Attacking Darius:

Loren Pechtel wrote:

cthia wrote: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?

I don't think the HV plasma torch will burn any hotter than one now. Fundamentally the temperature is limited by the energy density of the fuel. Gravity can compress things generating temporarily higher temperatures (gravity pinch fusion for example) but you can't make that into a torch because it will cool back down when it leaves the gravity pinch--Boyle's law is just as applicable in the HV as here and now.

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?

A turbocharger is simply an exhaust-powered air pump. Exhaust gases are not fed back into the input.

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.

You're grasping at straws here. Adding gold had absolutely nothing to do with attaining those temperatures. Rather, gold is simply convenient for use as a heavy ion in atom smashers. (The amount being used is so tiny cost is irrelevant.) That temperature came from the atom smasher, not from what was being smashed.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Loren Pechtel 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.)

And in the Honorverse they control gravity sufficiently for it to initiate fusion directly on its own.

Their nuclear missiles and laser heads have no fission stage. They use grav pinch implosion to ultra-compress the fuel to the point of fusion (rather than using the x-rays of a fission explosion to excite the fuel to the point of fusion; as with our modern day fusion bombs). Of course a warhead's fusion reaction is not self-sustaining, and doesn't even try to be, it simply uses sacrificial gravity generators to trigger the fusion explosion - and then yet more gravity to shape the resulting blast.
But we know that these pure-fusion warheads existed long before missiles had micro-fusion reactors of their own. So that's evidence that stored power is sufficient to jump-start grav induced fusion.

So I've no reason to think that a full up starship's reactors would be capable of the same gravitational self-start capability. The difference between them and a fusion bomb is less in how they start and more in the additional fields that keep the resulting fusion contained.

It seems most likely that it is only the micro-fusion plants used in Ghost Rider drones and Mk23s that lack the self-start capability.

Unless the impellers' were continuously online, which was extraordinarily unlikely, given the power demand and relatively short operational life of impeller nodes that size, that strike would have gone home before they could bring up the protective bands of their wedges.

cthia wrote:Take for instance a turbo system in a car which feeds the hot exhaust gases back into the system to produce more power.

Loren Pechtel wrote:A turbocharger is simply an exhaust-powered air pump. Exhaust gases are not fed back into the input.

cthia wrote:You are wrong about turbochargers. Exhaust gases are reused. Turbochargers recover waste energy that is usually lost in the exhaust.

penny wrote:I came across something early on in the climactic battle in the Galton System.

Honor wanted to roll pods before they entered the system to immediately launch on the forts. The Admiralty wouldn't let her. Meghan Petersen argued against attacking the forts (civilians) as well.

Anyway, Honor's musings stated that forts of that size can't possibly keep their impellers online.

Unless the impellers' were continuously online, which was extraordinarily unlikely, given the power demand and relatively short operational life of impeller nodes that size, that strike would have gone home before they could bring up the protective bands of their wedges.

I didn't know that forts have that severe a problem with Pac Man eating sprockets, cogs and nodes.

The RMN must be playing musical chairs with their forts a lot more than I thought. Though their forts are smaller.

tlb wrote:It is true that turbochargers recover waste energy that is usually lost in the exhaust.

However I do not think that you are reading what Loren Pechtel said correctly. A turbocharger uses the exhaust gases to drive a turbine that powers a compressor to feed fresh air into the engine, based on the pressure difference between the gases exiting the cylinders and the outside atmosphere. Now I am sure you know that and that is how I read what LP wrote.

The quibble is over you writing "feeds the hot exhaust gases back into the system"; the gases do not go BACK (they are not reused) in normal parlance; all that LP said is that "Exhaust gases are not fed back into the input", meaning that they are not fed back into the cylinders. Do you think that they ARE fed back into the cylinders?

Jonathan_S wrote:Which is a bit odd because I thought forts normally had impellers down and spherical sidewalls up.

Though they do make a point that the Junction forts need to rotate back periodically so they can turn off their sidewall generators for maintenance.

So, I'd have expected most of those Galton OWP forts to have sidewalls up at any given time - and thus been pretty well protected from a surprise missile strike.

Jonathan_S wrote:Loren Pechtel didn't specify which input he was speaking of, the turbo's or the engine's (air intake) input. Still, in neither case are the exhaust gases feed back in.
Yes they're fed into the turbo input, but just just once, and then flow from its exit out the rest of the exhaust system.

tlb wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Which is a bit odd because I thought forts normally had impellers down and spherical sidewalls up.

Though they do make a point that the Junction forts need to rotate back periodically so they can turn off their sidewall generators for maintenance.

So, I'd have expected most of those Galton OWP forts to have sidewalls up at any given time - and thus been pretty well protected from a surprise missile strike.

But isn't the spherical sidewall generated by the same nodes that work as impellers? So might the giant sidewall also put wear and tear on the nodes?

Jonathan_S wrote:I thought it uses a special type of sidewall generator.

Certainly SVW doesn't say anything about it being generated via impeller nodes - "the [Hancock] base wasn't totally helpless. It mounted no offensive weapons, but it was fitted with generators for a spherical sidewall "bubble" almost as strong as Nike's own"
and
"A few navies have experimented with the idea of mounting the sidewall bubble generators used to generate 360° "sidewalls" around fixed fortifications in their capital ships for use in hyper-space engagements, but the sheer mass of the system is self-defeating. A ship so equipped has an enormous advantage in hyper, but the volume consumed by the generators cuts deeply into that available for weapons, which places the same vessel at an even greater disadvantage in normal-space combat."

I suppose it's not impossible that they also tie into the impeller nodes - but I can't recall every seeing anything indicating that