ShadowDragon8685 wrote:
If you can't make industrial antimatter by 2160, give up and go home. Seriously, the hardest part with making antimatter is the energy required to do so, but by this point in the comic, they have access to the biggest fusion reactor in the game: Sol itself. Park some giant fuck-off toruses in close solar orbit, use some giant fuck-off solar panels, some really honking big magnetic tanks to store it in, and bob's your uncle.
And yeah, I wouldn't think 5,000 tons of antimatter would need to be assembled in one place, ever
I think this boils down to how Outsider is set up. Fusion is enough to propel a ship, power inertial dampeners/gravity generators, and, most importantly, charge up a jump drive. Those are the basics of becoming a space-faring race in this 'verse. AM would certainly be a better, more potent fuel, but humanity hasn't yet reached that point.
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:
If Bellarmine was using metallic hydrogen, I could believe that, but metallic hydrogen is useful primarily for reaction mass, you can't feed a fusion reactor with it. She wouldn't be able to make any hyperspace jumps like that.
And I'm skeptical about 5,000 tons of compressed helium exploding that way. Helium is very inert stuff. That would pretty much just escape along the path of the beam...
It wasn't helium in the tanks, it was liquid hydrogen. Catastrophic failure of the pressure vessels would result in pretty impressive explosion without anything having to fuse or annihilate; the nearby LOX tanks would help to make a nice fireball. This was really good for Alex, considering he was more than close enough to the wreck that a fusion or annie explosion would have vaporized him.
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:
"As energetic as antimatter, but easier to store."
Sounds like antimatter atoms suspended in a matrix of carbon fullerenes (aka buckyballs). If you do it right, and use a nice, heavy antiparticle instead of antihydrogen or antihelium; say, antiiron, or better yet, antiuranium, you can achieve some quite good antimatter:container weight ratios (just barely under a 1:3 ratio in the case of 1 anti-uranium particle suspended in a carbon-60 buckminsterfullerene). It has the advantage of being nominally failsafe, in that it doesn't need power to maintain storage the way a big honking magnetic tank does, and the container is also the reaction matter for when you want the reaction to occur.
Just don't carry it around in a paper bag.
Fullerened AM of some sort would be
a lot safer than magnetic bottling. What little info we have on taimat, or "Type-A conversion fuel," is in the forum dumps on the Insider. In a nutshell, while it's used as part of an annihilation reaction, that reaction has be induced under some unknown specific conditions.
Also, nice Schlock reference.
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