Talk-Polywell.org

...borderline thievery... It's really a confused mess that should have been hammered out over a century ago. That sounds a little harsher than I'd intended. I don't want to imply that the prevailing mathematical methods are "wrong"... they obviously work well, otherwise there would be no radios, mi...

I'm accused of an ad-hominem attack. My challenge was specifically to the quoted statement, characterizing GR as expressed in vectors, not far more capable tensors, and claiming that a quaternion based expression was more capable. While I accept quaternions as a valid mathematical tool, capable of ...

Hamilton made a few errors that unfortunately caused some lingering confusion, and general acceptance of quaternions as a tool for physics was delayed. A huge battle took place in the late 1800s literature. The anti-quaternionists eventually won the popularity contest around the turn of the century,...

Why would any company try to compete against the NASA-Industrial complex for low cost access to space? Why would the industries in said complex do anything to upset the tit they are suckling? Terminate NASA and get on with the REAL colonization of space. Point taken. Until some capitalistic entity ...

evaitl wrote:Anybody have an idea how much energy would be needed to set the spins
in the ion streams?

I haven't read this yet (it relates to FRCs, not Polywell), but maybe it might assist in answering your question:

http://depts.washington.edu/rppl/papers ... S_2002.pdf

Sachs is a peer-reviewed scholar. University Education: A.B., 1949; M.A.., 1950; Ph.D., 1954. All degrees in Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Post-Doctoral Employment: Professor of Physics Emeritus, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1997 – present. Professor of Physics, S...

As a former NSSer, Planetary Society-er, AIAAer and IEEEer, I think this is all moot until the NASA budget exceeds it FY2010 value of 0.52% of the US Federal budget,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budge ... _1958-2009

by at least a factor of 2 and preferably by an order of magnitude.

I've probably missed something necessary (like B field variations) to induce the Mach Effect. Anyway, let's get the baseline Polywell working first!

Or, better yet, just leave the coil currents constant and do it all by way of the separated coil-casing potentials. Symmetrical POPS + asymmetrical thrust vectoring and (if any benefit is obtained) spheroidalization. If smooth thrust vectoring around the sphere is not practical due to the coarseness...

IMO we will have to end up merging the best of Woodward's M-E and the QVF folks ideas into a working "Quantum Gravity" theory before we will have the keys to interstellar flight. The unification of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity? Already done! (and Maxwell's equations and the weak and str...

NASA is looking for ideas (they just don't have the money to fund them): "We are now formulating plans for new prize challenges with the help of engineers and scientists throughout NASA - and we would like to consider ideas from private industry, outside organizations and the public as well. Deadlin...

That makes sense. I hadn't considered before that capacitive reactance varies as 1/f and inductive reactance varies as f. If I recall correctly, the MLT performance should improve with higher f. So, it would then make more sense to implement the radially/rotationally symmetric (spherical/spheroidal)...

This is scary. My previous post was intended to be comical. Then I found this:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/070 ... 3115v1.pdf

Graphene, with unspecified dopants.

I'm thinking that all of the alphas (ideally) would eventually get used for direct power conversion, after doing Mach-Lorentz-Woodward thrust duty, but not for "classical" thrust. Assuming both devices (Polywell and MLT) are separately shown to work as desired, then for a Polywell/MLT combo some kin...