Talk-Polywell.org

One problem with a lower G launch is increased gravity losses, increasing the delta-V the engines need to produce.

I'm thinking that jerk, change in acceleration with respect to time, is a very important factor in passenger comfort. Ease into it and 2G shouldn't be shocking to a passenger. Slam into or out of the acceleration too hard and you invite injuries to unprepared passengers. Granted, 2Gs may not be the ...

Seriously, Ginsburg looks like a walking corpse.

What about the people who want to get out of their seats during the "weightless" phase of the suborbital hop?

The whole greenhouse gas "theory" is bunk. Most heat transfer between the surface and stratosphere is already connected to convection and phase change of water.

Moving charged particles create a magnetic field, which influences the path of the particles, which if your configuration isn't dynamically stable can lead to a very complex mess. All the good plasma codes at least try to account for this. Some might, in the interest of efficiency, use shortcuts tha...

There seems to be some confusion between 2 different meanings of scaling. In the software world scaling refers to how well code deals with a larger system or dataset. In physics scaling refers to how a system changes behavior at different length scales. A simulation that deals well with physical sca...

mvanwink5 wrote:Ever worked in a coal fired power plant? I have. GF's system is simple compared to it.

There's parts count and design complexity, and then there's required precision. General Fusion implosion needs a lot more precision than anything I expect to find in a coal plant.

A hydride would not have mono-atomic hydrogen, but be a compound with hydrogen. Mono-atomic hydrogen is hydrogen atoms not chemically bound to anything.

Mono-atomic hydrogen would be a chemical fuel, potentially the ultimate chemical fuel in terms of energy/mass if it could be stabilized without excess dilution. It has been proposed that deep frozen hydrogen could be irradiated to break apart the molecules. But that can only be taken so far before t...

It makes a big difference when tyrants and despots have reason to be afraid of pushing the gentle giant too far. We had that with Reagan, and it appears we have it again with Trump.

Tom Ligon, your past record shows you too smart for that sloppy of reading comprehension to be accidental. PLOINK!

Well, I think I understand Diogenes better now. And it explains a lot. He thinks voodoo is real. Say WHAT? I get nothing like that from Diogenes' statement. He's relating the apparent state of mind of someone who believes in voodoo. As for the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, I rate it consistent with ...

Wel Come To Ro Bo Bur Ger. CBS Local — As fast food employees across the U.S. continue to protest for higher wages, a California chain restaurant has decided to hire a new staff member that works for free. The competition for the company’s low-wage workers: a burger-flipping robot named “Flippy.” ht...

Detonating an orbital nuke as it passes over a target zone makes a lot of targeting details easy. Just need a well characterized orbit and a projection of when to detonate. But even at minimal orbital altitude you need a minimal blast size to produce an effective ground level EMP. And I'd not be sur...