Hyperion Vessel Ports
Ports are the vessel penetrations that admit heating, fueling, diagnostics, and maintenance access to the plasma.
The doors in the wall
A vacuum vessel would be useless as a sealed box; every system that must reach the plasma does so through a port. Ports are the engineered penetrations through the vessel, and through the shield and blanket around it, that carry heating beams, fueling lines, diagnostics, pumping, and maintenance tooling.
Kinds of port
- Heating ports for neutral beams and RF launchers.
- Fueling ports for pellet injection.
- Diagnostic ports for the instruments that measure the plasma.
- Maintenance ports large enough to remove blanket modules and divertor cassettes.
The breeding penalty
Every port is a hole in the blanket, and a hole in the blanket is a gap in tritium breeding and in shielding. This is a genuine design tension: the machine needs many penetrations to function, yet each one costs breeding coverage and lets neutrons stream toward the magnets. Port count, size, and placement are optimized against the tritium breeding ratio target of 1.8.
In the model
Ports are selectable on the vacuum vessel, and selecting one shows what passes through it and how it penetrates the surrounding shells. The exploded view uses the maintenance ports to show how large components are designed to be extracted radially or vertically.
Access and maintenance
The maintenance ports define how the machine is serviced. See the vacuum vessel they penetrate and the exploded view for the extraction logic.