Inertial confinement fusion engine

@deepfriedfrenchtoast interesting, thank you !

@TomKerbal the Daedalus engine also functions in a similar way to this craft, the Daedalus engine would have used deuterium and heium3 fusion pellets bombarded by electron beams, making them vaporize and rapidly fuse.
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@deepfriedfrenchtoast I think a laser fusion engine is also used in "The Expanse". I think it is in season 4 episode 3 where they showed some pellets exploding. Nice :)

@deepfriedfrenchtoast You could say so, the magnetic moment of a charged particle is given by its perpendicular part of velocity with respect to the magnetic field in which it is moving. So if scattering into the "loss cone" happens, it will leave the confinement along the magnetic field lines. Common problem in magnetic confinement fields. Microwave field can build up the magnetic moment for example when the particle traverses through a resonance (gyro frequency = microwave frequency).

@TomKerbal the bunch of rings on the outside of the engine are basically support segments. The charged particles leaving magnetic fields when their magnetic moment get low makes sense, from what I understand the magnetic moment describes the vector and strength of a magnetic field, so if the moment gets very low the object essentially looses its magnetic field, and is there by not effected by the other field. You are also totally right about the temperature of plasmas being weird. If the plasma is very low density, then the molecules will really only have a kinetic energy rather than temperature. Although I don't think the plasma pressure inside tokomak reactors is low enough for this to fully happen.

@deepfriedfrenchtoast The hole ship is a Helix/Spiral. Great btw ! :-)
Thank your for your explanations ! Do you know that charged particles leave a magnetic confinement if their magnetic moment gets too low (e.g. from Coulomb scattering of by cyclotron resonance effects) ? That's fascinating. I am not sure, on which level of science or fiction we are talking here... I am just curious :-)
And theses plasmas we are talking about normally do not have a temperature just because the particles in it are not statistically distributed and their velocities are not describable by a Maxwell-Boltzmann equation. Instead they are described by a "temperature equivalent" mean energy (normally in keV). But I have to admit I am no expert for dense plasmas, more for low pressure non-equilibrium plasmas, so that I am very interested to learn :)

@TomKerbal I'm not sure what helix you are talking about. The engine places a small pellet of fusion fuel (likely deuterium and tritium) in the middle of a combustion chamber. Multiple high power lasers are shot at the pellet, instantly vaporizing it into plasma. The ionized plasma is kept at high pressure by magnetic fields, making it fuse. The plasma is then ejected out of the engine to provide thrust.

the weight of the lasers and the engine in general wouldn't really be a big deal. launching it with todays rockets would be really hard, but for future space agencies with rockets like Starship it would be possible.

magnetic confinement fusion reactors have mostly been focused on developing methods to control the plasma, as controlling the rapidly spinning 100 million degree plasma is hard enough. So they don't really have power generation in mind. ITER does plan to start developing power production techniques in the form of its blanket modules, witch the reactor is planed to test about 200 different designs. By all calculations it should make a surplus of energy. But only time will truly tell.

@deepfriedfrenchtoast Could you explain the idea behind a little bit ? What is the helix for ? Laser induced fusion currently is the only form of fusion that gives a little bit of hope (I don't believe in ITER, but we'll see), even if the lasers are much the heavy to be used in space, but one day...