Space Engine 0.98

[Violet Mcdow]

Theportals are a clarketech produced by a portal generator. This generator consumes relatively little energy, and has a limited range (in order to prevent teleporting a bomb into your enemy's ship being the dominant form of warfare). The portals themselves are 2-dimensional circles that, in pairs, connect two points in space. The portals will have two primary functions to facilitate antimatter particle accelerators.

Placing one portal in front of a linear accelerator and one behind it will allow particles to repeatedly pass through the accelerator, constantly gaining speed and effectively giving that accelerator infinite length. When the particles reach the desired speed, the portals can be (very precisely) disabled, allowing the particles to shoot out the front of the accelerator. This allows incredibly short linear accelerators to produce particles moving at similar speeds to those found in much larger circular accelerators.

By placing a pair of non-orientable wormholes right outside the exit of the accelerator, the accelerated particles will have their chirality reversed, reversing their charge and turning them into the antimatter versions of whatever particles they are. As this is a clarketech, this process somehow does not draw much additional power from the portal generator (this could probably be used to create a perpetuum mobile, but such is sci-fi). I imagine the issue of some of the particles annihilating right outside the accelerator could be mitigated with strong electric fields clearing the entrance.

If you spice it up a bit to $100 GeV$ the "muzzle" velocity is already $0.999956747967c$. And that is a 10 meter long tube. What big accelerators like the LHC are after is hardly speed. You can make a 100 meter long accelerator that rivals the speed of the LHC. But you know what your 100 meter tube cant match ? The number of particles. Because that is where the issue is. One particle moving at close to the speed of light is fairly useless. You need a lot of them to do much of anything. To accelerate a lot of particles, you need big boy magnets. So even with your portals, a weapon capable accelerator will not be small. It cant be, otherwise you cannot physically accelerate the sheer number of particles fast enough to make anything funny happen.

But, just how much more energy would we get if we converted this Beam into Antimatter ? Well, that is just $E = mc^2$ assuming 100% conversion bla bla bla. Which works out to $0.02 Mt$ of additional energy ON TOP of our $10 Mt$ beam.

The render above is deceptive. It makes the exhaust look like a tiny baby girl flame. Where as in reality this exhaust would be several light seconds long before you couldn't see it anymore. The colors and apparent shortness is just relativistic effects.

Obviously, standing in such a beam reduces your life expectancy rapidly. Its a bit like the Titan, one moment you exist the next you dont. But this is not the main danger from such a Drive / Weapon. Its the radiation. Particle accelerators like the LHC, my drive or your Portal Gun produce radiation at the end of the day. And this radiation does not stop being angry until it hits something. So unlike normal rocket exhaust, these kinds of weapons are deadly potentially across a solar system depending on the exact numbers.

Its a bit hard to illustrate just how much radiation the weapon you propose would generate. But this radiation is your actual weapon. You can very realistically irradiate an entire planet in a few minutes with anything that powerful. And if you get close enough you can just cause the Atmosphere to undergo thermonuclear fusion. (Hyperbolic).

This is also why this scene from Avatar 2 is so god damn dumb. If you enter an Atmosphere with an Antimatter rocket Engine, the Atmosphere would explode. I did the math a while ago but each of the ISVs thrusters would produce the equivalent of 100 Mt per second.

First, the exhaust would literally be a few Billion degrees hot. So hot that normal matter just cannot exist within it. Which makes it really handy because it is quiet literally impossible to stop. Even a Magnetic field will struggle if the beam hits it perpendicularly.

Second, unlike a normal weapon this remains deadly for a long time. Even if you are light seconds away, the particles are still moving. They are just so far away that the beam has diffused and not really has a temperature anymore. Its just a bunch of really angry particles. Essentially Cosmic rays. These will not only irradiate anything they touch but also physically degrade the matter. In Fusion reactors, something known as Neutron-Induced Transmutation happens. Where Neutrons enter the atoms of the containment chamber and change the atom. Usually this does not happen with charged particles to the same extend. But if the Charged particles move this fast they overcome nuclear binding / repulsion forces and can Transmutate matter. Which weakens materials very quickly and makes them screamingly radioactive.

Your core idea is not bad, and really imo all you need to do is ditch the Antimatter part. With a pure particle accelerator virtually all of the Particles and as such the Radiation moves away from you. So you yourself do not get turned into a mutant. But the moment you interduce Antimatter some of that will Annihilate before it hits the target. Annihilation produces Gamma / X-Rays omnidirectional. So you get hit as well. The dosage might be low but it is just another point against Antimatter for this application.

Let's look at what this is weapon is doing, as stated. First, it is accelerating a particle up to super-high speeds without being the size of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Then it is converting said particle into antimatter at the instant that it leaves the muzzle and hurtles towards the enemy ship.

If the particle is accelerated to extraordinary speed (eg 0.999999 c, comparable to the LHC) then it gains immense kinetic energy due to special relativity increasing its mass, with this energy dissipated into the enemy ship it is shot into. If it is turned into antimatter then, when it interacts with an equivalent particle of normal matter, it will convert itself into a burst of gamma rays. The problem with doing both is that, all things being equal, damage output is much less than doing just one of them.

Let's look at the speed first. An old cathode ray tube, as found in pre-LCD TVs and monitors, shoots its electrons out at 0.1 c. It is not especially hard to get something that will shoot a particle out at 0.98 c without any need for extremely lengthy hardware or repeating-loop portals, and it will consume many, many orders of magnitude less power than accelerating a particle up to LHC speeds. (Feel free to work out the maths if anyone feels like it - I'm going to be really conservative and figure it will require about a million times less energy to reach 0.98 c vs 0.999999 c, but I suspect it's more like billions.) In terms of targeting a distant enemy ship, 0.98 c is practically as good as 0.99 c or 0.999999 c. The huge advantage is that by accepting an infinitesimally lower "muzzle velocity", your rate of fire for a given power input will be at least a million times greater. Which means that you get a million times more particles hitting the enemy ship.

Without the second piece of Clarketech, this would not be especially useful - a million times more low energy particles will do less damage than a single super-high-energy one. However, these are not normal particles, due to the second piece of Clarketech these are antimatter particles. (Yes, this second piece of technology, unless it has truly obscene power requirements, is a source of effectively infinite energy.) Bombard anything with a million particles of antimatter and it will have a very bad day, much worse than it would have with one super-high-energy antimatter particle.

In summary - pick your favourite piece of Clarketech and ditch the other one, so your weapon is either relying on kinetic energy or matter/antimatter annihilation but not both. You may wish to consider that the portal generator, as written, is a near-perfect defensive shield, as I mentioned in the comments on the question. (If you do not want it to be a defensive shield then you need to make the maximum portal diameter very small and specify a handwavium reason why non-linked portals must have some minimum separation that prevents an array of them being used as a shield.) On the other hand, the matter-to-antimatter gizmo blatantly violates conservation of energy.

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