Why isn't there any anti-matter weapons?

[lethalfang]

Anti-matter weapons will blow up pretty much everything it touches, or at least everything that I can think of at this point.
As a big honking anti-matter space gun, why don't you have an anti-matter core, say, positively-charged positron, that is to be surrounded by negatively-charged electron (confine the electrons on fixed objects do they do not fall apart themselves), so it would stay this way for a while.
Upon engagement, you make that above mentioned object and you shoot that sucker toward the enemy ship. Even if if they have a big shield, the impact on the shield will bounce the positrons and electrons together, and KAAAAAAAA-BOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMM!

[_Owen_]

Theoretically an antimatter weapon would be the most effective weapon, I have thought of this but never got around to posting it. However an antimatter weapon would also be higly unstable and would be a lot more work to maintain than any other weapon.

If you were to have a weapon that fired antimatter, the firing mechanism and the weapon itself would also have to be made of antimatter. This entire weapon would then have to be encased in a forcefield, like a protective skin, it would never be able to tough anything except other antimatter and forcefields. This force field would have to be constant, the antimatter that it would fire would have to be encassed in an antimatter container that would then be encased in another force field, when the container of antimatter is inserted into the weapon it the forcefield would need to be deactivated, releasing the antimatter into the weapon, then the forcefield would have to be reactivated to remove the case. Having the weapon cased in a force field indefinetly would be extremly dangerous because if the force field was deactivated, by accident or on purpose, it would have the reverse effect than the one you were looking for. The weapon could also be constantly in an oribt around Earth, but then it would be incredibly hard to reload, and incredibly easy to destroy, a quick burst of momentum in the wrong direction, the orbit decays, BOOM goes the Earth. The weapon could have thrusters though, but the thrusters would also have to be antimatter. The idea of the weapon is a good one, but it would also be a lot of work, however there are some situation were it would be worth it.

Sorry about the writing guys.

Owen Macri

[6thMonolith]

Anti-matter weapons will blow up pretty much everything it touches, or at least everything that I can think of at this point.
As a big honking anti-matter space gun, why don't you have an anti-matter core, say, positively-charged positron, that is to be surrounded by negatively-charged electron (confine the electrons on fixed objects do they do not fall apart themselves), so it would stay this way for a while.
Upon engagement, you make that above mentioned object and you shoot that sucker toward the enemy ship. Even if if they have a big shield, the impact on the shield will bounce the positrons and electrons together, and KAAAAAAAA-BOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMM!

Good point. There would be a huge Kabooooooooommmmmmmmmmmm!, so it does make sense for Anti-matter to be used. I have two guesses to why its not used: Shields may protect against it magnetically, and its way too expensive.

I dont think that making an anti-matter weapon would be hard, if you had the anti-matter. All you need to do is contain a (fairly large)pellet of Anti-matter in a magnetic field, and use the field to fire it so it doesn't hit anything else. But then you have the problem of creating the pellets, but it is a TV show after all.

[_Owen_]

it is possible please read my previous post, but it would be hard, and much more trouble than it is worth.

Owen Macri

[Macilnar]

it is possible please read my previous post, but it would be hard, and much more trouble than it is worth.

Owen Macri

Read the "Angels&Demons" it has a way to store anti-matter rather easly, I don't know if it would really work though because I haven't got any anti-matter.

[_Owen_]

I assume that Angels and Demons is a book? If so I probably won't have time to read it. Could you possibly tell me how they stored antimatter, I am curious to know what they came up with.

An antimater gun would be more trouble than it's worth, however, an antimatter bomb, now there are some possibilities.

Owen Macri

[Macilnar]

I assume that Angels and Demons is a book? If so I probably won't have time to read it. Could you possibly tell me how they stored antimatter, I am curious to know what they came up with.

An antimater gun would be more trouble than it's worth, however, an antimatter bomb, now there are some possibilities.

Owen Macri

In the book a "reverse polarity vacuum to pull the antimatter positrons out of the accelerator before they decay...applied a magnetic field. Matter arced right, and antimatter arced left...(the antimatter is stored using) two intersecting magnetic fields..."

I hope that exsplanes it if not than just read pages 75 to 76. of the book I would type them but I really don't feel like doing that right now (It is 11:00pm after all).

[_Owen_]

Thank you that does help. I believe that has much potential of working, that is pretty much what I was getting at with the forcefields. It is possible, and it would be a kick-ass weapon, but a gun to fire antimatter would be a lot of work to mainatain. However as I said before, anti-matter bombs have a lot of potential.

I think I will read the book anyways, it sounds good, thank you.

Owen Macri

[Macilnar]

Hope you like it.

[mindgamez]

I see 2 simple reasons most would never deploy anti-matter weapons.

First it is a finite resource where most races in the Stargate universe use energy weapons with more longevity. It may be very powerful but it is still ammo.

Second either each ship or base would have to have some device to create, package and store the anti-matter or there would be complex and lengthy supply lines to keep their weapons armed while away from the production area.

[Jarnin]

Antimatter Weaponry

As for why they don't use it in the shows, I don't know. I'm guessing most of the races are still getting around using fission and fusion. The ancients are way beyond Antimatter though, with their ZPM system.

Here's the reason why we don't have antimatter weapons right now (from Wikipedia):

There are two major obstacles on the way to the creation of antimatter weapons. First of all, creation of antimatter requires enormous amounts of energy. Even if it was possible to convert energy directly into particle/antiparticle pairs without any loss, a large-scale power plant generating 2000 MWe would take 25 hours to produce just one gram of antimatter. Given the average price of electric power around $50 per megawatt hour, this puts a lower limit on the cost of antimatter at $2.5 million per gram. Quantities measured in grams or even kilograms would be required to achieve destructive effect comparable with conventional nuclear weapons: one gram of antimatter is equivalent to 43 kilotons of TNT. In reality, all known technologies involve particle accelerators and they are highly inefficient, making the production of antimatter much more expensive. It is estimated that an antimatter factory could be operated at a cost of $25 billion per gram.

The second problem is the containment of antimatter. Antimatter annihilates with regular matter on contact, so it would be necessary to prevent contact, for example by producing antimatter in the form of solid charged or magnetized particles, and suspending them using electromagnetic fields in near-perfect vacuum. Another, more hypothetical method is the storage of antimatter inside a buckyball. Because of the repulsion of all the carbon atoms, the antimatter would never combine with its opposite and no energy release will occur.

In order to achieve compactness given macroscopic weight, the overall electric charge of the antimatter weapon core would have to be very small compared to the number of particles. For example, it's not feasible to construct the weapon using positrons only because of their mutual repulsion. The antimatter weapon core would have to consist primarily of neutral antiatoms. Antihydrogen is easiest to produce, but it has gaseous form at room temperature, making it hard to contain. Heavier atoms are easier to contain but harder to manufacture.

[Crazedwraith]

naquadah enchanced nukes are much more effective and less dangerous to use.

We haven't the tech to build antimatter weapons at all. We'd need strong reliable forcefiled tech.

[_Owen_]

As for the wikipedia quote, it is only not practical on Earth, now, in our universe, in the stargate universe, energy costs nothing, there are billions of planets, tons of them don't have currency, pick one. Plus we have more advanced technology in the stargate universe. Actually an antimatter weapon would be much more effective, antimatter destroys any matter that it comes in contact with, they anhilate each other, and the residual explosion would be tremendous.

Owen Macri

[Mr Prophet]

As for the wikipedia quote, it is only not practical on Earth, now, in our universe, in the stargate universe, energy costs nothing, there are billions of planets, tons of them don't have currency, pick one.

Money does not equal cost.

Even if you have no monetary price on energy generation, you still have to mine or acquire fuel, build and maintain a power station, transfer the energy to your antimatter production facility (which you must also build and maintain), create and maintain your containment units and connect them to your projector. All of this costs, in terms of labour, materials and research if not in hard currency.

[_Owen_]

No I agree with that, that it does "cost" several things to generate antimatter, on another planet, currency would not be one of them. I am sure that the asgard or someone have a more effiecient way of generating antimatter, even if they don't use it.

Owen Macri