Differences between plasma beam and ion beam.

Gist, no, that’s vastly overstated. We’ve already produced antimatter and Earth still exists doesn’t it?

Antimatter-matter collisions are strongly energetic, but on an atomic scale. It’s exactly like all those people who were scared of the LHC because it may produce minuscule black holes. Scale!

we produce antimatter in a low amount as you said. and by magnetic forces it is kept away from any matter, in a vacuum environment. the collisions we might have tested also are on a tiny scale. a few particles. i doubt we tested already the reaction of several grams of matter and antimatter. and i doubt that we can calculate what it’d result in. you know, one day people calculated the motions of the sun around the earth, still in the end they were wrong, no matter how scientifically advanced it might have seemed.

If you make one gram of TNT explode, you can predict the energy released by a kilogram.

The same applies here. This isn’t magic, there’s no “DARK FORCE” that suddenly makes the release of energy exponentially higher when you put more antimatter. We know exactly the kind of energy output this creates because it’s a perfect annihilation: every particle cancels out an antiparticle and releases a finite amount of energy dependent on the particle in question.

Antimatter-matter annihilation is really powerful, but no, it’s not “a gram blows up everything in a 3 ly radius”. It’ll make a big explosion and might even be comparable with nukes, but it won’t destroy the Earth or any such ridiculous thing.

In space your best weapons will be missiles and railguns (mass drivers). Weapon-grade lasers take up far too much space because of all the generators OR chemicals (some of them use chemical reactions to generate the beam) needed to fire them.

The flight model of a missile is a bit different in space since there are no aerodynamics to help it fly, but it’s still completely doable.

Missiles are probably the best space combat weapon imaginable because they can seek a target and engage at long range. Not to mention you can fill them up with goodies like nuclear ordinance or antimatter if it were to become cheap enough.

Antimatter explosions are powerful, antimatter reactions are measured in terra electron volts (i believe most fission reactions are it mega and most fusion are in giga), however it won’t blow up the entire planet let alone anything within 3ly

And 1.7 TeV is the kinetic energy of a fly…

Just to get this into perspective.

FriendlyFire wrote:
And 1.7 TeV is the kinetic energy of a fly…

Just to get this into perspective.

Per matter-antimatter pair. So a single annihilation between a proton and antiproton produces the KE of a fly.

I’m going to assume you have more antimatter than that

We don’t have a whole lot of antimatter lying about, and it isn’t easy to produce.

If you want numbers, consider this: Castle Bravo, the biggest nuclear bomb detonated by the US, had a yield of 15 megatons, which is about 1e16 Joules. It was detonated in 1954.

By comparison, you’d need one gram of antimatter (antihydrogen specifically) to have the same yield, assuming perfect efficiency. One gram which, according to the CERN’s estimates, would take them 100 billion years to create at the current rates, most probably not accounting for decay.

Matter-antimatter annihilation is very powerful, but it’s ridiculously impractical. Just get nukes instead.

for now it is, FF. i doubt our technology would not become more efficient with the time and i doubt we will stay by one or two producing entities. actually it is inefficient because we are investing just as much energy to produce antimatter (and matter), probably even a tiny bit more, as we would get back in case of a detonation. so the only advantage of this technology would be that we can concentrate energy on just a little space or save it in form of matter and antimatter.

You do realize that nuclear fission/fusion has, for all intents and purposes, about the same energy density?

Antimatter stuff is science-fiction for a reason. It is NOT practical and don’t come out with the “but in ZE FUTURE” argument again. Future techs will also have better nuke stuff or another energy source entirely. Antimatter requires complex containment cells, has enormous decay and is exceedingly difficult to produce. Fissile material is available naturally and just needs reprocessing, then it can be contained by anything dense and thick enough to block radiations.

within the precepts of science fiction, this is how most of them do it. the PPG/Plasma Cannons from B5 do it this way, the Romulan Plasma Torpedo does it this way in Star Trek, The Holy Covenant in Halo uses a similar technique for Plasma Torpedoes.

So if you want to use plasma within the precepts of softer sci fi, then yeah, it’ll work. If you want to be ubercore Hard Sci Fi, then no, dont even think about plasma weapons.