The airsup lab
A fusion reactor, a rocket engine, its turbopump, a production line, a Cybertruck and its drive unit, each one open so you can see how it works.
A star in a bottle
Fusion powers the Sun. Here it happens in a ring of plasma ten times hotter than the Sun’s core, held off the walls by magnets.
Every line has one bottleneck
Five stations build a drone. Change one of them and watch what happens to the whole line.
Inside the Raptor 3
Open the engine, follow the propellant and throttle it yourself.
One shaft, two jobs
The oxygen turbopump: hot gas spins a turbine, and on the same shaft a pump squeezes liquid oxygen from a few bar to hundreds.
Inside the Cybertruck
A full size electric pickup on a dyno. X-ray it, pull it apart and follow the energy from 1,344 cells to three motors.
How an electric motor turns
Cut open a drive unit and watch three phase current spin a magnetic field that drags the rotor around.
How to use it
Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom, right drag to pan.
Pick a machine at the bottom, or press the house to see the whole lab and click any machine in it.
Cutaway slices the reactor in half. Follow lights up the plasma, the magnets or the neutrons, and Power follows the heat all the way to the lights of a city. The plasma slider sets the temperature, and the scenarios show a start up and a disruption.
The machine is modelled on ITER's published design, at small scale. Fusion power follows the measured deuterium tritium reaction rate at fixed density, tuned so 150 million °C gives ITER's target of 500 MW from 50 MW of heating (Q = 10). Losses are a simple constant confinement time. ITER has not made plasma yet; these are its design goals.
Cutaway slices the engine in half so you can see every passage. Follow lights up one propellant from the tank to the flame.
Throttle and altitude change the chamber pressure and the air outside, which is what shapes the plume and its shock diamonds.
The model is simplified from public photos and diagrams. Thrust and specific impulse follow SpaceX's published Raptor 3 figures (280 tf, 350 s) and mass flow follows from those two. Chamber pressure uses the 350 bar SpaceX has reached in Raptor testing. Everything else is an estimate.
Follow the oxygen or the hot gas through the pump, change the shaft speed, and try a spin start or cavitation. The strobe freezes the blades.
Flow follows the Raptor 3 figures; pressure and power scale with speed squared and cubed from community estimates.
Every drone passes five stations. Add a second robot at the motors station, speed up the frame station, change the buffers between stations or switch on random breakdowns, and watch output, work in progress and lead time.
A small discrete event simulation with fixed cycle times (40, 60, 45, 35 and 30 s) and random failures, running twenty times faster than real time. Lead time uses Little's law: work in progress divided by output.
X-ray sweeps a scanner over the truck and shows what the steel hides. Follow the energy from the battery to the motors, the motors themselves, or the cast structure. Set a speed, or try a launch and regenerative braking. The truck stays on the dyno; its wheels drive the rollers.
Drawn from public photos at full size (5.68 m long, 3.81 m wheelbase). Mass 3,104 kg, 630 kW from three motors, a 123 kWh pack of 1,344 cells. Power follows air drag (drag area about 1.04 m²), rolling resistance of 1.1% and an 88% efficient drivetrain. Range is at a steady speed from a full pack. Tesla does not publish every detail; the inside layout is simplified.
Cutaway opens the motor across the middle. Current lights each of the 54 slots in the colour of its phase, Field shows the north and south poles the currents make, and Gears opens the two stage gearbox. Regen turns the motor into a generator.
A permanent magnet motor with 54 slots and six poles, geared about 12 to 1 (17/55 then 19/72). Motion is shown about 600 times slower than real so you can follow it. Layout simplified from public teardowns.
Building the lab