Talk-Polywell.org

If you want to recycle "unburnt" fuel (about 90% of flow) a Polywell will not be open to space. In the experimental units what is the current disposition of this unburnt fuel? Vacuumed out by the pumps and discarded? Recycled? And are there plans to deal with it in operational units? As for the adv...

From http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/faqs.html#7 However, the average impact speed of orbital debris with another space object will be approximately 10 km/s. OK, that's interesting. If the debris is in LEO from a launch, it's going to be in essentially the launch orbit. then, it's going to have a...

Unfortunately MMOD renders that very impractical. Micro-Meteorite and Orbital Debris damage is not a probability in LEO... it is a certainty. Less on the micrometeorite side of things and much more on the orbital debris side. One paint fleck at 17000 miles per hour and you're paying for new collecto...

And your Saturn V would be obsolete and inefficient compared to systems built with current technology... Doubtful. Aside from some marginal refinements in structural materials there have been no substantial developments in rocket systems for 50 years. Its a mature technology. Errr... no. Just one t...

D Tibbets wrote:Actually, I believe that Sandia Labs have played with the idea of using their Z- pinch machine as the basis for a Fusion reactor.

Yeah, but their Saturn accelerator is a bomb-code rectifier at heart...

Regardless of the number or construction of such "windows"... what you're duplicating here is the environment of a microwave electrothermal thruster (MET)... but you're not taking it far enough. METs use microwaves to heat flowing propellant to a plasma... the plasma blocks and absorbs the microwave...

Or at least some of them at reduced scale. http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=6090 Rumor going around the 'Net is that they were destroyed. That rumor was going around before there was a net :) And it's as false now as it was then. The blueprints etc etc etc etc etc were converted to microfiche and stored....

From a spacecraft point of view it would be better to just let it go if you don't need it. All of my current polywell ship designs have the reactor sitting in a depressurized pod of MMOD shielding, with the pod walls as transparent to x- and gamma rays as possible. This doesn't make you a nice neigh...

That's why aneutronic DPFs need the x-rays to pass through the electrodes and be converted to electricity in the foil layers around the reactor. Has this conversion method been demonstrated yet? I mean, this should be very easy to demonstrate. ? The photoelectric effect of x-rays is well documented...

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/05/progress-to-nuclear-fusion-with-pulsed.html Can anybody please explain to me what exactly they are doing? I dont even get what kind of fusion reactor they are working on... They're not working on any fusion reactor... which would explain your confusion :) The Saturn...

Hmm, if you can cool the electrodes somehow, you could use the heat for heating buildings. I guess the salvageable heat would be to little for a steam cycle though. Using an aneutronic fuel, yeah. The x-rays would provide a few megawatts thermal instead of 5 megawatts electrical. A carbon-fueled po...

side note: the electrodes for the operational reactors are to be beryllium in order to cut down on x-ray heating. Apparently all alternative materials and coatings suitable for extending electrode life also absorb x-rays and heat up. Not good for an operational reactor that gets its net power from x...

This may or may not be workable for your forum but for my phpBB forums I keep spammers from registering by... turning off registration :D Instead I edited the registration pages to indicate that people who wanted to join the forums should send an appropriate email to a spambot-obscured email address...

High energy particles are deflected by magnetic fields, but in the process they emit synchrontron radiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation . These are X or gamma rays, primarily forward along the particle's original path (like headlights). Maybe the resulting radiation dose is t...

We want to trust these people again? The same people who caused the mess now want to regulate Wall St.: http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2010/04/wall-street-is-not-where-economic.html How big a mess will they make this time? ... ... ... ... ... ... you just noticed? Obama does that. A lot. Peo...