[Aeronaut]

Thanx for the insights, epimenide. I’m in the same boat as Ivy Matt when it comes to graphics- I do a lot better with pencil and or pen than with mouse.

[Aeronaut]

I agree that top-notch (lots of shiny, reflecting stuff that exudes energy) graphics and animations will be absolutely required for the public release version, and that Torulf is more than up to the task if he should decide to get involved. But I wouldn’t necessarily begin with polished graphics. Too easy to have a change in art direction in mid-development. The point in my mind is to proceed using what we have in hand right now, which is good enough graphics to test game design and play.

[Aeronaut]

epimenide wrote:

An unfilled requirement is still the graphics: does anyone know a good illustrator that would work for the beauty of it (or perhaps a share, if we decide to go for anything that can generate revenue of a sort)?

Professional graphics can come later, and perhaps should. I can rough out moderately detailed flow chart style graphics in CS2. Perhaps the “piece of the action” would be a credit/ live, followed link to the contributors’ sites on the splash page?

Another catchy name could be Power Play so it could grab attention as a robber baron game built over power plant assets.

[Aeronaut]

Good points, Matt. I can help with the research, editing, and writing. Looks like most of it would be the “more information” series of flash cards. Any plan for cheap power can be assessed by asking only 3 questions:

1. Is a steam cycle required?
2. Is the nuclear reaction aneutronic?
3. Are external electromagnets required?

#1 knocks out fission, D-D, and D-T along with the single most expensive set of parts.
#2 knocks out radioactive fuel, waste proliferation and disposal issues.
#3 trades scalability against very expensive cryogenic magnets.

Thus not much writing needs to be done that I can see at the moment. While the obvious choice is the elegant design, it will be adopted along with competing fission and fusion designs. Let’s see how many billionaires these $1M investments can make, and Twitter the current Power Baron’s high score.

[Aeronaut]

epimenide wrote:

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?)

… and a eye-catching name, of course!

Glad you asked. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LANwIgpha7k

[Aeronaut]

Looks good, epimenide. Lots of ways for a simple game to inform and support some sponsor ads to help fund the engineering phase.
How would player(s) fund their first reactor(s)?
Something for the data sheets might be the increased insurance, real estate, and disposal costs of dealing with D-T operations. I’m also thinking that we should weave Next Generation Fission into the options, since in some aspects their operations resemble tokamak operations.

[Aeronaut]

Transparent aluminum! Another one for the sci-fi precedents thread, perhaps. Too bad the aluminum doesn’t stay “transparent”. But the power supply sounds like something with the same challenges we’re up against, and I’m wondering if this morphing might be useful for building onions?

[Aeronaut]

Even if we could be building commercial heat and or electric plants in 2011, there would be a long adoption gradient to traverse before the world’s fusion fraction begins showing up in anything other than local aberrations in the fossil-powered scheme of things. There may be an instant where the world is aware that fusion has been proven and commercialized, but that could be decades before a fusion-powered world.

The question thus becomes “how long will fossil fuels (not the wells) be economically viable?”

[Aeronaut]

dennisp wrote: “Again with the fusion ex machina.”…hmm, as if fusion were some unexpected savior coming out of nowhere? Isn’t this entire forum about the invention of fusion, and its consequences? On non-fusion related forums, I don’t bring in fusion as an argument.

Pretty much agree on the rest. If we were smart, we’d start taking carbon out of the atmosphere, with things like biochar and carbon-negative cement. Then instead of carbon credits being issued by the government, they could be issued by anyone who verifiably remediates carbon. If you emit, pay someone to clean up your mess, or do it yourself, like we all learned in kindergarten. The technologies are remarkably inexpensive.

We could have a carbon-neutral civilization and still drive around our SUVs, even without inventing fusion. Fusion is my main hope only because I think we’re too dumb to actually do it.

Until we actually prove a minimum of energy breakeven (unity), we may or may not have a technically feasible solution. And as Rezwan pointed out, the status quo has no pressing reason to change, unless they can be shown that they can make more money by adopting fusion energy than they can by opposing or ignoring it.

There’s already an industry that revolves around brokering carbon credits, and I suspect that carbon reduction consultants are cleaning up cleaning up by charging to reduce carbon exposure, and again by selling the newly available credits.

[Aeronaut]

A good leadin may be that 40 years ago, only Star Fleet had flip phones… and as Spock mentioned, fission didn’t last very long.

[Aeronaut]

The plasmoid (donut) is a microscopic magnetic bubble formed by the magnetic field which began with the capacitors dropping ~1MA into the fuel gas. Following the kink instability, the collapsing field compresses the fuel to a near solid, directing the ions in the opposite direction of the electrons. The electrons re-heat the plasmoid, and the ion beam continues until the field has entirely collapsed for practical purposes.

[Aeronaut]

The only comparison I can see is the fuel. Notice how theirs needed no shielding, vacuum, or cap banks?

[Aeronaut]

vansig wrote: increasing the pressure could be a good thing.

Reducing vacuum requirements would bring a big improvement in smaller, lighter vacuum pumps. The gotchya always seems to come back to a suitable capacitor life or developing a way to store the fusion outputs until the next pulse, since higher voltages rapidly shorten the design life of today’s caps.

[Aeronaut]

Sour grapes have little or no market value. The consensus and climatology exist because other groups have been more successful at getting publicity than we have. Of the 2 general groups of sales people, these people are the ones who can sell intangible “products”- ideas. The guy selling Hype Perions is a very good example, since, like us, he has no proven hardware or regulatory certifications in hand to sell with.

2 facts about internet marketing to consider are that the majority of “purchases” begin with offline marketing (TV, radio, and print ads), and 97% of the clicks go to the top search engine result. Without belaboring SEO’s inherent slant toward government-funded science (.edu and .gov sites with thousands of pages available for link juice funneling), we don’t advance the Cause by debating what can’t be proven.

[Aeronaut]

What about mil-spec radiation hardening (or at least screening?).

[Author]

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