Fusion Propulsion Post

I meant to write about it today, but I can't think of anything to write about. It has already been covered. The only thing I haven't written about is...  (blankout)

Look, the Lawrenceville Plasma Physics people are on to this, most likely. It would take only a minor modification of their device in order to make it suitable as a fusion propulsion device. How?

By taking away the coil which will be useful for electricity production, but not useful for spacecraft propulsion. But I covered that already. What next?

The thought occurred to me that if this device had sufficient thrust and ISP, you would not need to get to orbital velocity in order to escape Earth's gravity. But I covered that already.

Hmmm. Okay, so I went back into a Power Point file and picked out yet something else that I probably covered already. No, that was a different post.  This power point pic isn't what Lockheed Martin produced, because I blanked out what I didn't quite understand or even agree with and came up with this

Now, the main thing to see is a picture of what I'm seeing.  Here you have the Focus Fusion device (with the arrow pointing downward toward the magnetic nozzle), the tanks of hydrogen and boron that will comprise the reaction products that will fuse in the device and send out the alpha particles (mentioned in an earlier post) as thrust.

Lerner says that he can get 30,000 out of 100,000 joules expended.  The rest is still in the device, not lost.  This will demonstrate feasibility, says Lerner.  But, let's just say (for the sake of argument)  that we are just able to use the 30,000 joules.  That is 30,000 Newtons, is it not?  Is it not also true, that without slowing down the alpha particles (as would be the case if you were to convert to electricity), that you will get virtually all of this output?

It should be noted that

1. I am relying on memory about the 30,000 joules
2. That there isn't anything significant that I am missing
3. There could be something significant that I am missing because I am not trained in this area
4. My energy conversions could be wrong
5. The device mentioned has not demonstrated continuous firing.  It would have to fire continuously in order to be useful for power or propulsion.  I am assuming that Lerner has this figured out.

Why write all this?  Haven't they already thought about this?  Yes, I'm sure somebody has.  What bothers me is that somebody could have something worthwhile and have it suppressed.  There was a time when I thought that such a thing would not happen, but these days, I'm not so sure anymore.

Update:

I tried to confirm that 30,000 joules number by looking over a few of my posts.  I know that I saw or heard that somewhere, but can't remember exactly where.  Also, some of the energy production will come from the Xray emissions.  Not all of it will come from the alpha particles.  So, the potential thrust will be somewhere south of 30,000 joules.  Don't know how far, but somewhat south of that number.