Ambrosia Software Web Board: Fullerenes as weapons? - Ambrosia Software Web Board

I found out what fullerenes are - they're buckyballs (discovered by Buckminster Fuller, hence the names). I don't get how this little molecule is supposed to work as a powerful weapon. The way I understand it, an antimatter pulse would be far more powerful.

Mike Lee (Firebird)

Buckyballs are highly carbon based and almost indestructable. They are also very elastic. But you're right, any antimatter blast would be more powerful than a Buckyball. Where you saw this or who made it must have been thinking of something else or something more.

By the way, I thought I was the only one in a million who knew anything about buckyballs. How did you hear of them?

Sincerely,
Zeta

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Manager: Someone who makes nonsense sound reasonable.

The Fullerene is supposed to be quite strange a matter, for it is supposed to have some unusual quantum abilities (they say that it can be accelerated to such velocities [by heating it] that it starts to act like a wave ).
They are carbon and carbon only (as far as I know). One Buckyball contains 60 atoms of carbon each, in a form of a ball.

It is also super conductive in low temperatures, magnetic, and pretty heavy:
1mol of that stuff weigh about 720 grams or about 1.6lb (if some of you haven´t yet had senior high chemistry please ask someone else what a mol is).

So I think that the idea of fullerene pulse gun is to accelerate a buckyball to high velocities (somewhat like a magnetic train) and when in right speed, it is fired. Like a magnetic sling it can make quite severe damage.

But still I also think that almost any antimatter pulse would be more powerful.

Maybe the ishimans think about environment
(because when something is antimaterialized the remaining electrons turn into gamma radiation, not lifeform friendly )

I like physics and chemistry and I read about that stuff.

I read about them from Science 2000 magazine (in Finnish: Tiede 2000)

And there's something about fullerene (Buckyballs) in Star Trek Science Logs (book).

Gee… there's 6 billion representatives of the homo sapiens species and there really isn't many who really know more about fullerene than that it excists.
(I guess )

Again writes too long, but I was thorough.

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Strange… just a moment ago I was flying through a dense asteroid field… but now I feel quite cold… And just what happened to my
H-Cruiser?!?

[This message has been edited by The Anon (edited 03-21-2000).]

[This message has been edited by The Anon (edited 03-21-2000).]

anti-matter pulses, in theory, are the most powerful things in the universe.
A matter-antimatter reaction would require equal quantities of matter and antimatter. The two masses would cancel each other out, releasing 7x times 10^50x watts of energy where x equals the number of antimatter/matter atoms. The matter-antimatter would convert matter-antimatter into pure energy.

When I visited the Linear Particle accelerator at Stanford University (California) to inspect the accelerator. They said that they have been able to create antimatter an atom at a time (anti-hydrogen, because it's the cheapest).

Just a pound of antimatter (anti-hydrogen) sprayed into space towards the target(s) could eradicate entire fleets, as the anti-hydrogen would bond and eliminate with the hydrogen in the alloys that the ships would use in their hulls. This would literally cause the hulls in the ships to dissolve and flood the entire system with gamma-wave radiation.

If the huge blast of energy didn't vaporize the crew right there and then, then the exposure to space would kill them very slowly.

Fortunately, anti-matter is so expensive to manufacture and so hard to contain, that it would be 1/10th as expensive the build a device that would hurl stars at the enemy worlds.

In conclusion, antimatter weapons are pure overkill. It would be like using a nuclear missile to light a cigarette. Conventional weapons would be just as effective and 1/*th as expensive.

Yours truly,
Slug. (whew! that was a lot of typing)

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In accepting the inevitable, one finds peace.
In denying it, one finds hope.
-Last words of Admiral Williams before the fall of Earth.

[This message has been edited by Slug (edited 03-21-2000).]

Sure it takes (extremely) large number of energy to create antimatter, but one can always imagine of a device which would easily just flip the polarity of a nucleon.

So fullerene pulse gun is really possible (hypermodern magnetic ballista with extremely heavy "rocks") and possibly quite easy to manufacture, basically I think it could be linear particle accelerator (ofcourse smaller than the one in California) which would instead of atoms accelerate big superheated buckyball clusters

Great theory I'd say, but where (and how) could you manufacture billions of buckyballs to create bigger clusters for that fullerene gun?!?

If I'd be a researcher I would try my theory

I'll make a D-Gun to Ares as soon as Hera arrives (The one from Total Annihilation) and equip a modified research vessel with it

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Strange… just a moment ago I was flying through a dense asteroid field… but now I feel quite cold… And just what happened to my
H-Cruiser?!?

Uhh, you have to do more than flip the charge. I think you have to reverse the spin and some other stuff.

The only thing that might be as (or more) powerful as antimatter would be a gluon-powered laser - it would take a theoreticly infinite amount of energy to completely seperate a proton into quarks. If we could harness even a tiny fraction of that energy we could destroy galaxies. Scary.

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Commander-in-Chief of the Nijayias Interstellar Navy.

Oh, the reason antimatter might not be as powerful as the fullerene pulse is that antimatter needs matter to react with, and if shields are exotic energy fields, they wouldn't be overly affected by antimatter. Only ships with no sheilds would be affected at all, unless a positron got through or something. The shields would also block gamma rays. I think that's a consise explanation of why the fullerene pulse is more powerful than the antimatter pulse.
BTW I learned about buckyballs a way back from my grandmother's Scientific Americans

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Commander-in-Chief of the Nijayias Interstellar Navy.

Maybe it is a magnetically contained and accelerated bucky ball composed of anti-carbons. This would do some damage, as each anti-bucky ball would wiegh nearly ((6ish)/(6.22*10^23))/60 grams, more than enough to desintigrate a section of a ship's hull and give its occupants quite a suntan, as well as leave them open to a hard vacuum. I imagine the only thing keeping one of these from killing anything smaller than a carrier (gateship?) would have to be a particle shield of some sort, or lots of bulkheads and rad suits.

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Vladimir
StPF, RGMW

I actually don't think an Antimatter Pulse Reactor's projectiles have much to do with antimatter at all. Think about the Ishiman counterpart, the Fusion Pulse Reactor. What the hell is a fusion pulse? Fusion is a process, not a type of matter or anything; it can't be made into a pulse. However, imagine using the process of fusion to generate energy which would allow a pulse to be created and launched. If that's the case, then an Antimatter Pulse isn't a packet of antimatter, but simply a pulse created by an antimatter powerplant as opposed to a fusion one. That goes a long way towards explaining the relative innefectuality of a single antimatter pulse.

-reg

Do you know what you just described : Photon torpedoes

P.S. StarCraft sucks!

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In accepting the inevitable, one finds peace.
In denying it, one finds hope.
-Last words of Admiral Williams before the fall of Earth.

Why is everyone so obsessed to destroy the enemy ships when you cound just kill their crew a lot easier.
A single pulse of focused x-ray radiation (Despite it's correctness, I don't want to say X-Ray Laser because it sounds like something from a comic book) would penetrate most particle shields and, if it's strong enough, liquify anything organic in it's path.

Scary, huh

BTW : Antimatter-Matter reactions don't create infinite amounts of energy, just so much that we can't accurately measure it.
If you wanted to disable a ship's electronic systems and fry the crew in the process, you could use a particle accelerator and a hell of a lot of microwave generators to focus a beam at the tip (or the end) of the target ship.

When the Microwaves hit the metal hull, they'll focus on a certain point inside the ship (depending on the curvature of the ship) and that point would emit vast amounts of radiation and ElectroMagnetic energy.

It would be like putting a lightbulb in your microwave oven, where the filament is the crew and the systems that aren't heavily encased in lead.

-Je regret parce que je suis enneyeux
Slug

P.S. StarCraft sucks!

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In accepting the inevitable, one finds peace.
In denying it, one finds hope.
-Last words of Admiral Williams before the fall of Earth.

P.P.S.:

The full name for Bucky Balls is Buckminsterfullerene

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In accepting the inevitable, one finds peace.
In denying it, one finds hope.
-Last words of Admiral Williams before the fall of Earth.

Quote

Right on.

Heck!! Think… if the Fusion Pulses are just fusion activators, they would not themselves be in state of fusion reaction, but they just start one on whatever matter they impact on. It is possible you know

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Strange… just a moment ago I was flying through a dense asteroid field… but now I feel quite cold… And just what happened to my
H-Cruiser?!?

oh...
my...
god...

That just might be possible. Like antimatter but only, like, 1/*th as expensive. Wow. I've never thought of that. If you have plasmalised helium and shoot it at the ship's hull (which contains hydrogen atoms from all the interstellar crap they fly through) you might be able to start a fusion chain reaction in the hull. [of course, it would be a lot more damaging and 1/*th as cheap to detonate a fusion bomb on the hull, if it isn't scattered with lead particles]

Let's just hope the military doesn't classify this and kill us to keep us silent.

[ANON : It doesn't matter how you kill a ship's crew, you're still being enviromentally unfriendly. ]

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In accepting the inevitable, one finds peace.
In denying it, one finds hope.
-Last words of Admiral Williams before the fall of Earth.

Damn that's interesting... I wish I took physics, I'm in the dark about what exactly your talking about, but it's still interesting indeed...

Nice to see slug posting something intelligent...

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Lewis,
save yourself the pain,
you'll never get there.
-Radiohead, "Lewis (Mistreated.)"

Damn Slug, there may be hope for you yet.

You know, it's about time somebody started a scientific discussion on here. Unfortunately, this is something I should have jumped into a while ago, so I've got a lot to talk about.

1) I first read about bucky balls in Discover Magazine in '94. One thing that was left out of the discussion is the fact that if assembeled right, the balls get a diatomic covalence: they get connected on a molecular level. This would make a sheet of the stuff ridiculously strong, and mirror-like. (I applied some of this in my Ring diagnostics.)

2) Antimatter would be the most destructive weapon, but you need equal amounts of matter to achieve total annihilation. Now, a more effective weapon would use a process more like this: Look at the four universal forces, notabley the strong and weak nuclear forces. The strong force tries to suck sub-sub-atomic particles into each other, but the weak force prevents that. If you could block an atom (or trillions of them for that matter) from the weak force, it would implode on itself. You would expect this to create a singularity, but that needs a hell of a lot more mass than an atom, so the result is it explodes out in the form of pure energy: there you have it total conversion. Now you would think this immpossible, but it has been glimmered at. A scintist in Finland I believe ran various ultrasonic and electromagnetic frequencies through liquid helium and for no appearent reason, the minute ammount he was working with boiled and flash burned, leaving a small yet noticable amount of helium missing. This would suggest that somewhere at some tiny spot in the liquid helium, that this "Zero point" effect actually took place. So think about it. If you were to find the Zero Point frequency, and reprodice it, then that would be a truly terrifying weapon. It would most likely be huge if you wanted to take out something like a planet (the Finlander destroyed about .0003 grams using some big resonators). But even them, you would only need one. But maybe the frequency is simpler than that. Maybe something as powerful as a hand-held radio is enough to wipe out a planet as long as enough matter falls within the range. Or better yet! Find a way to make the detonating particles to produce the frequency a split second before they're completely obliterated, and you get a massive chain reaction, similar to the "Dr. device" weapon in Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game".

But this is just speculation and I've only had three sources on it, so I could be all wrong.

Congrats Slug. You may have earned back a little respect on this board.

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"…Throught their history, these 'unenlightened' beings have continually organized to opposed the injustices and attrocities committed by their bretheran in power. We, as the prophets, would do well to learn from these humans."
-Final statement of Salrilian reformist Sirthis before his execution.

While antimatter would be rediculously destructive, any particle shield would lessen the effects of the explosion. The front of the anti-matter wave would annihilate with the particle shield and the energy blast would deflect the antimatter into outer space.

If it was a layered particle shield, then the actual ship would be totally unaffected because the lower shield woul deflect the energy blast and act as a backup in case there was a second wave of antimatter.

The way to get through a particle shield would be with a blast of flourene (spelling?). Since flourene is an increadibly reactive atom (in the same Elemential family as Chlorine [also very reactive]), it would mess up or scatter the particle shield long enough to get a good wave of anti-hydrogen through.

-Slug

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In accepting the inevitable, one finds peace.
In denying it, one finds hope.
-Last words of Admiral Williams before the fall of Earth.

Wohoo!! Admiral Sargatanus seems to know something about that Finn. So we Finns are not that unknown to the rest of the world

By the way it's not Finlander it is Finn (male) and/or Finnish (female/male) .

Ehheh… well, I am just proud of being a Finn.

*****So Slug… how on earth could you make a particle shield‚ it is quite hard to keep those atoms/ions in place, unless they are magnetic, but that would require so much energy (not to mention the interference it would create), that it would drain all the ships energy, just to keep it in place.

Problem is though, how could one keep an energy shield on place too.

So this is what I came up with: The shields might be somewhat similar to the warp engine but they would only make a field of warped space around the ship and when something hits it, it would scatter the particles/whatever the projectile was, all around space. To recharge the shields on the impact point would require energy. BUT… that warpfield could also keep particles within it!!*****

Later I thought it again and now I'm not sure about that previous theory anymore… well the heck… I'll think up something better.

Maybe it just may be possible to keep the particles around the ship… hmmmh… hmm… mmh…ahhah!!… nyah… hmm… I'll be back later …

*Walks away*… OH I FORGOT TO SEND THAT DANG MESSAGE!!! *walks back… sends the message… turns off computer… really?!?… well anyway…*

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Strange… just a moment ago I was flying through a dense asteroid field… but now I feel quite cold… And just what happened to my
H-Cruiser?!?

Right now the particle shield would be difficult, but if we had superconductors (which are a necessity [pardon spelling] for all the other hypothetical technologies in this topic) we could just scatter the particles across the parabolic plane of a controled, super-dense magnetic wave. And to keep the shield up, with particles, you just use something like a bussard ramjet which would suck in intersteller hydrogen.

OOH! I just had a really cool thought! If you could control the shields to the point where you could fuse the hydrogen and not damage the ship, you could fly around in a gigantic fireball! Aside from the psychological damage this would do to your enemy (from scaring the sh*t out of them), you could easily tear through any fleet that didn't have the technology. Or you could make it look like your ship got destroyed and and hit them with everything you've got when they don't suspect it.

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"…Throught their history, these 'unenlightened' beings have continually organized to opposed the injustices and attrocities committed by their bretheran in power. We, as the prophets, would do well to learn from these humans."
-Final statement of Salrilian reformist Sirthis before his execution.

Sargatanus, from your footer it sounds as though you have a plug that you are developing with out telling us about it...
Care to share?

-Walter-

walterb@becktek.com

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Hey Slug, That's a really interesting theory. I never thought of that.

Anyway, a particle shield would be possible by using magnetic isotopes. The extra electron would make it pretty stable and the shield overall more durable. In switzerland, they've already created a massive electro-magnetic generator that can magnitize anything. They've managed to magnetize small frogs and throw them around the room using a large magnetic field generator.

Unfortunately, the generater requires as much power as half a small town would use. But if we were to use smaller particles, to the atomic level, it would require a lot less power and would be much more effective a shield as a frog would provide.

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Hope for the best.
Prepare for the worst.
-Russian Proverb

Walter: Actually I am developing a plug, but I've told everyone about it. In fact, Sundered Angel opened a topic where I had a bunch of people pour in ideas for what I should do for the ending.

Bananana: The energy required for that shield generator could be provided by that Zero Point energy I talked about. The air inside of a two cup measuring cup has enough Zero Point energy to vaporize, not evaporate, but vaporize the worlds oceans. The only trick would be controling it.

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"…Throught their history, these 'unenlightened' beings have continually organized to opposed the injustices and attrocities committed by their bretheran in power. We, as the prophets, would do well to learn from these humans."
-Final statement of Salrilian reformist Sirthis before his execution.

Evaporate and Vaporize mean the same thing.

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In accepting the inevitable, one finds peace.
In denying it, one finds hope.
-Last words of Admiral Williams before the fall of Earth.

Actually, that's what I thought when I wrote it down. I thought it would be a nice little obnoxious pun. But I was wrong, I looked them up. Evaporating is something that more or less just happens. Water will evaporate in sunlight in just about any temperature above freezing. Vaporising is a much more rapid effect requiring much more energy, and is often the result of an atypical outside force.

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"…Throught their history, these 'unenlightened' beings have continually organized to opposed the injustices and attrocities committed by their bretheran in power. We, as the prophets, would do well to learn from these humans."
-Final statement of Salrilian reformist Sirthis before his execution.