Fusion plants

I've often wondered why fusion plants in honorverse spacecraft are so prone to blowing up.

Think about it, they've had fusion plants for nearly 2000 years in the honorverse. You'd think they would have the safety systems all figured out by then. And if they didn't, why do they use them for surface power generation? Sure, a residential tower doesn't (usually) have things shooting at it, but you do have earthquakes, structure fires, and the odd terrorist nuke thrown in. I'd hate to be in a city when one of the fusion plants in a residential tower loses containment.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote: I'd hate to be in a city when one of the fusion plants in a residential tower loses containment.

Yeah. I'm sure a 500 gigaton explosion in the middle of Landing wouldn't be a big deal.

There are two different kinds of fusion reactors. Gravity pinch fusion and the other is laser induced fusion. Laser based reactors produce less power the gravity pinch.

A question is which is considered safer for ground based civilian use?

pnakasone wrote:There are two different kinds of fusion reactors. Gravity pinch fusion and the other is laser induced fusion. Laser based reactors produce less power the gravity pinch.

A question is which is considered safer for ground based civilian use?

Given the size and power requirements, buildings probably use laser containment, and utilities might use gravity containment.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:I've often wondered why fusion plants in honorverse spacecraft are so prone to blowing up.

Think about it, they've had fusion plants for nearly 2000 years in the honorverse. You'd think they would have the safety systems all figured out by then. And if they didn't, why do they use them for surface power generation? Sure, a residential tower doesn't (usually) have things shooting at it, but you do have earthquakes, structure fires, and the odd terrorist nuke thrown in. I'd hate to be in a city when one of the fusion plants in a residential tower loses containment.

Well in an SD it's probably producing on the rough order of st least A million times the power of a current day fission plant (recharging the capacitors that power the broadsides of small moon shattering energy weapons required unbelievable energy output). And the crazy hot plasma is under enormous pressure in order to continue to fuse hydrogen as the prodigious rates needed.
So you've got the worlds biggest hottest pipe bomb ready to go off if the magneto-gravimetric containment fails. Because nothing physical, of reasonable size, could contain that combination of pressure and heat.

That said they are remarkably reliably when you don't disrupt their control circuits (or worse their containment vessels) with nasty laserheads. But once battle damage starts causing failures...

Pack enough energy into anything and is very hard somsafeky contain.

ZVar wrote:

Vince wrote:There are no fighters in the Honorverse. LACs are not fighters, they are more akin to motor torpedo boats (and have only a small advantage in acceleration over starships). And trying to get a contact nuke first close enough, and second to fly down a vent on an Honorverse starship is impossible (the missile simply doesn't have the acceleration capability to make the turn).

Actually there are fighters in Honorverse. I think we only here about them once when the Queen visits Honor's ship. Something about the Stingships docking before the Queens shuttle.
Also was it not mentioned stingships are single pilot space/atmosphere fighters or am I confusing universes again?

What I should have said is their are no naval fighters in the Honorverse. Also I should have pointed out that out of atmosphere, their is no craft (including stingships) that can change course (make turns) without decelerating and killing their original velocity (and having to flip end for end to do so), and then accelerating along a new vector, the way current day airplanes can.

Vince wrote:What I should have said is their are no naval fighters in the Honorverse. Also I should have pointed out that out of atmosphere, their is no craft (including stingships) that can change course (make turns) without decelerating and killing their original velocity (and having to flip end for end to do so), and then accelerating along a new vector, the way current day airplanes can.

Not that it affects your point but it now occurs to me that the one time this likely isn't true is in a grav wave. We know from, IIRC, the appendix of SVW that originally grav sails were more like real sails and ships had to tack to move 'upcurrent' against the flow of the wave. But then they developed the ability to have a negative grab factor allowing them to sail directly up 'current' with only some increased component wear. But if you can reverse the grab factor to negative then you should be able to reduce velocity in a wave by only reversing the current grab factor - no need to flip ship like with a wedge. (Otoh this is probably a rarely used technique because usually you'd only slow down when you reached you destination and velocity drop from leaving hyper already provides more slowdown than you necessarily want.