Tag: Vladimír Suchý

Pulsars are certain types of stars that emit a tight beam of electromagnetic radiation. The beam doesn’t really pulse, it just appears that way because a pulsar rotates with a frankly ridiculous speed and we can only detect the beam when it’s pointed our way. Now, something the size of a star rotating in a matter of seconds or even milliseconds, that’s a lot of energy. And where is a lot of energy there are people thinking how to harvest it. Harvesting energy from pulsars is a wee bit beyond our current technology. But in the future, like, maybe in the year 2849?

Building pulsar-powered power plants, so called gyrodynes, is your job in Vladimír Suchý’s Pulsar 2849. A gyrodyne is basically a stellar scale dynamo, a ring built around a pulsar that turns with the force of the rotating star and transmits the energy generated elsewhere. But what powers the construction of a structure of that magnitude? Dice!