Monday…
Monday was Monday, even for someone like me. It was still the start of the workweek and I still had to deal with the deluge of requests that had piled up over the weekend.
After I went over the applications for the educated workforce for my reactor (Hey! A few more!), I checked to ensure that there weren't any issues on the job site in Niger.
Things were being put together faster than I expected, honestly, Though I guess it did help that I had way more people on staff than were actually necessary for this job.
Two hundred people, once I got them properly organized, had raced through the construction and wiring of the perimeter wall and now that the heavy equipment had been brought in, they had blitzed though laying the foundations for the various buildings.
We still had a little longer before I could get started on the reactor, but in all honesty, it was looking more and more like I would need to buy more land, especially for some of my later projects.
Thankfully, my bribes had already endeared me to enough people that any purchases I needed to make would be just as painless as this one and I would still enjoy the privacy that I was enjoying here. Well, unless I pissed off any of the locals by buying out land that they were interested in.
That, I would have to be careful about.
Still, that would probably only start being an issue next week, as the buildings start to go up. In the meantime, I had other work to do.
Like looking into the political systems of Gabon to see who I will need to bribe in order to set up a spaceport there.
It was busywork in all honesty, but to be fair, I would still need this information in a few months once I revealed the fusion plant to the world and I was able to start reaching for space.
Speaking of space travel, I still needed to adapt the muon source for the reactor into a workable fusion torch for the rockets that I want to send up. If my math works out, I should be able to recover most of the thermal energy with little issue while still generating plenty of power for the rocket's electronics. Perhaps not as efficient as my engines, but the fusion torch should be able to do a little bit more than break even, and still produce energetic enough exhaust to give plenty of useful thrust if I manage to shape the reaction chamber correctly.
I'm just worried that I will be forced to play my hand too strongly.
I could theoretically kick the problem at some of the particle physicists I'm thinking of hiring once the accommodations are sorted, but that wouldn't be nearly as secure and testable as having a design myself that I could test it here, using all the advanced technology I had in order to properly determine it was safe before releasing it to the wider world.
I considered the reaction chamber and sighed, putting it to one side as I started again.
Really, it was gas purity in the reaction chamber that was the issue here. The pathway that the particle accelerators use to allow the mass production of muons at a cost of 1.65 GeV would allow us to produce a great deal of power as long as we managed to keep the purity of the hydrogen in the reaction chamber relatively high.
Which was relatively simple in the closed reactor designs we were using for the plants. The torch, on the other hand, would require an entirely separate magnetic field geometry and an entirely separate mechanism to produce power from the excess heat that wasn't being used to accelerate the plume of hot gasses that the rocket would ride into the atmosphere.
Maybe if I pulsed the reaction? Muon catalysed fusion didn't need to worry too much about having a high reaction temperature, so I could get away with a lower temperature substrate by pulsing it in order to cycle the atmosphere of the reaction chamber.
It would cut down on thrust though…
Actually, how much would it? The previous chamber was too polluted with helium after the first few seconds of operation that I was starting to see a rather wide spread of possible thrust values a little too unstable for a fusion engine.
I started running the numbers on the engines, I'd have to try and model the pulsed power generation, but at the very least, it should be predictable enough that I should be able to include the fluctuations in the stable power curve.
As I typed up some equations with one hand, I reached into the drawers and pulled out some sheets of woven spider-silk. The thin gossamer fabric was soon inked with a variety of arcane sigils and symbols.
Moving over to the other side of the table, I carefully lit the small brass brazier full of herbs and burnt the silk.
Leaning over, I breathed in the smoke, my vision growing hazy as I was overtaken by the hallucination of the propulsion test labs a few rooms over. I saw as the room magically shifted into a new configuration. In front of my eyes, I saw a new reactor fabricate itself as it flew though the air into the test rig.
Then, I saw it engage.
It took a moment, for the muon synthesis to spin up, but once it did, I saw the glow of the fusion reaction kick in…
And the crash as the chamber blasted off the restraints and through the wall, collapsing the mystical simulation.
I collapsed back into my seat and massaged my head, forcing my slowly developing reserve of innate magic to expel the malformed remnants of the spell from my mind.
Well, that was something of a success.
As my headache subsided, I picked myself out of my chair and headed to the propulsion labs. It seemed I had some upgrades to work out.
Eventually, I collapsed back into my seat. It would take a few days for the people Winston recommended to me to deliver the new equipment I would need to update te laboratory.
At least this meant that the full-scale thruster should be able to produce plenty of thrust for the final design. Actually, I bet that I could even control that thrust by reducing the clock rate of the cycles.
Though, the pulses would quantize the thrust a little too much. Perhaps if I could buffer the thrust somehow? Of maybe even reroute it? The effect wouldn't be nearly as efficient as if I was able to mediate the fusion reaction in some other way.
It's too bad that the hardware for muon production can't be made variable.
Though, that said, I could waste some of the energy from the thrusters and decrease the chamber pressure and reduce energy production that way.
That might work, actually. I'll have to test it out once the upgrades are complete.
I sigh, at least this means that I can get enough work done to free up tomorrow for my double date with Raven and Gwen tomorrow.
Pulling up my computer again, I open up my email, the connection stalling for a second before the secure portal projector creates a link into my room and re-establishes access to my internet.
I nod, it looks like things are going well.
The fabrication is well underway, and some of the simpler parts are actually already en route to the hand-off locations. In a few days, I would be picking up various components and bringing them to the compound for quality assurance and storage until the reactor room is complete.
Still, that is a couple of days off, so I move onto my next task.
My little gold business is still producing plenty of funding for my projects, but it's becoming more and more obvious that it won't be enough forever.
Yes, my fusion business would give me a great deal of money soon, it would receive a lot of competition, especially once I revealed the basics of the pathway that allowed the mass production of muons.
That alone would let people produce fusion reactors of their own in as little as two years if they were lucky, even if the reactors weren't quite up to matching my own, they would still produce more than enough power for commercial use.
Realistically, my big push will be in the space sector.
Yes, Space X has been doing a lot, but my fusion torch should allow me to outperform their best rockets and a little cheating should mean that I can start work on asteroid mining operations well before they can.
My own thruster design makes use of advances that none of the others has, and it will take them longer to catch up in this respect than it will for reactor technology, especially considering that ITER has managed a good amount of work on that front as it is.
I'll have to make contact with the right people in order to find customers for the materials I gather from mining asteroids, even if I do have to supplement the output with some extra material from other sources.
And that isn't even considering the other services that I can offer with that sort of orbital capacity. I didn't really want to compete with Starlink, I'd rather just let SpaceX sort that out on their own, but plenty of governments would be very happy to learn that I was planning on placing a constellation dedicated to detecting astronomical phenomena in orbit around earth.
It had started as something of a whim, after yet another news report of astronomers complaining about SpaceX's plans for satellite internet. I wondered if it would be profitable to stick a bunch of space telescopes in orbit, network them and use them to create the largest telescope array known to mankind.
Oddly enough, it would be.
Fusion torch space-lift with reusable rockets was cheap enough that putting a few dozen or even a hundred such telescopes in orbit was actually a relatively simple thing.
Building and maintaining those telescopes would be troublesome, but at that point, I was mostly a matter of modifying existing designs and fabricating them.
We could auction off sensor real estate outside of large scale projects for not insignificant amounts of money, not to mention that the sensor systems could be used for any number of other purposes.
The only real upgrade, beyond simply capturing more light with more or bigger satellites, I expected to see was once I had orbital habitats and I could build a telescope with an effective radius of that orbit.