MSimon wrote: A couple of million $$ is not much of an embarrassment.
$~6M is if the data were in hand that BFR was impossible after the first $150k.
I HOPE that zbarlici is correct and this is a case of "no news is good news". But I tell ya, it ain't good for the nerves!
gblaze42 wrote:Putting two and two together I'm wondering how much of the future of the Polywell was tied to the DDG1000 (Zimwalte) cruisers that the Navy was making?
Not at all. There are good reasons to go all electric, even if the source of the electricity is a gas turbine (read LM2500 or MT30).
Would it be nice if the BFR were plug and play replacements for the current design? Sure. Will the Navy hold progress on something as distant as the BFR? No way.
I see the DDG1000 in the same light as the SSN21 (SEAWOLF), the last gasp of the Department of Defense. What they are being replaced with is the VA Class submarine and the LCS (with a few DDG reworks thrown if for ABM work) that mark the conversion to the Department of Offense.
Could you expand on that a little?
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
gblaze42 wrote:Putting two and two together I'm wondering how much of the future of the Polywell was tied to the DDG1000 (Zimwalte) cruisers that the Navy was making?
My guess is "None at all." While there will probably always be some pushing-the-envelope new tech in a new ship design, Polywell is still too unproven and untested to consider for a currently planned set of ships.
I find it likely that if the review team comes back to the Navy with a good report and they do decide to go forward with a net-power machine, the first ship to get a polywell fusion plant will be a small soon-to-be-decommissioned, easy to modify as a test bed ship, like an old tender or supply ship. Once it's been retrofitted and shown to work, then you'll see new ship plans come out that use a polywell plant.
Of course, it's entirely possible that a bunch of "electric boats" will get retrofits to direct-conversion p-B11 polywells once that tech is proven. I'm sure that direct-conversion p-B11 systems run quieter than existing fission boiler plants.
gblaze42 wrote:Putting two and two together I'm wondering how much of the future of the Polywell was tied to the DDG1000 (Zimwalte) cruisers that the Navy was making?
My guess is "None at all." While there will probably always be some pushing-the-envelope new tech in a new ship design, Polywell is still too unproven and untested to consider for a currently planned set of ships.
I find it likely that if the review team comes back to the Navy with a good report and they do decide to go forward with a net-power machine, the first ship to get a polywell fusion plant will be a small soon-to-be-decommissioned, easy to modify as a test bed ship, like an old tender or supply ship. Once it's been retrofitted and shown to work, then you'll see new ship plans come out that use a polywell plant.
Of course, it's entirely possible that a bunch of "electric boats" will get retrofits to direct-conversion p-B11 polywells once that tech is proven. I'm sure that direct-conversion p-B11 systems run quieter than existing fission boiler plants.
It's just if the Navy was moving to all electric ships as they had planned , I can see the interest in a polywell power source. The DDG1000 originally was to be fitted with rail guns around 2014 time frame, again Polywell would have been an excellent choice. I'm not saying that it's a definite, I just can see why the Navy would want something like Polywell. If Bussard was right and that Polywell could scale up within 5-6 years the Navy could easily put one on a DDG 1000 by that time, the first one wasn't going to launch until that time frame anyway.
All speculation of course since the DDG program almost nil now, but it's interesting to think about.