Comment on Actually it's pretty cool
barsoap@lemm.ee 3 days agoYeah I’m blind that’s four. Having fewer twists means more coils have the same shape so it’s going to be cheaper to build but of course that’s just one dimension of a massive, massive, design space. That’s practically all they’ve been working on since Wendelstein turned on and exceeded everyone’s expectations by behaving exactly as predicted. Wouldn’t make sense to build a thing that gets Q > 1 but can’t compete with at least fossil fuels, in fact that’d be rather embarrassing.
Yareckt@lemmynsfw.com 3 days ago
Oh that’s a good explanation for four twists. It sounds pretty likely that this was factored into the design.
barsoap@lemm.ee 3 days ago
On second thought, assuming equal spacing and same size of torus, less twists actually gives less repeated coils than more twists. An uneven number sounds bad for repeatability, though, and six might either be too much (ions don’t want to twirl that fast) or the coils get too complicated to still be amenable to proper mass production or something.