Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-06-23

The Current Prints in Red

The grid is printed in two inks and the red one is the current.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A two ink halftone print, black and one red on mid grey stock, of a high voltage transmission line crossing the ice of a gas giant's moon. A huge banded planet fills the upper left of an airless black sky, its curved belts screened in coarse dots and cut off along one limb by a sliver of bare paper like a pasted photograph. The nearest lattice tower is cropped by the left and bottom edges, its cross arms and stacked insulator strings rendered at billboard scale; four more towers shrink away along a diagonal to the right, and four live conductors sag from tower to tower in thick red strokes printed wider than, and offset down and right of, their thin black cores. A thin black shield wire runs above them with no red on it. At the far end a low reactor block sits on a mesa with a glowing red panel and a row of red radiator fins, and a terminal gantry takes the line in. Below, a spur drops into a substation with red busbars, and feeders swing down to three dark domes whose window slits and a long hall's window band glow red, while a buried feeder crosses the foreground as a single red line between marker posts. Everything is halftone dots; there is no text anywhere; nothing shown exists.
An artistic imagining, rendered procedurally, of the distribution grid of a colony on a gas giant's moon: a trunk line marching on lattice towers from a reactor on the mesa to the lit domes, printed in two inks so that the black plate carries the hardware and the red plate carries only the current. Grids really do move power at high voltage on long open spans because resistive loss scales with the square of the current, but this vacuum exposed line, its colony and its reactor are invented. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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