Rutherford Reactor?

What about microfusion in a cascade around a reflection chamber? By having the fusion somehow drive a shockwave through a confined plasma? Almost like a wave disk engine but all virtual parts pulsing fields instead of physical obstacles?

ckpooley, hmmmmmmm gigawatt level was too overestimated, Amicus keep in mind, we can use magnetic plasma ramjet to don't need propulsion with high Isp 4 1st stage

fusion reaction is hella nice conception, but would be possible only with tricky tunneling effects to break through Coulomb barrier, otherwise you need tremendous gravity to put stuff together

Oh, thank you, I hadn't thought of actually reading a textbook on the subject, I just like to troll serious technical forums for the condescention I crave.

This isn't Fusion power directly, but producing chemical reactives, oxygen, and hydrogen, from more common, and relatively stable elements like Nitrogen. If you actually read, and think about what I wrote, I already addressed your concerns in 1) liquid nitrogen raises the molar density of the reaction volume, and 2) accellerating the helions to overcome the charged resistance of electron shells.

And for everyone else talking about the current experiments in Hydrogen (Protium/Deuterium/Tritium...) fusion, I am aware of them, and that's not what I'm talking about here. Could we please try to discuss the Ni+He reaction, instead of using ths as a dump thread for any ideas about fusion in general?

Welcome to the board

Psiberzerker,

ans 2 yourself 4 following (?)'s:

1. is reaction exothermic or endothermic?
2. how much is percent of output?
3. how much is the percent of unused output?
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Trust me, Amicus, it'd be hella helpful 4 ye

{13375P33K expurgated for clarity}

1) Mildly exothermic, which actually retards efficiency due to having to maintain the liquid state.

2) By mildly, I mean that the thermal output isn't the intended use in this reaction, but liberation of Oxygen, and Protons, which neutralize into hydrogen when you wrap an electron around them. These can be combined with the oxygen to produce energy, and water vapor in a standard fuel cell, with high enough efficiency, enough to keep the cryogenic pumps, and alpha bombardment running (I hope.)

3) I don't know, because I haven't actually built such a reactor. I've gotten the reaction to happen, with an Alpha Anode Gun, but not in liquid state, and therefore without enough energy to sustain any reaction.

The idea is to possibly do this at high altitude, where the teperature, and pressure is low enough to produce the liquid state with relatively little energy, and use the chemical biproducts to produce energy, or possibly rocket fuel to launch microsattelites, or gas mine for LEO fuel stations.

Nitorgen is also plentiful up there, but in the trivalent neutralized state, which requires a lot of energy to seperate the diatomic molecules. Another possible by product would be N1 ions, which might be seperated to react back into N2, liberating even more energy.

If a small chemical factory could be floated up in an aerostat, then fuel/energy production would be that much closer to LEO, where they're at a premium. Using Helium as the flotation gas, and to fuel the reactions, they could be automated, and produce a variety of useful fuels. Hydrogen, Hydrazene, Ammonia, and Oxides to fuel sattelites, and shuttles on their way up from the surface.

The weak link here is the Helium, which isn't common, but could be a by-product of surface based Fusion reactions (if we ever get them to work.) Use the energy down here, then float the helium up with reactors to fuel the Leo stations. This would build an infrastructure to allow staging without carrying all the weight in one trip. All you have to do is make it to Leo, where you can re-fuel before moving futher up the gravity well to GEO, and escape velocity.

Another part of this infrastructure is orbital Hydrogen collection from the Solar Wind. Unfortunately, the Ruthorford reaction only produces 1 hydrogen, and oxygen from each nitrogen, which is nice for peroxide monopropellant, but ideally, you want to make water, and nitrogen for the most energy. This would require more hydrogen, which is fortunately fairly free, so ship the excess oxygen up to orbit, where the hydrogen is stored, but from high altitude, instead of the surface.

Psiberzerker

Amicus, chemical rocket has no future to fuel Space Exploration & Colonization bcoz of trashed Isp, your idea only takes Isp further down far simplier gonna be to realize SOPL (solar orbital power lines) to power orbital tugboats with SPT-290 or VASIMIR as propulsion. SOPL is system of orbital reflectors + collimators to concentrate solar rays onto chosen point of Space. Yep, angular velocity will be weak moment out there. but seems there is spacious room to improve realization

That seems to me like a much larger construction project than Psiberzerkers. I wonder though if putting fuel/energy production into the upper atmosphere would do much good. It's not that much closer to orbit, and the operations become a lot more complicated.

Lourens, SOPL doesn't produce/accumulate fuel, only "reroute" power from Sun. power density from the Sun at the Earth is 1366 W/m2, it forces to use too heavy + too vast solar panels. relatively SOPL is about to've been among most simple & effective projects to run "highway" EME (Earth-Moon-Earth):

• minimal payload upon orbits.
• minimized weight of tugboats.
• no radioactive waste.
• SOPL is scalable.
• Moon bases on the surface can be powered by it too, at least 4 1st time (to deploy system on the orbits is far cheaper than on the land).

Hella Yeah, it cannot be realized in no time, but step by step we can & must go this way, if we wanna be Space Civilization. Nothing easy exists onto this long road, but everything is satisfiable

Why not mix the technologies? A LARGE array of floating mirrors or lenses that could all focus on the ship? Enough cheap devices that are collecting energy and focusing could add up to significant thrust. And then we come to my idea? How do you use photons to accelerate a fuel contained In the ship.

Sigma, i ain't sure what the idea ye're talking about. microfusion? we need fusion, but no effective ways been R&D'ed so far. at nowdays, SOPL & fission are only method to power EME. Anyway, we need Lunar bases because it makes possible to really R&D new power sources (fusion, antimatter & so on).

solar power gets focused onto solar panels of the spacecraft, then either SPT-290 or VASIMIR gets taken in place to provide thrust. + high Isp doesn't need heavy storage of fuel, + fuel could be renewed out of the upper layers of Atmosphere

Sigma, just Google [Solar Thermal Rocket], it's really a fascinating design. The basic idea is to use mirrors to focus light through a window into a chamber full of propellant. This could be water, or ice, which the heat expands to a gas. This expansion is released into a regular shallow parabolic rocket ventury for thrust. Not unlike a thermonuclear rocket, only without the heavy, and dangerous fissiles.

ye too overrate that thing: there is too low Isp

Theoretically, as we haven't actually built one yet, low ISP is less of a problem if you can thrust constantly, instead of in short bursts. Also, the concentrators have enough surface area for solar sailing if you run out of fuel. Still, would be best in the near solar orbits (Inside the asteroid belt) like most solar designs.