Talk-Polywell.org

ckrucks: Let me take a shot at the Science/Religion question. Science has at it's root an assumption of naturalism. It's methodology is to explain everything by natural processes. Science therefore rules itself out of an exploration of the supernatural a-priori. That is the realm of Religion. If th...

Hello tombo, Your slingshot idea was used by (among others) missionaries in Ecuador in the 1950s (read about Jim Elliott, "Through gates of splendour"). They found that the tethered object moved to the centre of the circle of turn, and became almost motionless while the plane orbited around it. The...

I have a scooter and thought it got good mileage until I talked to my cousin whose moped once got 225mpg. I was impressed asking how he did it. (He's retired.) He said he never exceeded 22 miles per hour and pushed in the clutch and coasted downhill. I realized then and there that although I would h...

Even if polywell does not work, mad skillz at heat transfer and fluid flow engineering will do you well anywhere in nuclear engineering.

My daughter at U Mich just shrugs and goes "meh" when I rave about polywell: All but the smartest nuclear engineering students are put off by fusion. And why not, we've been hearing that fusion is just twenty years away for the last four decades. Conversely, if polywell works, you can bet everyone's...

Is the quality of lunar vacuum sufficient? Luna has plenty of He3 to burn. Heat sinks would be simpler, too.

Maybe in a hundred years lunar colonist kids will build BFRs in their back yards for high school science projects.

Pardon me for asking this Art, but if the ions are not oscillating through the centre of the potential well, then they must be orbiting in some elliptical orbit. If they orbit in this fashion, will not their energy of rotation be leeched by the EM field they travel through, causing them to spiral b...

Yes, me too. What results would it take to have the Navy cough-up $250 million at the end of this August or September? And, is WB-7 capable of producing such money producing results? I think they'll need more than a half-dozen neutrons to get the Navy to pony up some more cash. In the ideal case, t...

Why build pumped storage (sites are hard to find) if BFRs are cheap enough? Well, they do provide a nice lake for boating and waterskiing. I don't know why the power companies don't team with developers to increase the amount of lakefront property. You've got the coasts of all the great lakes to wo...

With all due respect to Indrek, we must firstly establish the correctness of this model before making decisions based on it. Indrek's work relies wholly on numerical simulation and not on experimental results, therefore it is within the realm where people remote from the site may do useful checking...

I believe barrage balloons were used extensively in WW2. Most people don't realize the Japanese bombed Idaho. The Japanese bombed Michigan. One landed about 15 miles southwest of where I live near Grand Rapids. I think another was spotted (but not found) heading toward Canada over Lake Huron, but I...

No Steve. The red region near the coils is at +10KV. The black is ground (0V). The red-yellow-green-black transitions form the potential gradients. Where's the +10KV come from? I thought it came from a mob of positively charged fuel ions, but charliem just said otherwise. If they're from the electr...

I got the sign wrong, eh? If those red spots are at way high + voltages, then they must be caused by clumps of positively-charged ions. Let me run at this again. The electrons are spiraling along field lines, then the field lines clump into those "red" areas whereupon they reverse direction. A few g...

McCain's proposing a $300M prize for a car battery that can replace internal combustion engines. http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2008/06/more-on-mccains.html So naturally, this makes me ask: what kind of prize is a working net power fusion reactor worth? I'd say a billion easy. With a billion ...

Talldave - thanks, I don't remember reading that. I think we can play games with electron density using POPS like processes. The thing that Bussard was worried about was that external electrons create electric fields that draw out ions as well as cause arcing to the external wall. By dynamically pu...