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If antimatter were common starship fuel, what could prevent it from being commonly weaponized?

My senario involves a high sci-fi setting, where starships are readily available to civilians with sufficient qualifications and money. Most civilians would not be fueling ships with antimatter though, as it would primarily only be used in warp drives, which only larger capital ships or specialized exploration vessels would have. In this setting, antimatter is relatively abundant, with basically anyone with a ship that needs it being able to aquire it. The problem with antimatter as you probably know, is its capability of creating massive explosions when it annihilates. Is there any reason that could prevent antimatter bombs from being commonplace and keep any Joe schmo with an antimatter fuel cell from instantly obliterating a capital ship while still allowing plasma based projectiles to be viable?

7 Answers
7

Expense of containing it

How do you contain anti-matter in a safe way? I don't know, but someone does in your story.

It may be that containing anti-matter is so energy expensive that the only way to power a long-term anti-matter storage unit is with an anti-matter reactor. In that case, only the people with the money to operate anti-matter reactors in the first place could possibly store enough anti-matter to make a weapon.

Anti-matter is still not easily store-able but is instead made on-demand inside the ship in some kind of "charge reversal chamber" (possibly with the aid of some kind of 'unobtainium' which would then become the defacto fuel being bought and sold in place of the anti-matter it produces).

since anti-matter cannot be stored the maximum damage your ships can do is simply going to be equal to their reactors power-output rigged up to the best weapon they can find, which might still be lot but isn't necessarily nuclear Armageddon levels.

It's possible that major governments to have specialised/expensive/advanced machinery capable of storing anti-matter if you still want some form of anti-matter weaponry in your setting

Yes and No,
The simplest way to think about it is how fertiliser is handled modern day, if you have a need for it (Farmer or in your case ship owner) you can get it. If you start to buy more than you need for your purpose they halt your purchasing and send investigators to clear you. So your security is making sure anyone who has enough to be a threat would never use it that way, it's not foolproof but that is the tradeoff between safety and usability.

You could make it very difficult to contain in the correct way to weaponize it.

We have this issue with nuclear power (thankfully!). It is much harder to get Uranium to explode with the force of a nuclear bomb than it is to get power from it. You have to enrich it first.

One of the major unknowns with using antimatter is containment. Good containment is tricky. The best we have accomplished has contained antiprotons for 16 minutes. Perhaps the only way to store antimatter for any reasonable period of time stabilizes it so well that even if you dismantle the apparatus, it still takes time for the energy to dissipate. Perhaps the antimatter itself is part of the containment, and the antimatter's properties are sufficient to maintain the containment for a short while.

Perhaps vortex math actually provides some useful results. Rodin coils are popular in that community because they are believed to be ... well... I'll just say there's a lot of people who think you can violate the conservation of energy principle with them. Here's an example of something they can actually do.

One of the neat things that happens in these experiments is that you manage to spin something up to great angular speeds, and even if you remove power, the object continues spinning (due to its angular inertia). However, if anything from vortex math turns out to be correct, we might find that "something else" can start spinning, and that spinning stabilizes the antimatter so that it doesn't immediately annhilate.

(Note: in particle physics, we often refer to things as "spin" simply because they have rotation-like properties. This "spinning" could be a new attribute of matter rather than actual physical spinning like the ball magnet in the video)

If this happened, it could take a minute or two for the spin to decay. A weapon that discharges over a minute or two is much less terrifying than one which discharges over milliseconds.

There are really two problems you should be thinking about here, but luckily they both have reasonable solutions.

The question you asked: Use of home-made antimatter bombs against military assets.

You're thinking "how do I keep home-made antimatter bombs out of Joe Schmoe's hands, but a military ship isn't really going to be worried about that. Joe Schmoe with a home-made antimatter bomb is equivalent to the modern US Navy facing a pissed off white nationalist with a ton of fertilizer in a fishing boat. Yeah, the bomb will do a lot of damage to destroyer if you actually GET it there, but if they're paying any attention at all, Joe Schmoe and his bomb are going to get detected and destroyed long before they're close enough to be a threat to the ship.

The trickier question you didn't ask: Use of home-made antimatter bombs against CIVILIAN assets.

This is trickier because office buildings and cruise ships and hotels and things don't have point-defense weaponry. Terrorism is a much more serious threat when you've got freely available antimatter, but I think you've got a pretty simple solution: Unless your containment system is 100% perfect, you're always going to be emitting radiation as stray atoms of antimatter annihilate with stray atoms of regular matter. A 99.999999% perfect system is good enough to prevent that from causing any damage anybody cares about, but it will STILL result in your antimatter fuel cells having a detectable radiation signature.

Your solution is just to ensure that antimatter fuel cells are only freely available in places where ships are being refueled, and trying to take one anywhere ELSE is going to be immediately detected and result in a giant pile of authorities descending upon you.

I think the best way to prevent antimatter use as a weapon is to simply have it be incorporated into your ship, so that you have to crash your entire ship to actually have it react to anything. During normal operation it'll be locked into a stasis field or whatever is on your ship that prevents it from exploding you.

Now if someone does crash a ship, there's a good chance of an antimatter explosions happening. Perhaps most cities will have anti crash buffers in place that will magnetically control a ships decent, locking it in place if it seems to be crashing? That would at least deal with your landing sites.

Another way that comes to mind is to use quantum teleportation to control antimatter. Have your antimatter entangled with the inside of a vacuum tube with the quantum particle you're using. Then you buy that unit and download the entanglement specs onto your ships computer. Now your ship can only access a single molecule of antimatter at a time whenever you engage the entanglement function. That would at least prevent someone from having a lot of antimatter at once, so long as bein locked into the engine is the only way to prevent it from exploding the ship.

The task is to keep it from irresponsible people

Antimatter can be stored as positronium hydride (a hydrogen atom bound to an atom of positronium) to keep from extreme damage when touching anything. Using this compound lowers the risk of catastrophic incidents. Anything can happen when you involve humans in anything.

Since Antimatter in your cas is mainly obtained through a spaceship, a system might have to be put in place that any interactions involving antimatter are computer controlled on a closed system. Internal specialists will have to be searched before entering and exiting the plant, and should work there no more than a week or so. This will keep internal sabotages at bay.

Then there is the case where an attack on an antimatter fueled ship could result in the annihilation of antimatter in extremely catastrophic ways, the same when an antimatter spaceship wrecks. This can be minimized through antimatter fuel cells, but again, anything can happen with humans.

The question you are trying to solve is about minimizing the risk of an antimatter attack, and preventing any antimatter fueled attacks means no use of antimatter whatsoever.

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