Awesome, thanks for those details! It’s not my expertise at all but I thought my explanation would be sufficient for a general audience just to give them the gist of what the hold up actually is with regard to fusion. Definitely not up to date either, I haven’t heard of any significant breakthroughs that were significant enough to filter through the general engineering population.
I love hearing about accidental breakthroughs! I once knew a materials scientist who’s team was tasked with designing a new alloy. Well they went nowhere very slowly until one day he was tipsy in the lab after a boozy lunch meeting. He ended up accidentally producing the perfect material but of course: he forgot to write down the recipe!! Took them the guts of a year to figure out what he did right, but they got there in the end and everyone made bank!
Free floating magnets are a bitch at large scale. Especially in 3-D! 2-D control is apparently difficult as hell to produce reliably. But if that’s the trick then they’ll figure out the practicalities given sufficient R&D I guess.
Let’s hope we get to subvert the commies long before then!
Awesome, thanks for those details! It’s not my expertise at all but I thought my explanation would be sufficient for a general audience just to give them the gist of what the hold up actually is with regard to fusion. Definitely not up to date either, I haven’t heard of any significant breakthroughs that were significant enough to filter through the general engineering population.
I love hearing about accidental breakthroughs! I once knew a materials scientist who’s team was tasked with designing a new alloy. Well they went nowhere very slowly until one day he was tipsy in the lab after a boozy lunch meeting. He ended up accidentally producing the perfect material but of course: he forgot to write down the recipe!! Took them the guts of a year to figure out what he did right, but they got there in the end and everyone made bank!
Free floating magnets are a bitch at large scale. Especially in 3-D! 2-D control is apparently difficult as hell to produce reliably. But if that’s the trick then they’ll figure out the practicalities given sufficient R&D I guess.
Let’s hope we get to subvert the commies long before then!