Interstellar luxury cruiser (nonfiction)

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An interstellar luxury cruiser is a spacecraft (nonfiction) designed to carry passengers between the stars in extreme comfort and elegance, with all the finest pleasures of the galaxy at their disposal.

Energy consumption

Energy consumption figures are necessarily speculative, since no such ship exists as of this writing (nonfiction).

However, back-of-the-envelope-taped-to-the-inside-of-my-(nonfiction)-skull calculations clearly indicate that my ideal interstellar luxury cruiser burns up one million Las Vegases per microsecond.

Las Vegas units

Are you picturing Las Vegas, in its entirely, lit up on a high-rolling Saturday night? Powerful! They have to run Hoover Dam (nonfiction) overtime to handle the load!

Take all that bright jangling Las Vegas energy -- billions of dollars -- billions of kilowatts -- winners! losers! jackpots! crackpots! Anything can happen, baby! Anything! -- and hold that idea in your mind like a diamond, the diamond that is Las Vegas at that screaming peak moment in that blinding Saturday night.

Scale

Take that diamond and crush it down into a grain of sand! Don't look! Even in your own mind!

At that scale, the brightness hurts.

Night sky

Finally, imagine the night sky full of stars ... the stars like your infinitesimal, intolerably powerful grain of diamond-sand ... imagine them up their, the stars ... the ... arrogance of it ... how dare they stay up there, out of reach? Do I not have in my palm one of their kind? Am I not worthy of their notice? Why won't they come down and play?

Summary

... Sorry, wandered off. Where was I (nonfiction)?

The deal interstellar luxury cruiser, yes. Here's the deal:

  • Diamonds are just luxury coal, and this is a coal-fired spaceship.
  • Shovel as fast as you can, because the passengers are watching.
    • After all -- what could be more luxurious that watching a man toil for nothing?

Nonfiction cross-reference

Fiction cross-reference