[Aeronaut]

Duke Leto wrote: My own calculations on whether you could strap in a FF generator to a commercial airplane indicate that it is probably not feasible, owing to the amount of thrust that would need to be generated to replace the Jet-A driven engines would be in the department of 50+ FF units for a full sized 747-400. So either they need to be miniaturized or multiple focuses have to share the same shielding. And then there’s still the issue of getting propulsion from the requisite electrical energy. If you have to carry your FF plus some sort of propellant than you really are better off just synthesizing Jet A on the ground.

Yep, I would, too.

[Aeronaut]

Duke Leto wrote: I again have to query, why in god’s name do you feel the need for air shipping? Rail, truck and sea are just fine.

‘Cause it can be done? Actually, all I wanted to do was see if a jetliner or cargo plane would be feasible to power with FF using today’s eclectic motors. If I was building FF, I’d definitely be on a rail line and ship them like tanks.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

…

It also looks like the number of licenses sold next year will probably be far less than a dozen, boding well for type-certification licensing from foreign governments’ agencies, which may in turn become the DOE’s model. NRC’s website looks reasonable as long as the machine, operations, and site are designed with safety and security in mind. Politics remains to be pioneered…..

Next year? What are your indications that any licenses will be issued before the engineering is proven? Eric, AFAIK, has shown no indication that he thinks that would be appropriate, sensible, or likely.

My bad.

http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?pr=Fusion_Projections seems to expect to sell 1 license each in 2011 and 2012, ramping up from there. Menu items on that page lay out the entire FF project for potential investors.

[Aeronaut]

Brian,

For 2 tons of mass to equal 2 tons of weight, you need to have done one of 3 things-

1. Persuaded Congress to repeal the Law of Gravity (which would make rockets much smaller), or
2. Beat CERN to discovering the god particle that’s supposed to impart mass to every atom in existence, thereby making an anti-gravity device possible, or
3. Gone off your meds.

To split hairs, NASA routinely ships water to the ISS. 8,000 miles plus a topoff makes almost any point in the world accessible within 24 hours. Granted, the bird of choice would most likely be a C5-A, as the situation would be motivated by political expediency rather than cost-effectiveness.

About water mass, are you calculating volume radially around the vacuum chamber, or 1 meter around the entire machine- cap banks, switches and all?

Duke, here’s a link to a borated polyethylene supplier who lists the TVT of .875 inches of lead as doing the same shielding as 1inch of his material, but around 11 times heavier. Probably costs less in materials and labor, too.

http://www.boratedpe.com/kingplasti-shieldboratedpesheet.html

Maybe we’re not stuck with quite as much weight as we were expecting yesterday….

[Aeronaut]

Duke Leto wrote: For once, Brian H and I are in clear agreement.

Neither of us have the slightest idea what Aeronaut is getting at.

Sorry, gentlemen. the point I was trying to make is that a machine with a mass of 2 tons has a weight of 64,000 pounds plus shipping container weight. This is not casual shipping. It’s more like chartering the flight or boatload.

[Aeronaut]

JimmyT wrote: The point in packaging a unit in a modular shipping unit is not to provide mobile power. It’s to make the power units easy and inexpensive to transport to the site where they are to be utilized.

I was going thru Rematog’s brown site / green site numbers for a 100 unit, 2GW plant a few hours ago. Why not make a domestic form factor in a steel cage that a crane could literally stack up to make significant portions of the building’s structure? Now no box requires 6 sides enclosed, and foundation design could be simplified. We’ve modularized not just the shipping container, but most of the building, too.

[Aeronaut]

Duke Leto wrote: Favor 2 tons, Lead is not a light metal.

I assume that the airliner tonnage max was more predicated on the density of the payload than the weight, or that he was talking about using the reactors as power supplys for propellor driven airliners and despaired of doing so.

You’d have to be pretty daft to want to transport a non-active FF reactor by plane though, there’s no benefit to not doing so by rail and sea.

Yeah, I guess we’re stuck with that weight. Still, outfits like F.E.M.A. wouldn’t necessarily be daft in the air freight scenario. What my examples above vividly illustrate is 2 modes of shipping that would look almost empty, even when loaded near their weight limits.

Jolly Roger was talking about keeping just the fan and replacing the jet turbine with a FF and electric motor. FF changes everything. In this case, it changed power to weight ratio into weight to power ratio, lol.

[Aeronaut]

RTFQ: Weight in pounds= 32*mass. The 140 ton limit is for an 8,000 mile range.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

The point in packaging a unit in a modular shipping unit is not to provide mobile power. It’s to make the power units easy and inexpensive to transport to the site where they are to be utilized.

I fully agree with the need for standardized modular form factors, Jimmy. The standard shipping container is the best current candidate due to the weight of the frame required to lift 2 tons of mass (64 tons) by crane. Since it could fit in air freight (if it wasn’t so durn heavy), two units would be at or near even a 747-400F’s 140 ton payload weight limit. What a picture, huh? Now, let’s imagine how we’re going to load the container ship- these go in the bottom of the hold to keep the ship stable. Somewhere between 100 and 1,000 FF pods may be enough mass to require sailing with an “empty” hold and deck.

Licking the mass challenge is going to be the key to economical shipping and wider application of FF.

?? Run that by me again? How did 2 x 2 tons get to = 140 tons?

Glad you asked, Brian. It’s in the fine print, where the mass is quoted as 2 tons. I’m hoping that it is more like .2 tons. It’s right around 38:00 into the video, right after the materials required section.

[Aeronaut]

JimmyT wrote:

Of course, you will need a license from the NRC and State regulator’s to operate a nuclear fusion reactor. As a powerful source of X-rays, it would be dangerous in the wrong hands or improperly built and operated. And I’d guess that the ion beam would be of some concern.

Maybe Eric or someone else with the physic’s knowledge could address that.

Either way, I’m sure some licensing would be required. We have to get a license to hold any radioactive source or a commerical x-ray analyzer.

Rematog

I can tell you from personal experience that being in close proximity to an Ion beam for long periods of time does significantly lower your I.Q. Did Gilligan ever get off that island?

Jimmy,

After carefully reading the LPP site’s development plan this morning, I’m sure the simulator has a lot of variables reserved for inducing spin. Problem with pioneering is the lack of maps, lol.

It also looks like the number of licenses sold next year will probably be far less than a dozen, boding well for type-certification licensing from foreign governments’ agencies, which may in turn become the DOE’s model. NRC’s website looks reasonable as long as the machine, operations, and site are designed with safety and security in mind. Politics remains to be pioneered…..

[Aeronaut]

JimmyT wrote: The point in packaging a unit in a modular shipping unit is not to provide mobile power. It’s to make the power units easy and inexpensive to transport to the site where they are to be utilized.

I fully agree with the need for standardized modular form factors, Jimmy. The standard shipping container is the best current candidate due to the weight of the frame required to lift 2 tons of mass (64 tons) by crane. Since it could fit in air freight (if it wasn’t so durn heavy), two units would be at or near even a 747-400F’s 140 ton payload weight limit. What a picture, huh? Now, let’s imagine how we’re going to load the container ship- these go in the bottom of the hold to keep the ship stable. Somewhere between 100 and 1,000 FF pods may be enough mass to require sailing with an “empty” hold and deck.

Licking the mass challenge is going to be the key to economical shipping and wider application of FF.

[Aeronaut]

Jolly Roger wrote:

Reactor plus shielding is 2 meters across but whole thing, including capacitor bank may be more like 3x2x2 meters.

Duke Leto wrote: So barring some miracle discovery in radiation containment, there’s an asymptotal lower limit on unit size of about a cubic meter. Ergo no fusion-electric car or propellor airplane…

It may be possible to design a semi-tractor or bus around a Focus Fusion reactor, but I wouldn’t be too comfortable being stuck in rush hour traffic next to an active gamma and x-ray source. But then again, I have been involved in shipping low-level fission waste down the road, so there is not much difference.

Trains and ships will not be a problem fitting an FF reactor aboard. A large plane could carry one under each wing or in its belly to power electric ducted fans.

1 Watt = 1 Newton-meter/second, therefore 5 MW = 5,000 kN-m/s. The engines of a Boeing 747 develop ~280 kN of thrust. (The units aren’t quite right, so this might be mixing “apples-and-oranges”.)

Does this mean that if a reactor/engine system had an efficiency higher than ~6% a Focus-Fusion-powered 747 could fly? If not, why not?

2 tons of FF mass +~2 tons of motor mass (G.E. Pegasus line- up to 22,000 HP @ 15MW and your choice of 13.2 or 6.6kV) is why I agree with Transmute. But it could make one heckuva marine drive when geared down from the 1,440 to 3,960 RPM shaft speed range. Best way to shop motors seems to be by specifying one or both of these voltages.

Here’s the bad news on required HP to retrofit large turbofans: Getting the power units to line up is presented as a chicken and egg type thing. We need HP to size the electric motor, but turbines are rated in pounds of static thrust. Here’s the formula using a 747-400’s 190 MPH (279 ft/sec) full power takeoff: HP= (velocity * thrust) / 550 / number of engines if using combined thrust. (English units only).

This works out to: Electric Motor HP= [(279 * 248,000) / 550] / 4 which resolves to 31,451 HP per engine. (!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Notes- I picked 190 MPH full power takeoff speed because I’d prefer a more cautious flight crew, and at that point we know velocity and thrust with the least amount of guessing. I took the engine specs from the FAA engine certification sheet. http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/propulsion/q0195.shtml provided the basis for the formula and a worked-out example of a NASA 747-200 cruising to double-check my calculations. While they didn’t provide the formula directly, this article does explain the approach and options better than anything else I found online.

btw- I began this project expecting the Flying Sub (damn that was a sweet ride- especially re-entering the water!), then thinking the 747’s 232 ton fuel + engine weight would surely be more than enough. Once I started shopping motors I began wondering if I Big Bird was going to be able to carry any paying freight.

One thing I haven’t checked yet is DC motors.

[Aeronaut]

3 quick thoughts about railguns-

1. Best use is probably as a high-tech replacement for the steam catapult, allowing heavier planes to operate from shorter runways.
2. Wouldn’t the aerodynamic friction of a projectile moving through the atmosphere at nearly Ve burn it up, making it essentially useless?
3. How are you planning to turn an orbiting rail gun into a recoil-less rifle?

btw- what is the weight of a FF reactor and shielding? I’ve been all over the search results and have only been able to find 1 reference to the MASS being 2 tons (means I couldn’t find it in the search results). I’ve also seen a guess that the weight is 2 tons, which looks more in line with my estimates. I need to resolve this to make Jolly Roger’s 747-400 carry some paying freight, lol.

Also, any ideas what 10MW or 20MW electric output tweaks would do to size and mass? Thanx.

[Aeronaut]

Buyer Beware, Breakable. The multi-million dollar Internet Marketing (IM) industry is built around selling people short-term ways to “beat” the system. What happens within a year or so is that the system wises up and zeros your account out. The end result is negative publicity that hurts more than helps.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote: My excuse right at the mo’ is that it’s very late, but I got thinking about causality, time, predestination, intelligence, and boredom. From God’s viewpoint. Einstein said God doesn’t play dice with the universe, but I wonder. He would have reason to.

Consider. Causality and reality are, per the Believers, created by God. His perfect precognition lets Him know everything that can and could have happened (if He’d set things in motion differently). But there are no surprises. Human volition is a very questionable commodity in that view of things; imagine a pair of retarded humans, barely able to function and learn. One grows up in a loose environment, and his powerful limbic drives are far more than a match for his weak intellect and forebrain-conscience. So he’s pointlessly brutal, and suffers an early demise at the hands of society. The other one grows up in much wealthier and more advanced circumstances; his limitations are recognized early, and he is thoroughly conditioned and restrained by social, physical, medical and technological means from acting harmfully. He lives a reasonably full life and dies without having harmed anyone. With our IQs double or triple theirs, we can see that neither was actually responsible for his behavior and criminality or virtue. They were both essentially wind-up meat dolls.

From the point of view of an omniscient God, who knows everything about every sub-atomic particle in the metaverse, and all their mutual influences and possible fates, we are even less “responsible” for our actions and levels of virtue than those dummies were for us. No human “choice and volition” can introduce interest and variability into existence for such a God. And creating beings who operate under the illusion of free will must have been some kind of joke. Christ’s plea/diagnosis from the cross, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani!” (Lord, Lord, forgive them; they know not what they do!”) is true at all times; we are permanently ignorant, and blameless and without virtue.

But perhaps there is an out. If God can and does/did introduce real randomity and indeterminacy into His stew, at some physical or “mental” level, then the future is not knowable in full detail even for Him. Choices and chance matter. God does, in that scenario, indeed “play dice” with the universe — in order prevent it from being an infinitely boring scripted charade. It means that even for God, Shit Happens. Otherwise, what fun would there be?

So Einstein’s sudden rush of Inspiration was “throwing the dice”? I like that. What we’ll probably never have an answer to is that perfect precognition seems to make it impossible to introduce variables.

[Author]

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