Noth, on 03 February 2013 - 12:52 AM, said:
The air would go back out the holes or any other cracks and opening it comes to as all explosions take the path of least resistance. At most it would be like a flamer, probably weaker. It still is not an explosion. The only explosion is an extremely rare boiler type explosion caused by essentially over revving the engine, which we cannot do.
sarna disagrees. around here sarna seems to be have the final say in any debates.
that was direct copy pasta from the fusion engine page. i even gave a link if wish to make sure i didn't edit anything.
what determines an explosion is the rate of expansion. if air were suddenly sucked into a vacuum (like exists around the fusion material) then is superheated rapidly enough it could explode very violently. according to sarna mech reactors are actually using plain hydrogen and not deuterium (which was my original assumption). this means that the fusion material needs to be kept at temperatures in excess of 2,500,000kelvin. just for perspective i am pretty sure temperatures on earth in a natural setting never go above 400kelvin. even our current hydrogen bombs cannot create those temperatures.
our hydrogen bombs use dueterium which only needs 100,000kelvin to initiate fusion.
Edited by blinkin, 03 February 2013 - 01:05 AM.