Talk-Polywell.org

Well, a fair bit of this requires number crunching. More stuff for my free time. But if I recall correctly, Dr. B did go steady state for a while, before going up to pulsed machines. I'm hoping to dodge the high voltages and cooling problems by going small. And I've really got no idea why he wouldn'...

I'm not sure I understand you. Are those four things problems? 1) Coils are cheap(ish) and easy 2) Electron guns are common, though I'm not sure if ripping apart an old tv is a good idea. I'll probably die of heavy metal poisoning instead of radiation poisoning. 3) Might be a problem. I understand t...

Not sure if this should be design or theory, but here goes. I'm an undergrad student, I'd like to do some research, but I don't know much about fusion. So I've been looking at trying to do research on the wiffleball effect. My school doesn't seem to have an UHV chamber for undergrad use (wonder why?...

Hum. I've given it a once over, and I'll go thorough it at depth after monday. Exams and all that fun stuff are keeping me a bit busy, I've got to fill my head with the wonders of molecular biology rather than fusion. I did notice, though that the Tritium article says that D-T has the largest cross ...

MSimon, if it's the neutron/charge ratio that tells you how likely fusion is, shouldn't T-T be a substantial side reaction in D-T reactors? For that matter, wouldn't T-T be a very attractive fuel from a physics perspective? I know that T is rare enough that it's not economical, but I could imagine i...

:? Well, my thinking was, why on earth do we use D-T instead of p-p if p-p actually easier? Then I tried to read up on it, and it gets kind of complicated. Best guess, since there's no neutrons, the strong nuclear force is half of Deuterium's. That would raise the energy quite a bit, I think. No ide...

Does nobody read Heinlein anymore?

"You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity."

As I understand it, p-p fusion is fairly difficult, so we still don't have to worry about those. But I just started here, I wouldn't take my word for it!

While I'm slightly in awe of the launch loop concept, and am hoping against hope that we manage at least one megascale engineering project before I die, I'm a bit enamored with the ram accelerator. http://www.tbfg.org/ Ignoring their terrible front page graphic, I hope that they manage to build a de...

That's... interesting. Why do most online papers include diagrams that don't actually mean anything? Bad drawings of space ripples don't add much to the paper. I would be interested to see the results of a 1E9 T magnetic field. I imagine that even if those people are off their collective rockers, it...

So you're saying 'JohnSmith' probably wasn't a good choice?
When I signed up, I hadn't realized just how bad the problem was. Afterwards I went and took a look at the member list. Ouch.