Boresighting, writ large

Or, How to properly boresight an M1A1 Abrams.

(Crossposted to guns)

Steampunk fusion

The latest Popular Science has an article on an tiny little private outfit in Vancouver Burnaby, BC that's trying to build a mechanical fusion reactor ... it uses an array of 200 precisely synchronized steam-driven pistons to create a contracting spherical shockwave in a ball of molten lead-lithium alloy, which is spinning fast enough to create a void in the center into which deuterium-tritium plasma is injected.  It's not continuous fusion — the machine is supposed to complete one fusion cycle per second.

At first, reading the article, I just thought, "Surely this can't work" (though some physicist PopSci talked to says that in principle there's no technical reason it couldn't work).  But then it hit me .... it's a steampunk fusion reactor.

Which would make it totally awesome if it DID work ....