Recent content by Colin LeMahieu

For anyone else looking NASA did a beam energy propulsion study. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120002761.pdf " For launching payloads, the study concluded that using BEP to propel vehicles into space is technically feasible if a commitment to develop new technologies...

And if the laser also heated the nitrogen gas in addition to just vaporizing it? Agreed, the laser power decreases by an inverse square though the reason for using a laser is it can keep the beam divergence small which might keep the constant factor small enough to still be useful.

He did have good information though it leaves me with some more questions. It seems like an incompatible comparison between the energy released through burning and energy required to vaporize a liquid. It seems like a good portion of the burn energy goes to not just vaporizing the next kg of...

I was thinking of something similar, it's been vaguely discussed as a form of non-rocket space launch though I don't know why it isn't used. There's a thing called lightcraft where the idea was to heat up a point to achieve thrust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightcraft My thinking for...

Thanks for taking a look guys, admittedly my writeup is simplistic since my background is in software. I'll read that book since it would certainly step up my understanding. I amended the writeup to clarify something I thought was especially lacking in a section called "Plasma tolerances and...

Hey everyone, I've been kicking around this idea for fusion for a while and thought everyone could check my understanding. The idea is to create a sustained z pinch using alternating current sources in parallel...

Interesting. I could see how lower density could affect results. Is the lower density because of technical limits to confinement? Higher density would generally be desired if possible, right?

I was reading a paper recently about guiding electric arc discharges with lasers. http://loa.ensta-paristech.fr/ilm/uploads/ILM/134_Forestier_discharge_AIPAdvances_2_012151_2012.pdf Since electric arcs are plasmas and they seem to be stabilized by lasers, could the same principle be applied to...