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[Rezwan]

Tulse wrote: While I’m all for people participating however they choose, it seems to me that a simple announcement of breakeven from LPP will do far more for the issue than any amount of advertising and advocacy by FFS.

Yes, of course. If they could simply get to that breakeven already. If everything goes without a hitch from this moment forward.

But supposing more hitches arise? And supposing they run out of funding before breakeven? You can’t simply announce what you don’t have the resources to accomplish. Suppose the switch delays go from 8 months to…let’s take it a month at a time. Suppose the decaborane handling raises all kinds of new and interesting issues. There’s not a lot of precedent here. Supposing things stretch out…a bit. How much tolerance is there for complications? How much margin for error? How much committed support to due diligence of seeing the research through?

Supposing this isn’t all as “simple” as we’d like it to be?

[Rezwan]

Tulse wrote: I personally don’t see the purpose of doing a lot of advocacy, which at best can have a long-term effect, prior to the demonstration that the technology actually works, and once that is demonstrated, I would think it would sell itself without the need for a lot of other promotion.

Just my two cents, of course.

Oh, I don’t know. It could sell itself, and it could also be crushed by nefarious forces of anticompetition. Eric has said quite often that he anticipates a fight for recognition even if it works. There will be skepticism and need for several rounds of verification. And there could be other attempts to suppress the technology. Broad based awareness of the process now, as it unfolds gives people a vested interest in what happens. Attracts allies.

And it has to be handled with thought because of the whole expectations/oversold/wishful factor of fusion research.

Better organization and awareness now will be important in the long run. Can’t hurt.

[Aeronaut]

Here’s the message that I think is going to be the easiest to sell to the non-scientific crowd: “This thing generates the strongest magnetic fields ever produced, equaling those on a neutron star, without huge external magnets”.

This begs to continue into who needs the world’s strongest mag fields and why, which of cuss leads directly into the capital expense. Hey, I like where that’s going!

[Tulse]

Rezwan wrote: It could sell itself, and it could also be crushed by nefarious forces of anticompetition.

To be honest, that seems a bit paranoid to me. The underlying technology is actually fairly simple, and if it’s successful the competitive advantage would be so huge that it is hard to imagine some company or organization picking it up.

Eric has said quite often that he anticipates a fight for recognition even if it works. There will be skepticism and need for several rounds of verification.

And after the debacle of cold fusion, and the generally association of fusion with huge multi-billion dollar projects, that is not at all surprising, and indeed, given the extraordinary claim of fusion with this kind of hardware, one would want there to be careful verification. But again, if LPP can demonstrate over-unity production of electricity from the device, there is no question that it will be adopted, and extremely quickly. It has far too many advantages not to, and the tech is simple enough to be essentially “unsuppressable”. Once it is demonstrated, almost any reasonable sized lab should be able to reproduce it.

[vansig]

Tulse wrote: Once it is demonstrated, almost any reasonable sized lab should be able to reproduce it.

From off-the-shelf parts, too. That’s the bit I want to see. Nikola Tesla worked with high voltages. Can we use only parts that were available to him? Can we turn the way-back dial even farther back, and use only parts that were available to Benjamin Franklin? That would make me really happy.

[Tulse]

vansig wrote: Can we turn the way-back dial even farther back, and use only parts that were available to Benjamin Franklin?

Those would be some massive Leyden jars, unless you only want to do shots during a thunderstorm.

[Aeronaut]

Alas, I don’t see the switches co-operating with the wayback plan. I favor late 20th century electrical parts so that everybody can understand the electrical system without much effort, especially aging electrical engineers.

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