- #1
Indomitable Dreamer
- 2
- 0
Greetings, philosophers, scholars, enthusiasts.
I'm writing an uplifting sci-fi/fantasy webnovel (240 pages atm), free to all. Only goal – to rekindle fighting spirits.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/33662/path-of-righteousness
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3340207/1/Path-of-Righteousness
It is rational, despite a fantastic motif. It is intense, though it starts slow. It is humorous, yet wholly serious. It is a fairy tale for the adults, who never let their childish dreams die – the uncompromising and unyielding warriors stuck in this miserable reality, starved, thirsty and beaten up, yet still standing in defiance to the injustice that befell them.
I'm putting a lot of effort to make the science as hard as possible, the assumptions plausible, and the logic sound, but I can only do so much research. While it's within my scope to provide a decent quality of language with enough editing, the spectrum of science I'm exploring is so wide, it would be a case of diminishing returns were I to proof it all myself.
If you like my style and end up reading the whole thing, could you point out any incongruities you find? I'm also open to all discussions that conform to forum rules, as I want the sci-fi part of my story to stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Otherwise, I'm just going to pick one problematic topic at a time. To that end: antimatter bomb, yet again. Because its not as simple, as it may seem.
My primary concerns are useful yield (what % of the released energy will be wasted on gammas) and ionizing radiation (residual more so than the initial burst). Those two, obviously, depend on the form of antimatter and on the containment, with which it interacts upon detonation.
From Wikipedia: “Similar reactions will occur when an antinucleon annihilates within a more complex atomic nucleus, save that the resulting mesons, being strongly interacting, have a significant probability of being absorbed by one of the remaining "spectator" nucleons rather than escaping. Since the absorbed energy can be as much as ~2 GeV, it can in principle exceed the binding energy of even the heaviest nuclei. Thus, when an antiproton annihilates inside a heavy nucleus such as uranium or plutonium, partial or complete disruption of the nucleus can occur, releasing large numbers of fast neutrons.”
In other words, you want your antimatter to be formed of stable and densely packed atomic nuclei and your bomb to have a lot of meat to be torn apart by the mesons before they decay, though a fraction will inevitably escape. All hell will then ensue – various species will collide (they don't have to be exact counterparts, after all, they only need to contain the quark antagonists), producing all the outcomes in the world, triggering all kinds of fissions and fusions, both exo- and endothermic, depending on materials used.
Here's my first question – how much can the fraction of initial ionizing radiation burst be limited in favor of blast/heat wave, assuming the warhead has to fit on a missile, and thus the walls can only be a few dM thick? What if it were a hypersonic projectile, a thin rod with an antimatter core, a few cm in diameter? I know it depends on how much antimatter will be used, so let's talk mass ratios, and let's consider a mid-air explosion.
Okay, so let's suppose you have the technology to make any antimatter molecules you need and produce a stable chunk of it, say antiiron, and suspend it in a magnetic bottle (which will be your warhead), thus also shielding it from background radiation (I'm guessing it would be a bad idea to use fissile materials for greater yield, as they would emit alphas at your antimatter chunk, messing it up over time?).
Side note here: is it a self-regulating system, where if your initial vacuum is good enough, all the loose particles in the containment field will collide with the antimatter chunk and turn to energy, heating up or transforming the surroundings and creating a perfect vacuum in the end? Meaning long term levitating storage and weapon shelf-life theoretically shouldn't be an issue?
So you want an antimatter nuke, where you use it to spark a thermonuclear reaction. The coulomb barrier matters, so the bomb needs to be configured to make the core as compact as possible (minimal distance between the antimatter and the walls of the container, a mere metallic shell, beyond which is an empty pit, flooded with liquid deuterium when arming the device, and then a few dM of dense shielding material to capture the remaining mesons, thus containing the thermonuclear reaction between those two layers if possible). What would be the highest attainable yield multiplier?
I know that's not how it should be calculated, but since annihilation releases some 160 times more mass than fusing deuterium, is it safe to assume that x160 should be feasible? In other words, 1 g of antimatter, that's 43 kt of TNT, detonating a 6.88 Mt TNT H-bomb?
Finally, you want the bomb to be clean. Only problem is, there will most certainly be unstable isotopes present in the aftermath. So the question is – how many and how long-lived? How would the residual radiation compare to a classical fission, where it's 5-10% of total energy? Here it also depends on the materials used, and if you use light elements, then there will mostly be light isotopes. I just have no clue how easily they form, what fractions would they be or how radioactive. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming a regular antimatter bomb will be significantly less dirty than a fissile nuke from the very beginning, and an antimatter H-bomb will be almost negligible in that regard?
For my purposes I only need to know about the first few minutes. Since light unstable isotopes usually have very short half-lives, they will mostly be gone by that time, but that also makes them very radioactive per unit mass. How will the situation look like 3 minutes in? Also, what will the temperature of the air and the ground in the epicenter be at that moment, if you detonated a 100 kt bomb? Can a human survive there?
Uff, what a long post. Not for the faint of heart :D
P.S. I know, I know (^.^). A short one – how close do quarks have to get to antiquarks to annihilate? How will nuclei of matter and antimatter overcome the Coulomb force when they meet? I can't find that anywhere...
I'm writing an uplifting sci-fi/fantasy webnovel (240 pages atm), free to all. Only goal – to rekindle fighting spirits.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/33662/path-of-righteousness
https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3340207/1/Path-of-Righteousness
It is rational, despite a fantastic motif. It is intense, though it starts slow. It is humorous, yet wholly serious. It is a fairy tale for the adults, who never let their childish dreams die – the uncompromising and unyielding warriors stuck in this miserable reality, starved, thirsty and beaten up, yet still standing in defiance to the injustice that befell them.
I'm putting a lot of effort to make the science as hard as possible, the assumptions plausible, and the logic sound, but I can only do so much research. While it's within my scope to provide a decent quality of language with enough editing, the spectrum of science I'm exploring is so wide, it would be a case of diminishing returns were I to proof it all myself.
If you like my style and end up reading the whole thing, could you point out any incongruities you find? I'm also open to all discussions that conform to forum rules, as I want the sci-fi part of my story to stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Otherwise, I'm just going to pick one problematic topic at a time. To that end: antimatter bomb, yet again. Because its not as simple, as it may seem.
My primary concerns are useful yield (what % of the released energy will be wasted on gammas) and ionizing radiation (residual more so than the initial burst). Those two, obviously, depend on the form of antimatter and on the containment, with which it interacts upon detonation.
From Wikipedia: “Similar reactions will occur when an antinucleon annihilates within a more complex atomic nucleus, save that the resulting mesons, being strongly interacting, have a significant probability of being absorbed by one of the remaining "spectator" nucleons rather than escaping. Since the absorbed energy can be as much as ~2 GeV, it can in principle exceed the binding energy of even the heaviest nuclei. Thus, when an antiproton annihilates inside a heavy nucleus such as uranium or plutonium, partial or complete disruption of the nucleus can occur, releasing large numbers of fast neutrons.”
In other words, you want your antimatter to be formed of stable and densely packed atomic nuclei and your bomb to have a lot of meat to be torn apart by the mesons before they decay, though a fraction will inevitably escape. All hell will then ensue – various species will collide (they don't have to be exact counterparts, after all, they only need to contain the quark antagonists), producing all the outcomes in the world, triggering all kinds of fissions and fusions, both exo- and endothermic, depending on materials used.
Here's my first question – how much can the fraction of initial ionizing radiation burst be limited in favor of blast/heat wave, assuming the warhead has to fit on a missile, and thus the walls can only be a few dM thick? What if it were a hypersonic projectile, a thin rod with an antimatter core, a few cm in diameter? I know it depends on how much antimatter will be used, so let's talk mass ratios, and let's consider a mid-air explosion.
Okay, so let's suppose you have the technology to make any antimatter molecules you need and produce a stable chunk of it, say antiiron, and suspend it in a magnetic bottle (which will be your warhead), thus also shielding it from background radiation (I'm guessing it would be a bad idea to use fissile materials for greater yield, as they would emit alphas at your antimatter chunk, messing it up over time?).
Side note here: is it a self-regulating system, where if your initial vacuum is good enough, all the loose particles in the containment field will collide with the antimatter chunk and turn to energy, heating up or transforming the surroundings and creating a perfect vacuum in the end? Meaning long term levitating storage and weapon shelf-life theoretically shouldn't be an issue?
So you want an antimatter nuke, where you use it to spark a thermonuclear reaction. The coulomb barrier matters, so the bomb needs to be configured to make the core as compact as possible (minimal distance between the antimatter and the walls of the container, a mere metallic shell, beyond which is an empty pit, flooded with liquid deuterium when arming the device, and then a few dM of dense shielding material to capture the remaining mesons, thus containing the thermonuclear reaction between those two layers if possible). What would be the highest attainable yield multiplier?
I know that's not how it should be calculated, but since annihilation releases some 160 times more mass than fusing deuterium, is it safe to assume that x160 should be feasible? In other words, 1 g of antimatter, that's 43 kt of TNT, detonating a 6.88 Mt TNT H-bomb?
Finally, you want the bomb to be clean. Only problem is, there will most certainly be unstable isotopes present in the aftermath. So the question is – how many and how long-lived? How would the residual radiation compare to a classical fission, where it's 5-10% of total energy? Here it also depends on the materials used, and if you use light elements, then there will mostly be light isotopes. I just have no clue how easily they form, what fractions would they be or how radioactive. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming a regular antimatter bomb will be significantly less dirty than a fissile nuke from the very beginning, and an antimatter H-bomb will be almost negligible in that regard?
For my purposes I only need to know about the first few minutes. Since light unstable isotopes usually have very short half-lives, they will mostly be gone by that time, but that also makes them very radioactive per unit mass. How will the situation look like 3 minutes in? Also, what will the temperature of the air and the ground in the epicenter be at that moment, if you detonated a 100 kt bomb? Can a human survive there?
Uff, what a long post. Not for the faint of heart :D
P.S. I know, I know (^.^). A short one – how close do quarks have to get to antiquarks to annihilate? How will nuclei of matter and antimatter overcome the Coulomb force when they meet? I can't find that anywhere...
