Polywell = Navy Advantage

[MSimon]

Tesla may have been a good experimentalist but he did not understand Q multiplication. A very glaring theoretical deficiency.

[TDPerk]

If the Polywell works middling well between best and worst assumptions.

Yours, TDP, ml, msl, & pfpp

[alexjrgreen]

Tesla may have been a good experimentalist but he did not understand Q multiplication. A very glaring theoretical deficiency.

He got at least part way there:

http://www.teslasociety.com/teslarec.pdf

You have a specific example in mind, perhaps?

[MSimon]

Tesla may have been a good experimentalist but he did not understand Q multiplication. A very glaring theoretical deficiency.

He got at least part way there:

http://www.teslasociety.com/teslarec.pdf

You have a specific example in mind, perhaps?

It has been a while since I read the Tesla book on electronics and I don't currently have it handy so all I have is a recollection. What I do recall thinking is that any freshman in electronics would have a better understanding than what Tesla laid out in his book.

Not that what he did wasn't amazing for his time. Just that on the subject of wireless power transmission his understanding precluded his knowing that what he was trying to accomplish was an impossibility.

[MSimon]

Tesla's "feel" for the subject was outstanding. However his understanding was no where near as sophisticated as that presented in the paper describing his experiments from a modern point of view.

[alexjrgreen]

It has been a while since I read the Tesla book on electronics and I don't currently have it handy so all I have is a recollection.

Which book did you read?

[MSimon]

It has been a while since I read the Tesla book on electronics and I don't currently have it handy so all I have is a recollection.

Which book did you read?

I don't recall. It did give what he thought the math was for his wireless experiments.

[hanelyp]

I don't recall what Tesla books I've read, but I got the distinct impression he didn't have a good understanding on conservation of energy.

[alexjrgreen]

I don't recall what Tesla books I've read, but I got the distinct impression he didn't have a good understanding on conservation of energy.

This is the key point. Non-trivial discussion of this is rare.

A place to start might be the first half of

http://amasci.com/tesla/tesceive.html

(up to UPDATE 9/6/99, after which the speculation gets badly out of hand)

and perhaps http://www.intalek.com/Index/Projects/R ... rWaves.PDF

[MSimon]

Tesla may have been a good experimentalist but he did not understand Q multiplication. A very glaring theoretical deficiency.

He got at least part way there:

http://www.teslasociety.com/teslarec.pdf

You have a specific example in mind, perhaps?

Here is the Tesla book I had in mind:

Here is a Tesla book I read a while back and really enjoyed. It covers some of Tesla's inventions in his own words. It gives a feel for how much Tesla understood about electrical theory and how much he was ignorant of. Any second year student in electrical theory would be familiar with this material, but when Tesla wrote it up it was state of the art. We have come a long way.

The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla (The Lost Science Series)

[alexjrgreen]

Here is a Tesla book I read a while back and really enjoyed. It covers some of Tesla's inventions in his own words. It gives a feel for how much Tesla understood about electrical theory and how much he was ignorant of. Any second year student in electrical theory would be familiar with this material, but when Tesla wrote it up it was state of the art. We have come a long way.

The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla (The Lost Science Series)

I've ordered it.

Interesting author: http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/s ... aeologist/

[MSimon]

Here is a Tesla book I read a while back and really enjoyed. It covers some of Tesla's inventions in his own words. It gives a feel for how much Tesla understood about electrical theory and how much he was ignorant of. Any second year student in electrical theory would be familiar with this material, but when Tesla wrote it up it was state of the art. We have come a long way.

The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla (The Lost Science Series)

I've ordered it.

Interesting author: http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/s ... aeologist/

The book is interesting. It has a fair amount of Tesla in his own words and a bunch of craziness that I never looked at.

I'm also a little familiar with Stelle which was getting a lot of press in Chicago in the late 70s early 80s when I lived there.

[EricF]

For the prospect of the navy, do you think D+D reactors are the most likely candidates, due to the availability of fuel from the seawater? Or is the process of extracting the deuterium from seawater too involved to make it worth the space and weight of equipment involved, and be better off just stocking up on pB11 fuels when they return to port between deployments?

[Mumbles]

For the prospect of the Navy, do you think... due to the availability of fuel from the seawater? Or is the process of extracting...

That depends on the size, weight and complexity of the equipment needed to do the deuterium separation. Maybe a consideration for the largest of ships, thus making them a fuel source for the smaller BFR propelled ships...? Not really an informed decision not knowing how big/complex the equipment would be...

But in all probability, for a fussion fuel source, the actual fuel tanks for storage - even for an extended deployment - are going to be inconsequential. That whole E=MC^2 equation and all... Compared to the volume of fuel stored on oil-burners today, the fussion storage would be minimal...

My 2 cents
Be Safe
Mumbles

[kunkmiester]

I looked it up once, plain boron is about $5 a pound. Don't know how much it costs to extract the desired isotope, but something I read somewhere on here indicated it wasn't a whole lot more.

A pound is probably several months of cruising for smaller ships, Maybe less for bigger ones, and your mileage will drop when you use various energy intensive things like high powered radars and rail guns.

Boron too can be extracted from seawater. While earth-bound boron is easier to get, it's actually not distributed that widely. I'm quite certain though that boron from seawater would be cheap enough to run a polywell profitably, meaning that anywhere with a coastline will be able to mine boron. We already know how to do it too, so dropping the price like they did in the eighties won't kill the projects as easily as it did all those alternative energy projects that were a response to the seventies' price spike.