Q is the ratio between energy in and out in a fusion system. Q > 1 is the holy grail, which implies we have more energy out of the fusion system than in. CFS is aiming for Q 11 in its prototype reactor.
SPARC is the "Smallest Possible" ARC I believe. It's their prototype reactor that they're working on that uses magnetic fields through superconductors to contain Hydrogen as it heats up into plasma and goes through the fusion process.
ARC is the 400MW reactor that will be produced (aimed for within a decade) if SPARC succeeds - it's the scaled-out version of SPARC.
It has an impressive set of people working on it (ex-SpaceX).
Yeah, large-scale systems are often boring in my experience, because the scale limits what features you can add to make things better. Each and every decision has to take scale into account, and it's tricky to try experimenting.
I think it has to do with the kind of engineer you are. Some engineers love iterating and improving such systems to be more efficient, more scalable, etc. But it can be limiting due to the slower release cycles, hyper focus on availability, and other necessary constraints.
I remember we migrated 2+ million LoC to being formatted by Black at Dropbox.
Our Livegrep instance with a custom Git blame implementation always crashed at the commit made to do the migration :-) We had to pause our merge queue because we didn't want to run into conflicts, and I remember the `git push` ended up taking a while.
I've been following PlanetScale for a few years and interviewed their CTO Sugu last week: https://www.softwareatscale.dev/p/software-at-scale-29-sugu-..., if anyone's interested to hear their story of building Vitess for YouTube and some details on PlanetScale behind the scenes.
This resonates well. I have a hobby software podcast (https://softwareatscale.dev/) and the most common question I get asked is around how I'm planning to monetize it. I've had unsolicited offers from acquaintances to partner up to set up merch deals (?) and even NFTs to sell episodes.
MCF: Magnetic Confinement Fusion
CFS is Commonwealth Fusion Systems - https://cfs.energy/
Q is the ratio between energy in and out in a fusion system. Q > 1 is the holy grail, which implies we have more energy out of the fusion system than in. CFS is aiming for Q 11 in its prototype reactor.
SPARC is the "Smallest Possible" ARC I believe. It's their prototype reactor that they're working on that uses magnetic fields through superconductors to contain Hydrogen as it heats up into plasma and goes through the fusion process.
ARC is the 400MW reactor that will be produced (aimed for within a decade) if SPARC succeeds - it's the scaled-out version of SPARC.
It has an impressive set of people working on it (ex-SpaceX).
And yes, ARC is named after the Iron Man reactor.