As it applies to shipping, I'm curious to know if you initially considered alternative/hybrid approaches which would augment current/modern approaches to shipping, like using sails. It seems to me like this is an obvious miss in modern (dirty) shipping.
Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
41–50 of 267 posts
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#42Congrats on launching. This is a hard area. Wish you luck.
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#43So your approach to fusion is "the same CFS but stay at roughly the size of the SPARC prototype instead of scaling up"? When you say "Q > 1 within a few (say 3) years" are you talking about your own reactors, or others? For that matter, are you trying to partner with CFS and license their technology or are you intending on starting "from scratch" (from whatever is publicly available)? If that timeline is for fusion i…
Our device is larger than SPARC (~3m major radius) and less power (100MW fusion), hence the confidence in being able to solve the steady-state (repeated inductive pulses) engineering challenges.
We won’t be the first to Q>1, I’m super excited for SPARC to achieve that and will be prepared with champagne.
We’re targeting early 2030’s for our reactor, we’re going straight for the full thing no sub scale reactor in between (we do have a plan for milestone-ing it out in a meaningful way)
I’ve worked on a few alternative approaches earlier in my career (FRC at Princeton, dense plasma focus at LPP Fusion) … I think all fusion approaches are worth looking at, but I’m placing my chips on the tokamak. If I were to pick a runner up, the stellerator.
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#44Twitter thread:
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#45so, given no one knows how to use fusion to produce energy, why do you think now is the time to plan how to put this non-existent technology on to boats?
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#46> “focusing on military vessels … [we] come from SpaceX and Tesla” So you guys are basically part of the MAGA military complex? Why do you need YC? Is funding your moonshot concept a way for YC to signal something politically?
Nothing to do with the hot news of the moment. It's just YC doing what it always does. I think there is probably some kind of headline bleedover effect where, because of repetition, we start seeing these things everywhere, like the afterimage of a bright light.
I think the point being made is more subtle than you're appreciating: it's not just any defense firm, it's a defense firm founded by engineers who have worked on multiple Elon projects. I understand we try to stay away from politics here, but speaking objectively+non-normatively: Elon has been known to greatly favor working with people that have worked at his companies, and he now has immense influence over the contracting processing of the federal government.
In other words: two Cybertruck engineers starting a defense company in February 2025 is naturally going to raise some eyebrows, especially when they're selling a technology that they're counting on other people to invent soon.
More interestingly/generally, your mention of confirmation bias/Bader-Meinhoff raises a question for me: is Y-Combinator really investing more in government and heavy industry as it appears? And it looks like the answer is yes, though it's still a tiny minority compared to general B2B SaaS companies:
https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-last-decade-of-y-combi...
Government is a bigger slicer than it's been since 2017, and similar for industry. More drastically, the pool of companies has greatly constricted in geographic terms, with almost all of the 2024 batch coming from the US. Most importantly--as many of y'all probably already know, but I didn't--they just backed their first pure-defense startup in August, Ares Cruise Missiles.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ares-industries
As far as company mottos go, "Missiles are cool" is a fucking terrifying one... Every day I fear the LessWrong people were less wrong than I thought they were.
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#47now, this is a thing that I want to see YC invest more into
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#48What would the engine with this look like? Does it cause a lot of noise or any other damage to sea life?
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#49What is the feedback from actual prospective clients?
Did YC ask mostly about feasibility, or were they more interested in the customer's opinion?
Re: Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
#50Re Q>1, isn't that just the reaction making more power as heat than you put in and you need something like Q>5 to use the heat to make steam to make electricity to run the thing? (as in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor)