Room-temperature superconductivity looks like it might be a step closer to becoming a reality. I need to steal some ideas, 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?
Kind of a pedestrian use case, which might be good for flavoring, but you could make a sweet “air” hockey table out of them. I imagine there being a future version of air hockey that actually magnets in a vacuum. You could basically flavor it as truly frictionsless air hockey, with the games having the puck fly around at incredible speeds.
Assuming that cars, or the preferred method of transportation uses the magnets to get around, you could also have new kinds of Rollerblades and skateboards that use the magnets to travel the infrastructure. Maybe its something that only punk kids do by slapping stolen magnets on planks of wood. They can cause problems as they constantly get in the way of the car users.
You could also flavor the skateboards/ as a corporation backed cost cutting measure. The only people with magnet cars are the elite/ultra rich and everyone else can only afford a magnet scooter or whatever. If you want a really cynical world you could even give right of way to the magnet cars, so common folk would have to dodge them traveling at incredible speeds.
I think there are a ton more examples, but I bet, assuming the super conductor is reliably reproducible, that we will have crazier use cases within a decade IRL than we could dream up here. Probably some weird way to make sprinklers work better or something
I like it, nothing like hover-stuff everywhere to make it feel like the future! Right-of-way definitely goes to whoever has paid their hover-stuff subscription fee this month.
- Levitation without equipment: like the frogs in the 10T megnetic field.
- Force field: impossible for organisms to enter an apartment
- High capacity energy storage: storing electicity in a loop of superconducting mater
Ooh nice, I hadn’t really read up on the frog levitation (which I think is just due to the diamagnetism of the water in their bodies), would your forcefield make use of the same principles?
Yes. 😁
The obvious one would be perfect efficiency transformers(?) so you lose no energy to heat.
Cheap handheld advanced medical scanners like tricorders.
Back to the future style hooverboard, it fits both in the punk aspect of cyberpunk and has that retrofuturist vibe. A nice video on the topic using high temperature superconductor (high temperature in the sense works in liquid nitrogen)
On the Dystopian side, room temperature supra-conductivity will reduce the price of MRI or even allow open ones, what about a building which use an MRI scanner at entrance like airport have metal detector nowadays
You could do cool stuff with maglev train, better electric engine or cheaper particle accelerators but it lack that the cyberpunk vibe.
Scanners everywhere, which can conveniently rip you apart if you happen to be carrying contraband
