Talk-Polywell.org

Now suppose it could operate on drop down electric motorized wheels near stations (thus fans off) and on an air cushion for high speeds. The cost of the "rails" would be about the same as building a roadway. The question is could it be made to pay? More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hovertrain Well...

Space weapons are technically illegal. When you have a gun that's big enough, the rules of engagement don't apply anymore. Sure, somebody can tell you "Hey, you're not allowed to do that!", but that won't stop you from blasting their city off the map. Anyway, orbital weapons satellites are quite a ...

My apologies. From what little I know, my opinion is that the earliest a Polywell could have been made was probably somewhere around 1930. This is due to the fact that while superconductors help they aren't needed, but the vacuum tube tech at the time would have helped it a great deal (assuming tho...

And put diagnostic equipment all over it. Shoot the thing off in a mineshaft at the Nevada test site PROVING GROUNDS. See what kinds of alphas and neutrons you get, just blow the thing up with extreme levels of power and minimal fuel to prevent vaporizing the diagnostic equipment with a 15 kiloton ...

Picture a small rocket with infinite impulse capability pushing an equatorial geosynchronous satellite northward. It still has a circular orbit, but it is displaced a certain amount north of the equator. With just the right amount if continuous thrust, you could cause it to "orbit" over any latitud...

Everyone talks about using nets to wrap and snag larger debris and stray sats. A sensible solution given the the lack of unified grappling fixtures.. or any grappling fixtures for that matter... but isn't that net the very definition of a space baggie? This is obviously a job for Commander Quark an...

Could you imagine NASA's crawler taking power off a giant trolley line? :lol: The crawler is one of the situations where that would actually WORK. Since it's confined to a (fairly) fixed track of motion, there's no reason you couldn't shove an HV plug up that thing's backside and make it work. Or j...

AFAIK, plasma stability problems are also what is bothering Tokamak systems, so there is extensive research being done into that right now.

Several solutions have been proposed, but there's no practical, reliable solution yet. We're close, but not 100% there.

Tom Ligon brings up a very good point, a negatively charged tower will collect positive ions. In addition to lightning discharges, such a tower reaching above sensible atmosphere would have a steady ion collection from ambient ions. If the envelope was conductive there would be a constant contest b...

A jet is a ducted fan designed for high speed. That's all it is. If you could change the length depending on airspeed, that would be cool. But ducted fans have horrid performance above about mach 0.3; we want to hit mach 15 at least in atmosphere. Jets are an added expense in mass, to allow takeoff...

If you have a massless thruster, then, of course you can go to the moon on a whim and never have to play with reaction mass. I was just trying to avoid using MLT's and other reactionless devices. When you're in the atmosphere, you've got reaction mass for free (namely, the atmosphere). The trick is...

That only holds if you're counting friction-based re-entry. Basically, if you can control your rate of descent and do not need to rely on atmospheric drag to slow you down, you can descend vertically on a dime with 2 KPH if you want. That requires propellant, if you don't have MLTs. Propellant has ...

Combine with high bypass turbofan systems for low speed, atmospheric flight, and mount the engine nacelles on a set of gimbals similar to a V-22 to control your direction of thrust. Gimballed thrust pods will probably melt at reentry. Everything has to be flush/sealed, especially the front, bottom ...

One concept has been using water injection into an heated aristream in atmosphere and a heat-based rocket engine for added thrust outside atmosphere. Since high speed electric fans are light and effective, I put my vote on this concept as reaching SSTO first. We already have very efficient gas turb...

This is true for traditional chemical propulsion, where you have to get to orbit in a hurry before you run out of cryogenic or hydrocarbon propellants. This is not true for a winged Polywell-powered flying machine using relatively small amounts of H and B11 to heat atmosphere as propellant. Propuls...