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Post by Rocket Witch on Jul 25, 2018 1:04:51 GMT
Would a fluorine particle beam react chemically with its target?
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Post by The Astronomer on Jul 25, 2018 1:29:53 GMT
Will chemical reactions be useful in a 1,000 km/s strike?
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Post by EshaNas on Jul 25, 2018 2:27:01 GMT
We've already had a Neutron particle beam cannon, basically just an accelerator put on a Minuteman and launched in a sub-orbital arc and retrieved after firing widly into space.
I refer to BEAR, or Beam Experiment Aboard a Rocket.
"Beam Experiment Aboard Rocket (BEAR)
The Beam Experiment Aboard Rocket (BEAR) experiment tested a neutral particle beam accelerator during a suborbital rocket flight. The Beam Experiment Aboard Rocket accelerator is the major component of an experiment designed to demonstrate the operation of an ion accelerator in space and to characterize the exoatmospheric propagation of a neutral particle beam. It is designed to produce a 10-mA (equivalent), 1-MeV, neutral hydrogen beam in 50-µs pulses at 5 Hz. The accelerator consists of a 30-kV, H- injector, a 1-MeV radiofrequency quadrupole, two 425-MHz RF amplifiers, a gas-cell neutralizer, beam optics, a vacuum system, diagnostics, and controls. The design has been constrained by the need for a light-weight rugged system that would operate autonomously.
Charged hydrogen ions that escaped neutralization might play havoc with an NPB satellite. The accumulation of charge might severely degrade weapon system performance in unforeseen ways, although NPB scientists are confident that this would not bean issue. The Beam Experiment Aboard Rocket (BEAR) experiment with an ion source was designed to answer any remaining doubts about space-charge accumulation.
The design of this 1-m-long, lightweight (greater than 55 kg) accelerator incorporates four aluminum vane/cavity quadrants joined by an electroforming process. With the vane and cavity fabricated as a monolithic structure, there are no mechanical RF, vacuum, or structural joints. The accelerator had undergone extensive environmental and operational laboratory testing by early 1989 in preparation for launch. Because of the rigors of spaceflight, the accelerator design has been constrained by factors not normally applicable to conventional terrestrial accelerators. The design techniques developed for BEAR would be applicable whenever, rugged, lightweight, or power-efficient systems are required.
On July 13, 1989 the Beam experiment Aboard Rocket (BEAR) linear accelerator was successfully launched and operated in space. The flight demonstrated that a neutral hydrogen beam could be successfully propagated in an exoatmospheric environment. The accelerato was the result of an extensive collaboration between Los Alamos National Laboratory and industrial partner. The design was strongly constrained by the need for a lightweight rugged system that would survive the rigors of launch and operate autonomously. Following the fight the Beam Experiment Aboard Rocket (BEAR) payload was recovered with minimal damage via parachute after an 11-minute flight to a maximum altitude of 195 km."
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Post by tepidbread on Jul 25, 2018 4:17:15 GMT
Is there even any widely available literature on particle beam damage? A quick google search gave me an article on Anatoli Bugorski, whom was struck by a particle beam in a particle accelerator. Pretty nasty stuff, however I did not find anything else on the subject in the short time that I had to look it up. I would assume that the conventional newtons laws still stand, but would it essentially be chipping away the enemy ship atom by atom? Also it is worth mentioning that the beam seemed to pass through his Bugorski's head without causing any apparent physical damage based on what I read, it seemed to be completely on a cellular level. So would a particle beam simply ignore any barriers that were placed in-front of it or would high density barriers such as lead or denser elements deflect them like Rutherford's gold foil experiment?
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Post by matterbeam on Jul 29, 2018 21:14:36 GMT
Would a fluorine particle beam react chemically with its target? The temperatures involved in collisions between particles and target materials means that no chemical reaction can occur.
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Post by orpheus on Jul 31, 2018 17:06:52 GMT
Particle beams can to an extent pass through solid matter, because they are composed of what we would normally consider as alpha or beta radiation. The denser the matter, the more likely that particles will collide with it (or inside it) and transfer energy. Also realize that a weapons-grade particle beam can't really be compared to the synchrotron radiation that accidentally hit that guy. It's like comparing a flashlight to that station-mounted 1GW laser. A weaponized beam would be far more intense and probably travelling faster. It also isn't just electrical transfer and radiation damage. The particles involved are tiny, but there'll be a LOT of them travelling extremely fast. The kinetic impact will not be negligible. I also had the idea of representing them in-game with ultra-high-velocity rapid-fire coilguns. Someone might need to mod some files to make subatomic particles available as an armature material, and maybe boost the exit velocity by a few orders of magnitude if you want realism. A final note - it is possible in theory to build a neutral particle beam WITHOUT using the ionize-then-de-ionize-in-flight method. The common wisdom is that neutrons cannot be manipulated directly because they don't have an electric charge. They DO, however, have a magnetic moment, and so can potentially be controlled using magnetic fields. An interesting twist to this is that they also have a wavelength (thank you, quantum duality!). And neutrons with exactly the right wavelength (IIRC around 6-7 angstroms), passing through a very precisely uneven magnetic field, can in theory be induced to form a coherent (ie, laser-like) beam. So when you're re-watching Babylon 5 and facepalming at the phrase 'neutron laser', it's actually not as silly as it sounds.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jul 31, 2018 18:17:09 GMT
Whether or not particle beams would find their niche as proper anti-ship weapons, I see at least two applications they could excel at: - Missile defences
- Police weapons
Stupidly overpowered particle beams heating and cutting matter are blah, what is really interesting is that much weaker beams or those same beams at much longer ranges might not noticeably damage bulk matter but will still be more than enough to wreak havoc on delicate electronics and biology.
Missiles can't afford bulk shielding so shining particle beam through them should reliably turn them into inert slugs.
As for policing, imagine a hostage situation inside a hab aboard civilian station or ship. You are not going to just brapp the thing with kinetics or zap it with lasers and sending people in are going to be problematic first and optionally nasty latter (if the first phase even succeeds). OTOH if you have any way of getting exact positioning data from aboard your hab, you can just fry the baddies with narrow beams delivering instantly incapacitating radiation doses. Yes, the hostages will probably require medical attention as they will probably suffer from scattering but it should be doable. It won't depressurize the hab and in microgravity the hostage takers might not even notice that something is killing their guys (it's not like they will suddenly start falling over while in free fall).
Plus, you can hide your emitter behind thin foil of something that doesn't scatter your beam too badly, making it impossible to discern if you are, for example sending an agreed upon ship to honor their demands or a ship with camouflaged particle accelerator to snipe them with.
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Post by apophys on Aug 1, 2018 0:40:40 GMT
As for policing, imagine a hostage situation inside a hab aboard civilian station or ship. [...] if you have any way of getting exact positioning data from aboard your hab, you can just fry the baddies with narrow beams delivering instantly incapacitating radiation doses. Yes, the hostages will probably require medical attention as they will probably suffer from scattering but it should be doable. It won't depressurize the hab and in microgravity the hostage takers might not even notice that something is killing their guys (it's not like they will suddenly start falling over while in free fall).
Note that the dosage required to rapidly incapacitate (around 10+ Gy) coincides with severe headaches, vomiting, and diarrhea, and is nearly 100% fatal (over several days) even with intensive attempted rescue. Seeing people spewing bodily fluids from all orifices will not be pretty, especially in zero G. I hope police will never be quite that brutal. Additionally, the measure can be completely blocked in zero/low G by every hostage-taker strapping a bound hostage to their back (or are you going to kill them both?...).
A hostage situation can be fixed by shooting off their radiators, or by cutting open a large hole in the cabin with buzzsaws/lasers/explosives and sending in a SWAT team with exosuits (and/or combat drones). The perpetrators will either surrender or be merely rendered unconscious after some while from heat, or quickly from lack of air; fatalities are not guaranteed, and you're not giving all the innocent bystanders cancer.
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Prancer
Junior Member
Jousting in space. We're all Knights of the Stars.
Posts: 57
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Post by Prancer on Aug 1, 2018 4:53:07 GMT
It would be a nice weapon to use before conducting a boarding operation with intent to kill the crew and capture the ship, then.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Aug 1, 2018 18:09:17 GMT
Note that the dosage required to rapidly incapacitate (around 10+ Gy) coincides with severe headaches, vomiting, and diarrhea, and is nearly 100% fatal (over several days) even with intensive attempted rescue. Seeing people spewing bodily fluids from all orifices will not be pretty, especially in zero G. Use far higher dosage concentrated on much smaller area. You don't want to irradiate the whole guy a bit to make them die slowly and messily. You want to rapidly cook enough of their brain. This way you won't get any projectile diarrhoea (because the intestines feel just fine), nor vomiting (because the part of the brain reacting to acute toxicity and also radiation damage has just been well and thoroughly cooked), nor opportunity for your target to react. The main hurdle is going to be avoiding scattering too much of your beam (and associated bremsstrahlung) into hostages - I think that using massive particles and carefully tuning their energy is going to be quite helpful here. When dealing with a hostage situation, hostage-takers' life, health and well-being are of secondary importance. How spacious are your habs again? Also, having a hostage strapped to your back makes it difficult to make good on your threat to kill them, so it increases the odds of response team successfully storming the hab and freeing the hostages. At which point a determined hostage-taker will start killing the hostages. Oops. Even if you blow the hab wide open the guys inside have at least 15s of consciousness (if they aren't suited up and you literally blow the hab wide open). A determined, trained and armed attacker can kill quite a few people in 15s. A determined, untrained attacker can kill even more people in 15s if they have brought explosives. Explosives can also be easily rigged to be triggered by rapid pressure drop. Hostage takers can also employ delaying measures putting mines or dynamically deployed mechanical barriers around the hab (along with sensors - so that they can make good on their threats if you try to neutralize their measures before assaulting the hab - this means people will die if the hab is depressurized. Plus, even if the hostages don't start dying the moment you shoot off the radiators, your attackers are likely to be more physically fit than some of the hostages and able to tolerate the deteriorating conditions for much longer. If you're living in space you hopefully have a really good cancer prevention, diagnostics and treatments, or, failing that, a cheerfully indifferent attitude to it eventually killing you.
It would be a nice weapon to use before conducting a boarding operation with intent to kill the crew and capture the ship, then. For a highly specific value of 'nice'.
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Post by Fgdfgfthgr on Aug 2, 2018 3:55:31 GMT
Wouldn't the hostage-takers just bring a Geiger counter to know if they are under attack or not?
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Aug 2, 2018 7:00:43 GMT
Wouldn't the hostage-takers just bring a Geiger counter to know if they are under attack or not? Well, you could rig a dosimeter to trigger the explosives, but that would need the dosimeter to be reasonably close to the beam's trajectory. If the particle beam is narrow and aimed precisely enough, that might mean the need for something like mouth-mounted dosimeter - doable, but still way above a simple pressure trigger positioned anywhere.
Everything can be countered, but some counters are less likely.
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Aug 2, 2018 16:49:59 GMT
For the record, regarding not irradiating hostages too much:
Anatolij Bugorski took somewhere around 2kGy through his head - enough to kill him several hundred times over, but since the damage was limited to narrow channel and since clearly not enough of this radiation was scattered around into the rest of his body he lives in reasonably good health (for a guy that got shot through the head with a particle beam, at least) to this day - and you can't stand closer to a guy hit by a particle beam than when *being* this guy yourself.
The event was clearly enough to play some immediate major havoc on the affected part of his nervous system, though, despite limited extent of the damage, as he reportedly saw very bright flash of light when hit.
Now replace this beam with a beam of similar density and velocity but wider - about brain-sized. I'd wager that precisely aimed (you would need real time targetting data from the hab - hack internal sensor grid, have a fake hostage inside with retinal implants and a comm package, covertly stick an USG equipped microdrone to the outside of the hab, etc.) beam would be capable of instantly de-braining a person without significantly damaging bystanders NOT in or near beam's path. I would also wager that, in microgravity, the results of this de-braining wouldn't be immediately obvious to the people in the vicinity, so you'd get some precious time before the other hostage takers would notice that Steve hasn't just zoned out, but is now a 100% corpse, even though probably still with a pulse.
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