Talk-Polywell.org

Without giving away all of its secrets, NT-Tao said it is taking the best of Tokamak technology and the best of stellarator technology and are refining those technologies to make a new design that will operate at significantly higher plasma density. The machine can heat up the plasma to huge temper...

If you can ship it there from the moon in a 5T craft, and return the craft to the moon, it costs 171 T of fuel. Much more interestingly, the same SSTO can now take 40T to LEO instead of 10 with little more total fuel cost. The fuel per tonne to LEO drops 72%. In honor of truth, with the increasing ...

93143 wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 01, 2023 12:00 pm

That's an air-breathing concept.

That's true and they explain it clearly in the introduction paragraph to their paper.

Indeed. It was just a quick apple to apple comparison to evaluate what the different ISP will allow. The logic (and the relative results) is similar if you will compare the the various technologies with their vacuum ISP. And if you are interested you can give a look to the experiments going on in th...

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.”...