Nuke

lessons learned when fusion becomes practical will be able to be directly applied to antimatter containment. by then it might be practical to produce anti matter in large quantities. i just dont want to live anywhere near the antimatter factory.

fenriz of darkthrone also credits motorhead as a major inspiration to the development of black and death metal. in fact i got into motorhead because so many other bands i liked considered them a huge influence, and now most of the music i listen to is motorhead.

i think its more about the overall ship mass than just the power to weight ratio of the engine. a big capital ship is going to have a lot of other heavy things in it, armaments, cargo, fuel, crew facilities, repair and maintenance facilities, perhaps some medical and science facilities as well and of course places to store, launch and maintain fighters (battlestar galactica seems to allocate a lot of ship mass to that job). the fighter in comparison is really just going to have bare minimum life support, some weapons, and an engine and fuel. so even though it has a highly inefficient engine with a poor twr, that engine doesnt have to push around very much else. star trek is kind of an exception i suppose. there are little ships but they arent capable of warp 9+. as a result you dont see much use of small craft except as shuttles. there have been a couple episodes where fighters were shown, but most of the space battles seem to occur starship to starship. now that i think about it trek space battles are kind of boring and very unrealistic militarily speaking (ignoring all the other more obvious technobabble handwavery). the real irony though is that it gets it right that fighters are mostly not neccisary.

god is dead! hail lemmy. may his conquest of the heavens be victorious.

i got me a cute little quad copter, some tools, copy of starcraft2:lotv and a bottle of jim beam.

my little sister mentioned that she played minecraft. so i played the raspberry pi version, this prompted me to get the pc version. this was a horrible mistake, now i have every possible color of sheep in my farm.

i think we already have them. many commercial airliners can be landed entirely by computer. of course military drones have had this for years. fly by waypoint systems with point and click interfaces. now whether these systems work with an external load or in precision flight or whether its a good idea to use it for that or not, is entirely up for debate.

in the world of fusion bigger is usually better. larger volumes mean a higher rate of fusion, and less energy lost from failed particle collisions (this actually sets lower limits on how small certain types of reactors can be). higher rate of fusion means more energy out and more power for coils (which by the way use less energy than heating the plasma does). we do know that magnetic fields can be the size of planets and keep charged particles away from places where we dont want them to be.

superconducting coils is the usual go to solution for that problem. i dont think any polywells to date have been build with superconductors. dr bussard got fusion out of wb6 on just copper coils.

problem is those grids let all the energy out and contaminate the plasma. thats why the polywell config was done. physical electro static grids are replaced by magnetic coils that confine electrons. this draws ions into the center where they can collide. it takes natures solution to the fusion problem and replaces gravity with a potential well. its elegant (its literally a star in a jar) and i like it. its certainly better than the brute force solutions.

i was tempted to watch it but decided against it. dont really want to take on new shows right now. might binge it some years later though.

i watched it, and it reminded me why i stopped watching the syfy channel.

emcc has some transitional funding but i think its trying to find investors right now.

as i understand it the next step for polywell is a demo equivalent reactor, and it will only cost 200 million.

even if iter-demo works, its still not really economically viable in anywhere but the richest nations on the planet. polywells are nice because you could roll them out in a factory and ship them all over the place, and its not the only option out there for an economically viable reactor.

100kv sounds about right (at least thats what my google fu tells me). i imagine power utilities know how to deal with dc to transmission level ac conversion. large scale pv solar does it, but at a smaller scale. expensive, yes, but its nothing we havent done before. turns out transformers are slightly more efficient than buck regulators, and both have efficiencies in the 90-99% range. its the power inverter thats going to drop it most. still way better than rakine though. hardest part is getting the reactor to work, and if we can do that it really doesnt matter how we get the energy out of it.

now thats some serious fusion pr0n. all the glowey bits <3

direct conversion doesnt use photons, it uses alpha particles (or anything with a charge for that matter). they are ejected from the core at high energy levels. you "decelerate" them by allowing them to pick up an electron. this creates a very high negative voltage on the direct conversion grid. then you just have to buck it down to line voltage (which will raise the amperage significantly) and run it through an inverter. expect about 10% loss in collection, buck and inversion and you get about 70% efficiency out of it (compared to about 42% with a rakine cycle, not counting losses at heat exchangers).

they have a pretty web page but thats all ive seen. i need to see more technical information to tell if its a good idea or not. it will happen, just not on earth. use whatever fuel is abundant locally. on earth we got lots of boron and hydrogen for p-b11, and lots of deuterium for boring fusion. on the moon, he3 is easier to find (and i wonder if you cant actually farm the stuff, set up favorable conditions for natural formation on the lunar surface and other bodies). of course it will be used there and its probibly not feasible to ship it home. unless of course we become planet locked with no means off due to declining resources, failing economies and dying populations. direct conversion is used in reactions that produce charged paricles and no neutrons (i suppose you could use it on d-t fusion since it puts out a proton, but you still have neutrons to contend with so its easier to have a pure thermo system rather than a direct conversion and thermo hybrid system). p-b11 only puts out alpha particles and you can directly convert those in their entirety, and you then only have to contend with waste heat from running your system.

i would have honed the copper to a mirror finish (at least the areas that serve as a thermal interface). keep using finer grit sand paper until shiny.

capacitor aging. you do all the math, add up all the wattages, you test your draw and make sure everything is good. then a couple years later your capacitor values start creeping (or they outright burst and stop being capacitors) and your psu is suddenly out of spec. if you are me, you replce the caps, if you are anyone else, you buy a new psu.

i just stick to motorhead these days. with some slayer thrown in for taste.

one thing i posted elsewhere on another forum is that aneutronic fuels and direct conversion are not going to be used until 3rd and 4th generation fusion plants. those fuels are just too hard to fuse. so all first gen plants are either going to be d-d or d-t and 2nd generation plants are going to be an upgrade to those based on things we learn while operating them. anything in a toroid is going to use d-t, polywell wants to start with d-d and so on. we will probibly skip he3 based fuels unless we can find a way to breed it and probibly shoot straight for p-b11 instead, which is very abundant on earth. ultimately all reactor systems are going to need special materials for turning neutron radiation into heat, and for d-t reactors, to breed tritium. they will all be steam engines initially. direct conversion is going to really cut down the losses a lot, so the lower cross section fuels will still be competitive with the neutronic fuel based reactors. though i suspect the aneutronic fuels will have lower operating costs.

p-b11 > he3 mostly because we can get boron now, in large quantities, without lunar infrastructure and transit system. i do however think he3 will be superior for space applications, assuming you can build a compact reactor system (like helion) and develop isru systems to harvest the he3. any fusion will be better than any fission in environmental impact.

i think i would opt for a woodward drive. all you really need is a 4 phase rf power supply and a few passive components found in any electronics hacker's junk drawer.