I agree. Also, liquid surfaced walls are probably required for any pulsed fusion approach, which at a given average power/area will have much higher instantaneous power/area. This drives one toward LINUS-like approaches.

Compact Fusion Systems recently got funding to push this approach. On LinkedIn they announced purchase of surplus high-energy capacitors (from the old Shiva Star at AFRL) to build a prototype.

They seem to have taken to hear some lessons learned from previous experiments (cannot assume lossless compression, must pay attention to RT instabilities, must think about vaporization of first-wall).

One downside to a fully liquid blanket: the peak temperature is limited by the vapor pressure of the first wall, which in turn is limited by the impurity tolerance of the plasma. In a non-imploding device, it would be possible to run the majority of the blanket at a higher temperature & separate that from the cooler first-wall liquid. Of course, this puts some solid material closer to the neutrons, so YMMV.

https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/ALPHA_TURCHI.p... https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/06_TURCHI.pdf

I've seen their slides before, and I was impressed by their engineering-oriented approach. The engineering obstacles to fusion are so great that (IMO) one should use them to drive the design, rather than taking a physics-oriented approach and worry about the engineering later.