The focus lens design for the 20-beam SHIVA laser fusion facility involves considerations of uniform and normal pellet illumination. The resulting requirements dictate tailored beam intensity profiles and vacuum-loaded thin lenses.

Various factors that can affect thermal blooming in stagnation zones are examined, including stagnation-zone motion, longitudinal air motion in the neighborhood of the stagnation zone, and the effects of scenario noncoplanarity. Of these effects, only the last offers any reasonable hope of reducing the strong thermal blooming that normally accompanies stagnation zones; in particular, noncoplanarity should benefit multipulse more than cw beams. The methods of treating nonhorizontal winds hydrodynamically for cw and multipulse steady-state sources are discussed. Pulse ''self-blooming'' in the triangular pulse approximation is discussed in the context of both single and multipulse propagation. It is shown that self-blooming and multipulse blooming cannot be treated independently.