Talk-Polywell.org

Also over at the Orbiter Space Flight Simulator Forum in this thread one guy did an interesting triangulation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx8i5EfmYU4

Pretty good explanation/simulation.

Mindblast, Would you really want all that spattering on your grids? Well i'm not sure.. i mean the usual figures for a polywell are like 20% thermal power anyway. I guess a lot if not most of that would be on the grids, so obviously they would have to be able to handle like 1.2GW thermal load in a ...

I was contemplating about the same things a while back for an Addon i'm working on for Orbiter. At first i wanted to use Superconducting electric ducted fans too but then it occured to me that the equipment to step down the voltage for a couple hundred megawatt would be insanely heavy. The alternati...

Earth escape velocity of ~40000kmh is for surface level (a bit lower for low earth orbit). If its closest distance will be 348000 km it won't be captured. For example the moons orbital velocity is somewhere around 1000 m/s (3600 kmh).

Edit: Ah right you answered your own question already..

At one time I was constantly trying to start a discussion about using a polywell for propulsion. Specifically, I was speculating as to what a design would look like that could use the high speed alphas (from pb11 fusion) directly as reaction mass. For some reason, no one seemed to think the idea wa...

Well the MHD Extractor would probably not be used at all in cruise flight. I got the general inspiration to use such a device from this paper: http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/reports/2003/TM-2003-212612.pdf The idea was to use the Extractor for high mach numbers when the inlet gets more and more inefficie...

As far as I know, the SABRE precooler is still expected to work. A piece has been manufactured and demonstrated, and they've solved the icing problem. Yes i found this paper: http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/downloads/JBIS_v54_199-209.pdf Thats also where i got the impressive value of up to 3000 m^...

Its just those first few hundred meters per second dv before the ram-air effect is possible. Twelve seconds at 3gees to boost upto 350m/s. Early designs such as the Saenger Silverbird and Soviet Keldysh used sleds, but the efficiency of QED/ARC makes a sled superfluous. Twelve seconds of low altitu...

Well my current idea here is to just use some ducted fans driven by turbines in the reactors cooling loop for taxiing/takeoff/climbout and acceleration to M0.9 or so. This would give the thing the capability to start and land on a normal airport and also gain some altitude before switching to airbre...

I got some inspiration from the SABRE research.. especially the possible density of the heat exchanger (3000m^2 / m^3, whoohooo). The thing is, Skylon is supposed to fly atmospheric up to around Mach5 i think and it uses LH2 for cooling all the time. What i'm trying to do with this Addon is fly with...

Yes i think i've read that paper before. I think my problem with the ISP calculations is that i didn't take into account ionization energy. That one is huge.. i just calculated about 650MJ/kg for H2. So depending on the degree of ionization of the H2 at ~2000K the ISP in the calculations of Dr. Buss...

Hello all, i'm in the process of developing an addon for Orbiter, the free spaceflight-simulator. ( http://www.orbitersim.com ) What i want to do is a SSTO spaceplane using Polywell reactors, inspired by the design proposed by Dr. Bussard for example in this paper: http://www.askmar.com/Fusion_files...