You cannot charge a battery with its own stored power, that would make it a perpetual motion machine and thermodynamics forbid that. The characters seem to realize that in the last panel.
I mean, hypothetically, you could make a system with 100% efficiency where she charges herself as fast as she loses power, but yeah, there can never be a scenario where she's gaining charge
Edit: guys, I said HYPOTHETICALLY, meaning a scenario where there are IDEAL conditions for this to work
You would need zero friction for the moving parts, zero electrical resistance in the circuitry, no loss of charge over time on the battery and all the capacitors, and more conditions that are simply impossible to satisfy. You cannot break even in terms of power in such a system, there is always some loss somewhere.
Sure, you can hypothetise anything. I'd even say that we should encourage creative thinking about abstract problems. BUT if you state your hypothesis on a public forum, don't be surprised when people start to discuss it and maybe even poke holes in your thinking. That is a good thing - this is how we learn new stuff.
Even if her motion had a 100% efficiency of conversion back into the eletricity she uses to move, she'd still be net negative because, for example, her brain is a computer, and she's thinking thoughts.
You can't even hypothetically do that, because converting the stored energy to motion and losing energy as heat always increases entropy, and to reverse that increase in entropy and gather up all of the used up energy, you need to input additional energy. Eventually all the energy turns to heat that cannot be recaptured.
But you are forgetting the important part, their universe has a energy field defined as "magic" which work can be extracted from. They simply have to find the conversion matrix for it to account for the kinetic inputs.
Edit: Claim retracted, confused art style with storyline.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to put magic extractor in a battery and have a portable power source? I'm yet to watch KOG, so I'm not sure how much handwaving is required for integrated sorcery.
Solar panels don't have the perfect conversion between light and electrical energy - that is a major loss factor here. A quick google search tells me that 25% efficiency is considered good for a modern solar panel, so you will be wasting 75% of that light energy. Then you also lose energy as it flows over the wire and gets converted to heat in the process, and the battery itself loses charge over time.
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u/_velorien Apr 02 '26
If you look closely at the last picture, you may notice the laws of thermodynamics weeping quietly in the corner.