[floxy]

I'm a complete layman when it comes to ICF, but I'm assuming that there is a scaling factor between surface area and volume that would eventually help here? As in, the lasers initiate fusion on the surface of the fuel pellet, which propagates the fusion into the interior of the pellet in a chain reaction / positive feedback kind of way. So that if you increased the surface area of the pellet by a factor of 10, you'd get 100 times more total output energy (since there is 100 times more mass in a pellet with 10 times the surface area). So you'd need 10 times the current input power, but would get 100 times the output power.

[leephillips]

That won’t work, I don’t think. You can’t make the pellets much larger because laser nonuniformities and hydrodynamic instabilities will kill the implosion; there will be no fusion at all. But that’s not a problem, you see, because in a commercial reactor you’ll have a pellet factory making the required one million targets per day, and they will be injected into the chamber 10 times per second, with practically no down time. And each shot will have gain > 100 to get net energy out.

[b33j0r]

That’s pretty much what this design would require for continuous operation.

But I cannot tell if this comment is being facetious or rather optimistic. Therefore, I’ll agree!