View source for Talk:Aurora/@comment-184.14.117.131-20180309020619/@comment-50.0.204.16-20190725192601

Okay, so if the flashlight batteries are dead, then it's the aurora that is powering the flashlight: something inside of it is acting as a mini antenna. (The power coming on in the rest of the places is a little silly, since you'd have to have the aurora generating something akin to 60-cycle power, at somewhere between say 50 and 350 volts, or things would either not work or just sort of melt/explode/catch on fire. But I can handle a little artistic license, and maybe there's a giant UPS somewhere attatched to the grid that is where the power is being sourced from and that's DC and it's what is powering the grid, or whatever.)

When the aurora's gone, it makes perfect sense that the flashlight would stop working: the batteries picked up a tiny bit of charge from the aurora, and then that goes away. Assuming they're alkaline batteries, they don't take kindly to charging, not at all. Severe Tire Damage May Result and all that. So even if they were partly charged when the Event happened, assuming it was just a much more powerful version of these auroras, then it probably simply killed the batteries. (If they were swollen we'd know for sure.)

If they were rechargeable batteries, well, same type of thing, really. None of the lithium formulations take very kindly to being charged wrong. If you charge a lithium battery without a regulation circuit, you can make it catch fire. Making it useless without making it catch fire is just as easy. So the event could have just killed all lithium batteries really easily. Or all of them that were full, or all of them that were empty, or all of them that were lined up in the wrong direction, or... anything, really.

That said, MAKING batteries is pretty straightforward, and we have access to everything we need in order to do so. I mean, hell, rose hip tea can be as acidic as pH 2. Scrounge a few LEDs from computers, phones, or whatever, and you could easily have a mason jar LED lantern that lasts a surprising amount of time and is fully 'rechargeable' just by adding more tea.

Hell, if you have an electronics book and a computer and a radio (and you'd need to add a set of earbuds, which alas don't currently exist) for parts, you can probably make a crystal radio that wouldn't even require batteries. Then you could wander around the frozen waste listening to classical music, a la Fallout 3+, for as long as you like.