Ways for more departments to make money

[QP Evergrande]

Also it would be really cool if you could turn the microwave emitter into a weapon somehow, maybe a traitor version that sets things on fire wirelessly, or perhaps the wrongest settings cause people to cook from the inside out. The frequencies for radar and microwaves are kinda sorta simular, so perhaps there's a special suit the engineers have to wear in order to get close to the emitter so they don't baconify.

I don't think it would matter in terms of radio communication. This isn't microwave radiation; it has to be a beam or else it would become too diffuse before it reached its destination. In my conception, the microwave emitter would be a piece of machinery on the station. It would be controlled from a computer, and connected to a series of capacitors. You'd set it up to build up a certain amount of energy (For ease, I think measuring this amount in orders of magnitude instead of straight numbers would be best), and once it has it fires a bolt into space, towards a "sell point" just like the one used by the cargo bay. A safety concern would be that the bolt could hit a pod, so you wouldn't want to set it up so that it would fire too often. Also, these capacitors couldn't be SMES units, they'd have to be specialized. Output on an SMES is limited to 200,000. For this, that would be way too low.

So, lets say this setup starts with four special capacitors. You have an engine burning at a reasonable 2 MW, and you want to sell half of that. You set each of the special capacitors to an input of 250,000. They'd be connected directly to the engine, of course, and not to the SMES units, so they wouldn't drain the station. Then you set the emitter to fire a charge of level 7, and it fires when it's build up the correct amount of energy, which is drained instantly from the capacitors. In this case, it would be 10^7 = 10,000,000 joules, so the beam would fire every 10 cycles. But another safety concern is that the capacitors could send off arcs if you get too close while they're charged to a very high degree. For safety, you could build more units and connect them to the system, and maybe make some kind of upgrades a la phasers.

As for using it as a weapon, that occurred to me too. In my Particle Physics lab concept I proposed that one possible use for the particle accelerators would be to build up a weapon beam that would be fired outside the station. This would be relayed around the station at several beam relay points, until being fired at an enemy target, such as a pod, using a targeting control on the bridge. The microwave emitter could be set up so that by default it fires at one of these relays, which then fires at the energy sell point. Then, it could alternately be fired using the same bridge control. But, it should be much less energy efficient compared to the particle lab weapon, because it'd be so much easier to set up. In this case, it would have an additional use. If part of the station became cut off from the power grid, the microwave emitter could be used to transmit energy to a relay there, which would absorb it and store it in a local battery. Potential for traitor abuse: delivering an energy bolt that's too strong overloads the local power cells, and causes arcs. After all, even if the energy in the bolt is low, its wattage would be extremely high. That's a situation where you'd want many weak bolts instead of strong ones.