[androa]

Short story, they are shooting small plastic cubes with gas inside. The cubes are called "targets".

The "bullet" is fast enough to compress the gas inside the cube, creating fusion.

It works. But in the scenario it does work, a machine is manually opened, loaded, prepared, and then they do the shot. Whole process takes days to prepare.

For it to be viable they need to do this every five seconds.

That is a hard problem to solve. First lights business model is not to solve that problem, but rather producing the "fuel", the tiny cubes with gas inside.

They say there is many details in how they are built which increases efficiency.

But someone still has to figure out how to build a machine that can continuously reload both the fuel and the bullet.

[oneoff786]

Ok. So dumb question. What complicates this beyond a conceptual belt fed heavy machine gun?

[Gene_Parmesan]

> To deliver this fusion result, First Light used its large two-stage hyper-velocity gas gun to launch a projectile at a target, containing the fusion fuel. The projectile reached a speed of 6.5 km per second before impact. First Light’s highly sophisticated target focuses this impact, with the fuel accelerated to over 70 km per second as it implodes, an increase in velocity achieved through our proprietary advanced target design, making it the fastest moving object on earth at that point.

Conceptually, maybe nothing, but we aren't really talking about your average MG-42 here.

[skykooler]

For one thing, it's a light-gas gun - you don't just reload the projectile, you have to refill the hydrogen after each shot.