New Mars

More info found: http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtop ... sc&start=0

Posting the link to Talk-Polywell because there's a good discussion going on, including the various machine bits that they ordered / bought. Quite exciting.

Another vague contract to open the black hole a little wider. So that more taxpayer dollars may cross the event horizon in the near future.

Simply excellent news. WB-8, plus WB-8.1, and then WB-9 and WB-9.1.
IIRC PB&j (PB-11 & Joules) has been done once, and they will be building a PB&j machine probably next year, if they fuse PB&j thats really a game changer.

PB&j net power by 2015? If so, will it will be hard to find the sentiment to finish the ITER....

Commercial generators roll out by 2020, QED space engine/spaceship development 2020 thru 2030.

The only 'good' result of a net-power Polywell is that it will deprive another much larger black hole - the ITER Hole - from its food supply of taxpayer dollars.

Yeah, it'll get to the point where no one wants to finish it.

Maybe they'll take that free money and give it to the various space agencies (ESA, NASA, RSA) to build us a proper Polywell based launch system.

All the talk about Polywells being used in submarines, launches, space, etc. had me thinking about how gravity and acceleration affect the Polywell system in realtime.

For example, I could see mass arrays of Polywells used to levitate megaships, or smaller sets used for fighters, etc. What will extreme changes in velocity, rotations, circular accelerations do to the complex flows of massed particles within during operation?

I wish I could answer that.

Well, if the things can achieve an energy density of a few hundred Kw/kg, building rockets and jets should work just fine... Levitation is simpler, but still very, very hard.

Considering the speeds at wich the ions travel inside the machine (realtivistic), I'd say that any deviations in the ions' trayectory caused by external changes in velocity should be trivial.

Of course, I'm no nuclear scientist, and mine is something less than an informed guess. But if that could be a problem Bussard wouldn't have proposed them as spacecraft engines.


Rune. Someone should work the numbers to know more. Someone with a fancy degree in physics.

They got the money!



Hope they turn out successful.

They got more money than they asked for. Don't know what that means, exactly, but I hope it's good.


Rune. Have fun doing the shopping list.

I'm sorry I don't really have anything to contribute to this thread right now, but it's been almost a year since anyone's touched this one. I haven't been able to locate any further news on how polywell is coming along and I'm curious if any of you have stumbled across anything recent.

Thanks.

There haven't really been any Polywell news. Only tiny bits of note.. EMC2/The Navy seem to be actively or passively making it so they don't have to disclose any information. There was an FOIA request that failed on technical reasons. That was appealed but the take-away is that they're, for whatever reason, not speaking. There was an update to their website a while back (not sure if within the year period), which gave a few details such as their three tier plan and a somewhat equivocal layout of the time frames.
Other than that, the happenings are mostly on the outside - a few different people see things differently on how good or bad this speaks for what actually is going on for the project.

A few are insisting that there's some foul play on some very specific nuances viz. what the website, Dr Bussard, and Dr Nebel have said about the project being something instead of another, with the bottom line being that EMC2's request for funds (via New Mexico Community Foundation) is dishonest, along with Nebel's ostensible continuation of Bussard's humanitarian objectives. A few of those are convinced that this all means Polywell is as mired as ITER but trying to keep it quiet. That anyone who thinks or says otherwise is either stupid or some kind of shill. Some bad blood.

Overall you can't really pull much of it all. Just about everything is vague - inferring exact ETAs from contracts, EMC2 is late reporting status according to Recovery.org project tracker, it seems you still can't see any WB6 data, or the WB7 August peer review even with everything but the gist of things censored (IIRC this is what the first FOIA attempted for), and so on.

There was positive (if not promising) referral to the project at (IIRC) a high level Navy meeting, but no one has yet retrieved the exact things said.
http://talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=2454

This is all from memory glancing at the forum once a month or so. Maybe someone else who reads there more regularly can correct the above or add something I missed.

Feynman Lectures I, page 2-4, first paragraph...

My guess is since they got the new Navy contract, nobody is going to hear anything until they get into a big-scale reactor (WB-9?) and are done with the electron guns, steady state operations, and fuel injection issues they are exploring now. Which is what they are doing with the WB-7.1 and WB-8 (those 8 million they got last year). Also, the scaling laws have to hold true.

When the money runs out or the objectives are met, the Navy will decide if they want to build a prototype powerplant (and I doubt tyhey can keep it quiet then) or if it is all a waste of time, in which case we will see a big stack of papers written about the whole thing by Nebel and co. as they look for new jobs.

And bob, I too look around there when I remember to, but this really seems to be an arid time in news.


Rune. As far as I'm concerned, as long a it's military and it's funded, no news are good news.

What gets my goat is all the conclusions being made when no one really knows. The apparent best math/physics types were saying flat out that a polywell simply couldn't work, and yet Nebel came out a few times consistently with a subtly positive assessment.. E.g. "No show stoppers" and "we ought to know within 2 years". A few people might have hints of what's going on.. E.G. those that actually do have some direct contact with someone on the research team, or with a line on someone inside, dealing with e.g. management, paperwork; but among those, the ones who spoke up have simply said they weren't getting any news at all. What if this is the govt (the Navy itself, or whatever) wanting to get ahead of other countries before those inevitably hear that polywell works? -- there's enough information in the open for any country with eggheads and a few hundred million to work it out within something like 5-10 years, so those initial years from positive proof of concept are the only ones worth keeping a lid on.

Instead most people drawing conclusions are of mostly pessimistic bent. Not at all a sign of impartial, dispassionate POV.

I wouldn't bet on any particular scenario. IMO it could just as well be a few minor problems, like the arcing problem they had in (IIRC) late 2007 that reportedly would have cost them whole months if one person with the know-how hadn't fixed it for them. Or any combination of events/factors. E.G. IMO it wins no sympathy from EMC2 to force them to spill some beans with an FOIA request.