Talk:Fusion Power Plant/@comment-96.3.96.31-20150622150752/@comment-24951265-20150622154132

In point of fact, there have been suggestions for using the waste heat from fusion power plants to separate waste material into raw elements via something like an industrial scale mass spectrometer in various SF stories over the years - James P. Hogan's "Voyage To Yesteryear" mentions it explicitly, Robert Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer" implies it. However, the only elements most fusion plants would generate as a matter of course would be helium, lithium, and trace amounts of boron and beryllium. Elements as high as carbon and oxygen would be extremely unlikely, and generating anything as high up the scale as uranium would be right out.

All in all, there's a certain amount of unreality to the game forced by the need to make it a game, and not a rather boring scientific NASA study. The number of finicky details to get this truly realistic would be insane, and quite frankly, would not run on tablets. Think, instead, of datacenters full of racks of computers stuffed with 4 or 8 video cards each, each video card being used for its computing power, and not its fancy graphics capabilities.

Simulated space travel is easy - the real thing? *HARD* - just getting to the ISS involves math that makes my head want to explode!

http://www.baen.com/rendezvous.asp

http://baen.com/rendezvous-part2.asp