I wrote:

> exactly *which* "mesons" are fired by a meson gun?

James Catchpole answered:
> One possible handwave is to say that jump space, or something similar, is involved somehow.
> The mesons are tunneled from the gun to the target point where they emerge as a beam and
> immediately start decaying...

Not bad. Sorta ties in with stutterwarp drives.

> The other possible explanation is the old suggestion that it was invented by Prof. Meson

Very droll. I like it.

And to my original point (about fusion reactor efficiency), he further wrote:> Yeah, but I'm looking at reaction drives because I don't want to use any kind of gravity control...

Fair enough. You can still hand-wave strong force control for the neutrons coming off
your fusion reactor. Or use them as propellant? :-) (OK, maybe not.)

My real point here is that once you posit the invention of not-well-described
technology X, this has all sorts of knock-on effects, especially when combined
with equally not-well-described technology Y.

Richard Aiken wrote:

> ISTR someone positing that the appellation "meson gun" originated with a TAS reporter of
> the time misunderstanding the technical briefing he was given and the IN subsequently not
> trying very hard to correct this (for security reasons).

Certainly has a ring of plausibility :-)

Jonathan