Reply To: A Big Prick in the Balloon of the Big Bang

[Timo]

Brian H wrote:

I’m currently resigned to a 1 meter water jacket and the same caps, maybe even switches, that LPP’s using for my sketches.

One meter radius ball would weight roughly 4.2 tons, and that doesn’t leave much space for actual equipment. Not quite car material. Does it have to be that big? Is there a better material?
It’s a 80-100 cm. shell, not a ball. The calcs are somewhere on the site; try https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/91/#346 (from 2006).

I guessed that it is not a ball, but ball is a shape with smallest possible volume to surface area and as such also weight. So I minimized it right there, and still got 4.2 tons of weight. Any other shape and it weights even more. Water is heavy stuff.

No, Timo. Its walls are only 80cm thick, hollow, diameter about a meter internally. Imagine if it was 1 cm. or 1 mm. thick. How much would it weigh? It’s not a solid/continuous sphere, it’s a container.

80cm thick is not one meter water jacket. It’s 80cm water jacket. Anyway any other shape than perfect ball weights more. 1mm thick would obviously weight less, but then it would be 1mm water jacket, which is not enough. You just increase the weight with any other shape (there is obviously the structural integrity issue, which probably require less spherical shape to reduce structural stress and weight of structure itself, probably a kind of arc, but you get the picture).