What are the risks with massive banks of batteries/capacitors?
In redesigning a large number of my ships, I've decided that having larger ships generate enough power for FTL was too convenient and made balancing the factions varied FTL methods difficult (both for writing and game development.) To work around this, I'm moving the ships towards having large banks of capacitors/batteries that store energy for later use (FTL or other power-intensive equipment.) The ships would need to recharge off their reactors between jumps/warps.
This also presents a new weak point on many of these ships, I think.
Ships are powered by fusion reactors (plural for redundancy reasons) and store the excess power that isn't running the ship into capacitors and batteries for later use. These capacitors and batteries would likely work similar to those we have today but with advances in energy storage density. Fusion reactors have the added benefit of being the "safer" forms of nuclear power in that a runaway reaction is not possible as fuel is added on demand and to maintain the reaction. If a system fails and takes away conditions needed to maintain fusion, the reaction ceases. Contained heat and energy might disperse into the local hull, but the rest of the ship would likely survive.
Batteries would be used for taking over powering ship systems in the case of a local reactor failing while the nearest reactor transitions towards higher capacity of output to compensate.
Capacitors would be used for systems that require all of that energy in an instant: massive weapons with slow firing cycles and various FTL drives being the two primary examples.
Both of these capacitors and batteries would function much like what we have presently, only with advances in energy storage density. Batteries storing energy through chemical reactions and capacitors storing the electrons themselves.
If these ships were storing massive amounts of energy, astronomical by our standards since we are talking about faster than light travel, I could imagine damage to these banks causing a catastrophic discharge of the energy contained. Something that would likely vaporize the ship in a near instant along with anything nearby.
What would likely happen if they were struck in combat or something collided with the ship? And are there means to prevent this violent discharge, protect the ship itself from it, or redirect it away from the ship?
If it could be directed, I can imagine fleet formations being set up so that friendly vessels are never in the path of these discharges.
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Watch this overly gratuitously destructive video of some poor normal capacitors.
Those are low-voltage low-capacitance capacitors. And they still have a decent amount of force to them.
A high-voltage high-capacitance capacitor would be, in a word, cataclysmic to anything nearby. Something powerful enough to power a FTL drive would probably completely destroy the ship it was on, regardless of size.
Modern capacitors are fairly safe from exploding via impact. The linked video was done via giving them too much power. The most likely thing would be that they simply stop working, or damage causes them to short - Releasing all of the power extremely violently in a very short period of time, as seen in this video. If it's metal that's causing the short, it will heat up and melt and cause all sorts of problems - And that's only for bare metal. Other materials, especially thing with water, will expand and explode. Woe to the poor sap that ends up being the path of least resistance for a discharging capacitor.
Having a capacitor explode is, in my thoughts as an electronics tinkerer, very unlikely. Having them cause all sorts of havoc when damaged? Totally possible.
To address fleet formations and the like - Space is huge. Absurdly huge. A "Close" formation of space ships will likely be outside of visual range, with hundreds of kilometers being absurdly close. No realistic weapon or destructive event caused by even a hypermassive ship should be large enough to make even "Close" ships blink, unless those ships are moving in to dock, perhaps for boarding or rendering aid. Still, those types of actions are likely easier done via smaller craft such as shuttles.
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