeah the short forms used across services aren’t always synonymous.
Ack. I’m not an Electrical Engineer so my understanding of what size/space limits exist for capacitors are fairly limited. Given what was learned from the AB departments, and that they haven’t hit the fleet yet, I’m guessing it isn’t yet there for conventional ships.
Relative energy densities for comparison: (
ref)
Units: kWh/kg
0.001 - Electrical (std capacitor)
0.03 - Electrical (battery - lead acid)
0.15 - Electrical (super capacitor)
0.20 - Electrical (battery - Li-Ion)
0.50 - Electrical (battery - Li-S)
12.6 - Hydrocarbon (fuel oil/diesel)
13.1 - Hydrocarbon (gasoline)
16.4 - Hydrogen (combustion)
34.1 - Hydrogen (electrical fuel cell)
22,000,000 - Nuclear (highly enriched U235)
So, making the energy…the hydrocarbon/hydrogen electrical generation source for a directed energy weapon is 50-100 times more dense than the storage medium. Add nuclear power source to the mix and you’re 100,000,000-200,000,000 more dense than the electrical storage medium.
If you have nuclear power available, good on you. Use it.
If you have hydrogen (in the near future, ) 2 to 3x more dense than hydrocarbons.
Otherwise use hydrocarbons as your source.
Using that stored electrical energy (I didn’t dive into chemical lasers), there really isn’t much choice…capacitors can discharge their energy at rates many orders of magnitude (100s/1000s+) greater than any battery tech out there now.
If I were King for a day, I’d go nuclear for my electrical power generation, make some hydrogen while I was at it for a nice high-density portable/transportable source and for secondary electrical generation via fuel cell, and store any generated electricity in a fuel cell to power the DE weapon system in a super capacitor array.