Talk-Polywell.org

This may be a bit old hat and I apologize if someone has raised this elsewhere, however Charles Chase, the Skunkworks Project Panager, can be seen here talking about a 100MW trailer-sized fusion reactor that they are building now and hope to have running in a year or so. Its very thin on detail, as indeed you might expect for a top secret projects division, but he wouldn't say this unless there were something to it.
http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge ... Years.aspx

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4273
Also here:
http://talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=5294

The short answer is that EMC2 is doing nothing to date with Lockheed Martin.

Ok, thanks for the info, it has been raised already. @Betruger, thanks for the links to where it has been previously discussed in this forum.

There's a few other short threads and off topic discussion of it in other threads IIRC, but those two should be the bulk of discussion.

But can´t Lockheed build a polywell (with enough budget) by themselves, based on the idea and the info released so far? Of course, they would need to find lots of solutions by themselves...

truth be told however, the few images they have shown are more of a cylindrical reactor, while I would expect a Polywell, from the outside, to be more cubic.

A lot of what we have on the Skunkworks proposal is speculation. My best guess is at viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5314

Anyone with enough resourcing could try.

There is a lot of ground that EMC2 has covered that would take others some time to cover. Granted they would do it faster, leveraging EMC2 hints and releases, but it would still take some time. The only way aroung this would be to get someone from the core EMC2 team to work with them.

Park's team really are the annointed few that understand the pitfalls and nuances after years of experience. You can't buy that unless you buy the people.

Skunkworks is working on a high-beta reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY#t=82

Magnetic containment, radio frequency induced heating. Appears to use a magrid like polywell. The radio frequency heating seems to be the added touch that allows for a more compact reactor than Bussard's scaling law would allow.

WB-8 could be squeezed into a trailer, but the extrapolations I've seen for a net power machine would not. The radius won't fit.

Things that might fit: Focus Fusion or Rossi's LENR contraption. The form factor of a trailer might also work with FRC machines (which tend to be long), but I expect the scale is too small for net power FRC.

It will be fun to watch the field for the next few years. Perhaps it is not a matter of "will any of these succeed?" but rather "which one will succeed first?"