Emergency Farcaster...Holy Crap
I was doing some back of a napkin calculations on another matter and I figured the total energy released when you annihilate the AM in an Emergency Farcaster.
Approximately 215 kilos of TNT.
I think perhaps that might be a little on the high side for a one time neutrino transmission. Ten nanograms might be too much, 100 Picograms might be a more reasonable amount.
Well... The book did say that the body was useless afterwards.
I would guess it was a slip of the prefix.
Of course, having a revenge option might interest some people. Detecting the difference between a nanogram and a picogram might be hard if the containment is good enough to mimic normal emissions, so you might still be able to claim it is a safe farcaster (still, a habitat that doesn't carefully track people with antimatter in their heads deserves what it will get). I would allow characters in my game to get the Khan Special for one price level higher than the normal emergency farcaster. And woe to them if they take too much damage to the wrong part of the body...
One problem, it's already in the highest cost range.
I allow (and use) costs above expensive. See my suggestions in the spacecraft cost thread.
Reasonable physics, perhaps, but I wouldn't want to be in the same room as somebody suddenly departing this way. I think 215 g TNT is about the same strength as a M67 hand grenade.
Reasonable physics, perhaps, but I wouldn't want to be in the same room as somebody suddenly departing this way. I think 215 g TNT is about the same strength as a M67 hand grenade.
They contain 184 grams of a cocktail of RDX and TNT. In fact, extended inspection showed me that almost every grenade back to WWII oftentimes had only 50 or so grams of TNT for effect. That makes this antimatter a skosh more dangerous. That said, checking the antimatter also probably precludes checking its containment system... and I'd imagine that those containment systems, besides being powerful magnets, are intended to withhold the explosion as much as possible should it come to that. If someone has a device or containment system that looks like it will intentionally fail, or simply explode, they'll probably see that person off... with a bullet... to the head.
this stuff could work as a blackmail chip.
"You'll do what we say, or your pretty head will be redecorating those walls. And don't worry, we've been taking care of your backups as well"
Terrorist of any faction's radical groups might also use the EFC as a weapon, and live to use it again
A tad expensive, sending an Expensive (weither in credits or rep) morph with such a dangerous stack.
"For the blue planet and a pure world!" boom!
(bit inspired by the Gundam Seed's terrorist group Blue Cosmos, there)
Here is how I handle it:
Antimatter detectors
Antimatter, when stabilized and kept in a proper containment unit, is hard to detect. Most security
scans look for the tell-tale signature of containment units but this only works when the unit passes through the scanner. A few scintillation detectors instead look for gamma photons with the specific energies of 938 MeV (the signature of proton-antiproton annihilation) and 511 KeV (electron-positron annihilation). Even a very good containment unit will have occasional annihilations. In space there are plenty of stray gammas but the signature gammas are specific for the presence of antimatter – if a detector gets a few flashes over a short span of time when it is not also detecting other cosmic ray activity, it can predict with good reliability the presence of sizeable amounts of antimatter within a few tens of meters. [Cost: Low]
I would assume that the default version has a sort of shaped explosion so it would still ruin your morph but be a whole lot less damaging to your surroundings. Modifying that to be more explosive and dangerous would most likely lead to it being detected by weapon scanners as it would probably be outside the standard/safe emissions expected.
Presumably it's easier to detect the containment systems but they could always be shielded and disguised.
A single gram of AM will ruin your hab. The amount in your average Fast Courier could put a sizeable dent in your planet....
It's a bit hard to hide an antimatter containment system. It requires a very powerful magnetic chamber, one capable of levitating the antimatter mass in such a way that it never touches any of the sides of the container. It's like magic tupperware that makes your food float... if your food was made out of particles that would explode with great force and energy upon contact with the tupperware.
One thing I'm reminded of when I think of magnetic antimatter containers is a video I saw way back in the day of scientists using magnets to cause a frog to float in midair. Current antimatter storage works because we produce individual charged particles and store them within a containment system magnetically charged the same way (positively charged to store positrons, negatively charged to store antiprotons) to repel the particles from the walls. Containment is difficult because the particles repel against one another as well. What if there was a way to make a solid antimatter mass? Wouldn't that be easier to levitate magnetically and contain? Is it possible that this may be the key to storing antimatter so safely in the EP universe?
I think a magnetic trap and a decently sized chunk of solid antimatter is the likeliest solution.
This paper (pdf) briefly mentions the theoretical possibility of quantum reflection, making anti-atoms not "stick" to container walls. Very cool if it could be done, and maybe similar effects are used to keep metallic hydrogen compressed. This paper (paywall) suggests that storing antimatter as Einstein-Bose condensates might help. But both solutions likely require extreme cryogenics, everything has to be kept close to absolute zero. This paper (paywall) reviews different methods. It notes that for more than 10^12 positrons Penning traps require more energy than is stored in the antimatter. It also suggests that there might exist stable bound states where positrons sit inside normal molecules like C60 without interacting, and this might form very energetic materials.
As I envision it, microscopic crystals of anti-atoms (likely anti-hydrogen or anti-lithium) with a magnetic moment are kept suspended within nanocontainers by very focused magnetic fields. These are likely at least partially generated by nanofactured super-strong permanent magnets, perhaps focused by small superconductor layers. The nanocontainers are rated for the accelerations they can take, probably in the tens of thousands of Gs. The system itself will be noticeable from occasional gamma photons and the presence of a sizeable magnetic moment (possibly shielded by superconducting plates on the outside).
I don't think it is easy to get a shaped charge effect with a small antimatter pellet since momentum is mainly transferred in the form of hard gammas that tend to break nanocontainers: if the detonation starts at one side of a pellet it will break down containers across the pellet long before it imparts a directional motion by transferring momentum to the molecular lattice. However, a larger pen-like charge with gamma-absorbing layers might be able to act as a nuclear shaped charge: the initial detonation is absorbed by the first layer which expands, pushing the rest of the assembly forward, and then subsequent layers will continue this. Unfortunately (I'm bad at running nuclear detonation hydrodynamics code in my head) I think this will mainly pancake the assembly rather than make a nice beam of detonation.





That does indeed seem a bit much. In case anyone is wondering, I am fairly sure that this video is an example of 200Kg of TNT going kerblowee:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3LM2N3xXDg
Must be one very controlled interaction.
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