root@Antimater Inconsistency

Decivre wrote:

root wrote:

The remerging of forks would be a primary strategic consideration when choosing between fabbed missiles and fighters, as one can bring back intelligence. Having many different primes helps reduce the stress on each prime, and creates a more heterogeneous XP pool to work from for future training. You can say the missiles can do the same, but I think it would be hard to find volunteers to explode over and over and over again. They would go insane far too quickly to be economically worth while. Although, I would guess you could find infomorphs from Earth who were willing to be a missile jockey for a chance to be re-instantiated.

Transmission from a cyberbrain is near-instantaneous and does not require an ego-bridge. It's very possible for a missile-controlling infomorph to ego-cast back to the firing ship, effectively allowing them to "eject" before impact. However, a fighter would still be more effective than a missile in all regards. A fighter craft could very well be built to explode on impact, but also be equipped with weapons and other equipment so it can fulfill non-suicidal roles.

Ah, yes. A missile with guns on it. It would make the end of Independence Day make more sense.

implication of all this: *At 150 kg of antimatter, you have about the firepower of an [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio-class_submarine]Ohio class missle sub[/url]. *At 150 tons of antimatter, you have about the firepower of [b][url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_the_United_States]the entire US or USSR at height of Cold War[/url][/b].

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

This also makes the destroyers a lot more intimidating. Not only are they fearsomely awesome, they're a fearsomely awesome that can no longer be replicated.

It also makes them very prime targets for exactly that reason, especially if, as is likely, the Junta lost most/all of the Jovian antimatter production during that 17-minute war they had. Frankly, that makes their antimatter destroyers paper tigers - they can't risk deploying them and losing them, and even if they could, they can't refuel them once they set out. At best, they'd see action if the Junta itself came under attack.

As stated, this is all very "back of envolope"! I say the energy budget for all of transhumanity is "in the ballpark" of 10^16 watts, but I could see that being moved by an order of magnitude (either way), and still being consistent. Re: the destroyers, as described, being paper tigers, that also possibly fits with my metaphor of aircraft carriers. I've heard some military nerds argue that, if the US ever got into a fight with a serious power (Russia or China for instance), the aircraft carriers would be very vulnerable to antiship missles. Mind you, there are other military nerds who argue that this threat to carriers is overstated, and I myself am not enough of a military nerd to discern if either side is full of bullshit or not. I know the antimatter also powers the propulsion, but, at 150 tons of it, [b]the antimatter is not the bottleneck to propulsion[/b]--which implies the majority of that antimatter is for weapons. Consulting "GURPS Vehicles" for instance, their model of an antimatter rocket, "antimatter thermal", requires 0.05 gallon of water per 4*10^-6 grams of antimatter. [b]Seven orders of magnitude[/b] between reaction mass required to antimatter required. There are some other types of antimatter rockets which do require much less reaction mass to antimatter. I'm trying to think of the implications if, in fact, the antimatter was the bottleneck to burns. I can work on some figures in a bit, but tl;dr you could basically do continuous 0.2g burns from one end of the solar system to the other.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

You assume firstly that they lost production capabilities, secondly that they burn through it that quickly, and thirdly they can't acquire it elsewhere.

You do remember that when the Fall happened, the three conventional military forces which were all eyeing each other over the barrels of guns over Jupiter had an all-out throwdown that left the Jovian orbit almost entirely scrap in the span of seventeen minutes, right? Antimatter factories would've been high-priority targets during that throwdown, and they're also pretty fragile because [i]freaking antimatter[/i]. All you have to do is get a few good laser cannon shots on target and BOOM!

boomzilla wrote:

Anyway, I know this is all a bit nitpicky, and I always feel like such a nerd (in the bad sense of "nerd") when I get caught up in figures like this for a game. I do think there are some important implications--for instance: the terrorists hijacked some antimatter! Do they have enough to: [list] [*]blow up a building [*]blow up a city block [*]blow up an entire city [*]blow up a Martian hemisphere [/list]

Depends entirely on how much antimatter they've got their hands on. You can do some reasonably simple math from Wikipedia, or you just can go [url=http://www.edwardmuller.com/right17.htm]here[/url] and plug in your numbers. But that's not the end of the story, mind you! About 30% of the energy released by matter-antimatter reaction will take the form of muons and neutrinos, harmless little buggers that fly off without interacting much with matter. So, it is true, for example, that a 250mg dose of antimatter will release a total energy equivalent of 10.72 megatons of TNT, but only about 7.504 of those megatons will interact with normal matter in any appreciable way. In this case, "interaction" means "will kill you dead in various ways." To put this in perspective, that 250mg dosage of antimatter, releasing 10.72 Megatons total or 7.504 Mt of "useful" destructive energy, is 375.2 times as destructive as [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man]Fat Man[/url], the bomb dropped on Nagisaki to bring WWII to an end... But only about half as destructive as [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo]Castle Bravo test[/url], the most powerful atomic weapon ever detonated by the United States, and significantly less than one-tenth the destructive power of the half-power tested [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba]Tsar Bomba[/url], the most powerful atomic weapon [i]ever[/i] detonated in human history. (Thus far, and hopefully, ever.) The takeaway from this, hopefully, is that yes, you can do an [i]awful[/i] lot of destruction with antimatter, and with antimatter, a little bit goes a very, very long way, because 250mg is a very, very small amount. Now, mind you, the containment device for 250mg of antimatter is going to be prettttty damn large, unless you've worked out how to suspend antiparticles in a fullerene matrix. To my way of mind, Transhumanity has [i]not[/i] worked out how to suspend antiparticles in a fullerene matrix... But the TITANs would have. So if you're salvaging a TITAN WMD (such as, say, for the Mind the WMD mission,) that antimatter bomb could be something so small you could load it into a seeker launcher designed for the job. Of course, this is only 250mg. If you scale that up, to, say, 2.5Kg... Well, I'll leave the amount of mind-blowing WTFness to you to contemplate how much antimatter you really need to bust off half of Mars. But 250mg is more than enough to ruin an entire city or habitat's day. 0.000025 Kg of antimatter will give you a total energetic yield of 1.074 Kt, or 0.7518Kt of useful explosive. That should be enough to take out a building. Remove a zero and you've probably got a good city-block wrecker. But at these scales and the precision involved you're better off using conventional explosives. [e] 150 tons of antimatter, by the way, yields 6,444,000 megatons of total energetic force, or 4,510,800 megatons of destructive force. I can't even guesstimate what kind of destructive force that would have, but I think it's safe to say that if one of those destroyers crashed into Olympus Mons, you wouldn't have a mountain there anymore.

ORCACommander wrote:

and now you know why emergency farcastrers are banned in some habitats.

Yep. You need very, [i]very[/i] very little antimatter to power an emergency farcaster. And since nobody wants their morph to be cooked prematurely, the containment system on an emergency farcaster is going to be overengineered like a motherfucker: like taking a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier on a three-hour tour of the Hawaiian Islands*. That kind of overengineered containment system could easily be used to hold a much, much larger quantity of antimatter - sure, it wouldn't be [i]as[/i] safe, but if you're already suicide bombing, all you care about is that it's going to hold on until you're at the place you want to blow up anyway, and an emergency farcaster can [i]probably[/i] hold 250mg of antimatter in reasonable safety. *You are now envisioning [i]Gilligan's Island[/i] if it was Gilligan, the Skipper, Thurston Howell III, Eunice, Ginger, the Professor, Mary Ann, and about 5,000 sailors. You're welcome.

ORCACommander wrote:

I think at 250mg it would only resemble an EFC :P the problem with antimatter munitions as i see them is that they need gravity to completely use the payload. in a nullg environment the initial contact detonation should push the rest of the AM out of contact with normal matter.

I don't think it will. The energy released by antimatter annihilation is radiation. Over very short distances, it starts decaying on hits with other stuff to produce a blast, but, at the distances you're talking about, it won't interact fast enough to overcome the momentum that's pushing the antimatter payload against the matter payload, especially if there's still magnetic field lingering pushing it towards the payload. Also, um... EFC?

Yes, but again: we're not talking about any leisurely collision here, we're talking about the matter and antimatter colliding [i]very freaking fast[/i].

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:

Antimatter factories would've been high-priority targets during that throwdown, and they're also pretty fragile because [i]freaking antimatter[/i]. All you have to do is get a few good laser cannon shots on target and BOOM!

That depends a lot on the output of the factory, or rather how much it stores at any one point in time. The total power in the flux tube is about 2 teraWatt, which puts an upper limit on the production of antimatter using Io's flux tube of about 22.25 mg/s. Using CERN's current efficiency of antimatter production, this comes to 58 micrograms of antimatter per month. (I consider monthly shipping from the factories not unlikely) If detonated all at once, this would equal slightly less than one Oklahoma City bombing. Antimatter production can probably be made more efficient, but at the same time you can only draw a fraction of the power of Io's flux tube. 58 µg/month is probably an upper limit[1]. Unless all the antimatter is stored in such a way that destroying one container will detonate [i]all[/i] the antimatter (and [i]why would you ever do that[/i]?), firing a laser at a Jovian antimatter factory would probably not have completely destroyed it. It would in any case be bad design to have an antimatter factory that is completely destroyed by a containment failure. [1] Requiring some 200 billion years to produce enough antimatter for a Destroyer. At 100% efficiency and using the entire Io flux tube, only 200 years.

Decivre wrote:

Slith wrote:

Remember the part where I said you'd try to change the definition of a destroyer?

I'm pretty sure Eclipse Phase did, unless you're going to tell me that the U.S. contingency of destroyers are space-capable or that navies now operate in space.

My question would be, why use an existing word if you're going to completely change the meaning of that word? You might just as well call it a Rudisplork; that way you don't confuse people who expect a pre-existing word to mean a specific thing.

John Ringo used fullerene antimatter in his Posleen series as a weird area affect weapon. the warhead released a "smoke trail" of fullerenes along with (microwave?) detonators at altitude. This narrow cone of anti-matter laced dust creates a large footprint with shallower craters. From memory, it wasn't a clean bomb but the hard radiation was supposed to be down to survivable levels in a few years. So great for taking out huge swaths of terrain that you want to eventually reclaim.

Seekerofshadowlight wrote:

I know this thread has moved away from this and has been resurrected but, the name "Destroyer" has been used a number of time in sci-fi. Space ships are not limited to the roles ships of that name carry out in the navy. Most folks could not tell you what a destroyer, frigate or cruiser do. Nor do they really care what they do, the name destroyer sounds cool. It invokes violence, power and destruction, it sounds fearsome.

That is sort of where the term "destroyer" comes from. The first naval destroyers were escort vessels designed to engage and destroy multiple smaller targets, and were originally classed "torpedo boat destroyers" in a classic example of names being used as a description of their function rather than "because it sounds cool". In order to meet the demands of their intended role, "torpedo boat destroyers" were lightly armored (and therefore fast) and had considerable firepower for their size, but lacked endurance for extended ocean operations. By WW1 the classification had been shortened to simply "destroyer". Post-WW2, with the development of computers and guided missiles, destroyers transitioned to a direct-combat role supplanting battleships and cruisers - thus their role shifted, and larger destroyers were built in order to extend the time they could spend at sea as surface-attack platforms. It's not much of a hand-wave to extrapolate that the Eclipse Phase term "destroyer" has a similar history; rather than "because it sounds cool", the warship classification may have originally been "______ Destroyer" before the Fall, where "______" is some noun referring to the thing they were designed as a hard-counter to.

Seekerofshadowlight wrote:

TheGrue wrote:

It's not much of a hand-wave to extrapolate that the Eclipse Phase term "destroyer" has a similar history; rather than "because it sounds cool", the warship classification may have originally been "______ Destroyer" before the Fall, where "______" is some noun referring to the thing they were designed as a hard-counter to.

Are you at all familiar with Babylon 5? The Earth forces largest ships were 'Destroyers" that are very close to what the EP Destroyers are. Heavily armed carriers that lay down a crap ton of weapons fire. That setting also uses names such as Corvettes, cruisers,dreadnaughts and Destroyers but the roles are not really the same as a navy. I think EP has the same thing going on, reuse the names but not the roles.

Your statement is not at all in conflict with what I wrote. In B5 as well, I have a hard time swallowing "because it sounded cool" as a reason a military organization chose a classification. Individual vessel names, perhaps, though in the real world those tend to be chosen based on a theme (for example the United States names aircraft carriers in honor of presidents). I proposed an explanation for how "destroyer" might have come to refer to a class of space-borne warship that bears little relation to its seafaring counterpart. The same explanation may be true for Babylon 5.