Re: Possible spacecraft weapons systems.
- From: Luke Campbell <lwcamp@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:54:00 -0000
Isaac already covered most of the main points, but I'll make a few
additional comments
On Aug 26, 3:10 pm, atomicthumbs <atomicthu...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Lasers - the classic weapon. Fires a beam of light, anywhere from low
infrared to x-rays. Useful for intense heating, burning, and cutting of
substances. Additionally, if used for atomospheric combat, an electric
current can be sent upon the ionized air (if the wavelength is high enough
(say, ultraviolet) to ionize air) to make an electrolaser.
You need electrical contact with the ionized channels, so this can't
be used for orbital bombardment. Also, the most practical method of
creating ionized channels is likely to involve the use of ultra-short
pulses of infrared light to get self-focusing and filimentation for
your conductive waveguides.
Can be
deflected by mirrored surfaces, but more powerful ones would burn through
those in short order. X-ray lasers can make things explode due to very
intense heating and other effects. These would also penetrate and give any
human inside the spacecraft cancer or serious death.
Soft x-rays are actually absorbed quite rapidly by matter. They have
good focus in vacuum for long range zapping, but only go a millimeter
or less on average before being absorbed.
Even hard x-rays are unlikely to be too much of a problem. They are
simply to easy to shield against. You need serious radiation
shielding for humans or non rad-hardened equipment to survive the
energetic cosmic rays and solar storms in space. These latter
particles are much more penetrating than x-rays. The only caveat is
if you are relying entirely on magnetic shielding for protection
against solar storms and cosmic rays, the x-rays will simply ignore
the magnetic fields that deflect and reflect the more penetrating
charged particles.
Electrical beam - an oft-overlooked weapon. Put a high enough charge into
a needle facing into a vacuum, and you'll get a stream of high-speed
electrons ready to create a current in whatever conductive surface they
hit. Can be negated by a plastic spaceship.
The beam divergence would be atrocious, and exacerbated by the fact
that the like-charged electrons repel one another.
Particle beam - Basically a more powerful version of your average linear
accelerator. Neutrons would cause radiation burns, DNA mutations, and
death to the people inside the spacecraft as well as inducing
radioactivity. Not sure about protons or more exotic particles.
Atom/molecular/ion beam - Like a particle beam, except uses more massive
"particles" for more damage. Ion beam would have electrical effects due to
positive/negative charge. More difficult to implement.
Particle and atom/ion/molecule beams are the same thing. Any you've
got it backwards - protons are easy to accelerate, so are atoms and
ions and even molecules, but neutrons well nigh impossible. We can
only accelerate charged particles, like protons and heavier ions. On
the other hand, the like-charged particles will repel each other,
causing unacceptable beam spread for space-based weapons use, not to
mention that charged particle beams will be impossible to aim because
they are deflected by ambient magnetic fields. So, you need to
accelerate the charged particles, then neutralize the charge of the
beam before it leaves the spacecraft, either by adding electrons to
the protons or positively charged ions, or removing electrons from the
negatively charged ions.
Luke
.
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