Electrostatic confinement works, but it's complete fucking dogshit and will never get you gains. Magnetic, inertial, or magneto-inertial are all infinitely better options.

Gravity is the shittiest option and only works by concentrating obscene amounts of mass to overcome the crappy efficiency.

>>17044684
I'm just not sure if that's true at all. Robert Bussard would disagree.

Thing is we can test 1000 different iterations of polywell or other electrostatic inertial variants for the cost of 1 tokamak, stellarator, or inertial confinement device...the thing is nobody ever tried doing this. A few official attempts were made and that was it...it was abandoned.

I don't think enough time or effort was put into designing and testing this things.

The magneto-inertial and field reverse configuration of the same thing is interesting but again expensive, complicated and no better than anything else officially anyway.

>>17044641
combine the electrostatic inertial concept with a radially polarized laser (vector beam) for confinement of ions (optical tweezers) or for additional acceleration.

Combining those two technologies I bet would show results.

>>17045325
>the thing is nobody ever tried doing this
The fuck are you talking about? It was researched professionally for decades, Bussard tested something like 20 different configurations, and other startups have tested dozens more. U Sydney's APP group spent like 10-15 years working on polywells and came to the same conclusion about losses every single time. Not to mention every motherfucking fusor hobbyist has tried doing some configuration or another because they all convince themselves that
>AHA! If I just add one more ring or twiddly bit here it will improve the effectiveness of this configuration a thousand-fold!
Pure electrostatic confinement just has way too many goddamned loss mechanisms to work effectively - it's like trying to fill a leaky bucket - and that's not because of bad engineering it's because of the fundamental physics of that kind of configuration. We moved on to tokamaks, stellarators, etc. because they were more promising. The biggest problem with tokamaks is that plasma instabilities require a system that can make rapid parameter adjustments to keep the system stable. The biggest problem with stellarators is that they're incredibly impractical to build and assemble. Those are big problems, but they're *engineering* problems. Electrostatic confinement has a *physics* problem.

>>17045337
I disagree that there isn't a viable method

>like filling a leaky bucket
>just add another ring!

I understand that confinement without leaks around the field edges is the big hurdle.

Please see: >>17045332

>>17045337
>The biggest problem with stellarators is that they're incredibly impractical to build and assemble
why

>>17045341
well haven't you seen them? they're all twisty and stuff. YOU try bending metal like that..

>>17045332
this seems like a good idea anon. I don't believe it's ever been officially attempted.

if you can confine ions using a cylindrical vector beam...I bet you could get a way more efficient fusion burn without the leaks.

>>17045342
It doesnt seem hard to make them in sections and weld/braze them. What are the tole

>>17045348
I was just joking honestly...not the person you were originally replying to.

Thing is they don't work any better than anything else (officially) so why bother?

>>17045332
this is interesting..

Russians took a hybrid approach to their Tokamak

https://www.iter.org/node/20687/t-15md-comes-line-russia

Cathode burns too quickly it's a material problem.

>>17045410
why not use a virtual cathode? You're talking about the negatively charged electrode that attracts the positive ions right?

That can be what's called a virtual cathode like what's used in a vircator. Just a cloud of electrons...nothing to burn out.

Combined with a radially polarized cylindrical vector beam to trap/contain the positive ions maybe we could get a way more efficient fusion burn, past unity.

>>17045739
bump

>>17045739
>>17046298
bump

Really needs more funding. All science does, not whatever retarded shit the world cares about now.

>>17046314
for sure, but what do you think about this idea?
>>17045739

I mean, how wouldn't that work? You could guide the positive ions down what is essentially a tube...or even trap them in a lattice (like those optical atomic clocks the kikes love so much)

How couldn't we make this work?

Anyone suppressing this needs to die.

>>17046320
Maybe the concept needs to be fleshed out more (optical tweezers operate with neutral atoms) but laser guided ions are a thing and why the concept hasn't been combined with Electrostatic Inertial Confinement is a mystery to me

>>17046332
but you CAN guide ions with a cylindrically symmetric hollow vector beam....which is the point. Optical tweezers may have been a bad term to use but the idea remains

>>17046341
so bumping again.

Come on, aren't the retards who frequent this board supposed to be smart?

>>17045348
Not only do the vacuum chamber segments have to be twisty, but the magnetic coils do as well; the chamber segments and coils end up being multiple different shapes which have to be precise to the millimeter to both produce the correct magnetic field geometry and fit together (and in the case of the coils, slide and rotate around the vacuum vessel during assembly).

W7X had 20 plasma chamber segments (5 different shapes) and 50 main coils (5 different shapes), and 20 fine-tuning coils (2 different shapes). All of which has to fit together. Then on top of that because you need cryostat conditions at those kind of magnetic fields, the entire inner chamber and coils need to fit into a second, slightly larger vacuum chamber that acts as a cryostat for all of the coils. Which means its geometry needs to accommodate all the stuff inside, and all the ports and instrumentation. And assembly has to maintain those tolerances when all the bits and bobs are put together: Even with overlapping timetables for vacuum vessel and coil construction, assembly of W7X took a million man hours across 9 years to complete.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ_OBoEs3uU

>>17045739
>just use electrons to attract the ions
You can try this, but your losses are gonna be fucking horrendous.

If you're concentrating enough electrons together to act as a large virtual cathode for a fusion system you're going to be in a collisional regime; that means Coulomb collisions/scattering between energetic electrons; and that means Bremsstrahlung radiation. So right off the bat you're losing shitloads of energy in an electrostatic configuration, and if it's a magnetic configuration or an electrostatic configuration with magnetic assistance lots of those scattered electrons are going to end up falling into a loss cone along the field lines.

If you're using electrons to attract your ions you also end up with space charge problems - the attraction of ions to the virtual cathode means you've now got a mix of positive and negative charge and your potential well becomes shallower and possibly neutralized, which means your trap gets exponentially less effective as you trap more ions.