Reply To: Iconography

[Aeronaut]

vansig wrote:

Here’s that marketing black-magic: if $250K for a 5MW reactor piques peoples’ “too good to be true” filter, then tell them $1M for 1..15 MW. People have come to expect incremental improvements, not revolutionary ones. We know it’s revolutionary. Let’s downplay that. Later, when the technology triples their expectations, we all win.

For a quite long time I was suggesting to go for the fusion-fission hybrid approach. Its essentially the same as going the high price road, but does not involve lying about the price.

it isn’t “lying about the price”. it’s “setting expectations”. we expect that the $1M will deliver the whole 15MW plus a spare generator. they (investors, licensees) expect marginal increase in value over what is currently available.

we have not yet met their expectations by demonstrating a working generator.

so let’s give ourselves some head-room, by testing receptiveness to the concept. the other day i had a chat with a guy from the local power generation company, and told him about the above spec, without mentioning that it is fusion. He was quite receptive, and suggested that a 15MW generator is in the zone for a typical university or industrial campus. my conclusion: an easy sell.

The 1st MW is going to take the longest and be the most expensive to deliver to a load, where it can solve a large number of real-world problems. But we’re still assuming one or a few large investors who will be looking for proof that FoFu1 actually works. The higher the individual contribution, the higher the expectation of a “sure thing”, which we all know can’t exist. All that will ever exist is a set of probabilities which will be interpreted differently by each individual.

That thought can be expanded, given our nearly universal market potential, to have individual investors organized at the local level who have a vested interest in seeing pB-11 work, even if it does take 5 or 10 years. And with their contributions being in the $100 to $1,000 range, and possibly tax-deductible, this network can spring up rapidly, sending clear signals from Main Street to Wall Street, and from there to Washington. The idea of as little as $100 sending an enormous signal is salable in it’s own right.

The need for working hardware is a hidden assumption that I’ve challenged in other threads. Today we sell Hope. If all stays on schedule, the world’s going to have one heckuva New Year’s party.