Talk-Polywell.org

Anything worth a layman reading on characterizing reactions? I'd be surprised if someone hasn't done the math yet. Particles in a tokomak, I can ask what one is doing and I can learn at length what it's doing and the extent of how and why we can't know everything, etc. Energy needed to get a particl...

I can Google too, probably should have a bit sooner. It's the "Chinese National Space Administration." Apparently they do have a civilian program, I was under a bit of an impression the PLA had a bit more to do with it, at least officially.

That "CN" label is confusing me, keeps making me think Canada, though I know that's wrong. In China all the armed forces are under the People's Liberation Army, so everything has that in the acronym, and so things are weird. Don't recall what they call their space people.

I still want to see an audit of current satellites. If Shawyer got his ideas from seeing thrust on satellite antennae, anyone can run the numbers and find the trend.

Isn't most of that cost red tape and over the top redundancy? The technical issues haven't changed much, just the environment. Perhaps. But I feel like I remember reading that even in states where pro-nuclear policy was put in place, no one wanted to build. But most of the red tape is national, fro...

Isn't most of that cost red tape and over the top redundancy? The technical issues haven't changed much, just the environment.

All that, and I got the impression that it would still be at photon rocket efficiency, which at this point it's above.

Nuclear and radiation have been demonized far too much over the past decades for this idea to see the light of day.

All of which also misses my point, to put a spaceship in your garage you at least need airliner reliability, automobile level if you want to use it a lot. While technically a thruster could be made in a garage, it would take a lot to make one with the mean time before failure as well as the thrust a...

I'll have to retract that, it makes it sound much worse than it is. If they have trouble with that though, imagine trying to do it in a garage. Point remains, to get a reasonably safe ship, you either need a lot more paperwork than I'd like to do in a garage, or a lot of work to build systems that t...

Having been in the Air Force, and in manufacturing...let me put it this way, Spacex has been QC issues, imagine what that will look like in most garage shops.

I'd love to have a spaceship in the garage, but I'd hate to have the paperwork that comes with it these days.

I would imagine devices running at far lower frequencies will happen eventually, if only by hobbyists. Once details are worked out, they should be easier to make. High school science projects should be easy, building space ships in garages less so. That's part of the excitement for some of these tec...

I think it was talked about either in this thread, or in a previous MET thread. That was also where talk of the new dielectric and why it was chosen was. I might look it up later, but as I recall they wanted something in the gigahertz range or even higher, and with a few hundred watts, apparently th...

Frequency yes, I recall they wanted an electrical engineer with a master's to design a new power supply though. Apparently they don't come off the shelf at the lower levels Woodward needs at the frequencies a better thruster would operate at.

I recall they were limited in how high they could drive both in frequency and power, both of which would boost thrust. They were also looking at capacitance materials with higher values, K I think was the letter they used. That and frequency were supposed to scale exponentially as I recall.