That's what I heard a chemical engineer say before an experiment. "Statisticaly there will never really be more than one or two going off". Then ... KABLAM!
After the smoke had wafted off and the coughing eased up we could see that everyone was dirty but ok. Even the supposedly unbreakable blast plate lay there on the floor in shards.
John,
Nice project and concise description! Did you get to build the multiple systems as well conjure the designs of the prototypes? Great project for high speed triggering, synchoronzation and general electronics fun.
Best regards
Marc Popek
We collaborated with the NIF people on the architectural design of the modulators and the timing system, and we did the detail circuit design. We built about 55 modulator chassis and about 250 VME timing modules.
These are the timing modules. Each one receives a master OC-3 fiber timing signal that's distributed all over the site. We phaselock to it and decode data packets that tell each channel when to fire.
Note the crystal oscillator mounted on tiny springs.
The head-end system that generates the master optical data streams was done by Timing Solutions.
These Big Science projects are interesting and can be profitable, bacause they buy a lot of stuff. The problem is that they only happen once in a while and once they're built, that's it... no more business. It's like crossing a river on the backs of the alligators. The other problem is that sometimes they get cancelled for political reasons, like the Supercollider and AVLIS.
John
Joerg snipped-for-privacy@removethispacbell.net posted to sci.electronics.design:
Yep, Nemisis came along on his rounds after Hubris visited.
The other one was a chemist just before he got his masters. "We had a minor mishap" ... "What happened?" ... "Well, remember my lab?" ... "Yeah." ... "It's a black hole now. Even the door blew out."
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