@kurt9, everybody's skeptical. Seems to be a Bremstrahlung thang....
The donut shape is a simplification. It's really more like an 8 or 16 tip spark plug, so the current sheath is shaped more like a daisy's petals. Then the geometry gets complicated.
The design is so small, light, and inexpensive since it uses peak currents and the resulting peak magnetic fields to burn pB-11 for tens of nS, rather than try to maintain containment current and cool the machine continually. Thus the thermal duty cycle is incredibly low- it spends most of the time removing the heat from the previous power cycle.
Although a few dozen FFs can match the PW output, PW is still simpler to engineer into ships. That said, PW would not fail gracefully in emergencies, like losing the use of one FF of 20.
@ D Tibbets, there are actually 2 direct converter subsystems- the inductive and the photovoltaic. The inductive handles most of the cap bank recharging and in one unity study, might be able to slightly exceed unity.
Electrical unity and above is almost certain to come from the X-ray to electric converter- thousands of thin foils and insulators making a sort of capacitor.
The electron beam is somewhat misleading, since it's dissipated heating the plasmoid into the ignition range and beyond. This subsystem will likely be the biggest engineering challenge. But the market will continually tweak it for decades- just like cell phones and PCs.
One other point is that to make 5MWe, the FF makes 8MWt (~17M BTU) that's useful for industrial furnaces, ovens, low pressure boilers, building heat, pre-heaters, etc.
So FF can be salable without achieving true electrical unity once it can lower the price of a BTU from 1,015J to around 125J.(!) All it has to do to enter the market is make electrical heat cheaper than natural gas. And paint it green.
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