Brian H wrote: Eric, could the switches have been made adequate then? That seems still to be a choke-point.

An electrical engineer suggested to me, to do away with the switches (and the capacitors, except for the first shot) and build a resonant circuit. The exit beam would then drive the next pulse, directly. zero-current-transition techniques generalize to the megawatts.

— http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1248264
— http://www.researchgate.net/publication/34763176_Unified_zero-current-transition_techniques_for_high-power_three-phase_PWM_inverters_electronic_resource_

zapkitty wrote:
… but this would solve the caps lifespan issue, right? 🙂

Yes. The more i think about it, the more it seems just like catching the energy from lightning.