Talk-Polywell.org

Impressive.

Lately there are so many interconnected technological singularities that are finally inching closer and closer to success that is hard to keep pace with all of them.

FWIW isn’t their power plant design enormous? Like O(~100m)? 1 Mw/m^3 might be Ok. Though in any case I don’t see that having much to do with the paper’s modelling assumptions. Well, considering the importance of the finding it will probably be anyhow a good time to revise also their planned plant ...

Has anyone access to that Nature article ? A rough idea of the main points would be appreciated. The paper is public, you can see it HERE . By the way, if TAE think they can reach 200 MeV in steady state, wouldn't it be easier with pulsed machines, like Helion's. Helion is using a different approac...

Any clue how much hotter you might make p11b in the same trap as DT? Interesting paper. I am wondering what densities TAE is going to use. We need to consider that this paper was just a theoretical one that served as the framework for the actual experimental set up, and the cited "Shot number" in t...

Here is a link to the article on raised p11B fusion rates (from 2019) - up 30%. 'Fraid I don't have access to the full text to know what that really means. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/ab1a60 This paper is available on TAE website just click HERE . The summary of the article...

It is worth noting that the result was achieved on the "Large Helical Device" (LHD) which is a Stellarator type of machine like the W7-X! The LHD has been developed to reduce plasma vortex turbulence diffusion, while the W7-X has been developed to reduce ions-electrons collisional diffusion, and the...

--- permanent magnets have a reactive behavior so their response to reach a new equilibrium position is slower than a coiled superconductor --- I wonder if different permanent magnetic materials have different response times ? I might also wonder if different material superconductors also have diff...

Which begs a question, due to my interest in permanent magnetic gearing, how much flux energy will a permanent magnet lose over time ? That depends on the use (and abuse) you do of the magnet. While there is no general formula to calculate it, you might consider that a modern magnet in isolated env...

There is still lot of road ahead before it can express its full potential, but the results so far are way better than expected. It's a beautiful piece of engineering art. Well it is German. So were the Tiger 2 and the V 2. Both were useless. From a practical point of view you are right, WX-7 will i...

There is still lot of road ahead before it can express its full potential, but the results so far are way better than expected.
It's a beautiful piece of engineering art.

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...