Features of a point design for fast ignition

Fast Ignition is an inertial fusion scheme in which fuel is first assembled and then heated to the ignition temperature with an external heating source. In this note we consider cone and shell implosions where the energy supplied by short pulse lasers is transported to the fuel by electrons. We describe possible failure modes for this scheme and how to overcome them. In particular, we describe two sources of cone tip failure, an axis jet driven from the compressed fuel mass and hard photon preheat leaking through the implosion shell, and laser prepulse that can change the position of laser absorption and the angular distribution of the emitted electrons.