I could see it as a warning shot. Just enough that any space faring species could identify it as an antimatter weapon, and then show you can hit them with it. Sends the message, “Quit your bullshit, or the next one hurts!”
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The “central space” needs to be right next to the empty torpedoes. Because you can’t pump antimatter around like beer in a brewery. You can’t pump it at all, or even use compressed air to push it. “Sir we’ve had an anti matter explosion in the conduits.” “Again!?”
Isn’t that what Kirk and company used on Norman? It was invisible, after all, so I couldn’t be sure.
But then, I’ll put a nail in the end of my stick. And the arms race is on!
Wasn’t Nomad’s weapon equal to 90 photon torpedoes? (“Ninety?!”)
The system would have to be some kind of force field thingy, held in a vacuum. Nothing else could prevent a reaction. And we know they have gravity control, tractor beams, and the like, so this would be pretty straightforward.
It would have to be fool proof. You think a warp core explosion is bad? Imagine a photon torpedo antimatter storage explosion!
(geek mode) I don’t think bare hydrogen atoms are magnetic enough, so maybe your antimatter supply needs to be anti-iron, so you can contain and manipulate the antimatter with a magnetic field. Pinch the field thusly and you can move the a-iron around in magnetic force fields. Bonus if you use superconducting magnets like an MRI machine you can be immune to system-wide power failures.
You know the photon torpedo need only be a torpedo for guidance. For non-moving or fixed targets, you can just have a big cannon that shoots a ball or stream of antimatter at the target directly.
Why no one beams a pound of antimatter directly into a Borg cube is one of the enduring technobabble mysteries. Or failure of imagination.
For that matter, if the (Doomsday Machine) planet killer’s weapon is pure anti-proton (Absolutely pure!) would it do anything at all to a ship with shields? They are some sort of energy field around a ship, they aren’t matter at all. There’s nothing to annihilate with. Sure it’d cut a planet to pieces, but a starship? Pish tush!
(Still one of my favorite episodes, though)
(eta: how much crust and/or mantel would such a weapon need to remove before there was enough pressure relieved from the internal iron core until the core exploded outwards from its own internal compressive force, and finished the planet?)
My understanding is photon torpedos use the collision of matter and anti-matter. So how powerful it is would depend on how many kg of matter and anti-matter are in the torpedo.
From what I could find online, a photon torpedo may have 1.5kg of matter and 1.5kg of anti-matter, which is equal to 64 megatons of TNT.
But I get the idea they can be adjusted to increase or decrease the amount of matter and antimatter
We would use magnets to control it, because that’s all we really have, but in Star Trek, there are multiple types of fields they can use, and with gravity at least, the charge or magnetic properties of the antimatter wouldn’t matter. We have no idea how ship’s shields, or hull integrity fields, or the force field doors on the brig work, but there’s nothing to indicate they have any limitations on the type of materials they can affect.
The trouble with such a direct antimatter weapon is the same thing that affects a conventional nukular weapon: the early parts of the explosion blow the rest of the bomb material outward at great speeds. And then the little antiprotons won’t meet and greet their matter counterparts. No earth-shattering kaboom. Just a measly kiloton sized poof.
Even if you made both m-am parts gaseous (or plasma) it probably wouldn’t be enough. You’d likely still get a small yield percentage.
(thinking) What you’d need to do is contain the m-am reaction in a force field long enough for most of the m-am to annihilate. The m-am are contained long enough for a near-complete reaction, then the force field is either shut off or it just overloads naturally, releasing all the energy. Probably 1/10 of a second should be sufficient.
So to make effective photon torpedoes, you need shield technology as well.
Or maybe a one-shot transporter that beams the matter supply onto the antimatter supply, superimposing them. That should produce as close to an instant & total m/am annihilation as possible.
Now you’re talking!
Even as a kid, I wondered how you get total annihilation of the m-am without it blowing itself apart (I was precocious…).
Now how you get essentially gamma radiation to power a warp drive is a product of handwavium, I mean, dilithium, so we can ignore that for this discussion. But a bomb is theoretically possible without violating the laws of physics or figuring out how to get energy out of the reaction. IF you can get a total conversion.
I wonder if a photon torpedo also has some sort of “reaction mass”, something for the gamma rays to heat and blow up to cause physical damage. Otherwise you just get a lot of radiation and no earth-shattering, starship-shaking kaboom. You just get a lot of dead people from overexposure to radiation, but they remain firmly still in their seats.
Given how they like to use force fields for things, maybe something like a bomb-pumped field that gets enormously supercharged by the detonation for a few moments and slams into the target. It would explain why they tend to impact like a kinetic or explosive strike rather than irradiating/melting everything.
I was about to post something similar regarding nukes in space.
I suppose that also includes damage from the mystery “ring” produced by large explosions in space.
In all fairness, Star Trek ship to ship battles do seem to take place less than a mile apart.
That’s the sort of thing I just shrug and give artistic license to. If you want both ships on screen and have them not be tiny dots, you basically have to drastically crunch the distances down.
Blowing the weapon apart isn’t a big deal, for an antimatter bomb (unlike for a nuclear bomb). Let’s say that the reaction starts, and your payload all blows apart. OK, but the torpedo is presumably right next to the target when this happens… which means that half of the antimatter is now blown into the target’s hull. Which it’ll react with just as well as it will with the matter in the torpedo. Sure, the other half might end up blown into deep space, but 50% efficiency is still pretty good, when you’re dealing with antimatter-level yields.
In The Wrath of Khan, the Reliant is shown being hit by 3 photon torpedoes. The result is similar to detonations of about 500 pounds of TNT. So less powerful than a typical WW2 torpedo. I’m not impressed.
Well, the hull is made of tri-titanium. So stronger by a factor.
But (if the plot demands) torpedoes can hit unshielded ships without utterly destroying them. So how powerful are they?
Unless I’ve gone full Mandela, I could swear there are episodes where Picard orders different levels of yield for the photon torpedo.
Perhaps it is a fruit roll up style setup of matter and anti-matter, similar to how some lithium ion batteries are constructed. An embedded precision transporter could remove the entire insulator simultaneously.
Hell, just make that the main source of damage. The torpedo casing just keeps the antimatter together until almost the point of impact, then shuts off the containment field. The antimatter does the rest.
'Zactly what I was going to say. It’s a waste of projectile mass to carry any reaction matter along. The torpedo supplies the antimatter and your target supplies the matter. Far smarter to fire e.g. 3 kg of antimatter at the target than 1.5kg each of antimatter and matter.
The “torpedo” itself could be composed purely of energy / forcefield treknobabble. All it has to be is a bag holding the antimatter in and the rest of the Universe’s matter out. Until the bag breaks against the target.