Talk-Polywell.org

Using Joe's DeltaV calculator and Starship and Raptor as a baseline: Assuming: 410s average Isp with an RDE ( 25% would be an 87 second improvement, so 410 might be conservative) Dry mass: 100 tonnes. That does not even account for structural mass savings through the reduced payload fairing size (o...

Very excited about those kinds of engines. They could make SSTOs possible. During the X-33 period I explored the SSTO math and it come out that you will need an ISP of around 2000 to make a meaningful and practical SSTO rocket/plane. The detonating engine design has a theoretical efficiency improve...

In truth the whole project was just a soup of older concepts without any real innovative idea.
Probably they was aiming for some grant and when they saw that no one was biting to the project they simply pulled the plug and moved to something else.

I tried. It got deleted. Go figure. That guy is a complete jerk. Not only him. I also tried few times in the past to correct wrong information on video of other channels, but if you do not follow their narrative they just delete you. It seems that this has become a standard procedure on youtube. Ju...

Probably in the future when high Tesla HTSC will become more common there will be a renaissance to this approach.

ohiovr wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 14, 2023 4:03 pm

I was wondering if people were still looking for virtual cathodes.

I am impressed. Quote: "Over the space of 6 months we designed and built a 300 kV DC feedthrough for Ultra-High vacuum pressure" If you've got an interesting use case for > 100kV feel free to reach out depending on interest we may be making our 300 kV units available commercially in limited numbers .

Is there any critical tech which is enabling this now? As I wrote before the critical tech is the high Tesla fields of actual (and coming) generation. They will enable to overcome a plethora of past limitations and there will be a renaissance of many older designs. Of course this does not mean that...

Looking forward to 2023, hopefully the good news will not stop coming.

Happy holidays to everyone!

Contrary to what I wrote few months ago, it seems that their lead engineer (Moein Borghei) did actually manage to find a new design for enabling high voltage feedthrough to high vacuum. They are actually testing a 300 kV prototype in the mA range, so I stand corrected. If they can scale up the curre...

What feedback is needed? I don't remember any mention of active stabilization. Is the FRC formation/acceleration/compression process not predictable enough? - In the formation there must be a feedback loop to ensure that the shape of the 2 FRC is the most similar possible to ensure an uniform impac...

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”...

A point that David Kirtley makes, as we can see based on the short plasma window of stability, is that power electronics that have to operate at such high frequency (short pulse width), current, and voltage are relatively recent as a commercial product. Hence, Helion's observation that their approa...

At 24:30 - 27:30 he discloses that one of the key parameters to obtain this (and other positive features) is that the formation of the Merged FRC must happen with a supersonic speed of the two starting FRC. I think at >1 million miles per hour they got that covered ;) Yes, i wanted to point it out ...

Great Princeton University presentation by David Kirtley. Should answer most of the questions asked by people (except for the direct energy conversion). It hopefully addresses the rotational instability concerns that Giorgio had. I believe it might be similar to the talk he gave at APS this year: h...

Patent A is listed as filed Nov-20 and published Nov-22. Patent B is listed as filed Nov-21 and published May-22. I don't know if the different patent offices confuse things or not. The publishing date is referring to the US publication only. Patent A: Application: EP19208258.4 of Nov. 11, 2019 WIP...