Reply To: specific foreign languages ?

[zapkitty]

Been figuring on what I think is the quickest implementation of FOOF yet.

This can be inplemented on any station currently planned, and I use ISS
here strictly as an example.

Even Excalibur’s small Almaz stations would work… although the reactor
module would be as big as the station 🙂

(Maybe a custom Almaz for the reactor?)

*ahem*

In this concept there would be a separate station module to hold the DPF
box, a heat-sink based on a vacuum-insulated water tank in the same
module and a few tons of supercaps stashed somewhere.

The supercaps can be in the module as well if there’s room… depends
on the module type… but they are not required to be module itself and can
even be mounted externally.

No large and red-hot radiators required.

The limitation, of course, will be that you can only run the DPF intermittently.

Let the station heat rejection system chill the heat sink back down,
and repeat.

But, unlike my previous 1 MWe low-power concept, during this power cycle
you can run the reactor at whatever power setting gives the greatest efficiency.

Full-tilt boogie… be it 5 MWe or 11 MWe.

With supercaps able to accept the surge of power at rates that are a pretty
good match for the reactor output and then distribute it to station systems
over an hour or two (or three) between surges… that would still be a huge
bonus in available power from the point of view of current station
operations and some high-powered experiments that were previously
unfeasible could be implemented and run with the reactor/supercaps
system.

For a spaceship the extra weight of the supercaps would be a cruel penalty…
for a current-design space station it wouldn’t be a problem and the increased
power would be well worth the mass penalty..

And it’s scalable. Add more conventional radiators to the station and get
more usable power.

When the concept is proven safe enough add a second reactor module for
backup… and ditch the solar arrays. Except for stubs of the main wings
as backups for emergency power… or ditch them altogether for some
SLASR-type boxes on the truss for backup instead.

And that would free up a big heat load from the dedicated radiators for the
arrays and their batteries… with ISS that’s 4 x 9kWt of radiator capacity of
which some might be adaptable for aiding the heat sink cool down.

But first off is just the module, heat sink and supercaps… fusion is validated
on orbit and the lucky station is maxed out on as much power as it can handle.

Thoughts?

(post edited… no, really!)