We obviously should come at this from all directions, and surround it so it has to surrender!
Yes, we have to work within the realm of the do-able for sure and certain. However, we also don't want to be the guy looking for his car keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is, even though we dropped them in the alley. In that case, the looking under the light is do-able, but not likely to find the keys in the alley.
The point of course being, no matter how well you refine your aim and your bunching, if you're trying to get something to happen that would cheat some conservation law, it's not going to happen. So we do have to come from all sides here. Sure, orientation may only be a minor thing, and might be pretty hard to get -- or easy, we don't know yet because we've not tried it, and the gist of the thread so far is "what should we be thinking about trying".
I do agree that at some point that has to be limited to the things we actually can try, of course. And yes, there's only some things we can turn the knobs on, and those all involve the EM long range forces as far as I know. We can't do the rest with any current tech I'm aware of. A long range strong-force transmitter would really be ground breaking!
My thinking is that yes, we can only do preparation of our reactants via EM kinds of things, and simply hope to set up a situation such that when the shorter range forces take over, everything is optimal for them to do as we wish. This may not be as limiting as some would think. We can polarize things with magnetism, taking advantge of any moment they have in that domain. We can impart angular momentum with circularly polarized photons -- assuming the frequencies required are those we can generate. And at the currents required for lab scale tests, we can surely aim and bunch almost to our hearts content -- I calculated 10pa as being the required rate to get there if the interaction rate is high, and that's a real easy number to deal with -- you can just about ignore complications like space charge repulsion and beam spreading at those levels.
My approach here is to eat our way in from both ends -- we have to have the theory worked to a certain extent, or we'd be trying to force nature to do something it just won't do, no matter how hard we try. But we also have to work within the realm of the possible -- point well taken. Up till this point, things like the selection and conservation rules have simply been ignored in the fusor community, and I was attempting to rectify that lack, because obviously they are going to be important -- and it looks like we're making at least a bit of progress there.
As an iterative process, we can now look at things like "now we know what we want to do, but can we do it, and if so, how" -- and maybe with a side dish of what the side effects and artifacts of the chosen "how" are. All these things seem to be to have to be done in tandem, kind of like a software design where nothing works until it all works, rather than sort of blindly working our way into each feature incrementally, only to find our original design makes adding that crucial feature very difficult. In our work in that area, we always supplemented our top down work with some small tests going bottom up. If we were going to do, say, VOIP, we could do an elegant top down software design only after we understood what TCP/IP and UDP could give us to work with from the bottom up, for example. because it would have been easy to create a pretty design that would have been hell to implement if we didn't know that stuff going in.
At some level, I do have an existence-proof that this is possible, from data already taken here, with technique that is obviously available, as it's already established fact that some of these phenomena have already occurred in the lab, purely by accident. I realize that since it only happened here with the local group having seen it with their own eyes, that this hasn't sunk in for everyone yet -- nor should it till someone else duplicates it, and that's hard in this environment as everyone is doing whatever it is they do, and can't spare the time and effort necessarily to go and dupe what I've already done, and won't if they think they're hot on the trail of their own vision.
What I'd propose at this point is to dramatically simplify the testing system, rather than use a plain fusor here. The fusor was able to show that some interesting and unexpected things can happen, but despite the apparent simplicity, is actually pretty complex in terms of what's going on in that soup, both in bulk and in detail. I'd prefer to investigate this in a system that lets us tweak one thing at a time more easily, rather than depend on emergent behavior in bulk, certainly. This made the fusor a way to "try everything all at once in a poorly controlled fashion". That showed some interesting things that should now be chased down under more controlled (and controllable) conditions. In short, I'm with you here.
So a simpler beam on beam or beam on target approach, where each aspect can be separately varied seems to be the thing called for to look at some of this, even though the apparatus would be more complex than the old "put a grid in a controlled atmosphere, push in some power, and see what happens" rig, as those with fusors have now.
I'm kind of fond of the idea of building one of these as a test platform. Bought the tooling, just haven't gotten around to building one yet. The flexibility of this would allow us to add any sort of focusing, bunching, twisting, whatever, to it and try things on a small lab scale.
For some unknown reason, the Accelerator directory in our online library keeps disappearing from general access -- perhaps some of the ISP software doesn't like that name, I'll look into it, but here's the relevant paper at any rate. The attraction of this design is that there is no reason you couldn't have bunches of ions counter rotate in it, rather than having to build two rings and have them intersect, and of course, it can be made small enough to fit through a 6" door in a system (and the prototype shown here is that size).
I really need to get all those papers back viewable -- it's a lot of good stuff including whole books on the things one can do with particles in beams, done by beamline experts, not just the "conceptually trivial" guys, but people who've actually done it. I'll post if I get it all working again, but till then, here's the paper inline. I can't do that with the books due to the board attachment size limits...I'll try and see what the FTP shows me now, last time it had mysteriously re-attributed itself to be invisible, I fixed it, and now it's happened again. That's one huge directory of good stuff to lose, and I didn't notice till now because of course, I have local copies of it all to look at.
And here's another one that came before the ring thing, less complex but also less versatile.
Ah, here we go,
here's the link to that stuff in general. Humphries has some good stuff in there, but it's too large to attach to a post.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.