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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30071 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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We have designs

As I wrote (and just linked to):

Stepping back and taking a very broad view, there are several steps to the research, development, and engineering of a system. Generally, one begins with physical principles. With those physical principles, one can compute theoretical limits. One can also sketch a concept of operation based on those physical principles. Often times, at that point, one can still handwave away many practical concerns and compute how close a concept could, in theory, get to the raw theoretical limits. As one progresses, one may include an increasing number of more real-world difficulties.

For nuclear rocketry, we are not building on a blank slate, as though no one has ever started down this path at all, as though we simply have no idea what the theoretical limits are or what the concept-based performance could look like (still handwaving away many practical considerations). People have been doing this work and publishing it for half a century.

Sigh.

What we DO know is that most fusion systems provide much better specific impulse and exhaust velocity than chemical rockets can.

As I just wrote, and you ignored:

I'll note here that you've already betrayed that you know nothing about what you speak of. We already have some other technologies that are "massively more efficient", but you're not talking about them. They have trade-offs, because yeah, trade-offs exist. When discussing them, we talk about standard performance metrics and how that corresponds to capabilities.

But I'm glad to hear that you've finally admitted that there are at least two useful performance metrics that we can actually talk about (specific impulse and exhaust velocity). So, uh, about how much better, in theory? (A range is perfectly fine here.) How does that compare to other existing systems? Are there tradeoffs with other performance metrics?

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