Talk:Ion drive

"Ion engines were fueled by power cells, liquid chemical reactants, onboard generators, or virtually any other device capable of providing sufficient power. The engine utilized internal fusion reactions to produce a stream of highly charged particles.."

This makes no sense whatsoever. Anyone who paid attention in high school physics should know.

It's like someone tried to stuff as many technical terms into once sentence as they could without understanding what they mean. (I daresay that is exactly what happened)

So let's say we're using "chemical reactants". That's a chemical reaction presumably creating energy. Which is basically always heat energy, sometimes you can make electric energy.

Now how does this tie into "internal fusion reactions"?

That's a whole different can of worms. This is a physical reaction by fusing lighter atomic cores into heavier more stable ones, resulting in lower bonding energy between neutrons and protons inside the core, releasing the surplus energy as mostly heat.

Ok so how does this tie into the ion stream??

Sure Fusion usually happens in a high energy plasma and thus has loads of positively charged cores free of their electrons.

So are you implying you're using chemical reactions to make electrical energy to accelerate the ions out of a plasma created by fusion? Or/And using the fusion energy, run it through a steam turbine to create electrical energy out of that? No way this fits into a TIE fighter, btw.

Also the masses involved in a fusion reaction are usually pretty small. So not a lot of ions to propel a ship. And there are easier ways of making ions... And acceleration ions needs electrical energy, and with fusion and most chemical reactions creating heat, you are gonna need a machine that converts those energy forms. Now creating a cool fictitious contraption that does this better than a steam turbine would be the main job of the fi part of sci-fi. That jumbled heap of a mess up there isn't that. The world building in the Star Wars universe is a mess... Just stop trying to explain Star Wars "science fiction" cause it simply isn't science fiction. It's a fantasy drama that happens to be in space with a magic force. Art design and fancy names took priority over consistent world building.