Experimental Magnetic Shield Against Cosmic Rays 199
stiller writes "British scientists from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have developed an experimental set-up in which a $20 magnet is used to deflect solar-wind-like radiation." Reader Dersaidin points out a slightly more enthusiastic article at Universe Today which emphasizes the possibilities of systems based on this phenomenon to protect astronauts during solar storms, writing
"It's a good start. Hopefully, later versions will be able to protect spaceships from energy weapons. A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of copper. Shields, check. Energy weapons, check. Now we just need a viable interstellar drive, and an energy source to power it all."
Experimental Magic Shield Against Cosmic Rays (Score:4, Funny)
Did anyone else misread the title?
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Oh ...takes off wizard robe and hat
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I thought it said "Experimental Magnetic Shield Against Cosplayers". I was planning to pick one up next time I went to Fry's.
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Ah, but any sufficiently advanced technology will resemble magic.
Re:Experimental Magic Shield Against Cosmic Rays (Score:4, Interesting)
Will any sufficiently advanced society resemble cosplay?
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No, but I wondered how this will be mounted. Probably using a Van Allen key...
Sorry.
Drive and Power source (Score:2, Insightful)
Make the drive coils out of uranium and power it with allotropic iron.
Of course, you will have to give the ship a good British-sounding name like "The Dentless".
ANd remember to really reinforce the breech shielding on the Q-Gun.
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I believe that was "Dauntless", actually. Just keep an eye out for the Bosconians and zwilnicks.
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Well I said "something like", there was a nifty short parody that was set on "The Dentless"
I think it was the Brittania that had the dangerously low shielding on the Q-gun breech. She survived firing it only once, but once was enough even if she was then hunted down and destroyed (booby-trapped self-destruct actually) by the Boskonians. Later Q-Gun designs beefed up the breech shielding considerably - a 20 mile long column of duodec combustion gas was nothing to sneer at.
The Dauntless was the next big ship
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Scorched Earth Deflector Shields (Score:2, Informative)
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You should try Scorched 3D [scorched3d.co.uk], then.
Very good remake. Good graphics, runs on pretty much any hardware, Linux and Windows version, multiplayer. And seeing half the island disappear after firing something very overkill is really awesome.
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so if you slashdot their site do you win?
ah... found it on SourceForge [sourceforge.net]
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Nope, but it sounds exactly like the magnetic radiation shielding used in a sci-fi juvie from the 80's or 90's. It was set in the moons of Jupiter and the characters used small open "shuttles" that had magnets placed on the frame around the passengers. This protected them from radiation in the Jovian system.
Re:Prior Art (Score:4, Interesting)
I was looking for a serious thread to reply to, but it seems this topic attracts more kidding than science. =p
Anyway, my college plasma physics professor, a decade ago, told us that he'd invented the "force field". It created a magnetic shield around an object in a vacuum, and was intended to protect things like satellites from charged particles. (For obvious reasons discussed below he didn't go into detail.)
His work was funded by the U.S. Air Force, who promptly took the patent and classified it. In other words, this was invented about 15 years ago, and this guy might have just made it public, but he's likely not going to get a patent to protect his invention since it will be rejected.
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Assuming it's done the same way.
Of course based on my experience with the military and satellites, it sounds like crap.
USS Liberty (Score:5, Funny)
I suggest mounting a standard generator at the core of the prospective space ship and attaching a coffin containing one of our founding fathers to it. The rapid spinning should provide plentiful power for all manner of techno-gadgetry.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttered_cat_paradox [wikipedia.org]
you mean engines like... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like Highlander (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone else remember that awful sequel [imdb.com]?
Re:Sounds like Highlander (Score:5, Funny)
There is no sequel. There can be only one.
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erm ... (Score:2)
As long as we're not venting drive plasma, we're good to go.
That is, unless somebody left a sweater in one of the warp plasma conduits.
Tea or Death? (Score:5, Funny)
This brings up a larger issue to me...how well does tea steep in zero G, And would there be a difference between an Earl Grey blend or a black tea blend?
Re:Tea or Death? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, obviously for the Earl Grey, you have to say "Hot", as in "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot", or it comes cold.
For the black tea blend, you get a cup of a drink that's almost but not quite entirely unlike tea.
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Wait for the computer to interpret it as :
Teabag Earl Grey, Hot!
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If you're hovering over a kettle, you may as well brew up a really hot cup of tea, and let your Infinite Improbability Drive get you out of harm's way. Either that, or thr Drive will turn the radiation storm into music, and you can protect yourself with earplugs. For that matter, if the tea is *really* hot, you can specify that the music be "Silence" by Phillip Glass, and skip the earplugs.
I doubt tea would steep well in zero G, because there would be no natural convection. Ordinary stirring is a no-no,
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You bring up a good point that I hadn't thought about. I remember during the space-race days as a kid, that they talked about the special tools necessary for zero-G because gravity wouldn't hold you fast to torque against something. So clearly it can't be any ordinary spoon. In addition to the more gentle stirring action, it's got to be a "zero-reaction" spoon, or a pair of mini-spoons going in opposite directions, to impart no net torque to the stirrer. The means for the stirrer to actuate the thing ha
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The whole system has to be zero torque... you can get around that problem by holding the pot/cup in your hand as you stir.
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But if it's a *really* hot cup of tea, you're going to need a very well insulated mug.
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The problem is the sippy-cup top, to keep the tea inside. All you need is a sippy-cup top with an auto-closing "dunking port."
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While it may be reduced, there still would be convection as the boundaries of the water lose heat to the container.
-nB
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But the essence of thermal convection is the difference in density driven by the heat. That difference allows gravity to drive the convection. No gravity and the regions of differen density will just sit in place.
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how well does tea steep in zero G
I don't know, but you can drink it with chopsticks. [nasa.gov]
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Just put the tea and the hot water into a closed sphere or cylinder, and give it a spin. The rotating walls of the container will gradually cause the liquid inside to rotate, producing a gravitational force within the liquid, and your convection will work just fine.
Checklist... (Score:3, Funny)
No, what we need is a strong hull that can withstand all the micro-meteoriods hitting it at 27,000+ mph.
I recommend getting a General Products #2 hull.
Re:Checklist... (Score:4, Insightful)
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The problem is that you need several feet of a very dense material to "absorb" cosmic rays.
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Well, you still have to accelerate and decelerate the ship, so yeah, mass still matters.
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Whoosh (n.): The sound a ship with a General Products #2 hull [wikipedia.org] makes as it soars over your head.
hot stuff (Score:2, Funny)
Now we just need a viable interstellar drive, and an energy source to power it all.
Then it's all alien babes from here to the farthest star! Warp factor exosex, Scotty, all power to the engines!
You know what this means... (Score:4, Funny)
Spoiler Alert - Shields (Score:2)
Hey, we got the Fantastic Four, least according to the movie, because the shields DIDN'T work.
Sorry for the movie spoiler.
A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of copp (Score:4, Informative)
A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of copper.
Technically, if things are set up, any continuous source of energy can melt just about anything meltable. Just keep the energy flowing, insulate the target, and if the temperature of the energy source (e.g. a lightbulb) is higher than that of the target, then energy will couple in and eventually melt the target. What needs to be mentioned if such a statement is to be of any use, is how long such melting is expected to take.
Re:A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of c (Score:4, Informative)
According to this CERN page [web.cern.ch], in the few microseconds that it takes a beam dump to complete. The circulating kinetic energy of the beam is an impressive 350 MJ, equivalent to running a 1000 watt heater for 97 hours.
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That is the most amazing engineering article I have read in quite some time.
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I agree with what you're saying.
But what they could be talking about -- something that's actually a useful metric -- is whether the energy source can get energy into a material faster than it can conduct the heat away. It's comparatively easy to drill a hole in a thermally insulative material with a laser, but much harder with copper. So if they want to make an impressive statement, they probably should make it clear (to those of us who care) that this thing can dump energy in, faster than any material ca
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TFA did exactly that. One of them, at least. This one: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug08/6558 [ieee.org]
That's pretty significant energy. Admittedly, it's probably a fairly small hole, but it does a good job of explaining why the beam needs to be diffused and scattered as it's being dumped into a block of graphite.
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The high-power laser systems I've worked with weren't anywhere nearly as intense as this beam, obviously, but the beam dump still cost a fair bit since it was consumable, so we went with cheap. We used a brick set at a very low angle to maximize the surface area exposed to the beam. We'd go through (in a couple meanings of 'go through') a brick a day. Still, cheaper than copper or graphite.
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s how long such melting is expected to take.
Presumably, about the time it takes light to travel 27km, since the beam can't be longer than the circumference of the collider and the beam is near light speed.
From page 2 of linked article (Score:5, Informative)
What needs to be mentioned if such a statement is to be of any use, is how long such melting is expected to take.
That's a very good point, and to answer the question raised by it I RTFAed so you don't have to! Regarding the "dump block" that they use to absorb the LHC beam before it becomes unstable:
Emphasis added. That's one hell of a beam.
BTW, I can't help but recall that the Enterprise D from ST:TNG fires its phasers from a large ring on the saucer section. You can almost imagine the LHC being weaponized and using the same technique that diverts the beam into the dump block to direct it outward towards enemy ships. Though it'd have the rather significant drawback that any damage anywhere on the enormous accelerator ring would take out the weapon. But hey, energy beam!
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What?
You are in a vacuum, at least if you are a starship, you should be
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yeh, trouble is you'd only need a saucer section with a 27km circumference and hope that you got the first hit in, which as you know is impossible because you've always got to let the bad guys blast you so you can stagger from side to side while sparks fly out a console.
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Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe we're in the alternate universe, where the Federation was evil.
The theory bears scrutiny. Haven't you noticed the popularity of goatees?
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can you please refrain from mentioning Goatsees when discussing a 27km-round ring.
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I couldn't find exact specs on the LHC, but I suspect there are lots better ways to get destructive energy from my ship to your ship. Even if you insist on an energy beam, I suspect traditional lasers would be more efficient and would also be immune to your puny shields.
Re:A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of c (Score:5, Informative)
FTA, testing showed a 1.5 mm beam "burnt" 40 meters into a block of copper in 86 microseconds.
So... napkin calculation...
density of copper is about 9 g/cm^2, so 5600 grams of copper melted per
500 lbs =~ 227 kg, so roughly forty 86 microsecond bursts to melt 500 lbs...
So we're talking roughly 3.5 milliseconds to melt 500 pounds of copper.
That's 70 tons of copper melted per second for a single beam. That's a hell of a lot of energy, but I'm not sure what the standard unit is for energy/time (hiroshimas is just energy; libraries of congress and football fields obviously don't apply). Anyone know what the standard made-up unit is for energy/time?
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Anyone know what the standard made-up unit is for energy/time?
Energy/time is Power. I don't know if there's a standard, but if not I nominate Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters.
That's ~4.9 GW, btw.
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Did the calcs... roughly 87 MW... not even close to the power of one SSRB.
Can you come up with something a little lestt powerful?
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Waaaay too much. You'll blow the flux capacitor. You only need to channel one point twenty one of them....
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Why cm^2 (square centimeters), not cm^3? It should be 0.15 * 0.15 * PI * 4000 cm = 282 cm^3. so 2544g of copper per 0.86 of millisecond.
This gives 76ms to melt 227kg of copper.
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Thanks for catching the error.
So it's only about 3 tonnes melted copper per second... still a lot of power.
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I would guess 100W lightbulbs would do the job.
350 MJ in 86 us = 4 070 000 MJ in 1 s = 4.07 TW
40.7 billion 100 W lightbulbs.
More than 6 each for everyone on earth.
--
But only for 86 us at a time every 10 hours. I get 10 kW for the mean power requirement assuming it is constantly charging. That is only 100 lightbulbs.
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Watt? Horsepower? Michael Phelps? NSA datacenter electricity usage? Total solar output?
Popularized unit (Score:3, Informative)
"Hoover Dams" are the units used to represent such things as the power output of the Shuttle main engines. Other popular ones are "enough to light N,000 homes" and "equivalent to N nuclear power stations" (always nuclear, for some reason).
Melting copper takes 13.050 kJ/mol. A mole of copper is 63.546 grams. We'll drop everything to two significant figures, which is probably already more precise than the rest of the numbers. 70 tons is one million moles, so melting 70 tons per second is 13E12 J/sec, 13 teraw
Math Nazi Time.... (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, some math errors exist in some of the parent posts.
A 1.5mm diameter beam that is 40 meters long has a volume given by:
V = pi * r^2 * d
If r and d are in cm, then:
V = pi * (0.15/2)^2 * 400
V = pi * 0.005625 * 400
V = 7.07 cm^3.
At 9 g/cm, this gives a mass of 63.2 grams.
If we're melting/vaporizing this much in 86 uS, that gives a rate of
63.2 / 0.000086 = 734,883.72 g/s (or 1,620.14 lb/s).
It's still a bunch of melted (actually, vaporized) copper, but it's nowhere near 70 tons.
All the above assumes that the beam stays perfectly coherent and doesn't have any losses due to heating of surrounding material. In reality, the beam would rapidly diverge, and heat would begin to flow through the copper. Oh, also, ejected copper plasma would at some point begin to interfere with the beam itself before it reached the copper itself. This would rapidly de-focus the beam and absorb energy, so the plasma ejecta would get oh-my-god hot while shielding remaining copper from being damaged.
Yes (Score:2)
Yep. Typos...
Multiply everything above by 10.
So, 7.348 Mg or 16.2 k pounds.
About 8 tons.
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Those were 70 Smurf tons.
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Besides, it's a napkin calculation, being off by only two powers of ten is not that bad.
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>>Libraries-of-Congress and football-fields can be made to apply to anything, if you use them right.
In power? I propose the imaginary unit of Work being the energy needed to move a Library of Congress across one football field at a rate of 1 ms/s
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40meter hole in copper in 86usec (Score:2)
According to the article, the 1.5mm beam (already diffused from the original 0.2mm beam) can penetrate 40 meters (around 130ft) into solid copper in 86usec.
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the LHC is not a continuous source. You'll run out of particles in the main ring after about 90 microseconds.
Now available from Monster (Score:5, Funny)
Space elevator (Score:3, Insightful)
When the space elevator eventually gets built, passengers are going to need something to protect them from the radiation in the Van Allen Belts. Rather than hauling a bunch of passive shielding up and down, these isomagnetic shields would be pretty useful.
Power would come from the same source that drives the climber (whatever that is...).
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or a 6 inch hull; which you will need anyways.
Yes, I can't wait for it to fall, won't that be fun~
Earth-based uses? (Score:2)
slow progress (Score:2)
This is an approach that's been worked on for years and years now, and there hasn't been any rapid progress. Electromagnetic shielding may ultimately work, but it has a lot of problems to overcome. Without some kind of significant technological progress, the radiation dose for astronauts going to Mars is a real showstopper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_threat_from_cosmic_rays [wikipedia.org]
Engineers have studied a variety of electromagnetic field configurations for this. Electric fields have a problem because any
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normal superconductors need liquid helium temperatures, which are very hard to maintain reliably,
Although in outer space, surely that's less of a problem?
Yes, I know about factors like engine heat, the need to keep critical mechanical components above a certain temperature a la the Mars landers, and so forth. But shouldn't it still be easier to maintain superconducting temperatures in deep space?
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A couple of years ago there was an article in Scientific American that reviewed all of the known technologies (including magnetic, electrostatic, and thick materials) to shield astronauts from space radiation on interplanetary missions. They found that none of them would work in the foreseeable future. Their rather depressing conclusion was that the best bet would be to develop drugs that work to repair radiation damage.
IIRC, they said that a astronauts on a quick Mars mission would probably survive, but th
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"If they're superconducting, then you're trusting your life to a type of technology that's notoriously prone to failure"
Why didn't someone tell me? There are at least half a dozen of those things in this very building, two of which are directly over my head! Not one of them has failed in the last six years, but that just means we're overdue, right?
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From the link it doesn't sound like such a showstopper. They estimate a Mars mission might expose astronauts to 500 to 1000 mSv. 1 to 4 Sv is the recommended career dose for LEO astronauts. If you got your whole 500 mSv dose very quickly, instead of over three years like on a Mars mission, you might expect some slight and temporary changes in blood chemistry. Over the three years that dose would produce no acutely observable effects.
So it's probably a bad idea to go to Mars more than half a dozen times,
We have the energy source! (Score:2)
"Now we just need a viable interstellar drive, and an energy source to power it all."
We just need an interstellar drive now. Oh, that and someone to teach that pink bunny how to pilot the ship, after all, his back is going to be plugged into the warp drive.
-Charlie
does this mean tin foil hats are out of vogue? (Score:2)
the new "in" fashion statement amongst the crackpots will be magnets tied to your head to protect from alien radiation?
Got the power source already... Here ya go (Score:2)
"and an energy source to power it all."
Check.
My anus after HomeTown Buffet.
--Toll_Free
Discovered? Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is Robert Winglee's M2P2 [washington.edu]. He Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion. His original idea was to use it as an innovative type of solar sail, but it quickly became obvious that it could be used in the way that these people have stated. All in all, nothing to see here, already been done, and here in the US too. You might also enjoy checking out his page [washington.edu], the guy is a big time plasma nerd.
Makes sense to use EM for protection (Score:2)
Considering some types of radiation are not affected or phased by solid materials, it would make sense that in order to deflect it you'd need to create some sort of EM interference, since the radiation exists somewhere in the EM spectrum.
My question is when is someone going to try to patent it? It's a little too obvious to me, and I really have NO experience in the field, so I don't think the idea itself could be patented.
Maybe the designs that accomplish the job, yes. But the idea itself? Let's hope one do
Missing ingredient (Score:2)
Now we just need a viable interstellar drive, and an energy source to power it all
And a human race that can make contact with aliens without being considered a disposable threat.
Seriously, if anyone's watching us out there, they must be real disappointed with us, and I'm not talking about those religious things.
Don't forget (Score:2)
we also need the total control of gravity.
A trifle, to be sure.
Re:Oblig ... (Score:5, Funny)
From Instructor: Now we're going to practice our impact procedures. Ok everyone lean to the left.
*Whole class but one guy leans to the left*
From Instructor: Good! Now lean to the right.
*Whole class but same one guy leans to the right*
From Instructor: Excellent! Your prepared for when the ship takes damage.
From The One Guy: Uh? Why are we leaning to the left and right like that?
*Instructor hands him a red shirt*
From Instructor: Keep your insurance paid up son.
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We all know the reason they were shook about during engagements with the enemy was due to the fact energy transferred from the enemy's weapon to the shields and finally to the ships gravity plating [memory-alpha.org].
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You mean shield harmonics?
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Re:What if you don't want to deflect? (Score:5, Insightful)
You only need to protect the occupants and sensitive equipment. You can just put the ramscoop out ahead of the magnetic protection field.
Re:sure it can melt 500 lbs of copper... (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone know what the standard made-up unit is for energy/time?
Sadly, we don't need a made-up unit for that. The one we have is bad enough:
Horses
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Anyone know what the standard made-up unit is for energy/time?
Not counting the old standard (Horses) mentioned previously, I believe the unit you're searching for is the Watt (joules/second).