Wireless power generation in a fleet of spaceships

Okay, so while I'm fairly certain this is possible to do, I wanna know if it actually makes sense to do so. Imagine you have a fleet of ships, each of them so large it takes megatons of antimatter to get the fleet moving at anything resembling a decent speed. Even for antimatter, carrying that much fuel is gonna cause problems. If not in weight, then in the inherent dangers of storing enough volatile antimatter on your ship to cause a planetary extinction event. Anyone could tell you that despite the pressing need to get the ship moving, this is still a terrible fucking idea.

So here's the solution I came up with. Build another huge ship that's completely unmanned and is basically a giant antimatter-catalyzed fusion reactor strapped to the universe's largest RC car, situate it in the middle of the fleet a few AU from every other ship just to be safe, and have it use tightbean lasers to transmit power wirelessly across multiple AU to receivers on the hull of all the other megaships in the fleet. Or at the very least, build a ton of smaller generator ships that'd serve the same purpose as one huge one.

Does this make sense as a means of keeping the fleet going without risking having a bunch of exploding murder-fuel aboard your starship or is it less safe/efficient than just keeping your means of generating power confined to the ship?

posted about 8 years ago

Z.Schroeder‭

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