Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Hi yall. First off, thank you for allowing me to join your forum. I am very excited to hear of your advancements in nuclear science and engineering, and being an avid gun nut myself, this forum seemed like a place I might fall in line with.

I hold a bachelor's in mechanical engineering, with my minor in nuclear engineering, and I work for a rather large oil and gas company designing completion tools (fancy pipes to extract hydrocarbons) down here in Houston.

Either way, nuclear engineering has always been my passion. I don't hold a big degree in it, but I have the fundamental gist of how it all works, and a couple text books and classes to help my brain understand how it all works.

Political wise, I'm a constitutional libertarian (or strict constitutionalist).

Glad to have you. Most of what I'm doing in fusion isn't actually new science, it's more like combining existing technique and actually getting it right that seems to be the key. Halliday's "Introductory Nuclear Physics" is dirt cheap and more book than you really need for most of this, though I favor Fredrick Terman's "Radio engineer's handbook" which like Haliday's book, uses real units, gives test cases, and well, all this was known by the end of WWII when Terman wrote anyway.

What I am doing here isn't really a fusor as envisioned by most - IEC is an utter misnomer, there's no confinement other than by the tank walls (which confine the outside air to outside, mainly). We are making a simple multi-beam collider here, as of now, 8 beams seems to work best, and much of the progress has simply been due to designing and making a better electrostatic lens to get to higher luminosity at the focus. Duh. (Terman has the math for that). Now we are adding bunching, which isn't new either, being almost as old as the particle accelerator. No new science, just using what's known in a different way. It's kind of irritating that when we pull this off - and I think we will - that many academics will point that out loudly.

Yet, they've taken tens of billions and a few decades to ignore this stuff themselves...I guess you just have to laugh.