I don't think a beam would work, but you could probably put sufficient magnetic containment on a micro-missile to house antimatter. Whether you'd be able to put enough antimatter to be a better explosive than a conventional munition would be the question, and it would almost certainly be prohibitively expensive.

If the particles in a normal particle beam are faster than 86% of the speed of light, they actually have as much energy as would be released by an antiparticle hitting a corresponding particle: even faster beams would be able to do even more damage. Whether this is useful depends on the situation: super-fast beams will have deep penetration and maybe not do so much damage to the sides. A pure positron beam would have trouble dealing with air and electromagnetic fields (just like an electron beam), but where it hits it will like release an intense gamma ray source. Probably excellent for sterilizing nanomachines when you really want to be sure. A proton beam will produce a more dispersed (but even more intense) gamma ray cascade, with pions and muons carrying a lot of the energy away. Less focused, I expect. In general, I suspect small antimatter bombs are the best approach. As discussed in earlier threads, it seems likely that one could make grenade strength and up-up-up bullets this way. Whether it is a *sane* idea is another matter: containment failure will be deadly.

The Green Slime wrote:

Incorporating some kind of precursor laser might work, creating a conductive vacuum corridor to the target and burning a hole through any ablative armour - kind of like an energy weapon version of a HEAT rocket.

You are not going to make it perfect enough. Any collision will produce a small explosion, which will tend to disrupt your beam and cause blooming - suddenly the beam will explode at some intermediary point, likely moving fuse-like towards you!

Prophet710 wrote:

That, would actually be kinda cool!

Not if you're the one shooting with it. It'd be like standing behind someone firing a rocket launcher; I don't know about you, but burning my face off with backblast isn't on my bucket list.

TadanoriOyama wrote:

That kinda sums up my thoughts on the matter. Pretty sharp risk/reward on carrying anti-matter around with you. There's also the problem of what are people going to if they discover you have it, especially in a habitat.

This, oh dear gods this. Bringing a substance of which 1 kg is the equivalent of [b]43 megatons of TNT[/b] onto a populated station is going to get you a stern talking to followed by immediate spacing. And that's IF they're feeling nice about it.

Arena, so there would be no benefits whatsoever to an .95C antimatter beam over a .95c conventional particle beam?

It's also a cheap way for the PC to either getting rid of an habitat going rogue or renew population obedience through scare tactics, like Sadam H or Muhammar K did with their own people.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Very little. At 0.95 c the energy of the proton beam is 2.2 times its rest mass (just kinetic energy), while the antiproton beam has a total energy that is released on impact that is 3.2 times its rest mass (kinetic energy plus annihilation energy). It packs more oomph, but not enormously so. At 0.99c the difference is between 6 and 7 times the rest mass, and so on. I think this makes the antiproton beam rather pointless, since you will have to handle containment and loads of engineering issues but don't get a decisive advantage.

Not to mention that this seems to go up exponentially as you cut ever-closer to the speed of light. At 0.999c, there is much more energy given to the impact, but again, the extra force granted by antimatter merely adds 1x rest mass energy. So with all things considered, it's probably a better investment to find the means to increase the speed of your particle beam than it is to research how to contain and expel antimatter as a weapon.

I don't think you can make proper clouds in space. If you disperse particles to attempt to create a conventional cloud then they do not stop dispersing (cus, you know, space). It's probably also unlikely that the anti-matter could be released without it somehow contacting the matter of its container after release.