What cyberpunk tech would you use a room-temperature superconductor for?
What cyberpunk tech would you use a room-temperature superconductor for?
Room-temperature superconductivity looks like it might be a step closer to becoming a reality. Let's stick with fiction for the moment though, what technology would you put in a cyberpunk world that makes use of zero-resistance electronics without the need for massive cooling? Super-fast computers? Super-powerful magnets? Maglev? Railguns?
Depends on what the material is like. If it's brittle like ceramic (as some of currently highest-temperature superconductors are), there is not much you can do with it. But a metal that you can create wires and coils from would be revolutionary. Still, there are limitations to how much current density the superconductor can handle at a given temperature before quenching. Also, high-frequency logic circuits lose power to capacitances and inductances, not just resistances.
I am guessing it will be only really used for power delivery and electromagnetic applications.
I mean there are always portable coil/rail guns
Relatively small, super-high capacity power cells.
This - once we've got small, dense power storage we can do all the cool scifi stuff: man-portable lasers/coilguns, strong augmentics with long battery life, chainswords, autonomous robots that operate for long spans of time.
I saw something once that said when you're writing scifi to pick one technology to improve/add, and have all the changes in the setting flow from that. I almost always pick batteries.
In a cyberpunk setting, I feel like the new tech should be stuff that demonstrates the wealth disparity, being used everywhere, wastefully in rich people's domain, while regular people are dependant on clunky, heavy, maybe unsafe older stuff. Batteries could be a good one for that, easy to build a plot around people stealing the new batteries from advertising drones or electric scooters from uplevel and selling them to shops that retrofit them into augmentic limbs or robots who otherwise need to recharge every couple hours.
I mean really small and powerful batteries gives us ironman suits and fucking lightsabers.