Attacking Darius:

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.)

tlb wrote:

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.

tlb wrote: However that process requires an energy source. Perhaps you think that the low temperature plasma itself can be used to generate high temperature plasma?

tlb wrote:That is too inefficient and will produce tons of cold gas for each pound of hot plasma in the capacitor.

tlb wrote:In the proposed system, there is no other energy source or if there is, it renders the whole piping network unnecessary.

tlb wrote: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.

Jonathan_S wrote: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.

cthia wrote:What we need in this particular application seems to be gravity and low energy plasma seeded with gold, and cascade relays to excite the whole process. I am assuming that the electricity stored in the capacitors will be the battery, the source. Remember, we only need the trigger to start it all. We are not too wedded to efficiency at this point. It is simply a trigger. We still need pipes, or some sort of conduit to direct everything where it needs to go.

cthia wrote:True to everything. I talked about the dangers of high capacity capacitors in several other threads. If you have ever seen high capacity capacitors accidentally ground out, you know why. Incidentally, grounded capacitors will provide the spark in my original scenario of ruptured high energy plasma conduits and oxygen conduits and hydrogen conduits and whatever else is part of the dangerous recipe. But I imagine the capacitors are in a centralized location, instead of coursing thru the ship's veins. And they can be shunted.

I am simply trying to make textev and HV tech work without a handwavium chamber. I am sure David would say 'no no no no no.'

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.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:What we need in this particular application seems to be gravity and low energy plasma seeded with gold, and cascade relays to excite the whole process. I am assuming that the electricity stored in the capacitors will be the battery, the source. Remember, we only need the trigger to start it all. We are not too wedded to efficiency at this point. It is simply a trigger. We still need pipes, or some sort of conduit to direct everything where it needs to go.

Plasma, not simply electricity.

cthia wrote:True to everything. I talked about the dangers of high capacity capacitors in several other threads. If you have ever seen high capacity capacitors accidentally ground out, you know why. Incidentally, grounded capacitors will provide the spark in my original scenario of ruptured high energy plasma conduits and oxygen conduits and hydrogen conduits and whatever else is part of the dangerous recipe. But I imagine the capacitors are in a centralized location, instead of coursing thru the ship's veins. And they can be shunted.

I am simply trying to make textev and HV tech work without a handwavium chamber. I am sure David would say 'no no no no no.'

No, there are capacitors filled with high temperature plasma at every energy weapon station and missile tube. In fact, there are capacitors at every location that requires a large initial burst of energy (such as wedge startup).

kzt wrote: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.'

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
By the same token, could they have accidentally inserted a fatal or at least lethal & exploitable flaw in their ships because they did things differently and failed to notice an important lesson from the past?

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?

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.