Concept: fusion plasma weapon

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I just had an idea: what if you used some powerful magnetic fields to compress tritium or deuterium or whatever until it undergoes fusion and decrease field strength on one segment allowing the plasma made there to vent in a given direction? If anyone at DARPA wants to work on that, feel free to steal the idea.

won't do; the heat is waay to high for this to not melt the weapon (and its wielder) upon fiering.
now, a bomb/mine would be more feasable, although in the distant future.

Heat wouldn't be an issue in a properly confined environment.

The Z machine at Sandia is used for relevant reserach.

Even if the weapon didn't melt, the isotropic radiation emitted as the plasma stream leaves the muzzle would be deadly to those nearby. Imagine trying to use the exhaust of a Saturn V rocket as a tactical weapon. Now scale up the power several thousand times. Not only would your weapon fry everyone within several kilometers, but it would likely be well on its way to your own HQ before you could press the 'Off' button.

A battlefield is not exactly a "properly-confined environment".

You could potentially cover the entire globe by putting them in orbit.

Magnetic fields would be more useful for doing ultra cold fusion (Bose Einstein condensation fusion) than thermofusion processes. I know that there is a big scientific consortium to build a large thermofusion reactor for research into possible power production. The main problem is that the temperatures that have been proposed for what they want to do is approaching the inside temperature of the sun. Containment becomes a huge issue, especially of the high thermal energy. Magnetic forces can be used to slow (and contain) certain particles during a fusion event, but as mentioned before, temperature can play a big factor on what you can do with it. If the materials used to produce the magnetic fields gets too high of a temperature, it can lead to catastrophic failure of the magnetic field during the fusion process, which is not a good thing if you want control over it. If it is being used as a weapon, that can be figured in as a trigger mechanism though. I suppose you could coat the magnetic materials with a temperature resistant coating (doped carbon aerogels would be my guess), but that would cut down of the resulting magnetic field range also. However, even carbon aerogels have their temperature limits....

To be honest, I favor going the ultra cold route if you want to produce usable energy (as I do):

On the BEC fusion side, there was a report last year on a successful experiment that produced more energy than put into the reaction, which is a key step to overcome for ultra cold fusion. A baby step towards the future of energy production if you will. The fuel used in this experiment was a 50/50 mixture of deuterium and tritium. During the process, they combine from compression force to become an unstable helium isotope (3n and 2p => He-5). It then converts one of the neutrons into energy (via E=mc^2, which is basically electromagnetic energy in the high x-ray/gamma region), with the resulting leftover helium product. The starting mechanism involves high energy photons from lasers (along with magnetic fields) that hit the hollow gold foil container that these isotopes are in. Overall the process is safer than thermofusion, as any temperature amount above BEC will kill the process from occurring.

Here is a link to the report:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/tech/inno ... =inthenews

The high beta fusion reactor is an interesting concept:

How about a weapon that shoot an einstein bose's condensate?

What possible advantage would such a weapon have over metallic projectiles accelerated by rapidly expanding high-pressure gas generated by chemical propellants? Especially when one considers that an object impacting at 3 km/s delivers roughly the same amount of kinetic energy to its target as a similar mass of TNT.

It was a joke

To have an effective means of initiating and controlling proton fusion, what is needed is a force so strong that it overcomes the repellent electrical charge between the two particles.

Something like point-source gravity control.

I hope that the LHC will produce enough data to enable scientists to develop a means to control gravity.

Then again, if the LHC is slamming protons head-on into each other at about 0.999999991 c (or about 3 meters-per-second slower than the speed of light), then why have the scientists running the place not observed nuclear fusion occurring in the target zone?