Differences between plasma beam and ion beam.

well… the ion beam sounds like a beam of loaded particles - ions.
the plasma beam is rather a beam of er… plasma - sorta matter or maybe in science fiction rather an intermediate between wave and matter - like photons. or maybe just indeed a liquid mass with acidic qualities that’d burn itself through solid hulls… for what i know none of those exist anyway, so what’s the matter?

Well Ion is just charged particles that in sci-fi are typically used to disable electronic devices, they do seem to be in the form of a beam mostly. I guess you could think of it as a sort of taser.

I’m not an expert on this kind of stuff, but I think you’ll find that plasma weapons use a projectile, and you could compare it’s function as being just like any conventional firearm. Difference is that they use electricity to heat a gas which expands rapidly to accelerate the projectile, as opposed to most conventional firearms which use a cartridge filled with gunpowder to accelerate the projectile. So this wouldn’t be a beam weapon.

Plasma is a gas of charged particles (there is no such thing as a plasma beam). Ions are charged particles.

An ion beam is mostly used as a propeller right now. A very thin, very concentrated stream of ions (a beam) can make satellites move at a sufficient velocity to navigate in the solar system, though the vast majority of the speed comes from chain slingshots using planets as accelerators.

Plasma has a variety of uses, but the science-fiction idea of it being a good weapon is mostly wrong. You’d have a hard time containing a gas in a vacuum; much better to just use mass drivers or lasers.

Aye, but from what I can make of it, plasma may just be the expanded gas used to accelerate a projectile from a barrel, as opposed to being the projectile itself. So as you say, the plasma would likely just disperse but the projectile would still be on it’s way. Result! lol.

If I’m to be honest, why not just go with what looks good, that’s far more important than what something should or shouldn’t look like. Everybody likes shiny stuff! Also, most of this stuff is sci-fi, doesn’t really exist, so it can be what the hell you want it to be.

You want the truth? Most of the stuff is invisible. When it’s not, then it’ll be a uniform color, depending on how energetic it is.

Also, plasma isn’t created by acids and bases, that’s only for aqueous environments. Plasma is most often created through electric fields.

Also, most of the words you’re using do not actually exist. The FL devs took random words and applied them to this context, but they make absolutely no sense. “Pulsed” refers to a beam that is quickly shut down and powered up. The other two words mean nothing. There’s no such thing as a “bolt of plasma” or a “bolt of neutrons”. Ion beams are just there. You can turn them on and off and that’s about it, and most of the time they’ll have very faint colors. Plasmas can be more vivid, but in space they’d become so diffuse so quickly you wouldn’t see much. You don’t tend to see free neutrons around much, since they’re part of atoms. If you do, they’re invisible and just collide with stuff, causing reactions (namely nuclear fission).

So really, do as Timmy said and just make what looks good because otherwise it’ll be boring as hell. Games are a way to escape reality

especially scifi or phantasy games, yea. there are other physics even in freelancer to be made realistic, just have a closer look at linear motions and there you go.
indeed i think one day we could have plasma or photon torpedoes or stuff - capsules containing concentrated amounts of named particles that would open on collision with objects causing the particles to react with its matter. neutron-filled missiles we might have already - nuclear weapons could be built to contain neutrons only and would cause just as much radiation damage (probably there wouldn’t be such an incredibly destructive explosion though).

Gisteron, please, read up on physics more ^^

Photon torps are absolutely useless. Why the hell would you take the time to build a light emitter (photon IS light), put it in a torpedo and then make it radiate in all space (which effectively diminishes the strength of the radiation by 1/r^2) when you could mount a reusable, much stronger and directed beam through a laser on the ship’s hull? Star Trek and science don’t mix. Don’t cross the streams!

Likewise, neutron-filled means nothing. WE are neutron-filled. Atoms are full of neutrons, but neutrons by themselves do squat. They’re like protons, but without the electric charge. The reason they’re being mentioned in stuff like fission is exactly because of that - they can be expelled from atoms in a fission reaction far more easily than protons, because they have no electrical charge. However, neutrons in themselves are just particles, they cause nothing spectacular. A neutron-filled thingy would just be a blob of weird matter which probably would have a hard time staying together.

If you want realistic space weapons, you need to look at lasers (the invisible type), missiles, standard torpedoes and mass drivers. Anything else is pure drivel.

well, as photons have mass, i think it could be possible to concentrate them to affect in a certain direction. but you’re right, lasers are more efficient for that purpose. concerning neutrons - well, exactly. it won’t be stable, and you can e.g. damage soil with neutron-filled capsules, so those soil would emit radiation - again, nuclear weapons are far more efficient, so no reason to make those complicated stuff, actually.

Photons have mass? News to me.

well, yes. they exist as long as they are in motion (for what i understood) and there are weighing scales that display the “mass” they recieve when enlightened. also, this very mass is the reason, why straight light rays can be refracted by gravity.

Err… Photons by definition have no mass. They otherwise couldn’t reach the speed of light.

You’re confusing with relativistic mass, which IMO is a really bad vision of things since it’s actually energy you’re measuring.

Photon torpedos in star trek are supposed to be anti-matter weapons, when they detonate that’s supposed to result in a matter-anti-matter explosion.

I’m just speculating here cos my only insight into any of this comes from watching silly movies, but if you’ve seen angels and demons, that follow up film to the davinci code, part of the plot involved such an explosion which illuminated the whole sky with a really bright light.

So maybe, the only reason they call such a torpedo a photon torpedo, is that if it were to exist it might result in a very bright light when detonated? Who knows.

Timmy51m wrote:
Photon torpedos in star trek are supposed to be anti-matter weapons, when they detonate that’s supposed to result in a matter-anti-matter explosion.

For that I would take a missile and put a warhead filled with
anti-matter. It’ll do the same and I suppose it would be cheaper
and easier to produce.

Timmy51m wrote:
I’m just speculating here cos my only insight into any of this comes from watching silly movies, but if you’ve seen angels and demons, that follow up film to the davinci code, part of the plot involved such an explosion which illuminated the whole sky with a really bright light.

So maybe, the only reason they call such a torpedo a photon torpedo, is that if it were to exist it might result in a very bright light when detonated? Who knows.

Star Trek, you can’t explain that!

I remember I read once about a supposed anti-matter matter
explosion (and alot of other theories) on earth, dont remeber
where it was but i remember it was described as “an explosion
which illuminated the whole sky with a really bright light.”

Anyway, I stay with mass drivers and missiles, I dont even think the
laser could be effective enought to be used as weapon.

The reason they are what they are in star trek, is to do with the idea of it being a shielded weapon which can deliver the payload beneath the surface of a planet or even a star, could say it’s a sci-fi super weapon, an everyday missile wouldn’t have the same ring to it would it lol.

Seems you’re drawing a similar conclusion to me then, it’s photon torpedo perhaps because of the light generated by it’s explosion.

Antimatter is still very much in the realm of sci-fi. Producing a gram of the thing could cost in excess of 25 billion dollars by the most optimistic estimates, and a gram gives very little. Just build nukes instead.

i heard, though that maybe is considered wrong now (heard rather a longer time ago) that even minimal reactions between matter and antimatter - say, a finger tip of both - would open a power high enough to destroy about everything in range of multiple lightyears. so, even if man would bother intensively creating antimatter (the price is a question of technology, technology a question of time and alltogether a question of economy), it would rather serve as energy source for e.g. jumpdrives or warpdrives (assuming those are possible). still, it is all very theoretic because we still don’t know, which exact materials would give what amount of power, we don’t know whether there at all is a way of warping space, neither how much power it would require, neither whether we could find anything that would be strong enough to keep the energy in a form and geometrical dimension we would be able to manage.