How much is 2 Gigawatts of power?

[lajoswinkler]

Each of Chernobyl's reactors, one of which caused the accident, has an electric output of 1 GW.

2 GW is a lot.

[Monkeh]

One point twenty one gigawatts!? ONE POINT TWENTY ONE GIGAWATTS!?!?!?

[plainawesome]

Wait! What the hell is a Gigawatt?

[Charzy]

One billion watts.

That is, 1 000 000 000 joules per second.

[Seret]

Wait! What the hell is a Gigawatt?

You're probably most familiar with the metric prefix giga from computing. In the metric system giga anything is 10⁹. So as well as your gigabytes and gigahertz you could have things like gigajoules and gigapascals.

[magnemoe]

Real life laser weapons seem to be in the tens of kilowatt range

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/13/us_military_laser_truck_destroys_mortars_drones/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2551219/Lockheed-Martin-reveals-portable-LASER-weapon-used-the.html

And a gigawatt is 100,000 times more. So 2 GW would be quite hefty.

This is an good way to compare it, 10KW is enough for taking out small drones or to destroy bombs on ground.

100KW and you have a decent weapon, you can take out small incoming rockets, even planes and helicopters, it will replace the 20-30 mm AAA guns also on planes, you could use it to hit targets on ground too.

1MW and you can take out ballistic missiles, shoot down planes from orbit, not an anti tank weapon but it would be an very effective weapon if made capable.

2GW in this setting would be devestating, think of an 40mm cannon with galing gun rate of fire, yes you will destroy tanks but might meed to hold on to them for a second or two, any ship including batleships but would require to hold fire longer, same for buildings this includes bunkers.

[Green Skull]

That's more than enough to power a DeLoean to travel through time. so quite a bit of power there.

Agree 2 Gigawatts is more than the 1.21 needed for time travel...

[Aghanim]

This is an good way to compare it, 10KW is enough for taking out small drones or to destroy bombs on ground.

100KW and you have a decent weapon, you can take out small incoming rockets, even planes and helicopters, it will replace the 20-30 mm AAA guns also on planes, you could use it to hit targets on ground too.

1MW and you can take out ballistic missiles, shoot down planes from orbit, not an anti tank weapon but it would be an very effective weapon if made capable.

2GW in this setting would be devestating, think of an 40mm cannon with galing gun rate of fire, yes you will destroy tanks but might meed to hold on to them for a second or two, any ship including batleships but would require to hold fire longer, same for buildings this includes bunkers.

CW 2 GW laser? The cooling will be a nightmare

[magnemoe]

CW 2 GW laser? The cooling will be a nightmare

It would but it was the premise here, it would also be serious overkill everywhere except capital ships in deep space. Limit it to say 10 MW and you get something 5-10x more powerful than the airborne abm laser project.

[Idobox]

1GW for 100s is 100GJ. If you use that to "punch" a car, let's say 1t, with 100% efficiency, it would get to 14km/s, 30% more than escape velocity. With something weighing 100t (big rock, train, small building), you get 1.4km/s, faster than a typical bullet.

For comparison, fat man was about 84TJ, about 100 times more. So it could cause a lot of damage, like maybe destroy one block or knock down a few buildings, but nothing comparable to even small nuclear weapons.

[Doozler]

If you use that to "punch" a car, let's say 1t, with 100% efficiency, it would get to 14km/s.

So completely ridiculous. but then again...

... nothing comparable to even small nuclear weapons.

I think in-universe people (well, mutants) regularly have power levels comparable to nuclear weapons, so put that way it doesn't seem too bad!

[rdfox]

This actually came up in the first "Iron Man" movie, when Tony mentions that his first-generation version of the miniaturized arc reactor (the one built IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAP! ...sorry, couldn't resist.) puts out "two gigajoules per second" power output. (Of course, any real engineer would have just said "two gigawatts," but hey, rule of cool.) As it turns out, if you do the math, two gigawatts *is* pretty much enough power to run any of the systems you saw the Iron Man suits use in the first movie (though not all at once).

It also roughly works out to the average electrical consumption of Los Angeles. All in a package the size of a can of mixed nuts, with no real fuel requirements and seemingly such limited waste heat that it can be carried in a cavity in the human chest without serious harm. This is the point where anyone with a brain would be patenting the HELL out of that technology so that he could sell it as a replacement for every kind of power supply on the planet (from batteries to engines to power stations)... and where any engineer just chuckles and notes that the job gets a hell of a lot easier when you've got that kind of energy density available.

[karolus10]

The largest power plant in the wold, the Three Gorges Dam (in china) produce around 20 gigawatts of power.

Even for "doc" this is a lot of juice...

[Scotius]

The largest power plant in the wold, the Three Gorges Dam (in china) produce around 20 gigawatts of power.

Even for "doc" this is a lot of juice...

http://youtu.be/I5cYgRnfFDA

He probably needs as much to power flux capacitor onboard his time train