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Scenario: Peak oil leads to old tactics in war?
Evan Edwards
Jonathan Sullivan
Would sharply declining fossil crude oil supplies reignite interest in Solar power satellites or would that threaten Judeo-Saudi investments in synthetic petroleum?
Sebastian Baker
The Japs won't care as long as their supply of silicone for sex-doll robots isn't threatened.
Adam James
Try going for a nuclear powered flying wing cargo/transport aircraft that can double up as high altitude strategic bombers. You'd also have enough power and space to put in a Russian tier EW suite with 360 degree LAMS coverage. Shit, you could probably use modified versions of that vehicle as the basis for almost every role a modern airforce has units for, except for CAS I guess. if anybody can turn this Ace Combat aircraft into a CAS asset then please do share
Levi Cox
What would be the best reactor type for a dirty bomb suicide plane?
Aaron Wilson
Whatever was in Project Pluto / SLAM?
popularmechanics.com
Gavin Cruz
forgot this image
Liam Davis
They've been able to sustain the plasma at reasonable temperatures for a couple of seconds at a time, and it's longer with every iteration.
The idea is to make the process indefinitely stable, after that it's going to be a competition as to how to best extract energy from the process. There are a couple of designs already. I like the one where the plasma is contained in a ball of liquid metal, pushed inwards by lasers. The lasers compress the sphere, then the fusible material inside burns, the sphere expands, and the heat is siphoned from the metallic shell to heat water and spin a steam turbine. It's kind of like a beating heart.
Failing all of that, we still have hot fusion. Dig a mineshaft into the ground, reinforce the walls with concrete, fill 1/3 with water, plug the top with a turbine and chuck an H-bomb in there. One-time use, but it's power for a decade at a time, plus the turbines could be scuttled and reused.
James Lopez
The real revolution in energy is directly converting radiation into usable electricity.
Xavier Rogers
We know that Fusion reactors can work, and that they're just too damn expensive to be more than an interesting idea at the moment.
popularmechanics.com
If that doesn't sound like too much of a bill then remember that Chicago Pile-1, the worlds first nuclear reactor, cost about $127 million. While the military is one of the few organisations that could potentially stump up the cash to build the first fusion reactor I don't think they're likely to fund it for something like the projects discussed ITT, and even if they did build it the gen-1 reactors would be too big even for aircraft carriers.