Powerlevels

Hello, I am Trainautist, you may remember me from such threads as "how to protect a train system" or "logistics of war".
Today I would like to touch on a subject that has been on my mind for a very long time.
Power, and it's military purpose.
As we all know, electric power is necessary to run 99.99999% of all production machinery. If your nation can't produce ammunition, food or anything else, you will lose any kind of war almost instantly. Not only will your soldiers either starve, be captured without ammo, or worse, but your population will suffer immensely, sine refrigeration/freezing has almost completely replaced pickling, drying, and salting as the main method of preserving food. Hostpitals would cease to function after a week or so, without electric pumps it would take ages to fill fuel trucks, or fuel trains to transport the diesel or gas to wherever it is needed for power production or fueling trucks/tanks/cars.

As you can clearly see, protecting the power network of your nation is one of the key goals of any defensive military plan, yet there are many ways you could permanently take out power structures.

There are exactly three points of failure in the modern power structure. The power lines, transformers, and power plants.
Let me begin with power lines, since they are very similar to train lines in how to defend them. You need regular patrols, possibly on bikes or on cars. It will eat up lots of your resources, but is absolutely necessary to keep your power network going.Taking out two or three large high voltage power posts using very little explosives, or just a metal saw and a truck, can lead to a total blackout in large areas, causing trouble and confusion.
You can always lay your power lines underground, but that bears a whole other set of risks. Underground lines may be a lot harder to take out, but damages are harder to detect and repair too. All it would take would be two guys with a shovel and some explosives. They dig a hole to your power lines, bust them up, and fill the hole again before running like a swarm of bees was after them. Even if your power lines are underground, you would still need to post guards or have patrols, but in longer intervals. The deeper they are (and the longer it takes for a saboteur to dig down to them) the fewer soldiers you need to put on patrol duty,but figuring out where exactly the damage was done will be a lot harder than with overground cables, since you can't just fly a helo along them to see where one of the poles has fallen over, or a cable was cut. You need men on the ground to walk along the line and see where the ground has been dug up and hastily covered again.

The next point of failure would be transformers, but those have already been discussed to death here. All it takes is a dude with some molotows and a vespa and an entire city is without power. Posting at least four armed guards (two asleep, two guarding at all times) would be an absolute necessity. They must also have backup on standby. Again, a helo with a squad on board, or just a truck with a siren so it can avoid traffic would be ideal.
However it would also be easy to have one guy with an RPG or MANPAD ready to take out the reinforcements before they arrive. At that point you would need to worry a lot more about why your own population wants you to lose the war that badly.

The third point of failure are the power plants themselves, and they are my biggest concern in a nation VS nation war. One good hit on a nuclear, coal or hydroelectric powerplant will not only halt power generation, but in the case of nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams, also cause massive damage to the surrounding areas. Using CIWS, and a layered AA missile system would be a clear necessity, and require lots and lots of resources. Decentralized power production, like windfarms, or solar panels would work and solve some of these issues, but especially solar farms would suffer greatly under light fragmentation bombs/artillery.

What's Zig Forumss opinion on this?

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michaelshermer.com/2015/10/the-electric-universe-acid-test/
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twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

I have little to no knowledge about this stuff but couldn't we just protect them with the same stuff the Burgers use to protect their aircraft carriers?

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It's good to see that I'm not the only one thinking about such problems.
Even in the early 20th century, most factories were steam powered, and the average home was heated with wood or coal. Now look at these:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater
Even 15% would be great, but if you can really reduce the fuel required to heat a home by 35%, then keeping a home heated shouldn't be that much of a problem. Especially because they can burn nearly anything. But that's only heat, and we want electricity. Luckily the Omnissiah already sent us the answer through Tesla:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_turbine
Instead of complicated blades these things only need circular metal plates, therefore you could mass produce them quite easily. With the rocket mass heaters every house could have its own combined system to produce heat and electricity. And you could scale them up for factories too without much problem.
Of course I mostly imagine it as a back up if your power lines do get destroyed, but if your factory has sufficient CIWS and AA, then I doubt the enemy will try to take out the coal bunk instead of the machinery. You can stock up with coal or other solid fuels when tensions are rising, and then even irregular transports of fuel could work if they conserve their reserves. And speaking of coal and solid fuels, remember that you can turn them into high quality liquid fuel for internal combustion engines.

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Just for your interest: do you remember that Bagger 288? Embed related. It's a massive fucking coal mining bagger, that transports part of it's coal towards a power plant using a long conveyor belt. It's practically self sufficient, and keeps powering itself as long as there is coal for it to mine. Slap a bunch of AA radars/missiles as well as CIWS on it, and your power issues in a small area will be solved.

I remember that most car factories over here use coal power plants to run, especially Volkswagen uses them in their main factor for power generation. They have special trainlines just for delivering coal to their own plant. Expanding this system to most ammo or military factories would be possible, but a massive investment, and it may not pay out in peacetime, so it is unlikely to see it without government money being pumped into it.
In the case of VW, the power plant that was built for the Volkswagen factory was also used to power the newly constructed "City of the car of power through happiness", today known as "Wolfburg".

This reminds me of China a lot, since most of their industrial cities and large factories have their own power plant, 99% of them coal. It would be pretty damned hard to take out China's power network.

Another fun fact about Bagger 288: it was built by Krupp, the same company behind the 80cm cannon "Dora", the greatest train gun ever built. That's right. 80CENTImeters, or 800mm caliber. 800 mm. Let that sink in. Nowadays 155mm is considered massive.
These guys built 800mm guns.
Bagger 288 is the greatest land-vehicle ever built. It's treads alone are 3.8 meters wide, and it has 12 of those.
There is a reason people were fawning over "Krupstahl", and it is not because they built good tanks.

DECENTRALIZED GRID POWERED BY A SMALL POWER FLOW-THROUGH WATER POWER PLANTS ON EVERY MINOR RIVER
also geothermy if you have pools

a literal meme.
Solar Panels are nowhere near required efficinecy to be more than a gimmick you slap on your rooftop in a libshit neighborhood
windfarms are shitty as well because they take a lot of area and harm environment as well.

Good way of protecting the power supply is having all companies be nationalized, so you rule out the possibility of an enemy just flipping a switch and leaving you in the dark.
The internal infrastructure needs to involve as little computers as possible so it doesn't get hacked

The only good commie is a cute one.
You can keep the computers disconnected from the internet. That way you can have all the advantages of advanced processing power, and none of the disadvantages of modern communication technologies.

hello lolberg.
Or did you misunderstand "all" as "every industry, as well as those unrelated to power" instead of "all electric companies"?

come on mongol you are better then that