It’s less weird when you realize it’s not a hexagon, it’s a sine wave in cylindrical coordinates. There are a lot of negative feedback loops such that a sine wave can turn into a standing wave. You just have to get a little lucky with a couple important things like your rossby number et voila, hexagon.

As someone who works in the field, that sounds like something I’d pitch to shareholders when I’m trying to steal their money, not when I’m trying to fuse particles.

Fusion releases a daughter particle and a neutron. The daughter particle is much larger and will deposit its energy back into the plasma, the neutron will travel much further until it hits a collector outside the chamber, heating it up, which will heat water. You don’t get to decide which direction the neutron goes, so you have to build this collector around the entire thing.

Not to say credit scores are fun, but comparing the two is kinda absurd. Credit scores are calculated by private companies and used by banks to determine your eligibility for a loan. Essentially, it’s an averaged history of how good you are at repaying debt, and it’s used to determine if you will repay future debt. The people who calculate your score have no interest in how it affects you. The social credit system is a government score and has tons of things that can affect it, and there’s plenty of opportunity for fudgery to screw you over. There are tons of ways in can negatively affect you. Worst of all, it can be used to deny international flights, and in effect your ability to escape the system. Since this is actually run by the government, it creates an avenue for punishing political dissent and control that just doesn’t exist with credit scores.