Reply To: Barack Obama on Energy

[Aeronaut]

DerekShannon wrote: yeah, I had to suppress my urge to scream “Who cares about the stupid suits when you have all those tiny fusion reactors?!?” during IronMan.

Anywhoozle, I envision my focus fusion-powered space yacht as a mock-up of the NCC-1701 Enterprise with the generators jutting out as the warp nacelles. Center of gravity be damned!

Mine is more along the lines of the Lost In Space series’ Jupiter II. There’s a flight simulator for it online somewhere with a screenshot looking in the flight deck’s window. The fusion reactor is clearly visible on the centerline, using roughly 1/3 of the ship’s volume.

Brian, I was wondering when somebody was going to catch that unity detail and call me on it. Long as we’re on the subject of details, I’m thinking Eric’s going to prove unity and beyond using the neutron tof detectors to prove that this many Joules in resulted in that many Joules out. Joules convert to almost anything, while eliminating the confusion of thermal vs electrical unity without the hassle and expense of a ‘regulation’ test chamber.

Long as you’re ok with letting decaborane vaporization temp/pressure tables specify your electrode and chamber temperatures (to keep decaborane a gas), you’re required to highly engineer your cooling system or vary your PRF to favor cooling at the cost of electrical output stability. It’s in the patent’s fine print (para 144) that using pentaborane frees the designer to optimize for cooling system efficiency by providing a much wider operating temperature range.