MHD Turbines...

Okay, somebody more in the know than I needs to explain this to me:

An MHD Turbine, used in most of the Grav vehicles for power AND thrust,
seems to me to be the following device:  a torus of water, accelerated by
a magnetic field, which is then pushed through a turbine to generate
electricity.

This is dumb.  It means we have electricity to begin with, but we want to
push it through this other device before we use it...Also, we don't get
any thrust from this, as far as I can see....

Option 2:  We're burning Hydrogen as a reactant and using the heat/whatever
to power a turbine, which pushes the water from which electricity is
extracted with an MHD setup.

This is also dumb.  Why not just pull the power off the turbine directly?
Plus, the Hydrogen needs a reactant which we also need to lug along, or it
won't work in anything but atmospheres with a reactant in suitable quantities.

Option 3:  The Hydrogen Exhaust (Water, if we're using Oxygen as our
reactant) is accelerated (?) by an MHD (or has power pulled off it, which
means it's *deccelerated*) and then pushed through a turbine.

This is also stupid.  Why use both for generating electricity?  At TL 8,
the turbine is more effecient than the MHD, although we could probably
fudge this with "hi-tech" superconductors, or whatever :)

Option 4:  We've got a turbine precompressing the atmosphere before pushing
it through the MHD (a la modern turbo-jets) <assuming that we're using the
atmosphere as the reactant...if not, no precompressing is necessary>.

This is dumb, 'cause it won't fly in a vacuum.  And really, what's the use
of a grav vehicle that can't be used in a vacuum (or any non-compatible
atmosphere, really).

So, basically, I can see no rationale for something called an MHD turbine
as either a good powerplant or a source of thrust.  Am I wrong?

Dane

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"I'm not a real Scientist, but I play one in an RPG."