People working on the chamber of the National Ignition Facility (N.B.I'd had a different image here, but the caption—from a stupid newspaper, I knew I should only trust academic sites—misled me to identify an artist's conception as an actual photo).Here's a diagram of the facility; I think that blue spherical room above is the thing at one end surrounded by all the red pipes.
The NIF should be like Jerusalem for science fiction writers, and not just because it's expected to be the fusion facility that gets reactions past the break-even point (i.e., that can be used for net power generation). Also, though, the energy and temperature its facilities cope with is on par with proton-chain fusion, which is the real deal. Know what other type of apparatus uses proton-chain? It's a product line called the main sequence.Yeah. In my book, the humans use proton-chain rockets in their starships (their interplanetary ones use lesser types of fusion). Why? Well, basically, having to spend months or years getting up to speed was a drag (even in a virtually frictionless environment [rimshot]); I gave 'em gravity-based inertia protections that bleed the forces off into the surrounding space-time geometry, and let their ships pull 20-30 gs.
It's interesting, were I writing it for the first time today, I might actually have the humans go into g-tanks during accelerations, and use rotating sections the rest of the time; indeed the felinoids might likewise use rotating sections in their ships (conveniently, their ships are spheres and don't, technically, ever accelerate, since the stress-energy tensor metric-patching they use as an engine essentially puts whatever's inside its matter shell into freefall). But, there's a limit to how much I can rewrite—I have whole scenes taking place during accelerations, and screwing up the time-frame of a book is a headache on the order of trepanning with railroad spikes. Come to think of it, I bet a felinoid wouldn't like freefall; all their self-righting instincts would go crazy.
The humans in my book can have incredibly light fusion-powered ships, not (precisely) because of "the speed of plot", but because it's the 24th damn century and they have superconductors to make the magnetic nozzle and use things like Bose-Einstein condensates as radiation shielding. Transhumanist SF writers strike me as bizarre, given they think humans can upload their minds, and other aspects of the
I refer you to the first two verses of "Kansas City" from Oklahoma.
Well, actually, that nonsense is just like the "atomic everything" in some of the lesser forms of sci-fi (and the cricket bow-chicka-wow-wow is deliberate): the Computer Revolution was just too damned impressive for their puny brains, and it robbed them of their reason. There's a real Cargo Cult element in both, in that they worship whatever marvels are near at hand, merely because of the emotional impact. Oddly it's combined with two forms of self-worship—the idea that humans will take total control even of their own bodies and minds, and the idea that the greatest power in the universe is a human thing, i.e. information. Now there's some basis for that second one, as found in all the traditions of mankind: but in the real tradition, man's speech is most powerful in that it grants dominion over nature. The Kurzweil Singularity is like the Rapture in more than just being apocalyptic millennialism—it also share's the Rapturers' (Raptors'?) idea of saying, to the rest of the world, "La la la I can't hear you I'm not listening." A transhuman (or tranny, as I like to call them) is a person who's given up hope in technology as the servant of humanity, and taken refuge (a false refuge, in Buddhist terms) in the old Gnostic cop-outs, immortality-seeking and inefficacious ascetic posturing.
N.B. #2: So I realized, I was wrong again. There was this graph, see, with the energy levels of various kinds of fusion, and there was a thing way up top marked "National Ignition Facility". But what it meant—and would have said, if the person making the graph were not a wrestling-headgear wearing retard—was "National Ignition Facility Lasers". The NIF proper is no more energetic than typical inertial-confinement fusion, which is fairly chilly, for fusion.
Shit shit shit. I probably over-estimated the temperature the NIF's designed to handle, although inertia confinement fusion is a lot more temperature intensive than magnetic confinement. See, even though inertia confinement works at a lower temperature, the plasma isn't nearly as contained—an inertia-confinement fusion rocket would apparently be a lot like a hydrogen-bomb Orion rocket, in terms of the stresses involved.
Everything else I said still stands, though.
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