What Runs Your Fictional Ship?

Now that we know how your fictional ship moves through space it’s time to talk about another form of energy. All ships these days, not counting the pleasure ships run by sails, are run by computers (as are all cars, most businesses, even many houses today). How do computers run? They use electricity. That said it would be a good idea to have an electrical plant on your ship. Electricity is created by coiled wires moving through an electrical current and creating an alternating current. However, energy is needed to create the movement of the coils. Nowadays that energy is created by a number of ways such as fossil fuels, windmills, water turbines, and nuclear energy. Although any of those forms could be adapted to work on your ship, they have their problems. Fossil fuels may be difficult to keep on hand and they create waste as well as generally need human aid to monitor or clean up after. Although windmills could possibly be used to harness the movement of space around the ship or the air moving within the ship for ventilation, it would be difficult to make a possible design for harnessing the space around the ship, and what happens when the ship stops for port calls or exploration, or a strong enough design from ventilation to run all the computers on ship. The same goes for water turbines, although steam power may work if properly designed. The steam could move the turbines and go through a system to be recycled so that same water could be recycled and steamed again. Every so often more water would need to be added as no system is perfect, but that system could work for a while or be the backup energy. Just keep in mind the boiler would take time to heat or be constantly on to a lesser degree if it were a backup. Next come nuclear energy which at this time I don’t believe it would make a good electrical plant. As the propulsion power of the ship it could also be harnessed as an electrical power source but to have the containment needed and care needed to protect a crew from nuclear radiation along with a propulsion source could be too much for a future ship once you take into account the other rooms needed on a ship.
That leaves at least two other viable forms of electricity creation to think about: solar power and geothermal energy. Solar power seems pretty cool for space and may be an effective backup energy but you have to remember these ships go pretty fast and try to stay away from stars as they tend to have possibly inhabited planets around them. The likelihood of solar panels on the hull of a ship being able to sustain enough power to run an entire space ship without major glitches or blackouts seems slim. The power creator I would use is geothermal energy. Instead of taking the heat energy from the layers internal of a planet, use the energy already given off to move the ship and create enough electricity to power a space ship.
Here is a site explaining the energy creators I spoke of and how they are made today. Take your pick as to what energy source you want to use but be sure you have some sort of backup, even if it is just a few hours worth of battery power for major systems. (That may work best for things like maintenance or a secondary back up but may not last long during a space battle.)