/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10891397
They're a bit more than that. They pretty much combine magnetic confinement with inertial confinement into one reactor. The ideal goal is to have a fusion reactor that can easily make a torid plasma that is self sustaining that is then shot down the axis of the reactor into a liner which then go through nuclear fusion to produce energy, and therefore thrust. The way I would do it would be to make the fusion reaction as small as possible but to increase the rate of pulses to hundreds of small fusion reactions per second. Then use the fusion reaction to heat reaction mass like Hydrogen or Methane to get blasted out of an actual nozzle like an afterburner. Therefore you can achieve both high efficiency(compared to chemical rockets) along with high thrust. In the hopes to making a spacecraft that would be capable of doing constant acceleration burns throughout its journey. Making travel times substantially shorter.