Antimatter weaponry. 1,000 times more powerful than nuclear weapons

originally posted by: BASSPLYR
a reply to: penroc3
My comments get worse keep reading if you haven't. Think my last one may have been in bad taste though. Get it!

I gave you an 8.5 for poor taste.

a reply to: Bedlam

BASS: Julienne fries are like mcdonads fries and then there are curly fries and the fat crinkle cut ones. julienne just means long and skinny(i felt strange typing that for some reason)



but back to anti matter. don't you think it would make a difference in how wide the 'beam' of antimatter was? and isn't there a anti partial for EVERY particle? i would think that the bigger the anti particle the more X-ray and gamma emissions would come off on Annihilation? the alpha and beta emissions would get absorbed quickly by the air.

originally posted by: andy06shake
a reply to: LABTECH767

Personally i imagine if we ever achieve the capability to produce and store Antimatter in any sufficient quantity or indeed manage to harness the zero-point field we will choose to use such technology to open up our universe and go to the stars.

Technologies such as the above are simply to devastating to use as a weapon, it would be like attempting to destroy a pinhead by way of an atomic bomb! Overkill does not even begin to cover the destructive forces involved. Using antimatter as a weapon takes the policy of mutually assured destruction(M.A.D) to a whole other dimension never mind level.

anti-hydrogen has been shown to be stable in the right controlled environment.

Making micrograms of antimatter much less tons of it would be a monumental challenge.

Maybe not. a reply to: John_Rodger_Cornman

a reply to: andy06shake

I hope so.

The oil/fossil fuel companies won't lose their marketshare so easily.

Call me a grade A noob... But what is anti-matter? (I'd google but I find if you ask questions to real people you get real answers.)

Is it like the "ant-material" rifle? Also, if it destroys hard suff(material) WHY THE HELL NOT use it on soft stuff?(Personnel)

Is it like the AK vs AR, Scalpel and a hatchet analogy?

a reply to: OfManAndWolf

Antimatter is matters' oppositely electrically charged brother. Hydrogen has protons and electrons, anti hydrogen has anti-protons (negatively charged 'protons') and positrons (positively charged 'electrons').

When matter and anti matter meet E = mc^2 squared takes over and everyone has a bad day.

originally posted by: framedragged
a reply to: OfManAndWolf

Antimatter is matters' oppositely electrically charged brother. Hydrogen has protons and electrons, anti hydrogen has anti-protons (negatively charged 'protons') and positrons (positively charged 'electrons').

When matter and anti matter meet E = mc^2 squared takes over and everyone has a bad day.

Damn. Sure wish I made it through school like all of you cool-kids. I'm not sure what goes on with the protons and stuff there when they are opposites like that, but the E = mc^2 reference sure clears it all up.

I have watched tons of videos of real war, like on shock sites and on documentaries(Obviously not as realistic as the shockers), but have never even seen anyone carrying an AM rifle.

In fact the only time I have seen this weapon was on a video game. AND WE ALL KNOW VIDEO GAMES ARE REAL LIFE! Just joking.


I would like to know why it's not a mainstream weapon if it's so powerful. Maybe it is and I'm just dumb. Who knows.


Either way thanks for the reply man!

a reply to: OfManAndWolf

Containment and projection require a lot of power. That means any weapon is going to be big, so it would have to be mounted on a fairly large aircraft to be able to get to a safe distance from the impact area.

Like in anti protons form the CERN super collider stored on supercooled magnetic bottles and transferred through quantum mechanics or Tesla device to locations of your choosing to be unleashed?
a reply to: John_Rodger_Cornman

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: Jonjonj
a reply to: BASSPLYR

How could you send anti matter down a beam that is consistent with matter?

Use something charged. Positrons would do nicely. Then spiral them down a magnetic field line.

and so then how do you make the magnetic field strong enough at a distance?

a reply to: johnwick

That's correct. Any warp drive is also a weapon of civilizational extinction. If you can fly so easy to other stars, how hard is it to cozy up to a big rock in the asteroid belt and push it in a Sun-grazing trajectory to poor Alderaan?

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
quantum torpedoes are supposed to be at least somewhat more powerful than photon torpedoes (I.E; more than 60 plus megatons TNT equivelent) yet these fearsome weapons are depicted as having no more effect than a hand grenade (if even that- more like one of those illegal fire crackers) when the Borg bombard Dr. Cochrane's Warp research compound.

When a photon torpedo impacts the hull of a 120 meter diameter primary hull (assuming a constitution or enterprise class ship) it essentially has no more effect than a 155 artillery shell. a megaton class nuke will take out a 50 to 100 km diameter patch of countryside.

Brace for 64 MT photon torpedo impact: ...pewf! pewf! pewf! Lol wut?

And in the movies, heroes walk away from 250km/hr plane crashes with a slight bruise.

In space, it's true that there is no blast effect so the effective radius of nukes is significantly less than in the atmosphere. They've already studied this for ABM defenses. They put some coating on the weapons to increase the x-ray (or was it neutrons) conversion to make the best destructive radius in space.

So it's more like, photon torpedo goes off and everybody is irradiated and barfing blood.

On the other hand, if you have a phaser bank and sensors and a tractor beam, how would you ever get attacked by a physical torpedo moving at v much less than c?

a reply to: mbkennel

Ive always rooted for scalar weapons or maybe nuetral partical beam stories.

originally posted by: cavtrooper7
a reply to: mbkennel

Ive always rooted for scalar weapons or maybe nuetral partical beam stories.

Well I guess positronium is a neutral particle, at least for a short time.

Scalar weapons? "I fart a diffusive aerosol field in your general direction!"

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
when anti-hydrogen is dropped to cryogenic temperatures it become dimagnetic. it is repelled by magnetic fields. it can thus be levitated. if you vary the fields right you can induce it to spin while levitated. in a vacuum this means it cannot contact the container walls or sublimate at significant levels. you could then shave it with a laser beam with the spinning keeping the remaining mass in the round to keep it balanced. The laser would also ionize it so it is no longer neutral. it can then be shunted out to a reactor chamber or a particle accelerator.

I hope they have a really really really good uninterruptible power supply on that.

originally posted by: mbkennel

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
when anti-hydrogen is dropped to cryogenic temperatures it become dimagnetic. it is repelled by magnetic fields. it can thus be levitated. if you vary the fields right you can induce it to spin while levitated. in a vacuum this means it cannot contact the container walls or sublimate at significant levels. you could then shave it with a laser beam with the spinning keeping the remaining mass in the round to keep it balanced. The laser would also ionize it so it is no longer neutral. it can then be shunted out to a reactor chamber or a particle accelerator.

I hope they have a really really really good uninterruptible power supply on that.

We'll come up with better ways eventually. containment materials that do not have the proper quark to match the quarks in the antimatter. containment materials that are made of monopoles. hybrid matter that electronically repels other matter and thus self isolates until ionized. or we will be able to make antimatter only as needed to run a reaction so there is no need to store it.

we can do this latter thing with positrons now. antiprotons are more energy intensive though.

originally posted by: John_Rodger_Cornman
What do you think about the use of antimatter weapons in the future?
I know it takes a massive amount of energy to create just micrograms of antimatter and keeping it stable long enough to use is a challenge.
But assuming we figure out those challenges what do we do about antimatter proliferation?

Will we even survive a antimatter war?

The obvious solution, don't do it!

It's not a safe source of energy either if you watch Star Trek.



It's probably a greater danger to you than your enemies if you stockpile such weapons.

originally posted by: mbkennel

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
quantum torpedoes are supposed to be at least somewhat more powerful than photon torpedoes (I.E; more than 60 plus megatons TNT equivelent) yet these fearsome weapons are depicted as having no more effect than a hand grenade (if even that- more like one of those illegal fire crackers) when the Borg bombard Dr. Cochrane's Warp research compound.

When a photon torpedo impacts the hull of a 120 meter diameter primary hull (assuming a constitution or enterprise class ship) it essentially has no more effect than a 155 artillery shell. a megaton class nuke will take out a 50 to 100 km diameter patch of countryside.

Brace for 64 MT photon torpedo impact: ...pewf! pewf! pewf! Lol wut?

And in the movies, heroes walk away from 250km/hr plane crashes with a slight bruise.

In space, it's true that there is no blast effect so the effective radius of nukes is significantly less than in the atmosphere. They've already studied this for ABM defenses. They put some coating on the weapons to increase the x-ray (or was it neutrons) conversion to make the best destructive radius in space.

So it's more like, photon torpedo goes off and everybody is irradiated and barfing blood.

On the other hand, if you have a phaser bank and sensors and a tractor beam, how would you ever get attacked by a physical torpedo moving at v much less than c?

Photon torpedoes just look slow. they were invented for FTL fighting. there is a coil device in them that is called a warp sustainer. it allows the ship to transfer warp field energy to the torpedo while it is in the tube. the sustainer circuits then maintain the warp field for a period of time after the torpedo has left the tube. but in sublight combat the warp sustainer just boosts the speed to mid to high relativistic speed.

Generally that is all it takes because for most of the series up until voyager no one went over .25 c under impulse power because it messed up all the clocks and electronics.