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zapkitty wrote:
An FF transport would not even be as fast as a 747… mach 0.72 as opposed to mach 0.85…

What I still don’t get is, why is Mach 0.72 an upper bound?

We’re not limited by mass; 80 anodes tesselating a sphere yields 20 tonnes, not 160 tonnes.

We’re not limited to propeller or turbo-prop configuration.

Fusion powered jet does not require a turbine; we don’t have to slow the airstream down or compress it, to heat it, as a ramjet does, since we don’t have to inject chemical fuels.

Scramjet configuration seems to be the simplest engine architecture. and it’s highly efficient, *if* we have a way to heat air with electricity. which we do: i propose to build a high-wattage infrared laser, emitting at a wavelength that air strongly absorbs, yet engine materials do not absorb.

What remains, that could keep this below high Mach numbers and altitudes of 35km or more?

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Breakable wrote: So the sweet spot for pB11 is around 160 keV or do you need higher temperatures to get decent output?

Wikipedia quotes Eric’s paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3149 as saying, 600 keV is optimal. AFAIK, at lower temperatures, combustion will be incomplete; at higher temperatures, too many side-reactions occur.

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“Polysilicon manufacturing market is in a very fast change now (2010). With high spot-prices in 2008/2009 and lack of available material, many companies announced additional capacities for the coming years.

“Leading producers as of 2010 are:
Hemlock Semiconductor (capacity 2010: 36 kt) from USA
Wacker Chemie (capacity 2010: 25 kt) from Germany,
GCL-Poly (capacity 2010: 18kt) from Hongkong,
OCI (capacity 2010: 17 kt) from South Korea,
MEMC Electronic Materials (capacity 2010: 8kt) from USA,
Renewable Energy Corporation ASA (REC) (capacity 2010: 17kt) from Norway and
Tokuyama (capacity 2010: 8,2 kt) from Japan.

— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrystalline_silicon#Manufacturers

Hemlock Semiconductor Group is owned by Dow Corning, a joint venture.

“In total, the Hemlock Semiconductor group has announced investments of up to $4.5 billion in the past five years to increase polysilicon capacity to meet the growing needs of the solar industry. By 2015, the joint ventures will have increased polysilicon manufacturing capacity by up to 10 times over that 10-year span.
— http://www.hscpoly.com/content/hsc_comp/$3.aspx

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“shown impossible”? not exactly.

Let’s play “battleship”, only I’ll hide what are the right variables to adjust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(game)

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Matt M wrote: The theory is boron fusion would be: p + 11B→34He + 8.7 MeV.
My question was whether the 8.7 MeV result has ever been documented?

Yes!
Take the discrepancy in mass between the reactants and products, and run it through E=mc²:

H-1=1.007825u;
He-4=4.002602u;
B-11=11.0093054u;

1.007825u + 11.0093054u – 3x 4.002602u = 0.009324u;

0.009324u x 1.660 538 782×10^−27 kg x ( 299,792,458 m/s )² = 1.3915×10^-12 joule
= 8.685 MeV

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nferguso wrote: Hi. Yes, that’s what is still confusing me. Maybe it’s the word “plasmoid”. I take that word to refer to the stuff that is being pinched, producing fusion of H and B ions. It’s what’s there before fusion. The helium ions are a product of the fusion. That’s two different things. The fusion doesn’t produce electrons; at least Wikipedia doesn’t mention them. So if someone refers to even just a virtual beam of electrons, if they’re implying high-energy (as in MeV) electrons, I don’t see where they exist. The only highly energetic matter in a beam would be the He nuclei.

If we’re talking about the material remnants of the plasmoid (and if that word means what I think it means), and if the story is that the nuclear and electron particles also end up in a beam coming out of the reaction area, ok, but they would be relatively low energy (kV) and unimportant. I might like to know just out of curiosity if that part of the beam is formed before, during, or after fusion occurs.

Corollarily, would there not also be two distinct bursts of (x-ray/gamma-ray/heat) radiation to consider – a large amount from the fusion, and a smaller amount during the production, compression, and collapse of the plasmoid? Naturally, all the radiation would be omnidirectional, though perhaps not uniform.

During the reaction, individual fusion products are trapped by the high magnetic fields in the plasmoid. The exit beam is the final result, as those fields collapse at the end.. after the bulk of fusion has taken place.

The electron beam width is much more spread out and cooler than the ion beam, and traveling in the opposite direction. The ion beam is tightly focused.

Individual fusions emit almost no gammas or neutrons, as those are side-reactions only (.1%)

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Allan Brewer wrote:
I’m working on an in-silico simulation of exit beam energy capture right now – will report back when results are solid.

Nice. what tools are you using?

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Well… how many useful things could be investigated without using a DPF at all?

tinkering with computer models? if there is source code available online?

designing the exit beam energy capture? if the right magnetics modeling tools exist?

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unfortunately, that may be precisely true.
thus, ITER has now fulfilled its covert purpose

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PV continues to make incremental advances. here is news of recent progress with thin-films:
“Plasmons are a type of wave that moves through the electrons at the surface of a metal when they are excited by incident light.”
“Catchpole’s experimental devices produce 30 percent more electrical current than conventional thin-film silicon cells.”
— http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/25083/

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MTd2 wrote: I`ve been using 1*10E11 Neutrons meaning 1J in lots of other posts. No one has corrected me and even Lerner assumed that as right (he kept discussing with me as there was nothing wrong).

Neglecting to look into correctness is not evidence of correctness.

By the way, the expression, “1*10E11” is a confusing mixture of two forms of a quantity.
FORTRAN and its successors use the E to mean “×10^”, so syntactically, it would be clearer
if you would write either 1E11, or 1×10^11, instead.

the problem is, that parsers for these languages are liable to parse your expression, and yield a value that is a factor of ten away from what you expect.

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pluto wrote: The Law of the lid states that you cannot think above the level that you know.

Is That right?

that will tend to limit growth, in human understanding of BH-like objects, to the replacement rate of leaders in the field, however it does not make an upper bound on that understanding.
— http://frrl.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/the-law-of-the-lid-and-why-leadership-cant-be-taught/

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mchargue wrote:
If that were true, it should place an upper limit on the density/mass of any high-mass object. Because, as the mass of the object increases, then so should the likelihood of the creation of this boson. Because of this, the mass of the object would then be limited by this mechanism, and that all BH objects would exhibit the same maximum mass.

However it’s a non-linear relation, and i see no upper bound.

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i have no choice for energy supplier right now

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gold has lots of ground-state electrons to stand up and be pushed around. so xrays, gammas, and betas should all do that as they scatter through the medium.

seems sorta like a shottky junction, with plenty of eddy currents near the absorption site.
a device doing this well would run a lot cooler compared to a heat engine. but, what’s the ultimate efficiency, i wonder?

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