> They got what, 2.5 megajoules out of 2.1 in?

Of laser energy into a tiny control volume that doesn't consider how much energy went into the laser systems. If you draw the control volume around the building and see that the lasers require vastly more energy than what came out, I think you'll be less excited, right?

We've been getting lots of energy out of fusion since the early 1950s with thermonuclear bombs. We know we can get energy out of a control volume. But is it a practical energy source is still the question imho.

Not an engineer in this field, so I may have misread/misunderstood, but I read that 2.5MJ out for 2.1MJ of laser energy in, NOT the total energy needed to make the whole thing work.. So, in a layman’s world, it is not a net gain of power, only a small subset of the system yielding more power than it took in.

Happy to be proven wrong and told that it is more of a breakthrough than I think it is..

Electricity in, heat out, I think. Getting that heat back to electricity will cost some, I expect more than that 0.4

The net energy gain is very slim and has to be converted to electricity to power the lasers – in doing so, there's so much loss, it is again NEGATIVE.

It's always the same…