[manglor]

The power requirements would be insane. Here's an excerpt from the Sandia website about the Z Machine. The most recent advance resulted in an output X-ray power of about 290 trillion watts -- for billionths of a second, about 80 times the entire world's output of electricity.

[manglor]

The Z Machine in action

[Mark Felton]

"The power requirements would be insane."

Drive it into the sun for a fill-up...

What do you think those solar flares are? Simply launch gasses from travelling sales-creatures passing through for a fill-up...

[Rockingham]

The energy requirements might be met through some form of scalar or zero point energy. There are indications of intense secret research on these subjects and on the gravity effects of high energy electromagnetic fields.

[Windcatcher]

I'm a bit confused about the power requirements. According to the PDF paper, they need a field on the order of 30-50T to test the theory. It all comes down to current density, but it doesn't strike me that a really staggering amount of power should be required (though, of course, I'm too lazy to dig out my textbook and do the calculation). In school we had a 1T coil that was a couple of feet across so tens of Tesla doesn't sound like something insurmountable. One thing I found vague, though, was whether they meant 30T generated by the stationary superconducting coil or the moving coil. It seems to me that they meant the moving coil, but the language was vague.