Betruger wrote:Just a strange mindset is my bet.
Then call my mindset strange as well. I have been following polywell since before Joe Strout stood up this forum. Although there's no evidence of complete failure, the absence of any actual positive evidence either makes the only *success* that EMC can talk about that of winning small (not increasingly large) contract extensions. This is not 'positive news' for the success of Polywell to achieve useful power levels.
The current fiscal environment notwithstanding, remember this is the same Navy that has funded Polywell from the beginning but is also dumb enough to fund clogging aircraft-type toilets for an aircraft carrier (GW) that literally makes its own water and uses less than 1% of its energy source to do that and everything else related to life support, in the name of *saving energy*. The same Navy that this summer for a photo-op paid $27 a gallon for "green" JP-5 that was <70% biofuel, (regular JP-5 is $4 a gallon).
Point being, examples of positive news for Polywell, even if the contract prevents them from releasing news, would be
*standup of an additional Polywell effort at NRL, SPAWAR, or DARPA
*transfer of the program to the Department of Energy
*transfer of the program to NAVSEA08
*a $15-30 million new contract for EMC
get it? Sometimes absence of certain kinds of evidence is itself evidence.
The fact that it remains at low low levels and at the fringes of Naval research (and nowhere actually near the propulsion arms of the Navy) says that its technological maturity and confidence has not greatly advanced since the first contract, becuase if it had, one of those things would be happening, and rapidly.