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[palsch]

1) Energy collection.
I'm not clear on what fusion reaction they are using, but no controlled inertial confinement experiment I'm aware of has a reliable method of collecting the energy output. Most reactions that can easily be conducted involve high energy neutrons you would want to capture. That's hard to say the least. More like destructive to your machinery.

2) Energy per shot.
If you can accelerate your ship over a few days it doesn't matter how long it takes to deliver your thrust. If you want to generate a certain megawatt output, it kinda does. I don't know how quickly this one can be cycled, but the laser triggered variations are not even near the ballpark.

3) Cost.
Each shot would need to cost pennies at most. We are talking about highly engineered pellets, likely involving some prior treatment of lithium to get a more suitable fusion fuel. Scale might do it eventually, but in the short term it would be way too expensive.

[Osmosis Jones]

If that works, AND is made fairly cheap, I shall be EXTREMELY pleased.
Thing is, it'd probably be unable to get the ship out of atmosphere, which would remain expensive (barring the creation of a space elevator/discovery of some magical substance that allows you to have no drag, less mass or something)

Oh, this almost certainly wouldn't be used in atmosphere. There's not much we can do about the cost of getting it up to orbit, but there is one slight advantage; this method requires a lot less lifting to get ready for any sort of long distance trip (less fuel, etc), so it's plausible you could do it all with a number of Dragon launches. Plus, because the engine is pretty robust, it can be reused continually once it's up there.

[Another]

I wonder if 30+ km/s directional plasma bursts can turn blades of an extra high-speed and hardened turbine.

Maybe de-acceleration of plasma in a long tunnel with EM fields with extraction of collective motion energy?

The technology obviously does not currently exist but sounds to me possible in principle.

[palsch]

I wonder if 30+ km/s directional plasma bursts can turn blades of an extra high-speed and hardened turbine.

Plasma burst I'm not worried about. But the high energy neutrons tend to interact unpleasantly with steel. And it's those that are going to be carrying most of the energy, not the relatively small amount of plasma.

The article talks about one burst per minute. That would be a pathetically low power output for a power plant. Not to mention this is far further behind on the demonstrated technology curve than either traditional ICF or MCF, either of which would be more likely to efficiently generate power from advances in similar areas.

[MaximumZero]

I honestly thought that article was a late April Fool's day joke. Holy headfuck.

[palsch]

I honestly thought that article was a late April Fool's day joke. Holy headfuck.

I'd seen similar proposals in the past along the lines of a smaller scale Project Orion, using ICF pellets in the place of nuclear bombs. This is the first detonation method that looks plausibly interesting. I'd love to see a more technical exploration of it.

[olemars]

The guys behind that fusion drive have a website. The awesomeness of their proposals are roughly proportional to its sparseness, but it's got some publications and articles.

[Putnam]

If this proposal can achieve at least double the efficiency of ion drives - what could prevent us from constructing such engine on earth and extracting fusion energy at net gain?

ugh

"Why can't we get power from X" is probably the most annoying thing people say

[MaximumZero]

The guys behind that fusion drive have a website. The awesomeness of their proposals are roughly proportional to its sparseness, but it's got some publications and articles.

That's an amazing website and I now want to be a scientist again.

[Scelly9]

Even their tagline is awesome...

Solving real world problems through advanced nuclear and plasma physics technologies.

[Sirus]

Even their tagline is awesome...

Solving real world problems through advanced nuclear and plasma physics technologies.

What more could you possibly want?

[Gentlefish]

An Aperture Sciences logo, of course.

[Starver]

I wonder if 30+ km/s directional plasma bursts can turn blades of an extra high-speed and hardened turbine.

Maybe de-acceleration of plasma in a long tunnel with EM fields with extraction of collective motion energy?

The technology obviously does not currently exist but sounds to me possible in principle.

I'm rather put in mind of thinking of taking the thrust and applying it at the tips of the blades, a bit like the "emergency lift system" occasionally tried on helicopters[1].  Except that the blades need not/should not be even inclined away from the plane of rotation...  The whole aim is to push the 'rotor' assembly round, this to be mechanically tapped for power.

The dangerous wash of the venting thrust never aims anywhere but "outwards" (tangentially backwards, of course), which any housing around can be placed fare enough away not to be dangerously "torched" by each and every passing armature as it spins by.  The blade needs 'only' be strong enough to transfer the thrust to the axle, which might be progressively loaded/geared highly onto increasing numbers of generators/etc, if there's enough power to spare.

However, I don't hold up much hope that this is practical (or efficient).  Merely maybe more practical than trying to make fan/turbine blades that are themselves resistant of a 'fusion torch', or similar, at a distance useful enough to try to recover the given energies.

(Besides that, some less aggressive/less frequent fusion pulse might be used to send (and smudge) an extreme heat-pulse through a rather more resilient mass block of material, on which the other side is drenched in water (or another suitable liquid for the temperature) to pipe (or further pipe by proxies) the energy through a standard turbine system.  Just with a rather more 'exotic' boiler element as its source.)


[1] Some monopropellant like H₂O₂ stored at the rotor-head and then centripetally piped to the rotor-tips, at need, and vented in order to spin up faster (or 'cruise' faster than normal for a limited time).

[werty892]

The guys behind that fusion drive have a website. The awesomeness of their proposals are roughly proportional to its sparseness, but it's got some publications and articles.

Your link appears to be broken.

[olemars]

Their server is down/struggling.