Alex Goodwin writes:

>     I didn't actually mention anything about "messy neutrons" - I think that
>     was one of the Jims.

Whoops, apologies.

>     IIUC, an upper bound on fusion efficiency is the relative mass deficit
>     between the reactants and the products - assuming you catch the direct
>     energy released, the kinetic energy of the products, and of the decay
>     products.

Agree. Lots of engineering hand-waving going on there, of course :-)

>     How does your assumption of having grav "almost certainly" imply control
>     of strong and weak nuclear forces?  Is that because in our current take
>     on grand unified theories, gravity is the sticking point?

Excellent point. Thank you. I withdraw the statement.

Now in the OTU, there is some level of control of all three of these forces.
In my T5 book grav control comes in at TL10, but Nuclear Dampers (strong/weak force
control) don't fully arrive until TL12, so in fact I had it backwards - grav control
comes before strong/weak force control. Control of the strong and weak forces seem
to be lumped in together, but perhaps the game designers were prescient :-)

Grav control would (as I said) let you get more efficiency out of a fusion reactor,
but it's not the only way. Control of the strong and weak forces could do the same.

Side question for anyone who's still awake: exactly *which* "mesons" are fired by
a meson gun? Options include what are now called muons, also pions, and more exotic
possibilities. IMTU (and I make no claim of canonicity here) the first few generations
of meson guns fire muons, and so imply weak force control (muons, according to
Wikipedia, decay via the weak force). Nth (current, IMTU) TL generation weapons fire
pions, so imply strong force control. I came up with this purely for plot reasons.

Jonathan