She paused again at the laser oscillator unit, forward of the laser generators. 'This is what you use to combine and channel the laser light?' she asked.
'The Faraday oscillator,' Jon said. He stepped over to the young girl, studying her eyes as she looked at the device. It was as big as the eight laser generators combined, taking up a huge amount of space inside the fuselage.
Jon had not been with Kelsey Duffield that much since her dad's company became one-third partners in Sky Masters Inc. But Jon had quickly learned one very interesting thing: Kelsey's eyes were truly windows into her extraordinary brain. He could look at her eyes and see the calculations, the engineering, the mechanics, and the physics coming alive, almost as clear as a computer printout. He tried to guess what she was looking at, figure out what she was studying so intently, and then try to outguess her. It was not an easy task-but it was a constant challenge for him, trying to at least match her lightning-quick rftind, and he loved the mental exercise.
That's why he was so disappointed when she moved on. He thought she figured something out about the oscillator. It was easily the clunkiest and most low-tech component of the SSL-basically just a big airless can with mirrors in it and a big lens in front. The laser light coming from the generators was directed into the collimator and bounced back and forth and rotated around between liquid-cooled mirrors in the oscillator. When the light was at the precise wavelength and all of the light waves were in perfect alignment, the lens allowed the light to escape out the front to the argon-filled waveguide, which channeled the laser energy to the deformable mirror in the nose turret.
'What are you thinking about, Kelsey?' Jon asked.
'Energy,' the girl replied.
'What about it?'
'How much we need, how much we have?'
'Relatively speaking, not very much,' Jon replied. 'We added just one alternator and one generator to the basic B-52 electrical system to power the laser. Four three-hundredamp engine-driven alternators, each one supplying power in a separate circuit to four essential AC buses and two emergency AC buses. Four twenty-kilowatt engine-driven generators supplying power to two DC essential buses and one emergency DC bus. Backup power is four engine-driven hydraulically powered alternators and generators, which power only the essential A and emergency A buses.'
'Generators and alternators, huh?' Kelsey asked.
'This is an airplane, Kelsey, not a spaceship. What do you want on board-fuel cells? A nuclear reactor?' She looked at him with a silent 'Why not?' expression. 'You want to put a nuclear reactor on board a B-52?'
'You have one, don't you?'
'A nuclear reactor? Are you craz-?' But then he stopped-he was doing that a lot, as if the ideas that flooded his brain used so much energy that he was unable to budget enough brainpower to move his lips. 'We… we can't do that!' He didn't sound too convincing, even to himself.
'Sure you can. We've had megawatt-power generators smaller than my mommy's car for years.'
'Sure-fission reactors.'
'Right.'
'Well, you can't put a nuclear reactor aboard an aircraft!'
'Why not?'
'Why not? It's… it's…' Jon couldn't think of a reason why right away. 'Because… because no one wants a plane with a nuclear reactor flying over their homes, that's why.'
'I guess,' Kelsey said. 'We've had ships with nuclear reactors sailing past our homes for a long time-but an airplane is different, I guess.' She continued to study the inner plumbing of the fuselage. 'But the LADAR is a diode-pumped solid-state laser, right?'
'Sure. But it's only one-tenth the power of the SSLnot enough to destroy a ballistic missile at the ranges we want to engage at.'
'But if we had more power?'
'The smallest diode-pumped laser in the one-megawatt range that I know of is the size of a living room, and it has its own transformer farm to power it.'
Kelsey looked up at the B-52 bomber. 'This plane is a lot bigger than a living room, Jon,' she said with a grin.
'We can't do that kind of engineering with…' But he stopped-again-as his mind began to race. 'I wonder… if we used a different pumping system…?'
Kelsey turned around and pointed to the Lancelot missile. 'We can take your plasma-yield warhead,' Kelsey said, 'and use it to pump the laser.'
'Pump a laser with… with plasma!' Jon gasped. 'I… I've never heard of that before.'
'You thought of it years ago, Jon,' Kelsey said. 'I read about it in one of the magazine articles you wrote. You were going to use lasers to create a plasma fieldLawrence Livermore built their inertial confinement plasma generator based on your ideas-and then you talked about the feasibility of using a plasma discharge to pump a laser. The system would have generated-tts own power and its own fuel-a virtually unlimited power supply. Why don't we do it? Take similar SSL arrays you use for the laser radar. You have four arrays on the Dragon. How many laser emitters in each array?'
'Three hundred and forty.'
'Oh, boy,' Kelsey cooed happily. 'We shoot the lasers into an inertial confinement chamber loaded up with deuterium and tritium fuel pellets and then channel the plasma field into the laser generator. What was the power level of the one they built at Lawrence Livermore?'
'Fifty trillion watts for a billionth of a second,' Jon said breathlessly. 'That's fifty thousand watts per second. We need at least seven hundred and fifty thousand.' His eyes darted aimlessly as he started to fill in details in his mind. 'But that's using only one ion generator…'
'And a solid-state ion generator is much smaller than your diode laser pumps,' Kelsey said. 'How many can we fit in the Dragon?'
'Hundreds,' Jon said. 'No… thousands. One generator of neodymium disks could have over a thousand in it alone. We could fit… we could fit over a dozen generators in a B-52. Over ten thousand ion generators, pumped by a plasma field… my God, Kelsey, we're talking about a ten-million-watt laserl'
'That's two million watts per second,' Kelsey said proudly. 'Almost double the size of the Air Force's chemical laser.'
'My God,' Jon muttered. 'A plasma-pumped solid-state laser-on board an aircraft. Incredible! Why didn't I think of that?'
'You did, remember?' Kelsey giggled.
'The plasma-yield warhead… can we confine the fusion reaction to the laser chamber?' Jon started mumbling to himself, the others forgotten. 'How much power will we need for that?' It was several moments later before he realized that Kelsey was holding a school notebook up to himwith preliminary figures already calculated. 'Kelsey!'
'I don't know all the details on your plasma-yield warhead, Jon,' she said, 'and I need to look at the schematics of the oscillator and laser generators. But a plasma field of this approximate size and of this density will need only this much laser power for the inertial confinement process in the fusion chamber, and then will require approximately this much power in the magnetic field to channel the plasma to the laser generator. I think we can do it.'
'You think you can do it? Kelsey, you 've just done it! This is it!' Jon exclaimed breathlessly, looking at the formulas with ever-widening eyes. 'This is the answer! I can take this to the engineering department and have them start building the fusion chambers right away! We've got so much work to do-reconfiguring test article number two, getting the engineering going…' To Jon's great surprise, Kelsey started heading for the door. 'Kelsey? Anything wrong? Where are you going?'
'To the bathroom,' she replied matter-of-factly. 'I can help with the engineering after I get done.'
'Well,' Helen remarked with a smile, 'that's certainly something you don't hear every day from a world-class engineer.'
At that moment, Jon's secure cell phone beeped. He looked at the caller's ID number, smiled broadly, then punched in a descrambling code. 'Patrick!' he said happily. 'Is that you?'
