Honest Gate: Plug Operating Regime
The plug must operate 166 to 830 times beyond any built device — a regime that cannot be post-dicted from experiment today.
Beyond the reach of any experiment
The end-plug plasma must operate in a parameter regime that sits 166 to 830 times beyond anything any device has achieved. Because no experiment has reached these conditions, the plug's behavior cannot be post-dicted today — there is no data to validate the models at these parameters. This is a candid statement of where the physics stands.
The plug ties together the highest field (26.49 T), a dense fast-ion population, a high confining potential, and the microstability that keeps that population intact. Every historic mirror operated far below these values. Extrapolating confinement, stability, and potential formation across two to three orders of magnitude is not something simulation alone can close credibly.
What would close it
Only experiment can. A staged program — through the test burner (~2032) and beyond — would advance the achieved regime step by step, shrinking the extrapolation. Until then, any claim about plug performance at the design point is a model extrapolation, and we label it as such rather than as a demonstrated result.
The 166–830× range is not a single number because different plug parameters extrapolate by different factors; taken together they describe a regime no experiment has entered. Simulation can explore it, but simulation validated only at far lower parameters cannot be treated as prediction there — which is why the program's answer is staged experiment, and why claims about plug performance are labelled as extrapolations.
- Plug regime: 166–830× beyond any device
- No experimental data at these parameters
- Cannot be post-dicted today
- Closed only by staged experiment, not simulation