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6/13/2025, 6:51:44 PM
Your assumption that the energy availability of petrol is 100% under any physically possible scenario is flawed.
HOWEVER
Let's see what mad science can do:
First assumption: We're burning this stuff inside a heavily modified human body. Are we adding cybernetics? If not, then the body itself is going to burn as well when the fuel is combusted. Famously, people doused in gasoline and set on fire die in the vast majority of cases. Even if we place it inside a vessel inside the body which can take the heat, contact with any part of the body comprised of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen is going to break down and ignite past certain threshold temperatures. Therefore, the system needs to be isolated inside the body and given a vacuum around it, with a heat sink, It also needs to be constantly cooled, fueled, and provided with oxygen to keep the reaction going. So we add some kind of water or superconducting condensate fluid to cool down the components faster than a literal gas fire heats it up. Cars which run on petrol are constantly in danger of overheating, and they're made of metal, which is pretty conductive stuff. Airflow can help with this as well. Maybe these soldiers need to be mostly submerged so they can have contact with water over a larger surface to dissipate the heat. Now, how are we converting the energy into something the body can use? We get electricity from running steam engines in the majority of cases, which push a turbine, and then send that DC through to a storage medium or the grid. Humans run on a small amount of electricity, the rest is chemical and transported through the blood via ATP.
SO: We can't burn the stuff to get energy out and convert it into ATP. We'd need to use it as mechanical energy at that point, and that's incompatible with biological systems, so unless you want robots, throw all the shit I've already said out the window.
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HOWEVER
Let's see what mad science can do:
First assumption: We're burning this stuff inside a heavily modified human body. Are we adding cybernetics? If not, then the body itself is going to burn as well when the fuel is combusted. Famously, people doused in gasoline and set on fire die in the vast majority of cases. Even if we place it inside a vessel inside the body which can take the heat, contact with any part of the body comprised of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen is going to break down and ignite past certain threshold temperatures. Therefore, the system needs to be isolated inside the body and given a vacuum around it, with a heat sink, It also needs to be constantly cooled, fueled, and provided with oxygen to keep the reaction going. So we add some kind of water or superconducting condensate fluid to cool down the components faster than a literal gas fire heats it up. Cars which run on petrol are constantly in danger of overheating, and they're made of metal, which is pretty conductive stuff. Airflow can help with this as well. Maybe these soldiers need to be mostly submerged so they can have contact with water over a larger surface to dissipate the heat. Now, how are we converting the energy into something the body can use? We get electricity from running steam engines in the majority of cases, which push a turbine, and then send that DC through to a storage medium or the grid. Humans run on a small amount of electricity, the rest is chemical and transported through the blood via ATP.
SO: We can't burn the stuff to get energy out and convert it into ATP. We'd need to use it as mechanical energy at that point, and that's incompatible with biological systems, so unless you want robots, throw all the shit I've already said out the window.
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