[noobermin]

I'm sympathetic, but how is projectile implosion supposed to be "proven" like NIF was? If anything, corrections to the imperfections which will come about and lead to instabilities will be harder with actually physically driven projectiles unlike the lasers at NIF where it's light and they can do crazy things like cross-beam energy transfer.

I also don't know why they claim to be "proven" by NIF's result, they are "ICF" by a choice of definition but it's a very different physical system, and just like NIF took decades, ironing out their sources of instabilities will literally be most of their effort, which they'll only know once they've done actual experimental runs.