Reply To: Need of beryllium and other rare materials for Focus Fusion

[epimenide]

Aeronaut wrote: How would player(s) fund their first reactor(s)?

I wouldn’t worry for the first release (that I’d try to keep as simple as possible, awareness is the target): if the actual score is a ratio between output power and costs, spending billions in the BOM list will probably get you higher in absolute wattage, but far lower in the leaderboard!
For the future (release 2?), we could add cost management, starting with bank loans and competing price per kW (taken from the other players in the leaderboard? That would be “social gaming” at its best, and add that “risk factor”), that assumes you’ll have to repay in a given time or bust, and resource management, that brings back to the “wilt” factor mentioned before: fuel gets burned in all cases, but, while pB is cheap and ready in no time, fission fuel would need difficult mining, enrichment, waste processing, thus is far more expensive and time consuming to get (leading to the need for careful planning to keep the plant running), and D-T would get in between the two.

Aeronaut wrote: I’m also thinking that we should weave Next Generation Fission into the options, since in some aspects their operations resemble tokamak operations.

Absolutely: I wouldn’t go to the full “hundreds of devices”, but focus on the few (4? 5? We definitely want DPF there, of course) that are actually being developed with some chances to get somewhere…

On more practical issues, we still need:
– A good designer / illustrator, would be perfect if with game experience
– A skilled physicist to work out the math behind the simulations (not a problem on this forum, I suppose?)