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

originally posted by: cavtrooper7
a reply to: mbkennel

Ive always rooted for scalar weapons or maybe neutral particle beam stories.

good news and bad news. we learned how to neutral particle beams right. that's the good news. It is also the bad news.

you use if you have a proton it can be steered via electrical or magnetic charges and it can be accelerated by the same thing.so you get them going the way you want and as fast as you want by the time it is leaving the "barrel" then you stick an electron on it and it becomes a fast moving neutral hydrogen atom. the same applies to any atom of any mass. this does not work for neutral single particles like a neutron but neutrons can be messed with due to their complex quark make up using other techniques.

wait until we get pion cannons. no armor will stop it. imagine explosions of gamma and x rays appearing inside a shielded and heavily armored ship. or stuff on the other side of a planet just having the bad fortune of random atomic like explosions going off for no apparent reason. or even a bunker 3 KM under the surface just getting ate up with random atomic seeming explosions.

originally posted by: penroc3
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.

for all modern designs particle beam weapons fired in a medium are preceded by a laser to create a nice clear path for the particle beam. otherwise it starts to annihilate the second it goes out the "barrel." with a clear path a particle beam actually stays coherent better than a laser beam because the electron shells of the particles in the surrounding medium tend to push the beam together from the sides.

originally posted by: mbkennel

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?

Geomagnetic lines would give you a way to hit a conjugate point from a ground installation, if you didn't mind the fireworks on the way up...

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?

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?

On TOS they often were unable to hit even biggish targets with a phaser if it was moving fast enough. See also: "Journey to Babel"

originally posted by: Bedlam

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?

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?

On TOS they often were unable to hit even biggish targets with a phaser if it was moving fast enough. See also: "Journey to Babel"

TOS phasers were turreted though. which means the servos or motors or hydraulics had to be able to match the speed of the fire control solution's aim point. which means lag time. it also means the fire control system could be easily fooled by evasive action or even ECM.

The kind of plasma charge that would allow for a certain type of pulsed fusion could in theory be modified as a temporary container for antimatter. (Has to do with the magnetic field caused by the current flow in the plasmid.) Then you just use a rail gun to send it on its way, once the plasma diffuses antimatter is no longer contained and would do its thing.

So yeah you could build anti-matter bombs like nukes we're famiar with, but in theory with the right gun you could also give something like an AH-64 the same level of hitting power as an WWII era Iowa-class battleship. It would be more versatile in terms of scalability. Open line of sight gamma exposure still may be a problem though as well as having and storing the stuff.

It's raining Positrons!

phys.org...

a reply to: stormbringer1701

Can't we make a beam that just disrupts the nuclear bonds of matter?

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
a reply to: stormbringer1701

Can't we make a beam that just disrupts the nuclear bonds of matter?

Thats not easy to do in bulk.

For compounds and crystals the electronic bonds are in the electron shells. there is a a term called the level of first ionization. this amount of energy must be applied to every binding electron. in the matter at hand. I assume this is what you mean. But you used the term nuclear bonds. that actually has to do with the strong force mediated by gluons. thats much more powerful than the electron bonds for various reasons including the bonding strength being inversely proportional to the bond length. nucleons are very short distances from each other compared to electron bonds and gluons are stronger (but are shorter range fields) than electrical bonds so they are tougher to break. now if you can dislodge or destroy the neutrons in the nucleus then the charges of the protons would break the nucleus apart. most nuclear decay is mediated by the weak force and the force exchange carrier particle for that is a type meson. if you could make a meson beam you could probably do something like nuclear disintegration. but somehow i think that is beyond our technological means at least for now. Antimatter weapons are also currently beyond our technological ability but likely to be achieved
before mesons and are probably more efficient than meson weapons.

on the other hand a meson weapon will ignore intervening force fields and matter. Armor will not help. shields will not help. it shoots through planets. but it requires exact control of the speed of the meson particles because it relies on time dilation to exist long enough to get to the target. a pi meson does not interact with matter and energy. it is just as slippery as a neutrino if not even more so. when a pi meson has existed for a fraction of a second it typically decays releasing gamma rays and maybe other particles though i am going from memory and am not certain of the decay chain. when a meson is at high relativistic velocity though it's decay time is delayed so it can travel further before going poof. potentially if you get everything right you can make it go poof inside something you also want to go poof.

a reply to: BASSPLYR


I got one of those a few times.... It was dark out too..... Weird how that happens...

a reply to: MystikMushroom

Quantum disruption devices, unfortunately at the moment our technology would probably prohibit the production of such a device, the reverse could be used for atomic bond reinforcement though and so strengthen materials at the sub atomic level without increasing there weight or mass so there is room for research into such technology though the relevant field's of physic's are still purely hypothetical and theoretical.

a reply to: roguetechie

a reply to: mbkennel
MB,

a reply to: MystikMushroom

Disruptors.

a reply to: mbkennel
MB,
The real question is, if you have a tractor beam why bother with phasers? Why not just build an LRAD/AESA type array of tractor and anti tractor beams.... And a 555 chip... Pulse at a suitably destructive harmonic with different portions of enemy vehicles locked up by different porions of the array....
B

a reply to: mbkennel
MB,
The real question is, if you have a tractor beam why bother with phasers? Why not just build an LRAD/AESA type array of tractor and anti tractor beams.... And a 555 chip... Pulse at a suitably destructive harmonic with different portions of enemy vehicles locked up by different porions of the array....
B
Remember the scene from the movie Black Sheep where Chris Farley is explaining his sales style to the waitress with the story of JoJo and his new pet? (as played by the dinner roll, which DEFINITELY WAS HARMED in the filming of this scene hey) Yeah imagine that happening to a Bradley....

a reply to: roguetechie

Presumably starships made out of what was it , duranium to withstand warp drive couldn't be vibrated strongly enough to be damaged.

The real unscientific WTF is the transporter, which is millennia beyond warp drive. Warp drive is at least conceptually understandable and vaguely feasible with a certain number of assumptions..


Say if we discovered how quantum gravity worked and could couple massive superconductors to radically amplify magneto gravitational effects from spin aligned barium nuclei or some such....

Don't even know how to hand wave transporter physics though. In the original Trek series it was introduced as a dramatic device to avoid boring shuttle missions and to get the action going quickly. And it definitely worked for that purpose, and in others for dramatic reasons they went back to shuttles for story purposes.

Anyway, if you have a transporter, you just transport your enemy's warp core into their bridge. Or transport an antimatter bomb 50m outside their ship if they have shields up.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

???

Mesons interact with strong force and have very short lifetimes. They sure as heck interact with matter being the carrier of strong force between nucleons.

Charged mesons have nanosecond lifetimes, and neutral mesons muc much shorter still.

originally posted by: mbkennel
a reply to: roguetechie

Presumably starships made out of what was it , duranium to withstand warp drive couldn't be vibrated strongly enough to be damaged.

The real unscientific WTF is the transporter, which is millennia beyond warp drive. Warp drive is at least conceptually understandable and vaguely feasible with a certain number of assumptions..


Say if we discovered how quantum gravity worked and could couple massive superconductors to radically amplify magneto gravitational effects from spin aligned barium nuclei or some such....

Don't even know how to hand wave transporter physics though. In the original Trek series it was introduced as a dramatic device to avoid boring shuttle missions and to get the action going quickly. And it definitely worked for that purpose, and in others for dramatic reasons they went back to shuttles for story purposes.

Anyway, if you have a transporter, you just transport your enemy's warp core into their bridge. Or transport an antimatter bomb 50m outside their ship if they have shields up.

Duranium, in it's incarnation as a second periodic table element, is theoretically feasible too. But to pull it off we have to find stuff to substitute for the baryons in the nucleus of normal matter plus the electrons. it could be anything from standard model particles to speculative particles such as magnetic monopoles. but if you could do it the bonding strength and other physical properties would make any normal element or alloy look like wet tissue paper in comparison. it could stand up to the conditions in gas giants, stars and even neutron stars without being melted, spun, fondled, or mutilated.