zapkitty wrote:
… actually, “it doesn’t apply” is a quite acceptable answer when a concept really doesn’t apply …

Rounnnd … and … rouunnnnd. And what we’re looking forrrrr still isn’t found. 🙂
Sorry, it was begging for a use here. Seriously, how about those pressures and reaction force equations?

zapkitty wrote:
Each pulse should generate about 66 kilojoules of gross fusion energy from hydrogen-11 Boron… and yet the physical structure of the device does not support the compression of the fuel. (It did its work holding the device together when a few million amps of current was dumped into the electrodes 🙂 )

66 kJ ? Not even a power figure here? And all for just a “few million amps”!!? You’re killing me over here.

zapkitty wrote:
General Fusion’s rather baroque concept is another way around the “problem”… a sphere a couple of meters in diameter is hammered to create a converging spherical shockwave through molten lead that is spinning inside. When the shockwave arrives at the center the pressure is (hopefully) enough to initiate fusion in the plasmoid hanging in the vortex at the center of the spinning lead… and yet at no time is any point on the outside shell subjected to the immense pressure at the center of the vortex.

And … what locates the hammer? Another way of asking it is, what is accelerating the hammer? What’s holding that?

zapkitty wrote:
Are two examples enough to start?

No, because you didn’t answer the question. In those two examples show me how much force (in the case of a conductor you can start with thermal breakdown) is required to get 100 MW out of that arc (and how much force that plasma will exert against those electrodes at 100 MW). Second, I’d like to know how much force is acting against the thing holding the “hammer”. These are basic, basic questions you should be able to rattle off easily if you’re the proponent (not that _you_ are, but you get the idea).

zapkitty wrote:
Again, each of the fusion startups has their own way of handling the issue.

Right, which works fine for demonstrating that you can produce fusion reactions, but it doesn’t demonstrate economic viability or any semblance of an ability to scale to anything useful.

Denying basic Newtonian mechanics is not a winning strategy if your goal is to figure out the riddle. But we haven’t even touched the other issues. Not to get ahead of myself or spoil an answer to the pressure question but, how about heating and energy transfer? Or what about neutron flux, whether a lot or even just enough to embrittle? Remember, what is 0.1 % of 1 GW? Not really “aneutronic”, is it? I’ll grant you that other schemes do in fact adopt the instabilities to their advantage (Lerner, et al), so I guess that one is fairly tokamak dependent.