>>13380Catalyzing fusion with anti-matter is a very good idea, because that can potentially be made very small. If you tear a hole into space-time with lasers you do loose some energy because of the Schwinger effect (i think that's what it's called, i'm not sure) so there still is some engineering difficulty with regards to getting net-energy.
>>13381Yeah you stop fusing at carbon, if you want energy. Multistage fusion sometimes gets called nova generators, in hard scifi, and the amount of energy you get from this is staggering. People saying it's unlimited energy can be excused, because from our perspective it would be. At that level of power generation, people might actually consider energy-consuming fusion to generate heavy elements, as in energy-to-mater conversion.