How Much Antimatter Can Mercury's Equator-Powered Solar Panels Produce in a Day?

[RedDwarfIV]

The ISS is also pretty small by science fiction standards, the size of an American Football pitch. A much larger station might not be quite so damaged (relatively, the section hit might not be nice to be around).

A larger station would also have the option of having less important things like monopropellant or waste water tanks around the outside as a crumple zone. If it's a wheel-shaped station for gravity, then the habitation areas would be well out of the way of the shuttle docking bay.

 

[mfb]

More fair points. But as far as I'm aware, the power requirements went from "literally all the energy" to "the mass-energy of Jupiter" to "the mass-energy of a Voyager probe"

As absolute value, yes. Unfortunately regular matter (or antimatter, or light, or anything we know) won't do the job, you need something with ... "unusual" energy/pressure-relations. Where unusal means "we have never observed anything like this and we have no idea if it exists at all".

 

[SlowThinker]

Your units don't match. The unit Watt is a measure of power, not of energy. One watt is equal to 1 joule of work performed/energy consumed in one second. So a 100 watt light bulb uses 100 joules of energy per second, 6,000 joules of energy per minute, and 360,000 joules per hour.

1 joule's worth of energy could create about 6.65 x 10¹⁵ antiprotons, for a total mass of 1.11x10^-11 kilograms.

So a terrawatt of power, over 1 years time, could produce about 3x10²⁰ joules, which could create around 6.65 x 10³⁵ antiprotons, or 3,330,000,000 kilograms worth of antimatter.

I'm a bit late to this party, but that figure is sooo way off I just have to show my calculation:
1 TW/##c^2##=0.011 g/sec, or 0.96kg/day, or ~360kg/year (divide by 2 for antimatter only).

For the OP, I'm pretty sure that photovoltaic panels are a dead end. Any serious solar energy capture uses large mirrors and a heat engine. For the purpose of sci-fi, I'd say "large mirrors and the central power plant", and stay away from details.

Also, antimatter is NOT exotic matter. Exotic matter is needed to operate the warp drive. It is hard to produce (it does not exist at all, according to current physics), but also it is not consumed during flight.