Burner Continuous-Operation Narrative

The burner (Aegis / MetroVolt) aims at steady export, so its operating story is about holding a regime, not chaining shots - under four honest gates.

Steady state, not shots

A tandem-mirror burner has no inductive current drive to cycle, so the intended operating narrative is continuous: reach the plug regime, hold it, and export firm power through direct energy conversion. The design point is a 26.49 T plug, 17 T throat, and 5.44% neutron fraction. Continuous operation is what a MetroVolt data-center customer or an Aegis fixed defense installation would need. The honest gates make that continuity the hardest problem, not the plasma physics alone.

The four gates bound the narrative

• Plug coil is overstressed ~3-3.9x at the design bore, so the plug cannot be run as specified without a coil redesign - infeasible today
• The plug operating regime is 166-830x beyond any existing device, so it is un-post-dictable: models cannot yet be validated against data
• He-3 fuel demand is ~400x domestic supply per commercial unit, so continuous fueling is gated on a supply that does not exist at terrestrial scale (why breeder-bred and lunar He-3 matter)
• Availability models sit at 0.86-0.995 vs a Tier III target of 0.99982, a 30-100x downtime shortfall

None of these is an economic statement; all four are physics-and-operations facts. The continuous narrative is therefore a target the design must earn, exercised in simulation, not a claim about a built machine.

def burner_hold(state, twin):
    if twin.plug_stress_ratio(state) > 1.0:      # design bore already 3-3.9x
        return derate('plug_stress')
    if not twin.fuel_available(state):           # He-3 supply gate
        return derate('fuel')
    if twin.confidence(state) < CONF_MIN:        # 166-830x regime -> low conf
        return 'hold_conservative'
    return 'export'

Why continuity still drives the design

Even un-validated, the continuous target shapes redundancy and degradation logic: a burner that must hold a regime cannot recover between shots, so it leans harder on graceful degradation and fleet failover to meet the availability gate. The breeder-bred tritium and helium-3 close the fuel gate over time.