Re:Lawrence Livermore claims a milestone in laser fusion
by DaiPlusPlus on Tuesday August 17, 2021 @11:40PM
(#28217526)
Out of curiosity, are you familiar with Project Excalibur at all? I’m curious how the simultaneous-targeting of dozens of reentry vehicles from a single fission-explosion-powered sea-urchin multi-laser was supposed to work. Going by leaked and declassified material I’ve seen the concept was too far developed for it to have been laughed-out of the room, so what’s the story?
…or any other juicy bits you got for us?
Re:Lawrence Livermore claims a milestone in laser fusion
by leephillips on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @02:55AM
(#28218348)
Doesn’t ring a bell, but I’m not an expert in Star Wars stuff. I don’t know if this qualifies as juicy, but let me just point out, as a general strategy, that if your boss puts you on a project that you don‘t want to work on, and you are in a position to ensure that the project will lose its funding by failing to meet its milestones...well, you can‘t work on a project that doesn’t exist.
Re:Lawrence Livermore claims a milestone in laser fusion
by DaiPlusPlus on Thursday August 19, 2021 @05:37AM
(#28231933)
> you can‘t work on a project that doesn’t exist.
You've lost me :S
But consider this analogous situation. I was working in a government physics lab when Star Wars (excuse me—SDI) was still a program that you could get money from for all kinds of projects. Nobody—I mean nobody—actually doing research believed in the program. That we would actually build a Star Wars defense shield to make Ronald Reagan proud. But they happily sent off grant proposals and were glad to accept money to work on various things. You can spin lots of pet projects so it sounds like they are all about missile defense. But the algorithms I worked on, during my brief involvement, would have been more useful for game design.