Weapons Plug

I think that you would need a special kind of armor or layer of plating to allow you to enter an anti-system. A simple minig scoop (albeit one with containment systems) would not give your ship any real protection. Something along the lines of an Antimatter Collection Frame, which builds a grid of space stabalizers around your ship along with a collection system. Maybe it would require you to fire a special capsule at the asteroid, which takes a sample and returns to your ship...

Can I get a firm consensus on exactly how much antimatter one of these warheads should hold?

E=mc^2 is your friend. Make up some structural integrity values. Then remember that pretty much nobody is going to check your math.

The equation would be e=(2m)c^2 since you're turning both matter and anti-matter into energy here. Wouldn't it?

No. It would still remain as E=mc2 for energy conversion, because, IIRC, the mass includes both the matter and antimatter.

@eugene-chin, on Apr 12 2007, 07:55 PM, said in Weapons Plug:

I just saw what you wrote about Antimatter, and at least some of it is inaccurate.

The reason you want 1.3 x 10^12 tons of Antimatter to smash a 5.973 x 10^21 ton planet is not because Antimatter destroys more matter than itself.

It is because you are trying to generate enough force to push the rest of the planet's matter out of it's gravity-well, so that the remaining chunks don't fall back in again (I've seen that "Destroy the Earth" site too).

A spaceship does not depend upon it's own gravity well (Unless you're talking about Death-stars, and that's just poor tactical design.)

A 200 mg Antimatter warhead would have less punch than a 10 kiloton nuke (About 8.6 Kt)

This is still a nasty hit to take, but nowhere near this 1:143,596 ratio you're quoting.

I do think that to actually annihilate the entire ships' mass, you need an equivalent mass of antimatter, right? Of course, to destroy/disable a ship, you probably only need to destroy up to a third of its mass, or less if you factor in decompression killing the crew, etc.

So I assume 33 tons of antimatter would be sufficient to kill a Starbridge. Hmm...this is still inefficient compared to multiple Hellhounds though. Bah...out the window with realism, just make it a 25 ton missile that kills everything, but is still very, very expensive, and hard to use properly.

Alright... if anybody actually takes the time to check my math, they will find that I made a value up off the top of my head. NEW WEAPON: Tachyon Pulse Cannon - gun that fires in HUGE bursts but takes forever to reload. Secondary weapon. I tried this out with a side project of mine and it is very cool.

@apache1990, on Apr 13 2007, 02:47 AM, said in Weapons Plug:

I do think that to actually annihilate the entire ships' mass, you need an equivalent mass of antimatter, right?

This is if you wanted to ENSURE that the ship was completely toast. An amount of antimatter equal to the same mass as a ship would indeed completely vaporize it, but you would only do this to make sure that there is no possible way that you can re-create the object in question (because all of it was vaporized by the antimatter).

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Of course, to destroy/disable a ship, you probably only need to destroy up to a third of its mass, or less if you factor in decompression killing the crew, etc.

This is also a true statement. However, as I've stated earlier...

@warlord-mike, on Mar 24 2007, 12:54 PM, said in Weapons Plug:

(...)if you annihilated 3.5 ounces (or 100 grams in SI) of Antimatter, you would generate an explosion of roughly the same caliber of a 5-Megaton Hydrogen Bomb. (...)

Thus, the missile that Kaoz is currently developing could probably take out even a Raven without breaking a sweat. This is, of course, mere speculation.

@warlord-mike, on Apr 12 2007, 11:11 PM, said in Weapons Plug:

No. It would still remain as E=mc2 for energy conversion, because, IIRC, the mass includes both the matter and antimatter.

Yeah, m would be the entire mass of the matter being converted to energy. In that, half of that matter would have to be antimatter to get complete annihilation and the conversion to energy.