Quote:
Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
I am aware of that, too. My point was that beamed energy might be useful for a small number of cases, but if you want a constant steady supply you would have to go wired. Reliability is more important than how fancy it looks, the same reason why I am using a wired mouse and keyboard.
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This may be true in the world of Gundam 00, but it's a very different case in the real world - technological limitations are even greater concerns than reliability. We can't conceive of a way to build space elevators (much less have the capacity to do so!), while beamed power is still in the realm of possibility (albeit it's still far from now). The main advantage of elevators is that they're useful for other purposes as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
And anyway, the elevator also functions as a cheap form of space transport for building materials. They couldn't have built all the solar panels and everything else in space big enough to wrap around the EARTH, using just rockets and shuttles, especially NOT during a fuel shortage.
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It's impossible to build an orbital elevator purely from the ground up, so you'd have to boost material into orbit with chemical rockets to construct an orbital elevator in any case. In fact, the amount that you'd need to boost up is probably greater for an elevator than for the described solar network.