Attacking Darius:

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:Can a gas discharge plasma be used to start a fusion reactor?

cthia wrote:I expect yes, since we know that chemical explosions are used as the primary for nuclear weapons.

Saying that a chemical explosion is the primary for a nuclear weapon shows that you might not have a full appreciation of what is going on. An H-bomb (fusion) is triggered by the heat and pressure from an A-bomb (fission). It is true that a chemical explosion is used to push the fissionable material into a critical state, but that just a matter of convenience and timing. If you were suicidal, you could take two lumps of fissionable material, one in each hand, and clap your hands together to create an explosion (provided each lump was more than half critical). However you might die before they hit together because of the increased radiation as they came closer to each other. The "Little Boy" bomb solved this by making one lump a bullet and the other a target; detonation was achieved by firing the bullet into the target. Again the explosion was a matter of convenience, a bomb could be created just by having the bullet get pushed into the target by impact with the ground (however this increases the chance of a dud, if the bomb does not fall correctly).

"Little Boy" had a limit on its yield, because neither lump could be of critical mass; "Fat Man" solved that limitation by creating an alloy of the fissionable metal with a light metal, chosen so the result could not reach critical density at atmospheric pressure. This was molded into a sphere and a uniform explosive blanket compressed the ball into the critical density to achieve detonation. The point of all this that fissionable material wants to fission, the only thing preventing that is "social distancing"; the explosion is just there to throw the parts together.

Can a gas discharge plasma ignite a fusion reactor? Only if you put it together with so much other energy, that the presence of the gas discharge was negligible.

PS: There is scientific evidence of a natural fission reactor two billion years ago in what is now Africa; fortunately not concentrated enough for an explosion: Oklo, natural fission reactor

Well, I'm no nuclear physicist by any means. But I do have the distinction of building a nuclear bomb and detonating it for a 4th grade science project. The pressurized cylinder of the old water rockets was used to throw the switch of an old-fashioned lighter which lit the fuse of an M-80. The whole thing looked like a cardboard Fat Man. The student got an A. LOL

Anyway, I am saying that it should be just as easy to accomplish. I understand your sentiment that so much other energy has to be there that one would wonder what's the point. The point is convenience, necessity, and practicality. The gases are already produced by the reactor.

cthia wrote:I understand your sentiment that so much other energy has to be there that one would wonder what's the point. The point is convenience, necessity, and practicality. The gases are already produced by the reactor.

I agree that plasma is produced by a fusion reactor and note that it is orders of magnitude more energetic than a gas discharge plasma. I am not even sure if a laser initiated fusion reactor would be sufficient to start a gravity contained fusion reactor.

The basic disagreement between us, as I see it, is that you do not want high energy plasma pipes running through the ship; because that would be very unsafe. Instead you want the pipes to contain low energy plasma. I can sympathize with your view of the danger and can only imagine that there are many safeguards that the author has not told us about. I do not accept the view that low energy plasma will suffice, because then there is no reason for the pipes at all; since that requires additional processes to put energy into the plasma before use.

If you are not going to change your view and I know that I am not going to change mine, then we might as well stop the discussion; unless or until the author provides much more information.

So thrusters may not require high-energy plasma or a nearby reactor. Those can be deep inside the bowels of a ship.

How about the impeller ring?

And, for that matter, how about the tractors of a spider? Does the spider ship have a distributed network of high-energy plasma skin-deep?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:So thrusters may not require high-energy plasma or a nearby reactor. Those can be deep inside the bowels of a ship.

How about the impeller ring?

And, for that matter, how about the tractors of a spider? Does the spider ship have a distributed network of high-energy plasma skin-deep?

I think that impeller ring and tractors require large amounts of energy. Bringing up the wedge, in particular, takes a lot of energy.

When the wall is bent, energy is siphoned across it from the "higher" hyper band on its other side. Hyper-space is an area of inherently higher energy levels, and the siphon effect could be considered a sort of strictly limited, primitive ancestor of the "core tap" in the Mutineers' Moon Universe. The initial power for the wedge has to come from internal sources -- current generation and stored power. Once the initial energy investment is made, something like 60% of the energy necessary to maintain and power the wedge is drawn through the "siphon" effect. Warshawski sails, because of their interaction with the gravity ways in which they are used, provides a substantially more powerful version of the siphon effect; that's why a ship moving under sail can provide its total energy budget through its sails, whereas a ship moving under impeller wedge cannot

I take the mention of current generation to refer to the plasma stream.
Energy-siphon effect

cthia wrote:Can a gas discharge plasma be used to start a fusion reactor? We have not gotten any feedback on whether a laser initiated fusion reactor can be used to start a gravity initiated fusion reactor, and the laser initiated plasma is more energetic. My guess is that so much more energy has to be put into the gas discharge plasma, that the process could have started with cold hydrogen and skipped the gas discharge altogether.

I expect yes, since we know that chemical explosions are used as the primary for nuclear weapons.[/quote]

Nope. Chemical explosives aren't a drop in the bucket compared to what's needed. Chemical explosives are simply used to very quickly convert a subcritical mass of fissionable material to a highly supercritical mass (by altering it's shape.) In a standard real-world hydrogen bomb there is a mass between the initial fission stage and the fusion stage that will effectively mean the fusion stage is untouched by the explosives. The power of the fission stage is first used to heat light material wrapped around the fusion stage. Expanding outward is limited by a wrapping of heavy material (note that this is purely a matter of inertia, strength is irrelevant), much of the energy goes inward compressing the fusion stage. The mass between the fission and fusion stages acts as a slight delay before compressing it in the other direction. Even all that fury isn't enough to set it off, though--that is accomplished by a plutonium rod in the center of the fusion stage, when it's compressed lengthwise it goes off in a second fission explosion, that actually ignites the fusion stage.

(And there is a limit on how much lithium deutride you can compress with the power of the fission bomb, if you want an h-bomb that's even bigger you use the whole thing to provide the energy to compress an even bigger bomb. You can also put another fusion stage on the opposite side of the original fission bomb.)

tlb wrote:The basic disagreement between us, as I see it, is that you do not want high energy plasma pipes running through the ship; because that would be very unsafe. Instead you want the pipes to contain low energy plasma. I can sympathize with your view of the danger and can only imagine that there are many safeguards that the author has not told us about. I do not accept the view that low energy plasma will suffice, because then there is no reason for the pipes at all; since that requires additional processes to put energy into the plasma before use.

If you are not going to change your view and I know that I am not going to change mine, then we might as well stop the discussion; unless or until the author provides much more information.

It occurs to me that there is a way to pretty much keep the plasma out of ships:

Put as much as possible of your plasma conduits outside the hull on the wedge-protected sides, include redundancy. You still need plasma in the ship where it has to connect to something that produces/consumes it, but most of the transit can be outside where if it does take battle damage there's pretty much no secondary effects. Only the feeds inside the ship can do nasty things and cutoffs can limit how much energy gets released in a breech. Note that almost everything that uses plasma will be near the surface, the runs will be fairly short.

The ship that blew to bits at Manticore is explained by their jury-rigging. In getting that laser to work they had to disable the system that normally would have cut off the plasma feed in case of breech. Once the jury-rigging failed they effectively vented the reactor into the ship and we know how ridiculously overpowered reactor contents are.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:So thrusters may not require high-energy plasma or a nearby reactor. Those can be deep inside the bowels of a ship.

How about the impeller ring?

And, for that matter, how about the tractors of a spider? Does the spider ship have a distributed network of high-energy plasma skin-deep?

Yes. Anything that works at those power levels is being fed by plasma, not electricity.

Loren Pechtel wrote:
Yes. Anything that works at those power levels is being fed by plasma, not electricity.

It's unsafe to assume the MA does anything the way everyone else does. They are deliberately setting out do things completely differently and rethinking 'the way things are', not just doing it because 'that's how we always did it.'

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:Can a gas discharge plasma be used to start a fusion reactor?

cthia wrote:I expect yes, since we know that chemical explosions are used as the primary for nuclear weapons.

Saying that a chemical explosion is the primary for a nuclear weapon shows that you might not have a full appreciation of what is going on. An H-bomb (fusion) is triggered by the heat and pressure from an A-bomb (fission). It is true that a chemical explosion is used to push the fissionable material into a critical state, but that just a matter of convenience and timing. If you were suicidal, you could take two lumps of fissionable material, one in each hand, and clap your hands together to create an explosion (provided each lump was more than half critical). However you might die before they hit together because of the increased radiation as they came closer to each other. The "Little Boy" bomb solved this by making one lump a bullet and the other a target; detonation was achieved by firing the bullet into the target. Again the explosion was a matter of convenience, a bomb could be created just by having the bullet get pushed into the target by impact with the ground (however this increases the chance of a dud, if the bomb does not fall correctly).

"Little Boy" had a limit on its yield, because neither lump could be of critical mass; "Fat Man" solved that limitation by creating an alloy of the fissionable metal with a light metal, chosen so the result could not reach critical density at atmospheric pressure. This was molded into a sphere and a uniform explosive blanket compressed the ball into the critical density to achieve detonation. The point of all this that fissionable material wants to fission, the only thing preventing that is "social distancing"; the explosion is just there to throw the parts together.

Can a gas discharge plasma ignite a fusion reactor? Only if you put it together with so much other energy, that the presence of the gas discharge was negligible.

PS: There is scientific evidence of a natural fission reactor two billion years ago in what is now Africa; fortunately not concentrated enough for an explosion: Oklo, natural fission reactor

cthia wrote:Anyway, I am saying that it should be just as easy to accomplish. I understand your sentiment that so much other energy has to be there that one would wonder what's the point. The point is convenience, necessity, and practicality. The gases are already produced by the reactor.

tlb wrote:I agree that plasma is produced by a fusion reactor and note that it is orders of magnitude more energetic than a gas discharge plasma. I am not even sure if a laser initiated fusion reactor would be sufficient to start a gravity contained fusion reactor.

The basic disagreement between us, as I see it, is that you do not want high energy plasma pipes running through the ship; because that would be very unsafe. Instead you want the pipes to contain low energy plasma. I can sympathize with your view of the danger and can only imagine that there are many safeguards that the author has not told us about. I do not accept the view that low energy plasma will suffice, because then there is no reason for the pipes at all; since that requires additional processes to put energy into the plasma before use.

If you are not going to change your view and I know that I am not going to change mine, then we might as well stop the discussion; unless or until the author provides much more information.

I think you are misunderstanding me. And I totally take responsibility for the misunderstanding because I have been laying the tracks down in dribs and drabs, and because as you said, we are handicapped by a lack of detail from the author.

It isn't that I don't want high energy plasma pipes coursing through the veins of the ship because of a concern for safety. It is that I can't imagine how it can be accomplished without causing a shipload of problems.

Before Jonathan supplied the textev, I suggested that any attack should burst open at least one plasma conduit. That particular textev says several conduits were ruptured.

Now, if those conduits are carrying such highly energetic plasma then a single rupture should cause catastrophic damage. Yet several ruptures only caused twisted metal and at most third degree burns on human skin. So, clearly the plasma isn't as hot as the sun. Therefore, I have already changed my stance to try to align with textev.

But let me attempt to lay my "conduits" clearly, even if it still does not work ...

Loren Pectel wrote:Nope. Chemical explosives aren't a drop in the bucket compared to what's needed. Chemical explosives are simply used to very quickly convert a subcritical mass of fissionable material to a highly supercritical mass (by altering it's shape.) In a standard real-world hydrogen bomb there is a mass between the initial fission stage and the fusion stage that will effectively mean the fusion stage is untouched by the explosives. The power of the fission stage is first used to heat light material wrapped around the fusion stage. Expanding outward is limited by a wrapping of heavy material (note that this is purely a matter of inertia, strength is irrelevant), much of the energy goes inward compressing the fusion stage. The mass between the fission and fusion stages acts as a slight delay before compressing it in the other direction. Even all that fury isn't enough to set it off, though--that is accomplished by a plutonium rod in the center of the fusion stage, when it's compressed lengthwise it goes off in a second fission explosion, that actually ignites the fusion stage.

(And there is a limit on how much lithium deutride you can compress with the power of the fission bomb, if you want an h-bomb that's even bigger you use the whole thing to provide the energy to compress an even bigger bomb. You can also put another fusion stage on the opposite side of the original fission bomb.)

Chemical explosives aren't a drop in a bucket compared to what's needed in a nuclear bomb?

Much like gas discharge plasmas aren't a drop in the bucket to what's needed in our application?

True.

But I am proposing that both can be the trigger for something much bigger.


Both of you are missing the point. Upstream I acknowledged that we presently know a lot about plasma. I also acknowledged that we are still learning, and I suggested that there is a lot that we still do not know, in conjunction with a lot of materials and methods we do not yet have at our disposal.

Take for instance an ordinary plasma torch. How much hotter do you think we could get that torch to burn with access to HV materials and methods? And gravity? And pressure which is increased by gravity?

And let's use everything that we have learned so far. Take for instance a turbo system in a car which feeds the hot exhaust gases back into the system to produce more power. Can that application be leveraged by our system using gas discharge plasmas held under incredible pressures and densities by gravity waiting for a trigger?

Kzt pointed out the temperatures needed. I am saying that those temperatures can be achieved using everything that man has learned today up to and including all of our HV knowledge and materials. It should be child's play. Consider this ...

A man made quark-gluon plasma that is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun! Created by colliding with the nuclei of gold. So, what, would the introduction of gold particles into the plasma stream and forcing a collision with the nuclei using some type of controlled gravitational methods produce hot enough plasma at the point where it is needed?

Due note that that record has already been broken.

We are still learning about plasma. And methods. And materials. We already know about triggers.

cthia wrote:I think you are misunderstanding me. And I totally take responsibility for the misunderstanding because I have been laying the tracks down in dribs and drabs, and because as you said, we are handicapped by a lack of detail from the author.

It isn't that I don't want high energy plasma pipes coursing through the veins of the ship because of a concern for safety. It is that I can't imagine how it can be accomplished without causing a shipload of problems.

Before Jonathan supplied the textev, I suggested that any attack should burst open at least one plasma conduit. That particular textev says several conduits were ruptured.

Now, if those conduits are carrying such highly energetic plasma then a single rupture should cause catastrophic damage. Yet several ruptures only caused twisted metal and at most third degree burns on human skin. So, clearly the plasma isn't as hot as the sun. Therefore, I have already changed my stance to try to align with textev.

But let me attempt to lay my "conduits" clearly, even if it still does not work ...

Chemical explosives aren't a drop in a bucket compared to what's needed in a nuclear bomb?

Much like gas discharge plasmas aren't a drop in the bucket to what's needed in our application?

True.

But I am proposing that both can be the trigger for something much bigger.


Both of you are missing the point. Upstream I acknowledged that we presently know a lot about plasma. I also acknowledged that we are still learning, and I suggested that there is a lot that we still do not know, in conjunction with a lot of materials and methods we do not yet have at our disposal.

Take for instance an ordinary plasma torch. How much hotter do you think we could get that torch to burn with access to HV materials and methods? And gravity? And pressure which is increased by gravity?

And let's use everything that we have learned so far. Take for instance a turbo system in a car which feeds the hot exhaust gases back into the system to produce more power. Can that application be leveraged by our system using gas discharge plasmas held under incredible pressures and densities by gravity waiting for a trigger?

Kzt pointed out the temperatures needed. I am saying that those temperatures can be achieved using everything that man has learned today up to and including all of our HV knowledge and materials. It should be child's play.

--- snip ---

We are still learning about plasma. And methods. And materials. We already know about triggers.

And you do not understand what I am saying: I freely admit that low temperature plasma can be turned hot as needed. However that process requires an energy source. Perhaps you think that the low temperature plasma itself can be used to generate high temperature plasma? That is too inefficient and will produce tons of cold gas for each pound of hot plasma in the capacitor. In your proposed system, there is no other energy source or if there is, it renders the whole piping network unnecessary.

We do not know enough about the reported disaster to be able to say the temperature in the pipes, because we do not know the duration of the flow nor the positioning of the affected crew.

Whether you do not want the high temperature because of "safety" or because of "a shipload of problems" (such as what happens when they burst, which sound like "safety" to me), you are ignoring "that there is a lot that we still do not know, in conjunction with a lot of materials and methods we do not yet have at our disposal.".

PS: Note that even it happened your way, there are still those capacitors all over the ship that can burst while filled with the HOT plasma that you want to minimize.