I wasn't advocating trying to scale up; the Vfr could no more have built a Saturn V than I could- everything in its proper time.
As far as I know the Farnsworth tube and descendants are the only known continuous controlled fusion devices to ever actually work. I was simply speculating on what might be possible. By the way my scaling may have been way off. I need to think about it some more.
The problem with the Tokomak approach is that they were taking something which might theoretically work and trying to build a huge version of it. That is a very different process than taking something which is demonstrated to work and scaling it up to a production level. The first is a stab in the dark - the second is fairly straight forward extrapolation.
The Farnsworth tube has been demonstrated and does work - a huge feat which places that form of plasma fusion in an entirely different class than any other.
It looks to me like the most useful work could still be done on small devices. There are some very important questions that 8" class tubes can answer: what sort of neutron flux can be gotten out of that size tube? Of how much use is increased ion gun output? How much use is raised reactant densities ( what is the practical limit on that variable )? How much of an effect is there with raised voltages? etc. These are very important questions and may be within the grasp of amateur experimentation.
Do I think the Farnsworth tube has a possible future in power level fusion? Well, I think there is a lot to be said for having a fusion process that actually works, as opposed to something which hasn't worked despite having billions of dollars thrown at it; I think the Fusor approach has more of a future than the Tokomak does. Although I suspect that the Tokomak has a lot better short term financial future.
In any case my comments about profound results still hold; getting fusion to work on shoe string budget on a 'desktop' is a PROFOUND result - my congratulations to everyone who has produced neutrons. Great work guys.
Created on Monday, January 22, 2001 8:11 PM EDT by Robert E. Canup