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So where do they get all that anti-matter to power all those ships and fighters and robots and power armour? No matter how little AM it takes to power the stuff, it all adds up to a LOT of AM.

I think with AM being so destructive the production would be in very high security areas, and there would be no civil facilities(NE and some other big name companies excluded of course) To the point that there might be only a dozen major production facilities in the entire 3Gs. Yes sure every AM powersource has a life span of 5 years or more years, but there would be new fighters, and new PA built everyday.

Any opinions?

Never really thought about it before, but I think you might be right.

I expect it would be produced in large secure facilities where a particular quantity of AM is created and stored in the container which will be used in the Figheter or starship. The container is then intigrated into the engine or power plant of the vehicle following production. THis suggests the procedure to replace your antimatter cell will be relativly simple, like changing a battery or protoculture cell.

darkmax wrote:Actually AM is everywhere in space. It's just a matter of harvesting them.

Star Trek's starships all have "scoops" on their nacelles to collect AM.... I think it is AM.

nope. in trek, the bussard collectors are tasked with gathering replacement hydrogen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramscoop

AM is very hard to make in RL. it involves bombarding a lithium target with a stream of near lightspeed protons. a few times out of a billion, an anti-proton is knocked out the target's atomic structure as a result of the bombardment causing atomic reactions.

with modern methods, to produce any useable amount of AM, you'd basically build an atom smasher complex the size of several states. to produce the amounts needed for space craft, your looking at converting half the planet.

which means in the 3G's, they use some other method.

trek has 'quantum charge inverters' (IIRC), that through some technobabble effect can turn normal matter into anti-matter, although it requires massive energy useage. in one of the scifi books i own (The island Worlds,) an inventor out in the asteorid belt invented a feild (an out growth of grand unification theory) that could convert any form of electric power into anti-matter.


whatever method you use, remember that it will be power intensive, and that it's usually not going to be something you can build into a ship (without sacrificing everything esle. sheilds, weapons, decent drives..ect.)






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personally, i figure phase world antimatter power plants only need a small 'seed' of antimatter to get the reaction going, and then use a small gravitic generator to simulate the event horizon of a singularity, drawing in virtual particle-antiparticle pairs created in the fluctuations of space-time. thus it's self fueling, and you don't have to carry more than a few kilograms onboard to start the process and to augment it every so often. (a few kilograms would still result in a hundred megatons or so of explosion when containment fails however. (3kg =128mt, 640 times more powerful than the Tomahawk cruise missile in Coalition navy. making it about... 1D6x25,600 mdc , with a blast radius of about seventy six miles.
(edit: i fixed my damage calculation., had to find my notes.. double damage for every five fold increase in yeild, double the radii for every 10 fold increase. 1d6x1000 mdc/6 mile radii = 1 mt. turns out my orginal calc in my head went over quite a bit. still pretty darn powerful though. the number may change later, since for simplicty i used Braden's Megaton listing from my last thread on antimatter, instead of directly calculating from the 200 kt Tomahawk warhead listing in RIFTS:SB4)

3kg =128mt, 640 times more powerful, or about 320 times more damaging than the Tomahawk cruise missile in Coalition navy. making it about... Nuclear 1D6x320,000 md Nuclear , with a blast radius of about a three hundred miles.

And THAT is why I use Fusion in all Phase World ships, save for the large missiles used to destory heavy cruisers and up, or to turn a planet into a steaming pile of nuked mud.

darkmax wrote:Actually AM is everywhere in space. It's just a matter of harvesting them.

Star Trek's starships all have "scoops" on their nacelles to collect AM.... I think it is AM.

Um... no. I ain't commenting on Star Trek stuff because I never gave a rat's ass about how ST "science" works, but you're hella wrong about antimatter. Antimatter doesn't exist all over the place, for the simple reason that every time a particle and its antiparticle run into each other, they annihilate each other. If there is any antimatter out there, it'll be in extremely minute amounts (the occasional molecule of antimatter hydrogen or antimatter helium, maybe one every few million cubic kilometres) floating around in intergalactic space.

For all we know there might've been a lot of antimatter particles floating around in the extremely early days of the universe when relatively complex matter like electrons, protons, and neutrons first coalesced out of the primordial "hot particle sea". But that would've dissapeared almost as quickly as it formed, careening off into normal matter and being annihilated almost at the moment of its creation.

Seriously, it's safe to assume that the universe (even a sci-fi universe like Phase World) is 99.9999999% normal matter, and I'm being conservative on the amount of 9s I'm using

Which basically means that all the antimatter they use is synthesized in particle accelerators, or whatever crazy technology the people of the future have. THey don't harvest it because there's none to harvest.

hmmm...I'd say that 'natural' sources of AM would be most likely in the intergalatcic void, away from concentrations of regular matter, that would annihilate it....making harvesting it in the space between galaxies a long, lonely, and dangerous business...and even the outgassing from a ship could cause a 'strike' of a few hundred molecules of AM floating freely to blow up in your face if you're not careful.

Another source would, of course, be rifts....another dangerous business, since you then have to contain the antimatter streaming out of the open rift, while the stuff is explosively interacting with all the normal matter in the vicinity....
Ironically, this makes magic-using nations like the UWW potentially the oil-barons of anti-matter, since they can manipulate rifts, as well as containment fields...allowing them to relatively cheaply harvest 'natural' AM from alternate universes....THe irony is, for the most part, the UWW and other magic-using peoples use direct magic-energy conversion to power their ships, rather than fuel their craft and arm their warheads with AM(though it could be argued that the more powerful TW engines and stardrives are actually 'seeping' minute amounts of anti-matter in their drive chambers to produce the fantastic amounts of energy necessary for galactic travel)

A natural rift to an anti-matter dimension would be a really dangerous thing...if not an outright navigation hazard, and would be almost indistinguishable from a pulsar...

I believe you can use magnetic fields to contain AM.

Aramanthus wrote:I believe you can use magnetic fields to contain AM.

Preferred safe medium for harvesting and containment.....as long as you can maintain the field...

Yeah, you'd have make sure that you wouldn't have an interruptions in the power supply.

darkmax wrote:Hmm... open a micro-rift to the AM dimension. erect a tube of force from the mouth of the micro-rift to the AM containment and packaging.... voila, we have an endless supply of cheap AM fuel.... though higher unstable in that state.

May be they can come up with AM in a block. A solid state AM that is held by magnetic fields.

A block of permanently magnetized metal impregnated at the time of formation(via rapid-vapor cooling in zero-gravity) to produce a 'sponge' of matter/anti-matter...to release the energy contained within, vaporize the block, the iron vapor loses its magnetic fields, mixes with the freed anti-matter...pow...

Aramanthus wrote:Yeah, you'd have make sure that you wouldn't have an interruptions in the power supply.

a couple of low level redundant AM reactors feeding off the stored AM would be a good start. self fueling containment. good for a few hundred years.

or an unobtainium magnetic alloy that uses it's strong natural magnetic repulsion for containment. (monopole plating perhaps?)

ultra-tech and magical methods might include sticking the AM into a dimensional pocket, so if the containment is lost all it means is you misplaced the connection to the pocket.

Actually Glitterboy, that is where a couple of low powered fusion reactors would be perfect. Because you can always use a ram scoop to refuel those in the depths of space.

Esckey wrote:So where do they get all that anti-matter to power all those ships and fighters and robots and power armour?

This calls for a new dimension book:

The Three Galaxies' Best Kept Secret: Splugorth excrete many tons of antimatter as digestive waste, and distribute it through anonymous resellers.

Even more obscure than Eylor, and guarded by the Splugorths' mighty Middenlords, the Splugorth planet of Krapheep secretly supplies 90% of the Three Galaxies' antimatter needs.

Okay, I'll stop now.

Ewww! That is very distrubing! :::Shakes thinking about it!::: Ewww!!!!

Aramanthus wrote:Ewww! That is very distrubing! :::Shakes thinking about it!::: Ewww!!!!

Think of all those accidents in the outhouse...

"Dang, forgot I'm not supposed to use TP!!! Oh well, I was meaning to go orbital this weekend...looks like I got an early start!"

(Two Kydians looking off into the distance)
Kydian One: "Oh drat...looks like Lord Nurggsyth launched himself again.."
Kydian Two: "Yah...always gotta expect this after Bean and Bone Marrow night at the Feeding Frenzy."

Why am I suddenly reminded of Nibbler and the source of Darkmatter?

Nikoli wrote:Why am I suddenly reminded of Nibbler and the source of Darkmatter?

Crass humorists think alike...

darkmax wrote:That would explain their apparently endless supply of money as well as power cells for their vehicles...... Hmm.... that would make Splugorth a necessary evil in the megaverses, which would also explain why the older gods have not crush them.

That, and it's great fun to bowl with those oversized oculars of theirs...

darkmax wrote:indeed.......

It's cleaning the darn things that's the real bother...but once you do, they're great for mega-marble games(although there was the time that idiot from the Nth Dimension tossed in its catseye sphere of anti-matter and buckshoted the whole game to niffelhiem....)