It’s something that’s been pestering me. Like in cyberpunk you never see people having to charge their mechanical arm, eye, gorilla arms, mantis blades. You never hear about people sitting around plugged into a wall because they forgot last night and now their artiforge pancreas lost its juice. At best, I guess it runs off the electricity of the heart, but that can’t be enough juice to keep it moving, can it?
Then you have extensive cybernetics like in stuff like Warhammer, and it just never quite clicks for me.
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In the Six Million Dollar Man Steve’s bionic limbs are supposed to be nuclear powered, with miniature nuclear power cells that got damaged on at least one occasion.
I some universes those mechanics are explained; in some they are not. Its not detrimental to some stories, but in others it adds more to the fantasy aspect than to science fiction. Alita battle angel kind of explores this.
Some have internal power packs and others collect small amounts of energy from the natural processes of the body and additional passive power generation. Just depends on the exact needs. Stuff like Deus Ex have small batteries that can last for months without recharging and combat Augs require more frequent recharges. Battletech has mostly passive energy generation with most cybernetics requiring vastly less energy than seems reasonable and battery packs for super strength or internal energy weapons. Cyberpunk 2020/2077/Red has lots of additional energy sources with things like wireless charging in vehicles and bedrooms as well as internal power plants.
But there’s also those wildly exotic things like Mass Effect that strap micro fusion reactors into some augmentations and in others just hook it up to a person’s heart while giving them an ultra high calorie diet after. Mostly though it all comes down to some internal power storage system that allows for either short bursts of extraordinary usage or replaceable power packs that currently exceed our modern understanding of power storage capabilities.
And in at least one fringe case in 40k there’s a cybernetic arm crudely attached to a human commissar by Orks and it only works because the orks think it’s supposed to work.
I imagine they do charge them, it just doesn’t come up in the same way that them using the toilet doesn’t – it’s just kind of boring, so it happens off-screen.
Generally, I’d assume they probably charge it overnight while they sleep, or maybe when they’re doing things like watching TV or otherwise on downtime. They’ve got a life outside of punching people through walls with their robot arms, you know.
Inductive charger under the bed. When they sleep, they recharge ALL the batteries.
But for real, it depends on the universe. Some are batteries, other are nuclear batteries, some are solar powered, others just use the internal energy of the body (drawing energy from food just like your regular body)
In Dresden Codak, there’s a character called Kimiko with extensive cybernetic enhancement. They’re powered by her own metabolism, so after action scenes she becomes incredibly famished and must consume enormous quantities of food
In Almost Human, the main character charges up his leg at night.
In Deus Ex it’s stated that the cybernetics are powered by a portion of the chemical energy from your stomach (I think they add an implant there too). This is somewhat realistic since, depending on the amputation, in real life you are recommended to lower your caloric intake since you don’t have to keep a set of legs running* anymore.
*Pardon the pun
In “I, Robot” Will Smith’s character has cybernetic implants. I don’t believe its power source is never referenced directly but Smith’s character is often seen eating lots of sugar which is interpreted as chemical energy for the cybernetics.
Deus Ex powers them through food
>The Sarif Series 8 Energy Converter transforms nutrients such as fat, glucose, and adrenalin into an electric charge that is then stored in augmentation-specific power biocells.
Said biocells are two to four times as energy dense as high grade lithium ion cells in the 2020s.
As for 40k, depending on the purpose of the augmetic, either internal power reserve or from a linked reactor (or even an implanted reactor for the more augmented individuals). Some of those backpacks you see can power their augmetics as well as their armour and weapons.
Venom Snake’s ROOOCKET ARRRRM! Is described as charging through both solar and mechanical power… somehow. Some prosthetic arm specialist he pulled out of Afghanistan could tell you more, but then you’d be on Diamond Dogs’ hitlist.
What if it was fuelled by glucose it takes from your blood? Then you could charge it up just by eating carbs.
In realistic science fiction, they do that stuff all the time- look at Murderbot or Ghost in the Shell. Heck, even the Borg do it in Star Trek.
In games, they don’t, but most games don’t handle bullet reloads believably, either.
There are sugar based batteries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_battery
They could just extract it from your blood.
It might even end up a similar amount of calories as the regular limb would have used.
In Texhnolyze, the cybernetics most people use in the city of Lux are powered wirelessly via an obelisk-shaped building in the middle of the city. At one point the protagonist needs to leave its area of influence and has to get fitted with a set of battery packs to keep his cybernetic arm and leg functional.
In Ghost in the Shell, implants are powered by their users’ food intake. Low-power stuff like communication implants don’t need anything more than that but heavily-augmented individuals need to eat specialised highly energy-dense foods to get enough energy to function.
Most bionics and prosthetics in Rimworld seem to be powered by the user’s food intake (there’s even a bionic stomach that can take over if their natural one is damaged), but it’s also possible to do the reverse – the “nuclear stomach” is an implanted, nuclear-powered chemical recycling plant that drastically lowers the amount of food the user needs, at the cost of dramatically increasing their risk of getting cancer over time.