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But hey, $50,000 round trip to the moon with no need for training? i think he found my price point.
but no EVAs. 🙁

i will wait to buy a ticket, because i definitely want to go for a walk when i get there.
🙂

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presently as far as i know, Helium is seldom recycled.

it’s just too precious to let go.

can we scoop it from earth’s upper atmosphere?

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now that’s funny

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annodomini2 wrote:

Above about Mach 5-10 you’ll need internal mass to throw out the back as the temperatures will well exceed the limits of the materials we have today.

Starlite was a possibility, but unfortunately Maurice Ward died last year and as far as is public, he took the recipe with him.

As you state more speed/energy can result in reduced mass, but there is a limit, in the sense that, above a certain temperature you’re effectively throwing a hugely powerful ion beam out the back of the engine. This would (at least) create the same political issues as with flying a Fission reactor, if not more.

Actually,
my understanding is that Ward’s family holds the Starlite recipe, but that industry isn’t really that interested in dealing.
Starlite is an ablative heat shield, and adequate ablative heat shields already exist.

Apart from the NIMBY attitudes about anything “nucular”, the ion beam will have about as much environmental impact as a lightning strike. presently lightning is seen as good for the planet, as it replenishes the ozone layer and makes nitrates, which are good for growing plants.

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basic rules of the Rogowski coil are: the windings of the coil are arranged such that current in the coil will flow parallel to the direction of the alpha particle pulse, and the magnetic fields consequently arrange themselves to oppose this current, thus making it a particle decelerator. (just like a particle accelerator, only in reverse).

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zapkitty wrote:

You misremeber your future-history…

I was wondering if ikanreed was a Kzin 🙂

I thought I met a Kzin once but it was just Garfield…

seems to me, that the closest match to Kzin we have, here, is zapkitty?

😛

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IRC, being text-based, ends up working a whole lot better than google wave ever did.
and the freenode IRC network seems quite active.

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trouble is, while it’s a fairly straightforward matter to write differential equations, the kinks in plasmas are regions where the circumstance is not exactly laminar, and chaotic fluids do not solve easily with normal methods.

unless of course, you can make quantifiable predictions that are supported by experiment?

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That’s the great thing about DPF. Success will undermine *any* current nuclear program.

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no, it’s silly. what could keep that beam running for 1/8th of a second? nothing could

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asymmetric_implosion wrote: Why not design around a problem before you have it?

because the engineering effort to do that requires money, which will not be committed until Q>1 is demonstrated. Unless of course, you have insight into the answer to this problem, that you can volunteer, in which case this is exactly the right forum to express it.

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say, I just noticed that LENR and LERNER use the same letters!

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let’s imagine that if there’s even a single atomic layer of erosion per shot, that it would be in nanometer scale thicknesses; then a million shots later, we’re up to millimeter scale, and that could be quite significant.

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Henning wrote: Looks like the electrodes are now coated.

coated with what?

and deliberately? or is it a side effect?

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ikanreed, i’m guessing.
the first Google result that is relevant to particle physics speaks of the Kronecker delta, mentioned in the section on orthonormality, in
http://physics.mq.edu.au/~jcresser/Phys201/LectureNotes/ProbabilitiesExpectationValues.pdf

but Zara still doesn’t offer enough context to really decipher this

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