starship-design: Plasma power

["Johnny Thunderbird" <jthunderbird@nternet.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Franchuk" <bfranchuk@jetnet.ab.ca>
Cc: "Starship-Design (E-mail)" <starship-design@lists.uoregon.edu>
Sent: Monday, June 19, 2000 4:46 PM
Subject: Re: starship-design: Starship-design: Plasma power


> Johnny Thunderbird wrote:

 energetic protons out of the proton linac, and you obtain clean
> > fusion. This may or may not catalyze proton-proton reactions, but either
way
> > it's an energy bonus.
>
>  I like it boron reactions better too, but lets first get  deuterium
> burning. Now if you want to study fusion better try this link.
> http://www.songs.com/philo/fusion/index.html

Folks are too worried about making a static sort of fusion reaction,
contained in a can so they know just where it's happening. The number one
fact about space is that there's plenty of room. That means you can use
accelerators to produce fusion, which is easy, rather than try to compress,
contain and confine an energetic plasma, which is hard. Using particle
accelerators is the only way we know that these reactions happen, and these
fusions have been done in detail, decades ago, in the energetic beams of
accelerators. Fusion research on Earth is concentrated on making it happen
in a can, and that's hard. To use fusion for space drives, we can use the
well-known accelerator research, because we don't mind if our entire
reaction is going thataway real fast, because that is just what we want to
do: our entire purpose is to make it go thataway real fast.

In that aspect, all Earthbound fusion power projects are false leads, and
trying to pursue the ephemeral deuterium-tritium reaction, in particular, is
a big red herring. To make a fusion space drive, all we need is the mature
and well-studied technology of fusion induced by beams from accelerators.

How long can a linac (linear accelerator) be in space? There's plenty of
room, right?

On redirect,
Johnny Thunderbird
http://members.100free.com/users/jthunderbird