Transporting it in small paper cups would be pretty dense, if not moronic.
What?
OK, how about transmuting it to some heavier set of elements and then doing the opposite at the other end?
What about shooting ice cubes from the ISS kitchen towards the mining outpost.
As far as transporting it goes, get yourself a hi-grav condenser and turn it into super-dense neutronium. Stop short of a black hole.
Transport problem solved.
Now, I will admit that reconstituting neutronium back into water will be a little bit of a problem…
Well, if we’re going to get speculative, why not just extract the necessary particles out of virtual particle pairs separated by an event horizon barrier. Then you can make all the water–or whatever–you want. You just have to find a singularity and keep feeding it so it doesn’t evaporate away. How hard could it be?
Stranger
Hey, nobody promised it would be easy setting up and supplying an asteroid mining colony.
I guess I could justify volume being important by saying something like your ship takes off from Earth so it has an airframe that everything must fit in and you need room for other things, and things like transmuting elements or creating particles to be cost prohibitive or the technology is unavailable. But really the essense of the question I’m asking is, is there a way to store the materials needed for water into a smaller space than just keeping it in the form of water?
So far it looks like the density of H[sub]2[/sub] is so low, water seems to be about the densest way to store it already.
My Google skills must be weak, as I cannot find a firm cite for their density relative to LH[sub]2[/sub], but how about storing the hydrogen in a palladium-hydrogen matrix? I did find that you can store up to 900 times the volume of a hydrogen gas in a palladium matrix, but I can’t find out if this makes a denser or less dense hydrogen density than liquid hydrogen.
Yeah, this is the hydride solution I mentioned above. I also wasn’t able to find a whole lot of hard numbers. I eventually did find this article on hydrides for fuel storage. Figure 1 shows that most of the hydrides interesting for hydrogen-fueled vehicles have about the same hydrogen-fraction volume as liquid hydrogen.
For palladium, using that 900x by volume (or the rough equivalent, 0.7% by mass, which I also found) gives an effective hydrogen density of about 70 kg/m[sup]3[/sup], just about the same as liquid hydrogen. (Solid hydrogen is a little denser, at about 90 kg/m[sup]3[/sup].) (This 900x only works out to a stoichiometric Pd:H = 3:1 or so; possibly at higher pressures this could be improved, but I don’t know.)
You can do about twice as well, getting about 150 kg/m[sup]3[/sup] of hydrogen, by using any of several light hydrogen-rich compounds such as ammonia, methane, beryllium hydride BeH[sub]2[/sub], or diborane B[sub]2[/sub]H[sub]6[/sub]. (This gets the hydrogen fraction into a lower volume than the water, but when the oxygen’s volume is added it’s still greater than the water’s volume.)
If you have a pressure vessel, you can compress the water into a higher-density allotrope of ice, and do better than the maximum-density liquid. At 2000atm, you can do 15% better than water (density ~1150 kg/m[sup]3[/sup]); at 4000atm, about 25%. At a mere million atmospheres, give or take a few, you can store water at about 2500 kg/m[sup]3[/sup].
In that case we might as well use a matter transporter beam - problem solved :smack:
WAG Dehydrate it? 