LEDs, drama

You have to pulse the water in just the right sequence to use it as a fuel you see:

Bosses do that kind of thing. It does blow up quite a few components.

Probably too embarrassed to admit it.

I wish there were more clients looking for designs where the designer gets to keep what it does a secret, also, that would make life easier.

Could be for the timing capacitors in a fusion bomb. I really wouldn't worry about it.

I've done timing to fire implosion fission bombs, and this doesn't look to be one of those.

Some of the things that could be really fun aren't, because the good bits are secret.

One of my son-in-laws has a PhD in engineering mechanics and works for a big lab that blows things up. He says it's not much fun because the booms happen miles away and all he gets is data.

Yes, I said *fusion* bomb which is somewhat different. Timing is critical for those. It's rather like grasping a wet bar of soap.

Yes, I can see how that would spoil things a bit from your POV.

Er, yes. I think on balance I'd sooner be miles away in his position. Jeff loves blowing stuff up. Haven't heard from him in a while; hope he's okay and not been 'hoist by his own petard' if I might throw in a bit of Hamlet here.

We did the master timing system and the beam modulators for NIF, the fusion laser in Livermore. The fusion energy yield is about the energy in a jelly donut.

After decades, they finally got the fusion yield, energy out over UV light in, above unity.

A petard was a very small canon or mortar used for blowing down doors and walls, and notoriously dangerous to the person employing it.

"Fusion" bombs are wrapped around a fission bomb, typically an implosion device. I haven't clue what the fusible layer is - Wikipedia says lithium deutride - and a tamper layer is wrapped around that. If the tamper layer is made of uranium you get a very dirty fission-fusion-fission bomb. The only interesting timing involved is in getting the shell of explosives to go off all at once so that you get your symmetrical implosion to compress the inner core of plutonium.

The fisson bomb is different from an implosion fission bomb, but only in structure - the timing problem is exactly the same.

Wow, thanks, I always wondered where the expression came from.

You see, for me the word "petard" is very similar to the Spanish "petardo", a firecracker.

The wikipedia doesn't explain why it was that dangerous. The Spanish article on it is much shorter, but the explanation on how it was prepared is more detailed.

It comes from French. It literally means "farter".

Jeroen Belleman

In French, "Chat GPT" becomes "Cat, I have farted".