Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

The reason I mentioned PERT was to force you to acknowledge the existence of nodes: events which MUST occur before others can proceed. I think you are hand-waving away a number of them. Properly done PERT would force you to confront that.

So which comes first- the ion conversion or x-ray conversion? I see both subsystems as being subject to continuous R&D;and improvement, even decades after the first FF ships. At fewer than five shots most hours (allows for data to be matched against projections, parts to be swapped and measured, etc.), a perfect cooling system is not needed at that point. Establishing and improving on baselines for these three critical systems will eventually raise steady output power to the 5MW (nominal) that we’re expecting.

Engineering, like politics, is the art of managing tradeoffs. I like the number 5MW (nominal), but I’m sure it will sell like hotcakes at only 1MW (nominal). The point I want to make is that we will never have a perfect machine, so if another year of engineering only adds a few percentage points, what was the rest of the world’s gain?