Play the simulator first. The live page is https://tcreations3888.com/eif/, and it opens on Lab day. This paper reads that first paint as a university-lab picture: a fenced hall, a viewport, instruments aimed at a column that is still a drawing. “Prototype” means a prototype of the question, not a machine to buy, staff, or license.
Published Z-pinch research exists in the laboratory literature. This site is not that research. It does not specify hardware, fuels, neutron yields, or a procedure. The numbers below are the toy, labeled so they cannot be mistaken for a shot log.
What this scale is for
Lab day closes three breakers: Facility lights (8 kW), Hall HVAC (22 kW), Diagnostic bay (35 kW). The edge rack and the workshop mill stay open. Hotel / aux is on, as always, at 12 kW. Demand factor sits at 100%. The balance line on the page reads:
12 + 100% × 65 = 77.0 kW
That 77.0 kW is the bus a teaching hall in this story would recognize: lights, air, a diagnostic bay, and a hotel floor of auxiliaries that nobody is allowed to switch off. The questions worth asking at this scale are observational questions about the toy.
- When the bay’s breaker closes, does the target for Iz rise with the square root of bus power?
- Does the column drawing tighten, radius a down and Bθ up?
- Do the magnetic gauges ease over τ while the breaker itself has already moved?
- Does the alternating tap stay locked at 60 Hz with no turbine in the picture?
A yes to all four is a yes about the script in the page, not a yes about nature.
Lab day’s first paint
The relations are the ones in WP-01, with Pref = 20 kW. For Pload = 77 kW the ratio Pload / 20 is 3.85, and the targets are:
| Gauge | What the page shows |
|---|---|
| Pload | 77.0 kW |
| Iz | 196.2 kA toy |
| a | 6.54 mm toy |
| Bθ | 6.00 T toy |
| Fusion intensity | 14.82× toy |
| VAC | 941.8 V, 60 Hz locked |
| PAC,toy | 159.79 kW toy |
| τ | 2.81 s |
Status is FOLLOWING once the ease has finished. The bus is under 180 kW, so the HIGH DRAW badge stays hidden. Standby, for contrast, is hotel-only at 12 kW and about 77.5 kA toy: the column dims, and the current does not go to zero. WP-02 shows the same Lab day bus pulled down to 44.5 kW by a 50% demand factor, hotel untouched.
Why the coupled-output number sits above the bus
Look at the two kilowatt figures on that first paint: the bus is 77.0 kW and PAC,toy is 159.79 kW. A hurried reading wants to call the difference gain. The formula will not support that reading.
Rfus = (Pload / 20)^2
PAC,toy = 0.14 × Pload × Rfus
= 0.14 × Pload × (Pload / 20)^2
= 0.00035 × Pload³
The toy coupled output grows like the cube of bus power. Set it equal to the bus and the curves cross near 54 kW. Below that, as in the tabletop step where the bus is 20 kW and PAC,toy is 2.8 kW, the coupled number is smaller than the load. Above that, as here, it is larger. At the Spike preset in WP-04 the cubic has run far enough that the coupled number is an order of magnitude past the bus. Same formula. Louder arithmetic.
The caption on the gauge is the interpretation: toy coupled output, not Q, not net plant power. Nothing in the script conserves energy, closes a plant balance, or reports a measured fusion gain. The 0.14 and the square are bookkeeping chosen so the gauge moves in a way a person can see.
Four beats, aimed at a viewport
- Load → current. Lab day’s 77 kW bus sets Iz near 196 kA toy because Iz = 100 × √(Pload / 20) and √3.85 is about 1.96. More draw, more current, on a square-root curve that the readout chip states in one sentence.
- Current → Bθ. Bθ = 2.5 × (Iz / 100) × (8 / a). With Iz near 196 kA and a near 6.54 mm, the toy field is about 6 T. The rings on the canvas thicken with that field. Radius shrinks mildly, because a depends on load only to the power 0.15. The pinch in this toy tightens; it does not collapse to a point.
- Inertia. τ = 0.5 + 0.03 × 77 = 2.81 s. Flip the diagnostic bay off and the breaker face changes immediately. The 196 kA figure eases toward the new target over those seconds. That lag is the electromagnetic inertia the concept cards describe. Inductance as a flywheel. The field stores the previous drive for a little while.
- Direct AC. VAC is about 942 V toy, frequency locked at 60 Hz, with a small drawn wave under the gauge. The concept card’s sentence is the whole machine: a resonant tank around the column, already alternating, no turbine and no boiler on the page.
What a university picture does not include
It does not include a procurement schedule, a headcount, a capacitor-bank energy, a neutron budget, or a path to a fueled campaign. Cost bands and megawatt ratings were doing prospectus work in earlier drafts of this series. They are not restored. Real pinch experiments are done in authorized laboratories under their own safety programs. This paper does not borrow their authority and does not hand you their apparatus.
The de-risking this scale can actually do is modest and honest: a reader who has used Lab day can say, in their own words, how load, current, field, lag, and the 60 Hz tap are tied together in the toy, and can say why 159.79 against 77.0 is not a gain. That is the prototype. The larger picture is datacenter supply scale, which is still a picture of a bus.
In this set
- WP-01 Tabletop proof-of-concept — one switch against the hotel floor.
- WP-02 Garage scale — demand factor as the second knob.
- WP-03, this paper — university lab. Lab day’s first paint, and the cubic that is not Q.
- WP-04 Datacenter supply scale — Spike, and why a large toy number is still a toy.
- Live simulator: https://tcreations3888.com/eif/
- Index of the four papers: https://tcreations3888.com/eif/#whitepapers
Honesty
Numbers are scaled for play. This is an educational demonstration under the MIT License, in the same spirit as the page footer. A university-lab picture is a way to aim attention at the toy. It is not an operating prototype, not evidence of net power, and not a construction guide.