Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships

For "boosted fission" and early thermonuclear bomb designs yes, but not so for the more evolved thermonuclear designs. Navajo (Operation Redwing, 1956) was 95% fusion, Tsar bomba (1961) was 97% fusion, Housatonic (Operation Dominic, 1962) was 99.9% fusion.

Do you believe MIT? They used to run the Alcator C-Mod, which had the highest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, did preliminary work with the new superconductors, and based on all that they designed ARC before they spun off a company to actually build it.

The main issue is that prevailing winds have a direction, and there's not a continuous open ocean path other than the Southern Ocean which is harsh even by the standards of oceans. Sure you can steer along trade winds in the Atlantic or Pacific but there's quite some efficiency loss.

(Give climate change another decade or so and the Arctic Ocean maybe becomes an option, although by then we'll have bigger fish to fry, or perhaps poach).

If you fix your goalposts for long enough, cohort effects will move around them.

I'm not sure how old your mom is, but 1000km drives aren't something most people want to be doing past 75 ish. And newer cohorts adapt their lifestyles and expectations to available technology, whether that's charging time, on-demand rental for the occasionally needed longer distance EVs, and so on.

Although I can't help thinking that hybrids are a better fit for this common usage pattern - given a choice between hauling the dead weight of a rarely-used gasoline engine, or the dead weight of the 80% of battery capacity you hardly ever use, the gas engine is cheaper and less demanding of rare metals.

It's a shame that weight considerations mean "rent 80% extra range in a removable module for occasional use" isn't a practical option. You could almost have a 10kWh/50km light EV with a gasoline generator or extra battery in a hitch trailer, but the trade-offs don't quite work.

> perpetual motion engine

[with apologies to OP] "Hey HN, we’re just Ian and Jay's son, co-founders of Maritime Perpetual Motion (https://maritimeperpetualmot.io/n). We’re working on pitching perpetual motion reactors to VCs—specifically, large well-capitalised funds and Angel Investor applications. Should be easy!

Yes, we know: perpetual motion has been the energy source of the future for centuries…and it always will be. But high-temperature superconductors (HTS) have changed the game for magnetic bearings, and we believe we’ll witness someone else achieving Q > 1 within a few (say 3) years. That’s huge.

(Side note: Q is the ratio of input power divided by output power. Q> 1 means the machine is producing more power than it consumes, achieving ‘perpetuity.’)

However, getting to perpetuity is just the first daunting challenge. Making the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) machines cost-competitive on the grid? That might be even harder.

That’s why we’re taking this hopefully-soon-to-be breakthrough in perpetual motion and applying it to the first market we believe makes sense: extracting money from VCs.

Instead of targeting 24/7 baseload grid electricity—where perpetual motion has to compete with real things which really exist and actually work, like solar, wind, batteries, and natural gas—we’re focusing on large commercial funds (>10,000 $) and mobile individual investors to provide wallet-to-wallet capital transfer capability.

Why VCs? They don’t have great alternatives—the crypto industry is old-hat, hydrogen and ammonia are being explored but come with serious downsides that can only be handwaved away for so long: low energy density, flammability, leaks, and massive infrastructure challenges. AI is running out its welcome, and nobody cares about the Hyperloop. It's time to return to the overbalanced wheel and friends for another 'go round' - see what I did there? Perpetual motion will provide a high-density, long-term solution without the same infrastructure challenges—once it works, of course! wink wink.

One common question is, why not zero-point energy? Zero point energy works fictitiously, but not practically. Small Modular Blackholes (SMBs) could produce power, but licensing is brutally hard and expensive—doing it internationally with enriched antimatter is nearly impossible. Public perception is another major barrier: if we’re deploying thousands of machines globally, they need to be meltdown-proof. Perpetual Motion is the only way to guarantee that. Regulation also isn’t as bad. While perpetual motion won’t be a walk in the park to license, the NRC has declared a distinct framework for it—more like FTL drives and teleporters than nuclear power plants. That’s a game-changer.

Instead of a 500+ MW grid-scale reactor, our system is 25 MWe, designed for, ummm, ... ship propulsion! Our tokamakebelieve is roughly, uhh, jet-engine-sized, but with Room Temperature Superconductor magnets (8-9T) and higher azimuth current (~10MA). The first-wall power flux capacitor is down from multi-MW/m² to nearly 500 kW/m²—still tough, but not nightmare mode. The materials challenges associated with the first wall and nuclear activation of the Bremsstrahlung structures is greatly reduced. Also, ships don’t require 90% uptime for some reason, probably, making this a far more forgiving early application of perpetual motion; the famously profitable and high-margin global shipping industry.

Jay's son and I come from Fintech and Theranos, where we solved hard marketing hype problems at scale. My background is BS engineering (NC State, BS) and VX physics[1] (Prager University, MS). We’ve been busy during our time in YC making progress on our elevator-pitch design, and are in the process of assembling a team of business development managers and LinkedIn rockstars who can pull this off.

We sell this as a ridiculously hard problem, of course (because VCs wouldn't invest in anything else). But we think extracting money for old rope is the right hard problem—one that’s actually solvable (and for us, worth solving!) with today’s tech if applied correctly. Eventually the cheaper and more robust SOAK and NOAK (second-of-a-kind and nth-of-a-kind) machines 'will arrive' in the coming decades (2050-2060) wink wink, and then we'll pivot to decapitalising the taxpayer and hypewashing saving the world (we'll need to change our name by then to keep the cash flowing), but until then we'll be out mining the ocean for precious metals using our perpetual Magneto Hydro Drive!

Would love to hear your thoughts—whether you’re deep into troll-physics and engineering, skeptical-but–gullible, or just have a trust fund and nothing to do with it. Ask us anything!"

[1] r/VXjunkies