William-Black on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/william-black/art/NTA-Sunheart-V-Fusion-Torch-526222365William-Black

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NTA Sunheart V Fusion Torch

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Created for Alistair Young's Eldraeverse

Nucleodyne Thrust Applications, ICC, first rose to prominence in the early Era of Diamond and Ice, when as a contractor for the Deep Star program, it was responsible for designing and manufacturing the drives which propelled the first eldrae sub-light colony ships to the stars selected to become the Thirteen Colonies.

These initial drives, the first in the Starblaze series, were variations on the then commonly used magnetic confinement fusion drives, making use of the Helium-3/deuterium process long familiar from second-phase fusion reactors. The genius of the NTA engineers was in scaling the process for interstellar travel; first-flight Starblazes were impractically large for most uses, temperamental, terrifyingly radioactive, and possessed of a regrettably short operational lifespan as the difficulty of containing plasma heated to stellar-core temperatures rapidly eroded even the most refractory materials available for the containment coils and blade shields of the magnetic drive nozzles. Despite this, only they successfully permitted the Deep Star ships to make the first ever interstellar transits.

In the modern era, while Nucleodyne Thrust Applications continues to manufacture new variants of the Starblaze-series, such large fusion drives for the remaining subluminal interstellar transit needs, primarily for exploration probes and stargate positioning, the advent of the stargate has concentrated their attention on the requirement for high-power drives for interplanetary operations – the spun-off Sunheart series.

The current Sunheart V drives, the fifth design iteration, make use of two products of the emergent field of ontotechnology operating together to enhance the fusion drive into a true fusion torch, capable of sustained operation to provide multiple gravities of thrust.

The first of these is vector control, which while still limited by the various conservation laws, permits limited manipulation of the gravitational interaction. Its chief role in the Sunheart drives is for containment, creating kinetic barriers which work in combination with the electromagnetics to safely confine and channel the drive plasma.

The second is the use of ontotechnology affecting the weak interaction (via manipulating the electroweak unification) to locally stabilize the muon, permitting the creation of muon metals. Due to the higher mass of the muon vis-à-vis the electron, the atomic orbitals of muon metals are collapsed, rendering them much more tightly bound than conventional “electron metals”, with extremely high densities and a remarkably refractory nature.


In short, the former allows the Sunheart V to successfully contain fusion plasma at the optimal temperature for He3-D fusion of 1.16 x 109 K plasma; and the latter allows a relatively miniaturized gravomagnetic nozzle to survive the process. As shielding, the latter also permits the use of pure orichalcium – the high-temperature superconductor used by much eldrae electrical technology – in the containment coils rather than less efficient but more resilient orichalcium alloys, which in turn permits the magnetic fields to be more tightly controlled and constrained within the immediate nozzle area, to the point at which, with careful design, fusion torch drives can even be successfully clustered, as in the Sunheart V 4x1 configuration used by among others the the Drake-class frigate, seen here.

Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rocket’s site provides the following pages on the basic MCFD (Magnetic Confinement Fusion Drive).
 
Fusion
Fusion Reactions  
Magnetic Nozzles

Related:

The Core War and Other Stories
The Eldraeverse
Image size
3206x4000px 2.61 MB
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xenoorb's avatar
Good work. What 3D program do you use? I'd guess light wave, modo, or 3ds max.