Nuke

is anyone still doing icf? i also think that is going to have a huge problem with getting to engineering breakeven due to the inefficiency of lasers. jet is going to be going for the q record using d-t next year. iter is looking forward to the result. lets hope they raise the bar.

polywell was a different machine arrangement entirely created by robert bussard of interstellar ramjet fame. a bunch of magnetic coils contains a ball of electrons in the core which the ions "fall" into. effectively replacing gravity with a potential well. in theory they cross in the middle and have a chance to fuse. it was meant initially for d-d and then p-b11 fuels. but the university of sydney put out a paper that has been consider a final nail in the coffin. it was such a shame because its the kind of reactor you could stuff in a rocket fairing and put on a space craft.

there is also the florine-politician fueled rocket engine. when it comes to magnetic confinement there are hard physical reasons why you cant make it smaller. you dont want a failed fusion to send the particle and all its energy into the reactor walls, because that takes energy out of the plasma. you want it to recirculate and potentially have another opportunity to fuse. so your toroid cross section has to be large enough for the particle to turn back into the flow. unfortunately it has the side effect of making your tokamaks huge and heavy. there was the polywell which used a spherical arrangement rather than a torioid, which would make it 3 or 4 meters across. but a recent paper has shelved the concept. i have a feeling first gen reactors are going to be tokamaks. its just the most well understood arrangement.

the gf reactor is tiny compared to iter.

im not denying that secret projects exist. i just doubt its active camo for use on aircraft. a fighter aircraft's sensors can see a lot more than the mk1 eyeball. you would have to do a lot of things to mask ir, acoustics, uv, etc. besides if i was developing active camo, it would be for spec ops armor. a seal team with that tech could do a lot more damage than an invisible fighter jet.

he understood ac and radio very well, but he didn't even believe in electrons. i think he is overrated but that doesn't mean the guy wasn't a genius. science is a group effort and i think its wrong to give any one scientist all the credit. i always wonder if the edison-testla fued has been blown way out of proportion. most of that was just edison electric and westinghouse jockeying for market share.

im not even sure how active camouflage would be useful in an aircraft. these days most engagements take place beyond visual range. the pilots never see eachother's aircraft. also just because something is invisible to the visible spectrum doesnt mean it will be invisible in radio or infrared. for a cas aircraft like the a-10, you want the enemy to see it. just the sight of that thing can quickly inspire the enemy to surrender or fall back, and if that doesnt work there is always brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt!

when i was very young i was at the pool (we were living in the california desert at the time). and this black triangular object flew overhead. everyone thought they saw a ufo. it looked a lot like an f117. probably because it was an f117. i think it was still classified at the time. the cia loves it when people make wild assumptions because its a damn good cover and it doesnt cost anything. every now and again some government agency will put something out there to fan the flames. whatever they are working on we will find out in 20-50 years. you will probably know what they are working on right now before you can watch public domain micky mouse cartoons. of course until you can say for sure its a rock or a radar ghost or even an alien space ship its still a ufo. the irony is if you identify a ufo as an alien space craft, it is no longer a ufo.

the problem is people falsely associate ufos for aliens. for something to be a ufo it just needs to meet these 3 conditions: 1. it needs to be an object 2. it needs to be flying 3. it needs to be unidentifiable. i dont see any aliens there.

its like a bunch of super massive black holes all decided to have a party. and they ate too much of my bean dip.

a lot of energy output is in the form of neutrons. these actually have to hit one of the reactor blankets, which are likely going to have a coolant loop behind it providing the hot side of a thermodynamic cycle. i assume the alpha particles will end up in the diverter and might be subject to direct conversion . but the neutrons coming off the reaction are like 4x more energetic. you need both for an efficient power plant. aneutronic fuels, and i think the most practical is the p-b11 reaction because of its abundance on earth. we need about another order of magnitude more performance out of our current fusion reactors to get to scientific breakeven, perhaps 2 for engineering breakeven. aneutronic fuels will require a couple orders of magnitude on top of that to be viable.

im all for grimdark nature simulation. i guess like most flight sims you can time warp through the boring stuff. human cat interaction would be an interesting so long as its from the cat's perspective. i actually did a search for this a couple days ago and found about 50 virtual pet type games with cutesie graphics, and almost all from the human perspective. as a long time cat slave i know that cats are a lot more sinister than that. they actively train their humans and are constantly extorting things from their human, and inter-cat politics has its own interesting dynamics. i swear that the consumption of cat litter grows exponentially with the number of cats, to them its some sort of contest to see who can stink up the box more. and then you got your time shares where cats take turns holding on to certain locations in the house. like you can get out of your chair 3 times throughout the day and each time you will find a different cat sitting there when you come back. or how our alpha cat despite being damn old, deaf, and being a bag of bones with barely enough energy to stand can still manage to hold the top position in the pecking order (the other 2 cats are either very large or very muscular and could take the top spot easily). of course one other problem with making a game to explore cat behavior is that said cat behavior almost never seems to be set in stone from minute to minute. something in the same vein as goat simulator would also be funny as hell.

i remember playing alley cat on my grandpas computer when i was a kid. got to love that four color cga goodness. does that count? when i think of cat simulator i dont think of a virtual pet type game but rather a fps (first person scratcher) type game where you can hunt and kill things at will. it would play a lot like the alien portion of avp games. levels would include a lot of climbing and jumping as well as stealth and stalking of prey. progression would start you with house cats, feral cats, move up to small wild cats and then do big cats. multiplayer could be pve of sorts involving a pride of lions. would allow you to explore all aspects of a cat's behavior from the cat's point of view. i never understood why wildlife simulation isn't a genre. people enjoy nature shows so why not simulations?

don't expect direct energy conversion until we start using second and third gen fusion power reactors. i think you also need to run aneutronic fuels for direct conversion to work, anything resulting in charged particles. initial reactors are all going to be d-d or d-t, and that means a thermodynamic cycle will be required to extract the energy. it might take a further 50 years to get there. got to walk before you can run.

fission and fusion reactors start looking more or less the same when you get into the thermodynamic loop. both are just over-glorified steam engines. you could also be electrolyzing with hydroelectric. at off peak hours you could be electrolyzing water rather than shutting off turbines, reservoir levels permitting. the hydro plants we have all around southeast alaska have very little to do at night, and its mostly rain forest round these parts (we make seattle look like a desert).

that may be true now. but in a post fusion world the more energy intensive operation may actually prove to be the cheaper option. really depends on the shape of the petrochemical industry post-fusion.

no but hydrolox is a renewable when you have a power plant that runs practically for free. i have a feeling that even in a world of fusion torches, chemical fuel will still be the primary means of getting to orbit. perhaps supplemented with beamed power. future iterations of space treaties will likely include a nuclear exclusion zone about the earth and any other heavily populated colonies. get your radioactives from space mining.

assuming iter/demo is successful and results in production fusion plants. power plants will be cheaper than research plants, as they need less instrumentation to function. but they are still going to be large and expensive. the first world gets them first. and expect the same kind of bureaucratic heel dragging and politicization that goes with any mega project, made especially worse because its nuclear. it will be a slow process. its going to bankrupt the middle east and anyone else running a primarily oil based economy. fusion will be very economically disruptive. its going to be just baseload for awhile. but expect a drop in the cost of manufactured goods. it will also reduce the cost of rocket fuel if you can convince elon to go hydrolox. theres a lot to be learned just from operating first gen fusion power plants. that knowledge will make 2nd gen power plants even better. fusion research is still going to be a thing. iter is huge by design. miniaturization would be desired, not to mention required for anything fun like fusion spacecraft. dont expect that to happen over night. extraplanetary bases become feasible. you can begin construction on a lunar colony, and with the reduced cost in rocket fuel and 100% reusable orbital vehicles, fusion doesn't really need to undergo miniaturization first. we could have our lunar colony done in time for first gen fusion propulsion. keep in mind it can go a different way if a different method of fusion is the first to produce a successful demo. a smaller reactor would facilitate a more rapid deployment and lessen the economic disruption as more people can afford them and transition to fusion based economies. you might also see fusion powered spacecraft sooner.

it certainly belongs up there with divide by zero.

what is noooooooooooooooooo

was that why there is vomit in my shoe?

i dont know where i read this but games are supposedly not engaging for most players if they cannot win at least 1/3 of the time. its why my mom refuses to play scrabble with me anymore, she just cant beat my vocabulary. she can still win like 1 in 10 games, but it got to the point where she would rather just do her sudoku instead. its probably why boomers (real boomers, not the xers that yzers call boomers) prefer games of chance over games of skill. they dont understand our new fangled videa games , but give them a deck of cards or some dominoes and they will never leave the kitchen table. the chance enables lower skilled players to compete with high skilled players, and win enough to stay interested. i play a lot of mechwarrior online (which isnt really an mmo as i understand the genre though many consider it such), and they are currently in a state of crisis with its declining player population. they have a huge problem with their highly skilled players (and there are a lot of them given the developer's attempts to foster e-sports) farming casuals. their recent inclusion of small teams into the primary game mode has caused a not insignificant number of players to quit all together. the only thing keeping the game from collapsing at this point is covid as those under stay at home orders have nothing to do but play games. its kind of a shame because ive been building my mech collection for several years now and play at an above average level. all attempts to refactor match making have failed (the low population is usually blamed). its a huge problem for which i dont think game developers have solved. and blatant manipulation of players into pre determined matches are not very game-like. for games with large player counts things are less troublesome, just assign players of appropriate skill to the correct leagues and only play within those leagues. but when you get into indie and niche games it becomes very difficult to maintain populations.

lol.

i figure the best nuclear engines for space travel would be ones designed to operate on a wide variety of propellants. so long as you can tank up enough delta-v to get to your next destination you are fine. you might be running at a sub-optimal isp most of the time, but if it gets you where you are going then it becomes irrelevant. staying with chemical propulsion around earth is probably a good idea. the reactor is better off on the ground making fuel. skylon type craft handle the ferrying of cargo and personnel to orbit where an efficient space tug or freighter (which may be nuclear powered) takes over the rest. skylon's use of a standard payload container means you can load up a large unmanned freighter in orbit with several skylon launches (including a few tankers), and send it on a long efficient crawl to mars or whatever. ships for moving humans around would be barebones and have higher thrust , lower isp for time optimized transfers (as opposed to fuel optimized). if you would want to build a mars base, you send a fully laden freighter ahead of the transport (they arrive around the same time though) and then manned operations can commence. later on as the system becomes colonized its better to have specialized surface to orbit vehicles at every destination.

gives me an excuse to watch zardoz again.