It seems to me pumping out water to near vacuum while under crushing outside water pressure would be a significant power hog

Well, yeah. That’s the point. It’s a battery. Whatever energy you put in to pump the water out, you get some percentage (probably in the 50-70% range) of it back when you let the water back in. The point of these is to store energy from renewables whenever they are providing more power than the grid demands - otherwise the power would be wasted.

Edit: The paper claims 72% efficiency which is pretty good if I understand things correctly

They are definitely not blasting gamma rays to bring down drones lol. “radio” is a specific range of frequencies so “high frequency radio” is just frequencies at the higher end of that specific range.

Gamma rays are insanely dangerous. I’m too lazy to do calculations/research to back this up but I suspect that gamma rays intense enough to reliably drop a drone would also give cancer/radiation poisoning to anyone remotely downrange (and also the operators). Furthermore, I don’t think we have a way to produce gamma rays in any high intensity in the lab. matter-antimatter annihilation and fusion bombs are the only way I know of for humans to produce gamma rays. The former can only be done at atomic scale in the lab and the latter is, well, I guess that also destroys drones (and everything else within 100km)

The reason Musk wants this might be greed, but it’s very stupid if that’s his reason. A huge amount of the US’s global economic power comes from strong-arming the rest of the world to enforce US patents and copyright, thus funneling trillions of dollars from the rest of the world to the US. Without any patents or copyright there would be improved Chinese Tesla copies on the market within a year.

The only sensible thing either of these two have ever said. All knowledge belongs to all humankind.

Stop trying to make me like these assholes