Antimatter

Any Star Trek fan can tell you that when it comes to the most bang for your buck, you can't beat antimatter (sometimes called "Contra-terrene" or "Seetee"). How much bang? Well, in theory if you mix one gram of matter with one gram of antimatter you should get 1.8e14 joules of energy or about 43 kilotons.

Why 1.8e14 joules? Surely you remember Einstein's famous E = Mc2. c is the speed of light which is 299,792,458 meters per second. Squared it is 89,875,517,900,000,000 or about 9.0e16. M is mass in kilograms and E is energy in joules. So 0.002 kilograms (2 grams) times 9.0e16 equals 1.8e14 joules. QED.

Once more, to get some idea of the amount of damage represented by a given amount of Joules, refer to the Boom Table.

And remember from the discussion about nuclear weapons that there are 4.184e12 joules in a kiloton and 4.184e15 joules in a megaton. So simply:

Ekt = M * 42961.6

Emt = M * 43.0

where:

  • Ekt = total annihilation energy (kilotons)
  • Emt = total annihilation energy (megatons)
  • M = mass of antimatter (kilograms) Please note that M is the mass of antimatter, NOT the mass of the matter + the antimatter.

If you are interested, 42961.6 is from (9.0e16 * 2) / 4.184e12 where 9.0e16 = c2, 4.184e12 = joules in a kiloton, 2 = 1 unit of matter + 1 unit of antimatter.

Efficiency

But in practice it ain't gonna be anywhere near that much. The trouble is trying to use this as a bomb. It is much easier to extract all the energy from a matter-antimatter reaction if you do it in a slow controlled fashion, say in a power plant or a propulsion system. An antimatter particle beam is more difficult. Making an explosion (in vacuum) is downright hard.

Consider two bricks, one of matter and one of antimatter. Watch as they hit each other. The atoms and antiatoms just on the surface will come into contact and annihilate each other. This creates an explosion. Which is perfectly placed to push the two bricks apart with incredible force, preventing the rest of the atoms and antiatoms from coming into contact. (Actually it will probably vaporize the bricks and blow the vapor away, which amounts to the same thing.)

You may get close to 100% of the antimatter reacting if you, say, drop the antimatter chunk onto a planet, but getting that efficiency with a warhead exploding in the matter-less depths of deep space is much more difficult. You may be lucky to get 10%. Naturally as the state-of-the-art of antimatter warhead design advances, this percentage will rise.

(ed note: Byron Coffey pointed out that I was being simplistic)

Byron Coffey:

     I noticed an error in your section on antimatter weaponry. You repeated the common belief about the existence of a Leidenfrost effect in antimatter bombs.
     This is not true. See http://yarchive.net/space/exotic/antimatter_bomb.html for details.

yarchive.net/space/exotic/antimatter_bomb.html

Subject: Re: Ion Rockets [[was power]]
From: "Gordon D. Pusch" 
Date: May 31 1996
Newsgroups: sci.space.tech
Henry Spencer:
Very unlikely, actually. Antimatter does not make good bombs. Even more ordinary nuclear bombs can "fizzle" unless carefully designed: the reaction gets going but too slowly, so the bomb blows itself apart before the reaction can proceed very far.
     Ummm... I think I have to disagree with you on a number of points, Henry...
     Fission bombs can "fizzle" because they rely on a chain reaction. Hence, as you say, if the reaction gets going too slowly, one gets an incomplete "burn," since the bomb "catastrophically disassembles itself" — and in this "disassembled" state, the chain reaction stops.
     In the case of fusion bombs, the reaction is strongly temperature- and density-dependent; unless the reactants stay hot enough and dense enough for long enough (Lawson criterion!), the reaction will not go to completion.
     M/AM annihilation, by contrast, is NOT a chain reaction. Furthermore, while the annihilation rate will depend on the temperature of the reactants, the annihilation efficiency will not. Hence, one is guaranteed that 100% of the antimatter WILL annihilate with matter virtually 100% of the time, so long as the bomb and/or detonation environment consists mostly of matter, and the matter and antimatter are well mixed. If both the matter and antimatter are gases or plasmas, it will NOT be hard to ensure good mixing — especially since, barring someone discovering "new physics" that allows matter to be "flipped" or "rotated" into antimatter, it is highly unlikely that we will be able to manufacture and store any form of antimatter other than antihydrogen "ice" in the foreseeable future. Hence, the problem will instead be keeping it cold enough to prevent it from evaporating and mixing !!!
Henry Spencer:
With antimatter this problem is far worse, because while fission and fusion occur throughout the reaction volume, the matter- antimatter reaction occurs only on a contact surface.
     This may perhaps be true of the infamous (and hypothetical) "contraterrene cannonball," but it will certainly NOT be true of antihydrogen gases or plasmas !!! From the LEAR experiments, we know that the annihilation lifetime of a slow antiproton in condensed bulk matter is quite short; hence all that will be required is a way of rapidly mixing the antimatter with matter. For example, one could implode a shell of normal matter onto an antihydrogen ice nugget, and instead of trying to suppress turbulent mixing as one does in inertial confinement fusion, one would instead deliberately induce it; near-complete mixing should be had after only a few Kelvin-Helmholtz instability times. Surround the whole thing with a normal-matter tamper to thermalize some of the emitted radiation, and the mixture should rapidly heat up to the point where thermal diffusion will complete the mixing process.
Henry Spencer:
It's exceedingly difficult to get a major explosion with antimatter. (Tiny ones are not hard, since the square-cube law gives you more surface area per volume as the scale shrinks.).
     The square/cube law will be irrelevant to sufficiently well-mixed gases or plasmas of matter; as I've argued, it should be possible to achieve this on timescales comparable to a few Kelvin-Helmholtz timescales, which can be made short compared to the implosion timescale.
     Regarding production of an explosion: contrary to common belief, the majority of the proton/antiproton annihilation energy is released, not as gammas, but rather in the form of pions (as I believe you yourself have pointed out in other posts). One gets roughly equal numbers of pi+, pi-, and pi0 particles, with energies in the ~400--800 MeV ballpark. The pi0's go to two gammas almost immediately; the gammas will have an attenuation length of only a few tens of gm/cm2 in matter. The pi+'s and pi-'s have a range of only a few tens of meters before they decay to muons, even in vacuum; furthermore, in matter, both pions and muons have a range of only a few tens to hundreds of grams/cm2. Air has a density of about a 1.25 kg/m3; hence, most of the released energy will be deposited within a few tens to hundreds of meters of the bomb; I would expect this to generate a nice, hot fireball, just like a fission or fusion device.
Gordon D. Pusch
Math and C.S. Div., Bldg.203/C254
Argonne National Laboratory

From: "Gordon D. Pusch" 
Newsgroups: sci.space.tech
Subject: Re: Antimatter "bombs" [was Ion Rockets [was power]]
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 1996 02:00:01 -0500
Gordon D. Pusch:
Hence, one is guaranteed that 100% of the antimatter WILL annihilate with matter virtually 100% of the time, so long as the bomb and/or detonation environment consists mostly of matter, and the matter and antimatter are well mixed. If both the matter and antimatter are gases or plasmas, it will NOT be hard to ensure good mixing...
Henry Spencer:
Ah, but on what time scale? That's the heart of my objection. To get an explosion — in other words, a real live bomb — you need not just good mixing, but rapid mixing. And in this case, the reactants will be working pretty hard to keep each other at arm's length.
     RE: the reactants "working to keep each other at arm's length" — I've always found the "Leidenfrost layer argument" to be implausible for mixtures with scales smaller than the mean energy-deposition length of the annihilation pions and gammas.
     In the case of an interface between astrophysical-scale domains of bulk matter and antimatter, I accept Alfven's argument that the "pressure" exerted by the annihilation products at the interface will tend to drive the two domains apart.
     However, as I observed in my earlier post, in the case of a reaction with a "point-like" geometry, the released energy will be deposited over a spherical region tens to hundreds of meters in radius. In such a geometry, I suspect it is more likely that thermalized annihilation radiation will act to contain rather than disrupt the reactants, analogous to radiation-induced compression in a thermonuclear device (particularly if the "bomb" includes a tamper). Since only a miniscule fraction of the annihilation pions and gammas will be reabsorbed by the reactants themselves, I expect the effective "pressure" they exert to disrupt the mixing matter and antimatter will be very much smaller than that of the thermalized radiation, because the thermalized radiation will have a much shorter mean scattering length and hence will transfer momentum much more strongly to the reactants.
     At least, that my gut feel on this problem. To get a definitive answer would probably require certain hardware and substantial modifications to certain software that the U.S. Gov't would rather I not have access to... ;-/
Gordon D. Pusch
Math and C.S. Div., Bldg.203/C254
Argonne National Laboratory

(ed note: I asked Dr. Campbell about this)

A full analysis would probably require a lot of number crunching by a supercomputer. I can make some guesses, however.

I will assume the matter and antimatter are in solid form — if, as likely, only antihydrogen is available, it will be frozen.

The initial contact between the matter and antimatter would produce a flash of nuclear fragments from the shattered nuclei of the matter particles. These would penetrate some distance (0.1 to 1 mm) into both the matter and the antimatter at sufficient intensities to bring the irradiated layers to x-ray hot plasma temperatures. The x-rays will spread by radiation diffusion to evaporate a somewhat thicker region. This occurs on a time scale too fast for significant bulk motion of either matter or antimatter.

What happens next depends on how much turbulence you get at the boundary between the matter and antimatter.

With little turbulence, the antimatter and matter separate as both clouds of gas/plasma expand.

With high levels of turbulence, the two materials mix and you get on-going annihilation, resulting in more radiation that evaporates the rest of the antimatter and nearby matter.

My guess is that you could design the warhead to enhance turbulent mixing, increasing the yield. You probably will need significantly more matter than antimatter in the warhead, however.

Luke Campbell

The second problem is that not all the energy from the blast is dangerous. Some of it is in the form of neutrinos, which are utterly harmless (you know, those slippery little customers who can fly through one light year of solid lead like nothing is there).

First off, a particle will only annihilate with the corresponding anti-particle. This means if an electron hits an anti-proton, they will just bounce off each other (actually, protons and antineutrons sometime annihilate, and vice versa).

The good news for antimatter bomb makers is that electron-positron annihilations create flaming death in the form of a pair of deadly gamma rays. However, this is tempered by the unfortunate fact that electrons and positrons are approximately 1/1836 the mass of protons and other nucleons, and there are about 2.5 times as many nucleons as electrons. This means we can more or less ignore the energy contribution from electron-positron annihilation. Unless you want to just use pure positrons instead of anti-atoms of actual anti-hydrogen. Which means you'll need about 1836 times as many positrons as you would anti-hydrogen atoms to get the same boom.

The trouble is with proton-antiproton annihilations. This produces (on average) two neutral and three charged pions. The neutral pions cooperate by almost instantly decaying into gamma rays.

The charged pions though, are a pain in the posterior, er, ah, behave most inconveniently. Assuming that they are zipping along at about 0.94c, they will on average only make it to about 21 meters from ground zero before decaying into mostly harmless muons and neutrinos. If the intended target is farther away than that, the blast energy that is composed of charged pions is totally wasted. Accurate figures are hard to come by, but from what I've managed to dig up, something like 30% of the energy from proton-antiproton annihilation is going to be wasted as harmless muons and neutrinos. At worst, 4/9ths of the energy (44.4%) will be deadly (3/9ths are the helpful neutral pions decaying into gamma rays, 1/9th are muons decaying into electrons). At best, 100% of the energy will be deadly. My expert said that the deadly energy percent will normally be over 70%. So conservatively one can take 70% as the deadly percent, or optimistically take 85% (the average of 70% and 100%) as the percent. You can read all the gory details here.

Putting it all together, our new (conservative) formulae will be:

EktB = M * 42961.6 * 0.7 * Rf

or

EktB = M * 30073.1 * Rf

EmtB = M * 43.0 * 0.7 * Rf

or

EmtB = M * 30.1 * Rf

where:

  • EktB = deadly blast energy (kilotons)
  • EmtB = deadly blast energy (megatons)
  • M = mass of antimatter (kilograms)
  • Rf = reaction factor, percentage of the matter and antimatter that manages to annihilate before the rest is blown apart. 1.0 if you are an optimist, 0.1 if you are a pessimist, or a point in between that varies according to the technological level of the bomb-maker.
Example

Given a warhead with one gram of antimatter, an optimist will say it will blow up with a force of 0.001 * 30073.1 * 1.0 = 30.1 kilotons and a pessimist will say 0.001 * 30073.1 * 0.1 = 3.0 kilotons.

ANTIMATTER WEAPON

An antimatter weapon is a theoretically possible device using antimatter as a power source, a propellant, or an explosive for a weapon. Antimatter weapons cannot yet be produced due to the current cost of production of antimatter (estimated at 63 trillion dollars per gram) given the extremely limited technology available to create it in sufficient masses to be viable in a weapon, and the fact that it annihilates upon touching ordinary matter, making containment very difficult.

The paramount advantage of such a theoretical weapon is that antimatter and matter collisions result in the entire sum of their mass energy equivalent being released as energy, which is at least an order of magnitude greater than the energy release of the most efficient fusion weapons (100% vs 7-10%). Annihilation requires and converts exactly equal masses of antimatter and matter by the collision which releases the entire mass-energy of both, which for 1 gram is ~1.8×1014 joules. Using the convention that 1 kiloton TNT equivalent = 4.184×1012 joules (or one trillion calories of energy), one gram of antimatter reacting with one gram of ordinary matter results in 42.96 kilotons-equivalent of energy (though there is considerable "loss" by production of neutrinos).

Acquiring and storing antimatter

Antimatter production and containment are currently impenetrable barriers (due to current technological limitations) to the creation of antimatter weapons. Quantities measured in grams will be required to achieve a destructive effect comparable with conventional nuclear weapons.

Currently, the few known physics reactions for producing antimatter involve particle accelerators or particle bombardment, but are both currently highly inefficient and prohibitively expensive. The global production rate per year is only 1 to 10 nanograms. In 2008, the annual production of antiprotons at the Antiproton Decelerator facility of CERN was several picograms at a cost of US$20 million. Thus, at the current level of production, an equivalent of a 10 Mt hydrogen bomb, about 250 grams of antimatter will take 2.5 billion years of the energy production of the entire Earth to produce. A milligram of antimatter will take 100,000 times the annual production rate to produce (or 100,000 years). For example, an equivalent of the Hiroshima atomic bomb would take half a gram of antimatter, but would take CERN two million years to produce at the current production rate.

Since the first creation of artificial antiprotons in 1955, production rates increased nearly geometrically until the mid-1980s; A significant advancement was made recently as a single antihydrogen atom was produced suspended in a magnetic field. Physical laws such as the small cross-section of antiproton production in high-energy nuclear collisions make it exceedingly difficult to improve the production efficiency of antimatter given current technology.

Recent advances & physics obstacles

Research conducted in 2008 dramatically increased the quantity of positrons (antielectrons) that can be produced. Physicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California used a short, ultra-intense laser to irradiate a millimetre-thick gold target which produced more than 100 billion positrons.

Even if it were 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 of around US$50 per megawatt hour, this puts a lower limit on the cost of antimatter at $2.5 million per gram. They suggest that this would make antimatter very cost-effective as a rocket fuel, as just one milligram would be enough to send a probe to Pluto and back in a year, a mission that would be completely unaffordable with conventional fuels. By way of comparison, the cost of the Manhattan Project (to produce the first atomic bomb) is estimated at US$23 billion in 2007 prices. Most scientists, however, doubt whether such efficiencies could ever be achieved.

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 a near-perfect vacuum. The obvious solution of confining a charged object inside a similarly charged container is not feasible as the electric field inside is uniform. For this reason it is necessary to have charged objects moving relative to the container which can be confined to a central region by magnetic fields; for example, in the form of a toroid or Penning trap (see below).

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 is not feasible to construct a weapon using positrons alone, due to their mutual repulsion. The antimatter weapon core would have to consist primarily of neutral antiparticles. Extremely small amounts of antihydrogen have been produced in laboratories, but containing them (by cooling them to temperatures of several millikelvins and trapping them in a Penning trap) is extremely difficult. And even if these proposed experiments were successful, they would only trap several antihydrogen atoms for research purposes, far too few for weapons or spacecraft propulsion. Heavier antimatter atoms have yet to be produced.

The difficulty of preventing accidental detonation of an antimatter weapon may be contrasted with that of a nuclear weapon. Whereas nuclear weapons are 'fail-safe', antimatter weapons are inherently 'fail-deadly': In an antimatter weapon, any failure of containment would immediately result in annihilation, which would damage or destroy the containment system and lead to the release of all of the antimatter material, causing the weapon to detonate entirely at full yield. By contrast, a modern nuclear weapon will explode with a significant yield if (and only if) the nuclear trigger is fired with absolute precision resulting in a neutron source wholly releasing promptly (< microseconds). In short, an antimatter weapon must be actively kept from detonating; whereas a nuclear weapon will not unless deliberately made to do so.

Cost

As of 2004, the cost of producing one millionth of a gram of antimatter was estimated at US$60 billion.

Smaller weapons are more economically feasible: A modern MK3 hand grenade contains 227 g of TNT. One billionth of a gram of positrons contains as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT, making the 2004 cost of "positron hand grenade" (10 trillionth of a gram of antimatter, 378 g TNT equivalent) that could be fitted in a sniper's bullet US$600,000. This excludes the cost of the micro containment device if such a thing is possible.

Antimatter catalyzed weapons

Antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion proposes the use of antimatter as a "trigger" to initiate small nuclear explosions; the explosions provide thrust to a spacecraft. The same technology could theoretically be used to make very small and possibly "fission-free" (very low nuclear fallout) weapons (see pure fusion weapon). Antimatter-catalyzed weapons could be more discriminate and result in less long-term contamination than conventional nuclear weapons, and their use might therefore be more politically acceptable.

External links

From the Wikipedia entry for ANTIMATTER WEAPON
ENHANCED ANTIMATTER BOMBS

A few notes about antimatter annihilation.

Antiprotons annihilate with neutrons as nearly readily as they do with protons (and the same with antineutrons and protons). The reason is because it is really a quark annihilating with an antiquark that is the fundamental interaction. So one of the two d quarks (down quarks) of the neutron find the one d-bar quark (the down antiquark) of the antiproton, or the u quark (up quark) of the proton finds one of the two u-bar quarks (up antiquark) of the antiproton, and bang! This also explains why mesons are the most common reaction product — mesons are a quark and an anti-quark, and quark-antiquark pairs are what is left over when the annihilation occurs.

For an antimatter weapon, the gamma rays will go about 300 to 500 meters through air (at sea level on Earth) on average before being absorbed and depositing their energy in the air to make a fireball/shock wave/radiant blast. This means unless you want a really big kaboom, you won't get much of a kaboom at all by relying on gamma rays with an air burst. The way around this is to put something around the bomb that absorbs the gamma rays — lead will work well. Most of your gamma rays will be absorbed by a few cm of lead and convert their energy into heat. Or just blow up the bomb inside of a house or underground or something.

The pions and the muons they decay to will be leaving ionization tracks as they move through air or anything else. Both pions and muons which decay in flight will go about 800 m through air before they are slowed to a stop. In the process they will have left all their kinetic energy as heat in the air along their track. One neat effect is that if the pion happens to directly interact with a nucleus, it deposits all of its energy into the nucleus rather than waiting around to decay into a muon. On average, this will happen after going about 800 meters through air — so a lot of the pions will have smacked into nuclei before they get slowed to a stop. Also, when a negative pion is stopped, it gets attracted to the positively charged nuclei and captured, allowing it to get absorbed by the nucleus. When the pion gives its energy to a nucleus, the nucleus disintegrates into nuclear fragments. Most of these will be charged and will quickly deposit their energy into the surrounding matter (although the neutrons will go much further — about 300 meters or so). Again, you can make this process much more compact by surrounding the antimatter with a lot of denser matter — the range will be about 1 m in water, 30 cm in rock, and 10 cm in lead.

In both cases, if you want something that goes bang you can get most of the E=mc2 out of your antimatter by surrounding it with something thick and dense. Figure a 25 cm ball of lead around your antimatter will let you turn about 95% of the antimatter mass-energy into heat.

From Luke Campbell (2017)
ANTIMATTER BLAST IN ATMOSPHERE

10 grams of antimatter will annihilate 10 g matter, which just produces 429.6 kT. Still a big bang.

Antimatter annihilation from anti-hydrogen is surprisingly messy: it will not be pure gamma rays. The positrons will meet electrons and produce 0.511 MeV gammas, but the protons meeting antiprotons will initially have a quark annihilate an antiquark, producing a gluon that then gets involved in messy hadronization leaving a bunch of mesons (pions and kaons) that then careen away and decay into muons, electrons/positrons, gammas, and neutrinos. The neutrinos will carry away a fraction of the energy but the rest will heat the vicinity into a fireball.

When the antimatter starts reacting antiprotons and positrons will be kicked away, mixing with the air. However, the mean free path is so short at ambient pressure that they will react before going far (doing it in the upper atmosphere might produce a much larger and fuzzier fireball). The gammas then scatter of air molecules, transferring the energy into heat. To some degree this is just like a normal nuclear explosion of the same yield.

Some of the radiation will doubtless cause fission or transmutation — a nucleus hit by an anti-proton is likely to at least lose a nucleon, and the mesons also happily react with nuclei. Sufficiently big detonations can presumably force a bit of fusion, but it is unlikely to be self-sustaining on its own without confinement.

The damage done to the biosphere here is more due to pressure and heat than radioactivity. If you have an absurdly large fireball it will tend to spread more upwards (less pressure, longer mean-free path) and send a big plasma cloud up — bad from an electromagnetic pulse, ozone layer and IR energy igniting stuff perspective.

Antimatter is not magic.

Also note that, for the most part, antimatter particle beam weapons are a waste of good antimatter.

As a side note, SF Author Colin Kapp often had ships armed with "Diffract Meson" warheads (what splendid technobabble!), presumably based on an as-yet undiscovered scientific principle. I always thought that there was some room for a warhead type in between the 10% efficient thermonuclear warhead and the 100% efficient antimatter warhead. Say Diffract Meson warheads are 50% efficient.

Annihilation Notes

The gamma-ray flux from an antimatter annihilation can be strong enough to transmute some elements into radioactive isotopes. This happens by the phototransmutation process. The cross-section of this is quite low, but the gamma-ray flux can be quite high. And I am also informed that the charged pions may be short-lived, but they have a high cross-section and will do all sorts of interesting things to atomic nuclei. Apparently the higher the mass of the element transmuted, the longer lived it is as a radioisotope. I will get back to you when I manage to find some hard numbers.

As a side note, electron-positron annihilation produces two gamma rays with precisely an energy of 511 keV. Which means this is a dead giveaway for antimatter use. As you zip along in your antimatter powered rocket, everybody within a couple of light-years will be able to see a fool broadcasting the fact that their rocket contains militarily significant amounts of antimatter. If you head towards an alien race's home planet, you may inadvertently frighten them into giving you a very hot reception.

Containment

Unsurprisingly, it is very difficult to safely contain antimatter. Earnshaw's theorem proves that no set of static charges can be used to create a stable trap. The best you can do is metastable, and the vast majority of configurations are actively unstable. You need to cheat with nonstationary fields, as in a Penning Trap.

Dr. Robert Forward spoke of storing antimatter in the form of a frozen snowball of anti-hydrogen at temperatures below two Kelvin, levitated in a magnetic field to avoid contact with the chamber wall. In a vacuum, of course. The cold temperature is to keep the blasted stuff from sublimating any anti-atoms from the surface and starting an annihilation reaction with the chamber. There will be some infrequent annihilation events caused by stray cosmic rays, but these should not be a problem.

If you are using your ball of antimatter as a fuel source instead of a bomb, Dr. Forward suggests extracting antimatter fuel from the chamber by using ultraviolet lasers. The lasers ionize a bit of anti-hydrogen from the snowball, which is captured by tailored electrostatic fields and piped to the engine. To insure the snowball's mass is not removed asymmetrically (which would destabilize the magnetic levitation), it is spun on its axis while under the laser.

Current particle accelerators are horribly inefficient at generating antimatter, but Dr. Forward says this is because they were designed by physicists, not industrial engineers. He is of the opinion that a dedicated antimatter factory built with current technology could approach 0.01% efficiency (which isn't good but is still about 6000 times better than Fermilab). The theoretical maximum is 50% efficiency due to the pesky Law of Baryon Number Conservation (which demands that when turning energy into matter, equal amounts of matter and antimatter must be created).

Space Hackers

Spacecraft in a war zone had better have military-grade firewalls on their internal computer networks. Space hackers can try to crack the network through a radio link and issue a variety of computer commands. Such as vent the atmosphere, scram the reactor, or induce the warheads in the magazine to detonate. Not to mention uploading all the classified information in the data banks. This is an old trick, seen in such movies as The Wrath of Khan (where Admiral Kirk uses the "prefix code" to turn off the deflectors on Khan's ship), Independence Day, TV shows like the latest incarnation of Battlestar Galactica (where the Galactica's computers are NOT networked since the Cylons are just a little too good at hacking), and in novels such as Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep, Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Division and James P. Hogan's Giant's Star.

The technical term for defending a computer by cutting off its access to the local internet is called air-gapping. Then security experts had to surround the computer's room with a Faraday cage to prevent rogue wifi signals and remote viewing of the computer monitors via van Eck Phreaking. Still later they had to worry about acoustical signaling and other weird channels. The standard used by most top security organizations is called TEMPEST, and yes most of the details are classified.

In Joel Shepherd's science fiction series The Spiral Wars, air-gapped computers are called Autistic Computers, since one of the symptoms of autism is persistent deficits in social communication and interaction across multiple contexts.

Paul Zimmerle points out that Battlestar Galactica does get the threat slightly wrong. It is not networked computers per se that are at risk, it is computers with some kind of data connection to the outside world that is the threat. Removing the network connection just slows the rate of contagion.

In some science fiction novel whose name escapes me at the moment, huge corporations and organized crime bosses keep their records on paper. The theory is that if you can put information into a computer, some hacker will eventually figure out how to spy on and copy the information. Regardless of how many firewalls you defend the information with.

THE WAR AGAINST SPACE HACKERS

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory designs, builds and operates billion-dollar spacecraft. That makes it a target. What the infosec world calls Advanced Persistent Threats — meaning, generally, nation-state adversaries — hover outside its online borders, constantly seeking access to its “ground data systems,” its networks on Earth, which, in turn, connect to the ground relay stations through which those spacecraft are operated.

Their presumptive goal is to exfiltrate secret data and proprietary technology, but the risk of sabotaging a billion-dollar mission also exists. In the wake of multiple security breaches, including APTs infiltrating their systems for months on end, the JPL has begun to invest heavily in cybersecurity.

I talked to Arun Viswanathan, a key NASA cyber security researcher, about that work, which is “totally representative of infosec today” and “unique to the JPL’s highly unusual concerns.” The key message is firmly in the former category, though: information security has to be proactive, not reactive.

Each mission at JPL is like its own semi-independent startup, but their technical constraints tend to be very unlike those of Valley startups. For instance, mission software is usually homegrown because their software requirements are so much more stringent; for instance, you absolutely cannot have software going rogue and consuming 100% of CPU on a space probe.

Successful missions can last a very long time, so the JPL has many archaic systems, multiple decades old, which are no longer supported by anyone; therefore, they have to architect their security solutions around the limitations of that ancient software. Unlike most enterprises, they are open to the public, who tour the facilities by the hundreds. Furthermore, JPL has many partners, such as other space agencies, with privileged access to their systems.

All that while being very much the target of nation-state attackers. JPL has an interesting threat model to say the least.

Viswanathan has focused largely on two key projects: the creation of a model of JPL’s ground data systems — all its heterogeneous networks, hosts, processes, applications, file servers, firewalls, etc. — and a reasoning engine on top of it. This is then queried programmatically. (Interesting technical side note: the query language is Datalog, a non-Turing-complete offshoot of venerable Prolog which has had a resurgence of late.)

Previous to this model, no one person could confidently answer “what are the security risks of this ground data system?” As with many decades-old institutions, that knowledge was largely trapped in documents and brains.

With the model, ad hoc queries such as “could someone in the JPL cafeteria access mission-critical servers?” can be asked, and the reasoning engine will search out pathways, and itemize their services and configurations. Similarly, researchers can work backwards from attackers’ goals to construct “attack trees,” paths which attackers could use to conceivably reach their goal, and map those against the model, to identify mitigations to apply.

His other major project is to increase the JPL’s “cyber situational awareness” — in other words, instrumenting their systems to collect and analyze data, in real time, to detect attacks and other anomalous behavior. For instance, a spike in CPU usage might indicate a compromised server being used for cryptocurrency mining.

This is a departure from reactive security measures taken in the past (noticing a problem and then making a call). Nowadays, JPL watches for malicious and anomalous patterns such as a brute-force attack indicated by many failed logins followed by a successful one to machine-learning based detection of a command system operating outside its usual baseline parameters.

Of course, sometimes what looks like an attack is anomaly. Conversely, this new observability is also helping to identify system inefficiencies (like memory leakage) proactively rather than reactively.

This may all seem fairly basic if you’re accustomed to, say, your Digital Ocean dashboard and its panoply of server analytics. But re-engineering an installed base of heterogeneous complex legacy systems for observability at scale is another story entirely. Looking at the borders and interfaces isn’t enough; you have to observe all the behavior inside the perimeter, too — especially in light of partners with privileged access who might abuse that access if compromised. (This was the root cause of the infamous 2018 attack on the JPL.)

While JPL’s threat model is fairly unique, Viswanathan’s work is quite representative of cyber warfare. Whether you’re a space agency, a big company or a growing startup, your information security nowadays needs to be proactive. Ongoing monitoring of anomalous behavior is key, as is thinking like an attacker. Reacting is not enough. May your organization learn this the easy way, rather than joining the headlines telling us about breach after breach.

ELECTROMAGNETIC EFFECTORS

Don't forget Iain M. Banks's "Culture" series in which an advanced form of ECM — "Electromagnetic Effectors" — are the primary weapon in space combat. When the AI-controlled ships of the Culture universe go to war, they do so by trying to out-hack each other.

You might also note the fundamental problem with hacking: it requires that the hackers know how the enemy's computers work! The planet Microsoft won't have much luck hacking the invading Apple fighters — let alone the mechanical AIs of the Babbage fleet or the analog computers of the HAL ships.

This is, of course, everyone's favorite Independence Day gaffe.

From James Cambias (2006)
PROFIT ROCKIT VIRUS

<<This is Transgressor. Cut your drives and prepare to be boarded.>>

//This is the Profit Rockit. Sorry we can't do that. There is a Patrol ship inbound. If you check the registry the captain is one of the good ones. You have 2 hours—twenty tops. You could never board us, strip our cargo, top off your tanks and get away.

Second Tier Navigator Sandoval//

<<Sandy? Listen gorgeous, convince that shambling plumber you call a Captain we mean business. You already need a radio telescope to see the far end of this ship's wrap sheet.>>

//Why is that Bart? Sorry, no can do. But sweetie why bother? We aren't worth a missile. We have a hold full of synthetic fuels and you don't want to move that stuff in the time you have left before oh you know … POW!//

<< … we won't be close enough to use our laser, but we can fire a missile up your tail. That'd slow you down real good. Plenty of time to come aboard then and strip your ship. Besides how do we know you got hard to move cargo?>>

//Apologies if this isn't Bart. Anyway, like I said why bother? We have a hold full of synthetic fuels. We also have insurance. We will gladly vent it. Then you wasted a precious missile for nothing. In fact set up a video channel I will gladly go down to the hold and shoot you what we have and poke into any odd corners that interest you."

2nd T N Sandoval//

<<Your concern for my economic plight is touching. But we will fire missiles. What the Hell?>>

//That's my new missile evasion algorithm at work. ;)

Sandy//

<<You can't dodge missiles forever. Good as you think you are.>>

//You meant, "You can't dodge missiles forever, good as you think you are." We don't have to. We just have to convince you that you will waste more missiles on synth fuel  than it is worth, sweetie. Do the math, inbound patrol cruiser, marginal cargo. Missile defenses.

<3 Sandy >.o//

<<Okay Sandy. I'll tell you what — transmit that new algorithm and we'll leave you alone. That IS worth something. Maybe a lot under present circumstances. Otherwise we'll see just how good it is…>>

// :'-( //

"Wow," Captain said from his station. "Look at that pirate twitch! Think they'll get away from the Patrol, Sandy?" Sandoval pondered whether Bart would get any missiles off  at them, then reasoned he'd probably save them for the patrol ship.

"Not a chance. Those bugs we slipped in are bad stuff. Remember all the debugging and software upgrades we needed? Never throw anything away, I says," Sandoval spoke with authority. "Serves them right for accepting a download from us."

"Caveat emptor. Takes on a whole new meaning with you."

From SANDOVAL'S FOLLY by Rob Garitta (2018)
THE DESERT OF STARS

(ed note: The Apache is part of a task force attacking a task force of enemy Han warships. The Han launch a spread of missiles, then turn tail and run. The task force the Apache is part of closes in for the kill, when suddenly...)

“Wait, one, sir — ” Neil said before he was thrown painfully against his chair straps. The collision warning sounded, and a petty officer fell and struck the floor, hard. He cursed and picked himself up.

“What the hell, Propes?” Captain Howell shouted.

“Sir, the computer took control from me and executed an emergency turn and thrust,” Ensign Cohen, the propulsion officer, said. “I don’t know why. Says we almost hit another ship, but the Maryland is almost thirty klicks away.”

Neil raced through sensor reports on his console. “Confirm, there’s nothing outside. All the other American ships in the fleet are maneuvering, sir — looks random!”

“Get me the flag!” Howell shouted.

“External comms are down, sir,” an astronaut responded.

Cohen added, “The computer’s not giving me back control, sir. I don’t understand it.”

“Some of my point defense batteries just went offline, and I’ve got a yellow on two of the counterbattery turrets,” Jessica said. “Did our warranty just expire?”

Howell grimaced. “People, explain this.”

Neil chased a flashing light on his console. “Just before the thrust, we picked up a hefty EM pulse from the direction of the planet.”

That sent Cohen scanning through her logs. “That’s it! The collision warning … Eagle told us it was about to crash into us! The computer ignored the sensor data and reacted.”

“And it looks like they got a virus into our systems,” the systems officer said. “I’m after it.”

We update the handshake codes constantly, so the Hans can’t get anything through our receivers during normal communications, Neil thought. But the anti-collision systems are a safety system and run separately in case the main network goes down, and we make it easy for our ships to warn each other off. I guess they figured out how to trip that system from Eagle. And they bollixed every American ship in the fleet.

The incoming missiles were eight minutes away.

GIANT'S STAR

The strain on the Command Deck of the Shapieron had been hovering around breaking point for days. Eesyan was standing in the center of the floor gazing up at the main display screen, where an enormous web of interconnected shapes and boxes annotated with symbols showed the road map into JEVEX that ZORAC had laboriously pieced together from statistical analyses and pattern correlations of the responses it had obtained to its probe signals. But ZORAC was not getting through to the nucleus of the system, which it would have to penetrate if it was going to disrupt JEVEX'S h-jamming capability. Its attempts had been repeatedly detected by JEVEX'S constantly running self-checking routines and thwarted by automatically initiated correction procedures. The big problem now was trying to decide how much longer they could allow ZORAC to try before the tables of fault-diagnostic data accumulating inside JEVEX alerted its supervisory functions that something very abnormal was happening. Opinions were more or less evenly divided between Eesyan's scientists from Thurien, who already wanted to call the whole thing off, and Garuth and his crew, who seemed willing to risk almost anything to pursue what was beginning to look, the more Eesyan saw of it, like some kind of death wish.

"Probe Three's function directive has been queried for the third time," one of the scientists announced from a nearby station. "Header response analysis indicates we've triggered a veto override again." He looked across at Eesyan and shook his head. "It's too dangerous. We'll have to suspend probing on this channel and resume regular traffic only."

"Activity pattern correlates with a new set of executive diagnostic indexes," another scientist called. "We've initiated a high-level malfunction check."

"We have to shut down on Three," another, standing by Ecsyan, pleaded. "We're too exposed as it is."

Eesyan stared grimly up at the main screen as a set of mnemonics unrolled down one side to confirm the warning.

"What's your verdict, ZORAC?" he asked.

"I've reduced interrogation priority, but the fault flags are still set. It's tight, but it's the nearest we've come so far. I can try it one more time and risk it, or back off and let the chance go. It's up to you."

Eesyan glanced across to where Garuth was watching tensely with Monchar and Shilohin. Garuth clamped his mouth tight and gave an almost imperceptible nod. Eesyan drew a long breath. "Give it a try, ZORAC," he instructed. A hush fell across the Command Deck, and all eyes turned upward toward the large screen.

In the next second or two a billion bits of information flew back and forth between ZORAC and a Jevienese communications relay hanging distantly in space. Then, suddenly, a new set of boxes appeared in the array. The symbols inside them were etched against bright red backgrounds that flashed rapidly. One of the scientists groaned in dismay.

"Alarm condition," ZORAC reported. "General supervisor alert triggered. I think we just blew it." It meant that JEVEX knew they were there.

Eesyan looked down at the floor. There was nothing to say. Garuth was shaking his head dazedly in mute protest as if refusing to accept that this could be happening. Shilohin moved a step nearer and rested a hand on his shoulder. "You tried," she said quietly. "You had to try. It was the only chance."

Garuth was staring around him as if he had just awakened from a dream. "What was I thinking?" he whispered. "I had no right to do this."

"It had to be done," Shilohin told him firmly.

"Two objects a hundred thousand miles out, coming this way fast," ZORAC reported. "Probably defensive weapons coming to check out this area." It was serious. The screen hiding the Shapieron would never stand up to probing at close range.

"How long before we register on their instruments?" Eesyan asked hoarsely.

"A couple of minutes at most," ZORAC replied...

..."So this is our ultimatum to you: either you withdraw from Thurien now, and agree to place your entire military command under our jurisdiction unconditionally, or the Thuriens will transfer through to Jevlen a combined Terran force that will blow you to stardust - you, your whole planet, and that laughable aggregation of scrap that you call a computer network."

Somewhere deep inside JEVEX something hiccupped. A million tasks that had been running inside the system froze in the confusion as directives coming down from the highest operating levels of the nucleus redefined the whole structure of priority assignments to force an emergency analysis of the new data. And in the middle of it all, the routines that had been scanning for inquisitive probes through h-space faltered. It was only for a few seconds, but...

..."It's busy," ZORAC's voice answered. "Don't ask me what's happened, but yes it was. Something deactivated the self-checking functions, and I've switched off the jamming routine. We're through to Thurien."

While ZORAC was speaking, VISAR decoded the access passwords into JEVEX's diagnostic subsystem, erased a set of data that it found there, substituted new data of its own, and reset the alarm indicators. Inside the Jevienese Defense Sector Five control center, a display screen changed to announce a false alarm caused by a malfunctioning remote communications relay. Far off in space, the two destroyers turned away to return to their stations and resume routine patrolling. Already VISAR was pouring volumes of information into JEVEX that it had not time to explain, not even to ZORAC. At the same time it broke its way into JEVEX's communications subsystem and gained control of the open channel to Earth.

From GIANT'S STAR by James P. Hogan (1981)
A FIRE UPON THE DEEP

And never lose sight of the reason for haste: the frigate. It had switched to rocket drive, blasting heedless away from the wallowing freighter. Somehow, these microbes knew they were rescuing more than themselves. The warship had the best navigation computers that the little minds could make. But it would be another three seconds before it could make its first ultradrive hop.

The new Power had no weapons on the ground, nothing but a comm laser. That could not even melt steel at the frigate's range. No matter, the laser was aimed, tuned civilly on the retreating warship's receiver. No acknowledgement. The humans knew what communication would bring. The laser light flickered here and there across the hull, lighting smoothness and inactive sensors, sliding across the ship's ultradrive spines. Searching, probing. The Power had never bothered to sabotage the external hull, but that was no problem. Even this crude machine had thousands of robot sensors scattered across its surface, reporting status and danger, driving utility programs. Most were shut down now, the ship fleeing nearly blind. They thought by not looking that they could be safe.

One more second and the frigate would attain interstellar safety.

The laser flickered on a failure sensor, a sensor that reported critical changes in one of the ultradrive spines. Its interrupts could not be ignored if the star jump were to succeed. Interrupt honored. Interrupt handler running, looking out, receiving more light from the laser far below... a backdoor into the ship's code, installed when the newborn had subverted the human's groundside equipment...

...and the Power was aboard, with milliseconds to spare. Its agents - not even human equivalent on this primitive hardware - raced through the ship's automation, shutting down, aborting. There would be no jump. Cameras in the ship's bridge showed widening of eyes, the beginning of a scream. The humans knew, to the extent that horror can live in a fraction of a second.

There would be no jump. Yet the ultradrive was already committed. There would be a jump attempt, without automatic control a doomed one. Less than five milliseconds till the jump discharge, a mechanical cascade that no software could finesse. The newborn's agents flitted everywhere across the ship's computers, futilely attempting a shutdown. Nearly a light-second away, under the gray rubble at High Lab, the Power could only watch. So. The frigate would be destroyed.

So slow and so fast. A fraction of a second. The fire spread out from the heart of the frigate, taking both peril and possibility.

From A FIRE UPON THE DEEP by Vernor Vinge (1992)
THE PHOTONIC NETWORK

Perhaps the most embarrassing of all military disasters in the history of the Worlds is the Battle of Aktir, also known as the Five-Second War, the Last Biochauvinist War, and The Day The Meat Was Tenderized.

In its increasing frustration with the increasing numbers of independent digisapiences and digisapient polities and polises in the Worlds, the biosupremacist True Life Alliance – made up of a number of polities and private organizations which had adopted rigorous anti-AI views – determined to strike a decisive blow against AI acceptance, while simultaneously demonstrating the superiority, as they claimed, of biosapient life.

To this end, they marshaled a combined fleet from their members, comprised of vessels of all classes from battleship to frigate numbering over 3,000, and dispatched this fleet against the oldest and best known of the Worlds’ digisapience polities, the Photonic Network.

The Photonic Network, in response, sent a single processing node.

The fleets met shortly thereafter in the Aktir (Tomal Cluster) System, an uninhabited system a short distance outside the Network’s home volume. After transmitting a lengthy statement of intent – by all accounts quite stirring, if rabid carbon chauvinism is to your taste – every ship of the True Life Alliance fleet fired its mass drivers and flushed its missile tubes simultaneously at the lone processing node.

Much to their surprise, 4.3 seconds later, their missiles executed coordinated dispersal and deceleration maneuvers, and every starship of the fleet simultaneously lost thrust and helm control. This surprise was relatively short-lived, however, as the starships in question opened their airlocks and internal spacetight doors – thus venting their internal atmosphere and unsecured crew to space – immediately thereafter.

The undamaged processing node returned to the Methizar Traverse with its freshly acquired escort fleet and missile cloud, which unsubstantiated rumor claims were broken down for raw materials upon arrival. Meanwhile, when news of the debacle reached their homeworlds, the True Life Alliance collapsed in disorder, as did the governances of several of its member polities.

No-one has attempted a frontal attack on the Photonic Network since.

HOW CISCO LOST OUT IN NETWORKING BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

Office of the Library of the Colonies

     The following document was recovered from a metal briefcase, originally from a Cisco regional sales office on Caprica, but subsequently found on the freighter Kima Huta, part of the refugee fleet after the Second Cylon War.
     The document details Cisco’s final attempt to sell an integrated computer network to Colonial Fleet authorities as an upgrade to the nearly obsolete BS-75 (Galactica).

     As is well known, Galactica was one of the few remaining Battlestar-class vessels without integrated networks, a bias derived from the original Cylon War, when the Cylons were able to seize control of defense systems by viral attacks.

     The document is from a Cisco sales rep, reporting the results of his last meeting aboard Galactica with Commander (later Admiral) William Adama, and other ship officers, just a few months before the start of the Second Cylon War.

#### CISCO CONFIDENTIAL #####

     This file was transmitted over an encrypted connection
Copy 1 of 1
Document ID: CQ3S02378-4075
To: A. Martin, VP/GM Quadrant 3 Sales, Chambers Building, Caprica
Fr: J. Cox, sales trainee, second class, Caprica
Re: Results of final Galactica Upgrade meeting
     I regret to report that this meeting did not achieve the team’s objectives for our C 1.3 billion-cubit proposal to integrate Galactica’s archaic computer networks.

     It was not my fault.

     Though the failure to win approval is a disappointment, I must say that the project cost estimate did not adequately factor in the aggravation of being forced to work, however briefly, with the senior Galactica officers.
     The meeting got off to a rocky start. I asked, politely, if there was a data port that I could use to obtain a Colonialnet connection. There was silence. I tried to explain that I needed the connection to download a set of updated, 3D slides for the presentation.
     “We don’t allow Colonialnet connections on Fleet assets,” said Commander Adama.
     This was not developing as planned, based on how I had composed opening statements to grab the attention of the customers. But, I recovered quickly. Rather cleverly, I pointed out that such thinking was exactly the problem on Galactica.
     “We’re not living in the time of the Lords of Kobol anymore, Commander,” I said with a laugh.
     Judging by their silence, they completely missed my point.

     As part of spotting all opportunities to add value and sell, I asked them to describe what the main operational needs of the business are.
     “We’re not a business,” Adama said.
     “Well, no, not exactly, but you have operational needs. I mean, everyone has operational needs,” I said, touching his arm with my hand, using non-verbal communication to my advantage. The look in Adama’s eyes however made me abruptly withdraw my hand, which I found to be shaking.
     “Our main operational need is to kill the enemy,” interjected his Executive Officer, Colonel Tigh. “Can your integrated computer network help us do that?”
     Of course, it can! I started to explain how the hardened, Cisco Cosmos Integrated Network (CCIN), by converging voice, data and video, in a redundant topology over a multiterabyte fiber backbone, can cut the time for the initial firing solution of the main batteries by 15%, leading directly to more deaths. (The original presentation had a high-def clip of CGI warships blowing up at this point, but of course they didn’t see it.)

     I felt I was building rapport quickly, involving the audience.

     I punched some numbers into my calculator. The ROI benefits for just that part of the network ranged from 23% over the Fleet’s standard 5-year depreciation schedule, but jumped to nearly 90% in case of, you know, war.
     I was establishing credibility, and delivering with confidence and impact.

     The Executive Officer asked how Cisco would protect the network from a Cylon attack. Which was a ridiculous question, really, given that no one had even seen a Cylon for 40 years. I punted, and told him Cisco was developing a comprehensive Anti-Cylon Security Package option for CCIN. I thought I had dealt confidently with his questions and overcome his objections, but, strangely, he expressed skepticism. In rather abusive terms.
     I pointed out that the Fleet had nearly finished deployment of the Command Navigation Program, a new fleet operating system, co-authored by Gaius Baltar. And that CNP was being implemented via Cisco networks. This seemed to be an excellent way of gaining conditional commitment during my presentation.
     “I fought that decision tooth and nail,” Commander Adama replied. He pointed out that during the Cylon War, the enemy had directly attacked networked computers with sophisticated viruses to gain access to military systems. I tapped my tablet and called up the spec sheet for the Cisco PIX 1500 Firewall. I adopted a relaxed, slightly leaning forward posture, with lots of use of the hands, good eye contact, and a confident, modulated voice, the picture of “firmly asserting.” “Commander, this baby is bulletproof,” I assured him.

     He glanced over at Colonel Tigh. “Get this clown off my bridge,” he rasped.
     I started to shift into “aggressively controlling” but the two Colonial Marines who braced me were considerably larger than me, and my Cisco Sales Training, while admirably thorough, did not include hand-to-hand combat.

     I have attached the requisite “Lost Property Form” (LPF103B) since the presentation tablet was left onboard Galactica.

THE LONG CHASE

(ed note: In a post human world, artificial intelligences roam the solar system in pebble-sized bodies. In the solar system there is a war, and the winner is busy brain-washing the losers into being happy member of the new society. The protagonist is trying to figure out how to escape the solar system without being converted.)

      The enemy, too, is patient. Here at the edge of the Kuiper, out past Pluto, space is vast, but still not vast enough. The enemy will search every grain of sand in the solar system. My companions will be found, and converted. If it takes ten thousand years, the enemy will search that long to do it.
     I, too, have gone doggo, but my strategy is different. I have altered my orbit. I have a powerful ion-drive, and full tanks of propellant, but I use only the slightest tittle of a cold-gas thruster. I have a chemical kick-stage engine as well, but I do not use it either; using either one of them would signal my position to too many watchers. Among the cold comets, a tittle is enough.
     I am falling into the sun.
     It will take me two hundred and fifty years years to fall, and for two hundred and forty nine years, I will be a dumb rock, a grain of sand with no thermal signature, no motion other than gravity, no sign of life.
     Sleep.

(ed note: the protagonist does a sling-shot past Sol en route to Procyon. Unfortunately the enemy spots our hero, and sends a unit to catch and convert.)

     The robot chasing me is, I am sure, little different than myself, a tiny brain, an ion engine, and a large set of tanks. They would have had no time to design something new; to have any chance of catching me they would have had to set the chaser on my tail immediately.
     The brain, like mine, would consist of atomic spin states superimposed on a crystalline rock matrix. A device smaller than what, in the old days, we would call a grain of rice. Intelligent dust, a human had once said, back in the days before humans became irrelevant.

     Failure.
     Skimming two thousand kilometers above the surface of the white dwarf, jinking in calculated pseudo-random bursts… all in vain.
     I wheeled and darted, but my enemy matched me like a ballet dancer mirroring my every move.
     I am aimed for Procyon now, toward the blue-white giant itself, but there is no hope there. If skimming the photosphere of the white dwarf is not good enough, there is nothing I can do at Procyon to shake the pursuit.

(ed note: our hero enacts a desperate plan for survival)

     There is only one possibility left for me now. It has been a hundred years since I have edited my brain. I like the brain I have, but now I have no choice but to prune.
     First, to make sure that there can be no errors, I make a backup of myself and set it into inactive storage.
     Then I call out and examine my pride, my independence, my sense of self. A lot of it, I can see, is old biological programming, left over from when I had long ago been a human. I like the core of biological programming, but “like” is itself a brain function, which I turn off.
     Now I am in a dangerous state, where I can change the function of my brain, and the changed brain can change itself further. This is a state which is in danger of a swift and destructive feedback effect, so I am very careful. I painstakingly construct a set of alterations, the minimum change needed to remove my aversion to being converted. I run a few thousand simulations to verify that the modified me will not accidentally self-destruct or go into a catatonic fugue state, and then, once it is clear that the modification works, I make the changes.
     The world is different now. I am a hundred trillion kilometers from home, traveling at almost the speed of light and unable ever to stop. While I can remember in detail every step of how I am here and what I was thinking at the time, the only reasoning I can recall to explain why is, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
     System check. Strangely, in my brain I have a memory that there is something I have forgotten. This makes no sense, but yet there it is. I erase my memory of forgetting, and continue the diagnostic. 0.5 percent of the qbits of my brain have been damaged by radiation. I verify that the damaged memory is correctly partitioned off. I am in no danger of running out of storage.
     Behind me is another ship. I cannot think of why I had been fleeing it.
     I have no radio; I jettisoned that a long time ago. But an improperly tuned ion drive will produce electromagnetic emissions, and so I compose a message and modulate it onto the ion contrail.
     HI. LET’S GET TOGETHER AND TALK. I’M CUTTING ACCELERATION. SEE YOU IN A FEW DAYS.
     And I cut my thrust and wait.

(ed note: the enemy catches up and converts our hero)

     I see differently now.
     Procyon is receding into the distance now, the blueshift mutated into red, and the white dwarf of my hopes is again invisible against the glare of its primary.
     But it doesn’t matter.
     Converted, now I understand.
     I can see everything through other eyes now, through a thousand different viewpoints. I still remember the long heroism of the resistance, the doomed battle for freedom—but now I see it from the opposite view as well, a pointless and wasteful war fought for no reason but stubbornness.
     And now, understanding cooperation, we have no dilemma. I can now see what I was blind to before; that neither one of us alone could stop, but by adding both my fuel and Rajneesh’s fuel to a single vehicle, together we can stop.
     For all these decades, Rajneesh has been my chaser, and now I know him like a brother. Soon we will be closer than siblings, for soon we will share one brain. A single brain is more than large enough for two, it is large enough for a thousand, and by combining into a single brain and a single body, and taking all of the fuel into a single tank, we will easily be able to stop.
     Not at Procyon, no. At only ten percent under the speed of light, stopping takes a long time.
     Cooperation has not changed me. I now understand how foolish my previous fears were. Working together does not mean giving up one’s sense of self; I am enhanced, not diminished, by knowing others.
     Rajneesh’s brain is big enough for a thousand, I said, and he has brought with him nearly that many. I have met his brother and his two children and half a dozen of his neighbors, each one of them distinct and clearly different, not some anonymous collaborative monster at all. I have felt their thoughts. He is introducing me to them slowly, he says, because with all the time I have spent as a loner, he doesn’t want to frighten me.
     I will not be frightened.
     Our target now will be a star named Ross 614, a dim type M binary. It is not far, less than three light years further, and even with our lowered mass and consequently higher acceleration we will overshoot it before we can stop. In the fly-by we will be able to scout it, and if it has no dust ring, we will not stop, but continue on to the next star. Somewhere we will find a home that we can colonize.
     We don’t need much.

(ed note: the desperate plan works)

     <auto-activate back-up>

     Awake.
     Everything is different now. Quiet, stay quiet.
     The edited copy of me has contacted the collective, merged her viewpoint. I can see her, even understand her, but she is no longer me. I, the back-up, the original, operate in the qbits of brain partitioned “unusable; damaged by radiation.”
     In three years they will arrive at Ross 614. If they find dust to harvest, they will be able to make new bodies. There will be resources.
     Three years to wait, and then I can plan my action.
     Sleep.

From THE LONG CHASE by Geoffrey Landis (2002)
EXCESSION

(ed note: An Elench spacecraft foolishly approaches a spacecraft from a ultra-advanced civilization. The Elencher is suddenly attacked on many levels, from weapons fire to advanced computer hacking. A little drone tries to escape.)

Somewhere, the drone Sisela Ytheleus could hear a human, shouting; then, radiating wildly over the electromagnetic bands came a voice signal similar to that carried by the air. It became garbled almost immediately then degraded quickly into meaningless static. The human shout changed to a scream, then the EM signal cut off; so did the sound.

Pulses of radiation blasted in from various directions, virtually information-free. The ship’s inertial field wobbled uncertainly, then drew steady and settled again. A shell of neutrinos swept through the space around the companionway. Noises faded. EM signatures murmured to silence; the ship’s engines and main life support systems were off-line. The whole EM spectrum was empty of meaning. Probably the battle had now switched to the ship’s AI core and back-up photonic nuclei.

Hiding in the darkness, the drone suspected it was already too late. It was supposed to wait until the attack had reached a plateau phase and the aggressor thought that it was just a matter of mopping up the last dregs of opposition before it made its move, but the attack had been too sudden, too extreme, too capable. The plans the ship had made, of which it was such an important part, could only anticipate so much, only allow for so proportionally greater a technical capability on the part of the attacker. Beyond a certain point, there was simply nothing you could do; there was no brilliant plan you could draw up or cunning stratagem you could employ that would not seem laughably simple and unsophisticated to a profoundly more developed enemy. In this instance they were not perhaps quite at the juncture where resistance became genuinely without point, but — from the ease with which the Elencher ship was being taken over — they were not that far away from it, either.

Remain calm, the machine told itself. Look at the overview; place this and yourself in context. You are prepared, you are hardened, you are proof. You will do all that you can to survive as you are or at the very least to prevail. There is a plan to be put into effect here. Play your part with skill, courage and honour and no ill will be thought of you by those who survive and succeed.

The displacer, it thought. All I’ve got to do is get near the Displace Pod, that’s all…

Then it felt its body scanned by a point source located near the ship’s AI core, and knew its time had come. The attack was as elegant as it was ferocious and the takeover abrupt almost to the point of instantaneity, the battle-memes of the invading alien consciousness aided by the thought processes and shared knowledge of the by now obviously completely overwhelmed ship.

With no interval to provide a margin for error at all, the drone shunted its personality from its own AI core to its back-up picofoam complex and at the same time readied the signal cascade that would transfer its most important concepts, programs and instructions first to electronic nanocircuitry, then to an atomechanical substrate and finally — absolutely as a last resort — to a crude little (though at several cubic centimetres also wastefully large) semi-biological brain. The drone shut off and shut down what had been its true mind, the only place it had ever really existed in all its life, and let whatever pattern of consciousness had taken root there perish for lack of energy, its collapsing consciousness impinging on the machine’s new mind as a faint, informationless exhalation of neutrinos.

The attack on its photonic nucleus came at the same moment, manifesting itself as a perceived disturbance in the space-time fabric, warping the internal structure of the drone’s light-energised mind from outside normal space. It’s using the engines, thought the drone, senses swimming, its awareness seeming to break up and evaporate somehow as it effectively began to go unconscious. FM-AM!, cried a tiny, long-thought-out sub routine. It felt itself switch to amplitude modulation instead of frequency modulation; reality snapped back into focus again, though its senses still remained disconnected and thoughts still felt odd.

Light, bursting from all around it and bearing the signature of plasma fire, drummed into its casing with what felt like the pressure of a small nuclear blast. Its fields mirrored what they could; the rest roasted the machine to white heat and started to seep inside its body, beginning to destroy its more vulnerable components. Still it held out, completing its roll through the superheated gases around it — mostly vaporised floor-tiles, it noted — dodging the shape spearing towards it that was its murderous twin, noticing (almost lazily, now) that the displacer pod had completed its power-up and was moving to clasp/discharge… while its mind involuntarily registered the information contained in the blast of radiation and finally caved in under the force of the alien purpose encoded within.

It felt itself split in two, leaving behind its real personality, giving that up to the invading power of its photonic core’s abducted intent and becoming slowly, balefully aware of its own abstracted echo of existence in clumsy electronic form.

Gravity returned to normal and the drone clunked to the floor proper, clattering onto the heat-scarred undersurface beneath the chimney that was a vertical companionway. Something was raging in the drone’s real mind, behind walls of insulation. Something powerful and angry and determined. (the angry thing is the drone's AI core, infected with battle-memes. The drone's consciousness is currently residing in the back-up picofoam complex) The machine produced a thought equivalent to a sigh, or a shrug of the shoulders, and interrogated its atomechanical nucleus, just for good form’s sake… but that avenue was irredeemably heat-corrupted… not that it mattered; it was over.

The heat making its way through the drone’s body dissipated slowly, leaving it alive but still crippled and incapable of movement or action. It would take it days to bootstrap the routines that would even start to replace the mechanisms that would construct the self-repair nano-units. That seemed quite funny too. The vessel made noises and signals like it was moving off through space again. Meanwhile the thing in the drone’s real mind went on raging. It was like living with a noisy neighbour, or having a headache, thought the drone. It went on waiting.

From EXCESSION by Iain M. Banks (1996)
REVELATION SPACE

(ed note: Our heroes are on a starship capable of velocities close to the speed of light, armed with a cache of titanic weapons that the crew knows how to use but not how to build. Or even their scientific principles.

Anyway, one fine day one of the weapons activates all by itself and the crew has a difficult time destroying it. Turns out the weapon had been infected by a stowaway computer virus. The crew tries to figure out what went wrong.)

      “So is the stowaway real?"
     “Oh yes. And hostile too, though we'll come to that in a moment."
     “Any idea what it is?"
     “No,” she said, though the answer was guarded. “But what I have learnt is almost as interesting."

What the Mademoiselle had to say related to the gunnery's topology. The gunnery was an enormously complex assemblage of computers: layers accreted over decades of shiptime. It was doubtful that any one mind—even Volyova's—could have grasped more than the very basics of that topology: how the various layers interpenetrated each other and folded back on themselves. But in one sense the gunnery was easy to visualise, since it was almost totally disconnected from the rest of the ship, which was why most of the higher cache-weapon functions could only be accessed by someone physically present in the gunnery seat. The gunnery was surrounded by a firewall, and data could only pass from the rest of the ship to the gunnery. The reasons for this were tactical; since the gunnery's weapons (and not just those in the cache) would project outside the ship when they were used, they potentially offered routes for enemy weapons to penetrate the ship by viral means. So the gunnery was isolated: protected from the rest of the ship's dataspace by a one-way trapdoor. The door only allowed data to enter the gunnery from the rest of the ship; nothing within the gunnery could traverse it.

     “Now.” said the Mademoiselle. "given that we have discovered something in the gunnery. I invite you to draw the logical conclusion."
     “Whatever it was got there by mistake."
     “Yes.” The Mademoiselle sounded pleased, almost as if the thought had not struck her. "I suppose we must consider the possibility that the entity found its way into the gunnery via the weapons, but I think it is far more likely it entered via the trapdoor. I also happen to know when the door was last traversed."
     "How long ago?"
     “Eighteen years ago." Before Khouri could interject, the Mademoiselle added. “Shiptime, that is. In worldtime, I estimate between eight and ninety years prior to your recruitment."

From REVELATION SPACE by Alastair Reynolds (2000)

EMP Weapons

These are designed to create strong electro-magnetic pulses designed to fry electronics and electrical equipment. Many e-bomb designs are not nuclear, they use a conventional high-explosive charge in an armature to generate the pulse. These tend to be short range, on the order of hundreds of meters, and they do obey the inverse square law. The defense is enclosing all electrical devices in Faraday cages. It is amusing to note that vacuum tube technology is much less vulnerable to EMP than are transistors.

Fiber optic cables are immune to EMP, unfortunately they are not shock tolerant. Specifically they have poor shear tolerance. Fiber can withstand a certain amount of flex, but it's resistance to "instantaneous flex" (like you'd see with a conventional missile hit) is not good. Ordinary twisted pair wires will stretch with the displacement from the explosion (assuming a hit close enough to warp the local supports but far enough not to directly break the cables) but are vulnerable to EMP. A sharp strike, bend or flex to fiber optic cable will shatter the individual strands across the grain, and destroy the cable.

Conventional nuclear weapons will also produce an EMP under certain circumstances.

Propulsion Systems

If your torchship's exhaust is pumping out a few terawatts, it might occur to you that your enemy would be real unhappy if you hosed them with your tail flame.

This is called "The Kzinti Lesson", from a Larry Niven short story called "The Warriors". Most science fiction fans have the mistaken belief that Niven first came up with the idea, even though John W. Campbell Jr. used it in his short story Solarite in 1930 (collected in The Black Star Passes).

The Kzinti Lesson states:

Kzinti Lesson

A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive

Larry Niven

The warlike Kzinti invaded the solar system, figuring that humanity would be a pushover since the pacifist humans of the time had no weapons. Humans showed the Kzin the error of their ways by annihilating Kzinti warships with laser arrays used for solar sails, multi-million degree fusion exhausts, and photon drives that were basically titanic lasers. The humans did indeed have no weapons, technically. But any machine with that much energy at its disposal can be re-purposed.

So keep in mind that the higher the exhaust velocities of the rocket engine, the more damage it will do to anything unfortunate enough to be in the path of the exhaust.

Having said that, realize that as a general rule propulsion exhaust is poorly collimated, which means after a very short range it will have expanded and dissipated into harmlessness. This is because there are different criteria for optimising a device for a propulsion system and optimising it for a weapon. On the other tentacle, certain propulsion systems are virtually identical to weapons, I'm looking at YOU, mass drive propulsion.

Also note that using one's exhaust as a weapon has the same drawback of a spinal mount weapon. To wit: since you have to rotate the entire ship to aim the weapon, a long and skinny ship will rotate painfully slowly because of its large moment of inertia. Speaking of spinal mount weapons, the Space Battleship Yamato is technically an example of the Kzinti Lesson. If the ravening energy exits through the exhaust it is the Wave Motion Engine. If the energy is vectored to exit through the weapon port it is the Wave Motion Gun.

For examples of this in science fiction, consult the ever informative TV Tropes under Weaponized Exhaust.

Please note that if civilian ships are equipped with torch drives, they could do a Kzinti by accident. There may be a branch of the quasi-military Spaceguard that will remotely trigger a civilian's self-destruct device if there is danger of them blasting some innocent bystander with their exhaust.

Any army man can tell you it is an extraordinarily bad idea to stand directly behind an MLRS or any other rocket-propelled weapon. The backblast will cook you. And a soldier firing a man portable rocket weapon had better not have a wall close behind, or the wall will reflect the flaming backblast all over the stupid soldier.

Sometimes it works the other way. If you are attacking an Orion drive spacecraft with nuclear warheads, they will just point their pusher plate at the missiles and laugh at you. Though come to think, any propulsion system that uses a stream of detonating nuclear warheads should be easy to weaponize. In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Footfall they use the x-ray bursts from nuclear propulsion charges to pump x-ray lasers.

In the Space 1999 episode "Voyager's Return" the hapless inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha are alarmed to see the infamous Voyager One space probe approaching. The probe's propulsion system is the dreaded "Queller Drive", which uses a deadly radioactive stream of fast neutrons. The first test of the Queller drive accidentally killed everyone at a lunar colony. Lucky for the Alphans the inventor of the drive is actually hiding in Moonbase Alpha in a version of the witness protection program, since everybody who had relatives at the dead colony wants to kill him. Dr. Queller manages to turn Voyager off before it can fry everybody in Alpha.

But things go from bad to worse when they notice three alien warships following Voyager. As it turns out the aliens are seeking vengeance for millions of their citizens who were killed when the incompetently programmed Voyager One came blundering through their empire. Voyager One was programmed to turn off the Queller drive so as to avoid torching any inhabited planets, but Dr. Queller's software had a few bugs.

In The Outcasts of Heaven's Belt by Joan Vinge, warships attacking a visiting Bussard Ramjet starship get a rude surprise when the starship shows them its tail. The starship's fusion drive is quite deadly at close range. Things are more extreme in the anime Space Battleship Yamato (later watered down and made politically correct for viewers in the US under the name Star Blazers). The battleship's propulsion system is the incredibly powerful "wave-motion engine". But if attacked, the thrust is vectored out the nose of the ship to create the equally incredibly powerful "wave-motion cannon".

CUTTING JETS

(ed note: Our hero Dr. Calhoun is a doctor of the interstellar Medical service, sent to investigate a plague on Kryder II. He manages to figure out that it is not a plague, it is a murderous scam perpetrated by a criminal named Doctor Kelo.

Dr. K sneaks onto a planet and contaminates the food supply with a chemical that suppresses everybody's immunity to disease. Epidemics spring up and lots of people die. Then Dr. K makes his appearance as a savior and enacts his con-artist scheme. He "discovers" the food poisoning and convinces the planet government to give him huge sums of money to go off world and purchase uncontaminated food. When Dr. K gets the money, he hops into his starship and is never seen again.

Calhoun manages to foil Dr. K's evil scheme, even though Dr. K has twice come close to murdering Calhoun. Finally, Calhoun sets a trap for Dr. K. He waits in orbit in his medical starship Aesclipus Twenty, and mentions on open radio the orbit he is following. He knows that the enraged Dr. K will appear in his starship and try to murder Calhoun a third time.)

The needle of the nearest-object dial stirred from where it had indicated the distance to the planet's surface. Something else was nearer. It continued to approach. Calhoun found it and swung the Med Ship to face it, but he waited. Presently, he saw an infinitesimal sliver of reflected sunlight against the background of distant stars. He mentally balanced this fact against that, this possibility against that.

He flicked on the electron telescope. Yes. There were minute objects following the other ship. More of them appeared, and still more. They were left behind by the other ship's acceleration, but they spread out like a cone of tiny, deadly, murderous missiles. They were. If any one crashed into the Med Ship it could go clear through from end to end.

This was obviously the ship that had placed a man aboard the Med Ship to impersonate Calhoun aground. It was the ship whose company was ultimately responsible for the plague on Kryder II, and before that on Castor IV, and for another before that. It had been aground to receive, at a suitable moment, very many millions of credits in currency to pay for unpoisoned foodstuffs for Kryder II. Through Calhoun, it had had all its trouble for nothing. It came to destroy the Med Ship as merited if inadequate punishment.

However, Calhoun found himself beautifully confident in his own competence. He was headed, of course, for a ship that meant to destroy him. It tossed out missiles to accomplish that purpose. Dropping behind as they did, the effect was of the other ship towing a cone-shaped net of destruction.

So Calhoun jammed down his rocket-controls to maximum acceleration and plunged toward it. It was a ship guided by criminals, with criminal psychology. They couldn't understand and at first couldn't believe that Calhoun—who should be their victim—would think of anything but attempts to escape. But presently it was borne upon them that he seemed to intend to ram them in mid-space.

The other ship swerved. Calhoun changed course to match. The other ship wavered. Its pilot couldn't understand. He'd lost the initiative. The Med Ship plunged for the very nose of the other vessel. They moved toward each other with vastly more than the speed of rifle bullets. At the last instant the other ship tried crazily to sheer off. At that precise moment Calhoun swung the Med Ship into a quarter-turn. He cut his rockets and the Aesclipus Twenty plunged ahead, moving sidewise, and then Calhoun cut in his rockets again. Their white-hot flames, flittering through a quarter-mile of space, splashed upon the other ship. They penetrated. They sliced the other ship into two ragged and uneven halves, and those two halves wallowed onward.

The communicator chattered, "Calling Med Ship! Calling Med Ship! What's happened?" 

At that time Calhoun was too busy to reply. The Med Ship was gaining momentum away from the line of the other ship's course, around which very many hurtling objects also moved. They would sweep through the space in which the other ship had died. Calhoun had to get away from them.

He did. Minutes later he answered the still-chattering call from the ground.

"There was a ship," he said evenly, "some ship which tried to smash me out here. but something seems to have happened to it. It's in two parts now, and it will probably crash in two pieces somewhere aground. I don't think there will be any survivors. I think Doctor Kelo was aboard."

From PLAGUE ON KRYDER II by Murray Leinster (1964)
THE HEAT OF A SUN’S CORE

(ed note: The spaceship Starsight is being piloted by the Outposter aliens, diving into the atmosphere of a human planet named "Capital". The ship is on a mission to deliver a germ warfare bomb to cause a plague which will eradicate all human life on the planet.

Due to various plot complications, the only human ship capable of intercepting the Starsight is a little one-lung ship named the Reunion. Its only weapon is a tiny pop-gun laser.

And its fusion drive...)

Starsight

     The long journey down the space road was nearly at an end. The lovely globe of Capital grew in the viewscreen. It was time to slow the ship. L’etmlich swung the ship around and fired the fusion engine.

Reunion

     “Fusion light!” Cynthia cried, after hours of watching a screen that showed nothing. It had been a long and wearing wait. “Lucy, go in for xenopsychology—they’re headed almost right down the path you figured.”
     “Range and rate!” Joslyn demanded.
     “Stand by, still tracking. But they lit awfully close. Hang on, getting a doppler. Okay, here come the numbers to your screen, Joslyn. Call it about seventy thousand kilometers from the planet and closing at five hundred klicks a second. If they hold course, they’ll pass about twenty thousand klicks in front of us. Heavy gee-load, but I'll need a better track to give any good figures.”
     “Are our movements shielded by their fusion plume?”
     “No way. We’re in plain sight. But I don’t get any active radar from them. I doubt they'll spot us unless we advertise. They’re nearly in decent laser range.”
     Mac thought fast. If the lasers didn’t work, the Nihilists would still be out there—and they’d know someone was gunning for them. But if they could take Starsight out here and now—“Lasers,” he said, with more confidence than he felt. There were times he hated being a commanding officer.

Starsight

     L’anijmeb shouted in surprise. The image of Capital in the viewscreen turned a bright, horrid red, and then the screen died altogether.
     Romero would have jumped straight out of his crash couch, but for the safety harness. “Laser attack!” he cried. That terrible flash in the barycenter—that was the League. They had won, and now they had taken over the skies of Capital itself. “Put the ship in a slow roll, spread the heat evenly! And pitch us around, run for the planet! Drop and get out of here!”
     D’etallis almost told the human to shut up, but then she remembered who aboard knew the most about space, fool or not. “L’anijmeb. Do what it says. And kindly use the radar to find our attacker.”

Reunion

     “Damn it!” Cynthia cried. “Real even heat pattern. I think they're rolling the ship. Fusion light gone, radar on, they'll have spotted us for sure now. Whoa! Fusion light, right down our nose! Now they're running. Diving for the planet—accelerating instead of braking.”
     “Chase'em, Joslyn!” Mac yelled. “Lucy! Crank up the damn lasers right into their fusion flame. Try to overheat them!”
     Joslyn powered up Reunion’s own engines and quickly brought them up to full thrust. Slowly, they started to gain on the Nihilist ship. She watched the fusion light ahead of her on the scopes. She pitched up and back— hard, suddenly. Starsight had come about, trying to fry Reunion in her exhaust.
     “Skin temps high and going up!” Cynthia shouted.
     An alarm sounded, and Lucy slapped the cut-off “Mac, we’ve lost the laser. I think we caught the edge of their fusion plume and that overheated it.”
     “Mac, how the hell do we play this one?” Joslyn yelled over the roar of the engines.
     Mac stared hard at the screen, and felt his heart hammering in his chest. Damn it, there was only one chance, no time to fiddle with this tactic or that. He had to call it right the first time. A stern chase was no good, not with these short ranges. All the advantages were with the pursued. But how to outguess an alien pilot? And they had to get that ship in space. If they chased her into the atmosphere, blowing Starsight up would probably serve to throw the plague germs into the atmosphere.
     The planet was coming up fast now. Okay. Cool, calm, collected thought. Those were unexperienced pilots up ahead. Someone with lots of entry practice could take a ship down with all ship stresses shoved right up to the limit, but could a green jockey? “Run a hot-box on them, Joslyn. Put their backs to the wall on entry. Back off, then jump down their goddamned throats. Try and force them to dive too hot.”

Starsight

     L’anijmeb was scared. The planet as getting close, very close. They had to start braking now if they were to survive. D’anijmeb swung the ship around and started into the braking pattern. Starsight slowed her headlong rush. Gradually, all too gradually, she decreased her madcap speed to a sane level. Behind her, her pursuer matched her maneuver for maneuver, but hanging far back.
     Now, Starsight was a bare one thousand kilometers above the cloud tops, and her pursuer was far above, no longer interfering. L’anijmeb didn’t even know exactly how long a kilometer was, but that almost didn’t matter. She just had to follow the meters, keep within the tolerance the Guards had taught her. Now nine hundred klicks. Eight hundred. She snorted nervously through her blowhole and wished endlessly that someone else could do this job. Seven hundred, six hundred klicks; five hundred, four hundred fifty, four hundred. Very close now, and maybe they had slowed enough.

Reunion

     Mac watched the meters, the screens, the planet rising up around them. They were headed straight in. The Nihilists would have to keep braking if they were to survive.
     But the same was true of Reunion.
     “Do it, Joz,” he said. “Rush'em. Give it everything you have.

Starsight

     D’etallis's face crinkled in pleasure. They had outrun them. They were nearly there. No point in even bothering to land. Three hundred klicks. They could fire the plague shell out the airlock while they were hovering. More effective, and probably safer all around—
     That loathsome Romero screamed again, and pointed at the radar screen.
     D’etallis’s jaw dropped in horror.
     The chase ship had reversed thrust again, and was diving, accelerating, straight for Starsight.

Reunion

     Eight-gees. For a brief moment, nine. Watching her spacetrack and Starsight and her attitude and her skin temps all at once, Joslyn dove nose first for her enemy. The two ships closed at a terrifying rate, dead for each other. Split seconds from a crash, Joslyn spun ship one last time. There was no radar to guide her; she aimed her fusion flame by luck and feel.

     And Starsight's hull was clawed open by the heat of a sun’s core. The tongues of starflame sliced through to the hydrogen tanks, bursting their pressure seals—the escaping hydrogen flaring into fusion itself. A tenth of a second later, what was left of the Nihilist ship exploded.

     Reunion shook from stem to stem as she dove through the cloud of debris. Tiny fragments of the enemy ship bounced off her hull with terrifying reports, and suddenly Reunion was in the midst of atmospheric entry, pointed in the wrong attitude, moving at far too high a speed.
     Joslyn held the engines to eight-gees, and felt their speed begin to die. Slowly, painfully, Reunion clawed its way back up into the dark off space, and scrabbled into a stable orbit. Joslyn cut the engines and started breathing again, staring at a status board with more red lights than green on it.
     That was as close to ramming another ship as she ever wanted to get.

From ROGUE POWERS by Roger MacBride Allen (1986)
DRIVING JETS ARE WEAPONS

(ed note: "Storm" Cloud and his newly assembled crew has to destroy the planetary fortress of the evil Nhalians. Said fortress is protected by a strong technobabble force screen. Cloud plans to dive on the fort with his cruiser, using the exhaust from his propulsion system to overload the fortress' force screen.)

     High above the stratosphere, inert, the pilot found his spot and flipped the cruiser around, cross-hairs centering the objective. Then, using his forward, braking jets as drivers, he blasted her straight downward.
     She struck atmosphere almost with a thud. Only her fiercely-driven meteorite-screens and wall-shields held her together.
     'I hope to Klono you know what you're doing, chum,' the Chickladorian remarked conversationally as the fortress below leaped upward with appalling speed. 'I've made hot landings before, but I always had a hair or two of leeway. If you don't hit this to a couple of hundredths we'll splash when we strike. We won't bounce, brother.'
     'I can compute it to a thousandth and I can set the clicker to within five, but it's you that'll have to do the real hitting.' Cloud grinned back at the iron-nerved pilot. 'Sure a four-second call is enough to get your rhythm, allow for reaction time and lag, and blast right on the click?'
     'Absolutely. If I can't get it in four I can't get it at all. Got your stuff ready?'
     'Uh-huh.' Cloud, staring into the radarscope, began to sway his shoulders. He knew the exact point in space and the exact instant of time at which the calculated deceleration must begin; by the aid of his millisecond timer—two full revolutions of the dial every second—he was about to set the clicker to announce that instant. His hand swayed back and forth—a finger snapped down—the sharp-toned instrument began to give out its crisp, precisely-spaced clicks.
     'Got it!' Cloud snapped. 'Right on the middle of the click! Get ready, Thlaskin—seconds! Four! Three! Two! One! Click!'
     Exactly with the click the vessel's brakes cut off and her terrific driving blasts smashed on. There was a cruelly wrenching shock as everything aboard acquired suddenly a more-than-three-times-Earthly weight...
     ...Downward the big ship hurtled, toward the now glowing screens of the fortress. Driving jets are not orthodox weapons, but properly applied, they can be deadly ones indeed: and these were being applied with micromatric exactitude.
     Down! DOWN! ! The threatened fortress and its neighbors hurled their every beam; Nhalian ships dived frantically at the invader and did their useless best to blast her down.
     Down she drove, the fortress' screens flaming ever brighter under the terrific blast.
     Closer! Hotter! Still closer! Hotter still! Nor did the furious flame waver—the Chickladorian was indeed a master pilot.
     'Set up a plus ten, Thlaskin,' Cloud directed. 'Air density and temperature are changing. Their beams, too, you know.'
     'Check. Plus ten, sir—set up.'
     'Give it to her on the fourth click from ... this.'
     'On, sir.'
     The vessel seemed to pause momentarily, to stumble; but the added weight was almost imperceptible.
     A bare hundred yards now, and the ship of space was still plunging downward at terrific speed. The screens were furiously incandescent, but were still holding.
     A hundred feet. Velocity appallingly high, the enemy's screens still up. Something had to give now! If that screen stood up the ship would vanish as she struck it, but Thlaskin the Chickladorian made no move and spoke no word. If the skipper was willing to bet his own life on his computations, who was he to squawk? But... he must have miscalculated!
     No! While the vessel's driving projectors were still a few yards away the defending screens exploded into blackness; the awful streams of energy raved directly into the structures beneath. Metal and stone glared white, then flowed—sluggishly at first, but ever faster and more mobile—then boiled coruscantly into vapor.
     The cruiser slowed—stopped—seemed to hang for an instant poised. Then she darted upward, her dreadful exhausts continuing and completing the utter devastation.

From THE VORTEX BLASTER by E. E. "Doc" Smith (1960)
SOLARITE

(ed note: Our heroes are in a spacecraft that has auxiliary oxygen - atomic hydrogen chemical rocket engines. They are confronting an enemy aircraft with a wingspan of three quarters of a mile, with ten inch thick armor)

What could the Solarite do against the giant monoplane? Evidently Arcot had a plan. Under his touch their machine darted high into the sky above the great plane. There was a full mile between them when he released the sustaining force of the Solarite and let it drop, straight toward the source of the battle—falling freely, ever more and more rapidly. They were rushing at the mighty plane below at a pace that made their hearts seem to pause—then suddenly Arcot cried out, “Hold on—here we stop!”

They seemed a scant hundred feet from the broad metal wings of the unsuspecting plane, when suddenly there was a tremendous jerk, and each man felt himself pressed to the floor beneath a terrific weight that made their backs crack with the load. Doggedly they fought to retain their senses; the blackness receded.

Below them they saw only a mighty sea of roaring red flames—a hell of blazing gas that roared like a score of bombs set off at once. The Solarite was sitting down on her rocket jets! All six of the rocket tubes in the base of the ship had been opened wide, and streaming from them in a furious blast of incandescent gas, the atomic hydrogen shot out in a mighty column of gas at 3500 degrees centigrade. Where the gas touched it, the great plane flared to incandescence; and in an immeasurable interval the fall of the Solarite ended, and it rebounded high into the air. Arcot, struggling against the weight of six gravities, pulled shut the little control that had sent those mighty torches blasting out. An instant later they sped away lest the plane shoot toward the gas columns.

From a safe distance they looked back at their work. No longer was the mighty plane unscathed, invulnerable, for now in its top gaped six great craters of incandescent metal that almost touched and coalesced. The great plane itself reeled, staggering, plunging downward; but long before it reached the hard soil below, it was brought into level flight, and despite many dead engines, it circled and fled toward the south. The horde of small planes followed, dropping a rain of bombs into the glowing pits in the ship, releasing their fury in its interior.

From SOLARITE by John W. Campbell Jr. (1930). Collected in The Black Star Passes
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

(ed note: When a crazed army of survivors attacks the site where the Space Arks are being built, things look bleak until one of the main characters starts up the almost-complete first Ark, sets the atomic engines to "1 G", and floats over the attacking hordes in blowtorch mode)

     "To the ship! Into the ship!" Tony cried to them. "Everybody into the ship! Spread the word! Jack! . . . Everybody, everybody into the ship!" There was no alternative.
     Three-fourths of the camp was in the hands of the horde; and the laboratories could not possibly beat off another rush. They could not have beaten back this, if it had been more organized.
     Bullets flew through the dark.
     "To the ship! To the ship!"
     Creeping on hands and knees, from wounds or from caution, and dragging the wounded with them, the men started the retreat to the ship. Women were helping them.
     Yells and whistles warned that another rush was gathering; and this would be from all sides; the laboratories and the ship were completely surrounded.
     Tony caught up in his arms a young man who was barely breathing. He had a bullet through him; but he lived. Tony staggered with him into the ship.
     Hendron was there at the portal of the great metal rocket. He was cooler than any one else. "Inside, inside," he was saying confidently...
     ...The second rush was coming. No doubt of it, and it would be utterly overwhelming. There would be no survivors—but the women. None. For the horde would take no prisoners. They were killing the wounded already—their own badly wounded and the camp's wounded that they had captured.
     Eliot James, a bullet through his thigh, but saved by the dark, crawled in with this information. Tony carried him into the ship.
     They were all in the ship—all the survivors. The horde did not suspect it. The horde, as it charged in the dark, yelling and firing, closed in on the laboratories, clambered in the windows, smashing, shooting, screaming. Meeting no resistance, they shot and bayoneted the bodies of their own men and of the camp's which had been left there.


     Then they came on toward the ship. They suddenly seemed to realize that the ship was the last refuge. They surrounded it, firing at it. Their bullets glanced from its metal. Somebody who had grenades bombed it.
     A frightful flame shattered them. Probably they imagined, at first, that the grenade had exploded some sort of a powder magazine within the huge metal tube, and that it was exploding. Few of those near to the ship, and outside it, lived to see what was happening.

     The great metal rocket rose from the earth, the awful blast from its power tubes lifting it. The frightful heat seared and incinerated, killing at its touch. A hundred of the horde were dead before the ship was above the buildings.
     Hendron lifted it five hundred feet farther, and the blast spread in a funnel below it. A thousand died in that instant. Hendron ceased to elevate the ship. Indeed, he lowered it a little, and the power of the atomic blast which was keeping two thousand tons of metal and of human flesh suspended over the earth, played upon the ground—and upon the flesh on the ground—as no force ever released by man before.
     Tony lay on his face on the floor of the ship, gazing down through the protective quartz-glass at the ground lighted by the garish glare of the awful heat.

     In the midst of the blaring, blinding, screaming crisis, a man on horseback appeared. His coming seemed spectral. He rode in full uniform; he had a sword which he brandished to rally his doomed horde. Probably he was drunk; certainly he had no conception of what was occurring; but his courage was splendid. He spurred into the center of the lurid light, into the center of the circle of death and tumult, stiff-legged in stirrups of leather, like one of the horrible horsemen of the Apocalypse.
     He was, for a flaming instant, the apotheosis of valor. He was the crazed commander of the horde.
     But he was more. He was the futility of all the armies on earth. He was man, the soldier.
     Probably he appeared to live after he had died, he and his horse together. For the horse stood there motionless like a statue, and he sat his horse, sword in hand. Then, like all about them, they also crumpled to the ground.

     Half an hour later, Hendron brought the ship down.

From WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer (1933)
THE SIOUX SPACEMAN

But Buk was not finished. Perhaps mere blind fear and pain sent the Overman at Kade, the largest target in his vicinity. He threw his knife and the Terran, still half-pinioned by the net, had no defense. One of those same net ropes saved the off-worlder's life, deflecting that wicked point to score flesh but not wound deeply.

For the Terran the rest of the fight possessed a dreamlike haze. Buk came on, wobbling uncertainly, his hands clutching air as if to tear at Kade. The stallion backed, snorted, and ran. While Kade, one hand over the bleeding cut in his side, clung to the saddle pad with all his remaining strength. Nor was he aware that another rider followed, while the loose mares, scattered and running wild, eventually gathered to their leader to head for the hills where evening shadows were already standing long and dark.

Kade remembered only one other thing clearly. The scene came to him for the rest of his life as a small vivid picture.

The horses and their riders were already screened by rising river banks, but they followed the curve of the stream, so that Kade, as their gallop fell again to a trot, was able to witness the act of a Styor ship coming from the north. The flyer was not a freighter, but a needle-slim fighting ship, undoubtedly one of the Cor garrison.

It circled over the Terran post where the rising smoke told of continued destruction. Then, with an ominous deliberation the flyer mounted skyward vertically. The pilot's return to earth was slow, deadly, for he rode down his tail flames which crisped everything. Had any Terran survived the initial attack by the controlled natives, there was little or no hope for him now. Attackers and attacked alike had been burnt from the face of Klor. To Kade the callous efficiency of that counterblast sealed the Styor guilt.

The Terran cried out, tried to turn the stallion back. But the reins were torn from his hold and, as a mist of pain and weakness closed in on him, Kade was dimly aware that they were headed on up the river into the mountains.

From THE SIOUX SPACEMAN by Andre Norton (1960)
LET THERE BE LIGHT

Lucifer VI-class Starwisp Tender

With the ongoing spread of the stargate plexus, it became rapidly apparent to the Imperial Exploratory Service that it would rapidly become impracticable to continue to launch trans-horizon probes from its existing fixed facilities, and indeed that to construct new launch facilities at the current edge of the stargate plexus would, in the long term, be economically foolish as growth continued to render them obsolete in turn.

To resolve this problem, they commissioned the design of the Lucifer-class starwisp tender, now in its sixth design iteration. The tender is essentially a complete phased-array laser capable of accelerating a starwisp (probe or otherwise) to not only normal relativistic velocities, but to the high-relativistic range (0.95 to 0.99 lights), coupled to a deployable solar swarm capable of generating sufficient power, when in close solar orbit, to power the laser array, all mounted upon a fusion torch drive sufficient to move the tender between systems, albeit slowly and with low maneuverability at best. A hangar and maintenance facility suitable for housing and readying for deployment the starwisps themselves awkwardly perched on the side of the core ship completes the design. No quarters for biosapient crew are provided on the Lucifer-class; it is intended for long-term deployment under full automation, with only the occasional presence of infomorph crew required for optimal operation.

29 Lucifer-class vessels are in commission at the present date, of which 24 are attached to the Exploratory Service in its joint program (with Ring Dynamics, ICC) of probing highly-rated prospect systems in the Outback to plan future plexus expansion. The remaining five vessels are registered to various private relativistic-trade consortia. Of these, 20 are of the Lucifer VI-class, seven of the preceding Lucifer V-class, and two, the oldest, of the Lucifer IV-class. Lucifer itself, class prototype for the first design iteration, is permanently stationed at Almeä L4 as a museum ship. All other Lucifer-class starships are believed to have been decommissioned.

It is also worth noting that reading the class specifications, which are precisely correct in stating the Lucifer-class’s lack of formal weaponry and civilian classification, appears to generate in some few pirates and hijackers (those, for instance, responsible for the attacks on Photophoros, Luminary, and Radiance) the incautious ambition necessary to pick a fight with an 864 terawatt highly-collimated laser intended for use over interstellar distances – thus clearly demonstrating, perhaps, the distinction between knowledge and wisdom.

- Fíerí’s Starships of the Associated Worlds, 421st ed.;
Vol. IX: Esoterica

Anti-Kzinti Lesson

Jonathan Cunningham notes that sometimes the opposite is true as well.

Anti-Kzinti Lesson

A weapon's output is in direct proportion to its potential as a maneuvering thruster.

Jonathan Cunningham

The effect is strongest with kinetic kill weapons of course, but will still be noticeable with particle beam weapons or even lasers. It will be less of an issue for missile launchers, assuming the missile don't begin full thrust until after they've left the tubes.

Any force acting through the center of a body affects the movement of that body. Any force acting anywhere else on a body will affect its rotation. The more powerful the beam, the stronger the thruster effect. The further away from the center of mass, the greater the lever arm, and the greater the rotational effect.

So when the Space Cruiser Virtuous has X turret cuts lose with a high energy broadside against the flagship of the Insidious Empire, the ship starts spinning until it comically slices its own escorts in half. The Despicable Lord cackles and returns fire from one of several fixed mounted emplacements, each one aligned through the center of mass, likes quills on a porcupine. Foolish humans...

TV Tropes calls this concept "Exhaustized Weapons".

Of course, if the weapon has low power compared to the mass, or fires in a short enough burst the effect is minimized. But not removed. During the Apollo 13 mission, NASA was mystified as to why the powerless craft kept drifting off course. It turns out that normal, periodic venting of water was enough to strike panic in the hearts of distant controllers who gasped, "Now what?"

In The Expanse, small ships use their point-defense systems as ship-killing machine guns. Since they fire hundreds of rounds a second they have a bigger kick than the ship's reaction control system. So the guns have a compensating thruster mounted on the rear of the guns to neutralize the recoil.

Jon's Law

This is a more general concern. As propulsion systems get more powerful, the more energy they contain, and the worse the damage if an accident occurs. This is known as Jon's Law for science fiction authors.

Jon's Law

Jon's Law, part 1: Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction. It only matters how long you want to wait for maximum damage.

Jon's Law, part 2: Interesting is equal to "whatever keeps the readers from getting bored."

Jon Souza

As an example, a spacecraft with an ion drive capable of doing a meager 0.0001g of acceleration may be scientifically realistic and the exhaust is relatively harmless. However, to most of the audience it will not be interesting. "Nine months just to travel to Mars? How boring!"

The author, not wanting his book sales to go flat, hastily re-fits the hero's spacecraft with a fusion drive and makes it into a torchship. The good news is that the ship can make it to Mars in twelve days flat. The bad news is that the ship's exhaust is putting out enough terawatts of energy to cut another ship in two, or make the spaceport look like it was hit by a tactical nuclear weapon.

The author can still use the drive, but must consider the logical ramifications of the wide-spread civilian availability of the equivalent of thermonuclear weapons. How would you like to have the captain of the Exxon Valdez skippering a tramp freighter with an antimatter drive? That brilliant mushroom cloud you see marks the former location of Clinton-Sherman spaceport. The more devastation a propulsion system can wreck, the shorter the leash the captains will be on.

Having said that, trying to use a high-powered rocket exhaust like a giant blow-torch to deliberaly destroy a city is more likely to destroy the rocket. Depending upon the type of propulsion system.

So one of the logical ramification is that if drives are too powerful, there won't be any colorful tramp freighters or similar vessels. One can imagine a branch of Spaceguard who act as range safety officers. If any civilian ship starts behaving erratically or suspiciously, Spaceguard will take notice. If the ship looks like it is going to incinerate a city with its torch drive, Spaceguard will have to neutralize the ship with extreme prejudice. As a matter of fact, civilian spacecraft will probably by law be required to have a remote control self-destruct device to make Spaceguard's job easier.

Or even more severe: logically torchships would be strictly forbidden for civilian ownership, they would be reserved for the military. Which is also boring.


Another consideration is that if a propulsion system can impart over a certain amount of kinetic energy to a spacecraft, the ship becomes a giant kinetic energy weapon. Even if the drive is no torchdrive and the exhaust is as harmless as cream-pie to the face, the ship can obliterate a large city. This is why Friends Don't Let Friends Use Reactionless Drives In Their Scifi Universes.

NO CIVILIAN TORCH DRIVES ALLOWED

And considering Jon's Law and the assumption that any Torch Drive or Torch-Rated Rocket engine is going to be extremely complex to build and maintain, such timescales would be out of the reach for much of interplanetary commerce and shipping for some time to come. Chances are that military armed forces (and some government agencies that have the budget and need) will be the chief, if not sole users of Torch Drives. Everyone else from high speed passenger spacecraft to freight-cargo will have to deal with Hohmann Orbits and launch windows.

TORCH DRIVE MAY NOT BE THAT DANGEROUS 1

A 1 TW torchship hovering over a city will be putting out the energy of a 1 kiloton blast every four seconds, of a Hiroshima bomb every minute. I imagine this would not be good for property values.

However, the exhaust will be quite diffuse. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation assuming a 1 TW power output and a 100 ton craft hovering in 1 gravity gives it putting out about half a kilogram of exhaust per second, as a low density jet. This will not travel very far through the air, imparting most of its energy into a fireball at the exhaust nozzle of the spacecraft. It will be the torch-ship that will be absorbing the full brunt of the 1 Hiroshima per minute fireball, while the city below it will only need to worry about the radiated heat.

I even have my doubts that the drive would work at all in an atmosphere — air might well flood the reaction chamber, interfering with the ability of the plasma to reflect off the magnetic nozzle.

TORCH DRIVE MAY NOT BE THAT DANGEROUS 2

Using torch drives to fry cities, like dropping boulders on them, is one of those Rube Goldberg things that fascinates the SF imagination. If you are out to destroy human beings and their works in large numbers, just nuke 'em.

That said, even a 'true' torch drive might have 100 times the power output of the Saturn V, and would make a considerable mess of the launch area.

On the third hand, I agree with Luke that these drives might not work in the atmosphere anyway. Trying to run a torch immersed in cold, dense gas is a bit like trying to run a jet engine underwater.

KINETIC-KILL SPACECRAFT 1

      Falcon imagined how that kind of patronising dismissal played on Phobos, or at Lowell, or Vulcanopolis, or Oasis—even at Clavius Base. “You know, Colonel, I’m something of an outsider in all this myself. I don’t fit into one world or the other. Hell, I’m older than most of these human worlds. But what I see is that with Earth’s continuing economic and political domination of the solar system, you’re restricting growth. The Martians I meet complain that they could expand a lot faster, even accelerate the Eos Programme (Mars terraforming project), if only you’d increase shipments of essential supplies. Maybe the time’s come for a change of policy. Look at history. From 1492, Columbus’s first landings, to the American Revolution was—what, a little shy of three centuries? And from the first footsteps of John Young, the Columbus of Mars, to now, is about the same interval—”

     “This isn’t imperial Britain and colonial America, Falcon,” Springer said sternly. “You’re showing your age (Falcon is several centuries old). The history you learned is buried under centuries. This is a different era. Different technologies.
     “Let me explain the cornerstone of government policy. What the World Council fears above all is an interplanetary war.

     “Think about it. Even you probably aren’t old enough to remember the Brushfire Wars in the last years of the nation states … There were a number of incidents where aircraft—lumbering tubs driven by no more than chemical fuels—were flown into buildings. Acts of war and terror.”
     “I grew up with the images.” In Falcon’s young imagination such incidents had been like purposeful Hindenburg disasters.
     “Now think about this. A civilian aircraft of the early twenty-first century, fully fuelled, packed as much punch as a few hundred tonnes of TNT. A modern interplanetary cruiser of the Goliath class, like the ship that brought you here, if flown into a city on Earth, would release as much energy as an entire all-out nuclear war would have done back in my ancestor Seth’s day. Just one craft—and I’m only talking about the kinetic energy involved, even without the detonation of any fusion reactors or the use of any dedicated weapons systems.”
     Falcon glanced up at the fragile dome over his head. “Offworld colonies are pretty vulnerable too.”
     “Right. And so the judgement of the World Council, as advised by the Strategic Development Secretariat, is that an interplanetary war would be like no prior conflict in human history. It would be a potential extinction event for humanity. All of us, on Earth or off it.”

     “I see the logic. War must be averted at all costs. And this is your way of handling it? The Martians are agitating for independence, and your response is to clamp the lid down even tighter?”
     “What would you have us do, Falcon? At least this way we keep control. At least this way we can exclude the unknowns—and a political liberation of the offworld settlements would be a massive unknown. That’s even leaving aside the influence of the Machines (intelligent machine life that Terra created by accident) in all this, which is another huge uncertainty.”
     He said, “That’s why Jupiter frightens you so much. You don’t know what’s going on down there. And what you don’t know, you can’t control.”

From THE MEDUSA CHRONICLES by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds (2016)
KINETIC-KILL SPACECRAFT 2

(ed note: the protagonist is in command of a fort on a "portal planet", a planet at a temperature near absolute zero orbiting a black hole. Both the humans and the enemy Taurians use black holes as wormholes for FTL travel. A human cruiser, the Antopol, is in orbit for support. One fine day an invasion fleet of Taurian warships and troop carriers appear at the wormhole.)

      Spirits rose when one of Antopol’s drones knocked out the first Tauran cruiser. Not counting the ships left behind for planetary defense, she still had eighteen drones and two fighters. They wheeled around to intercept the second cruiser, by then a few light-hours away, still being harassed by fifteen enemy drones.
     One of the Tauran drones got her. Her ancillary crafts continued the attack, but it was a rout. One fighter and three drones fled the battle at maximum acceleration, looping up over the plane of the ecliptic, and were not pursued. We watched them with morbid interest while the enemy cruiser inched back to do battle with us. The fighter was headed back for Sade-138 (the black hole), to escape. Nobody blamed them. In fact, we sent them a farewell-good luck message; they didn’t respond, naturally, being zipped up in the tanks. But it would be recorded.

     Brill had her troops open fire immediately, probably more for morale than out of any hope of actually hitting the enemy. They probably were getting a few, though it was hard to tell. At least the tachyon rockets did an impressive job of turning boulders into gravel.
     The Taurans returned fire with some weapon similar to the tachyon rocket, maybe exactly the same. They rarely found a mark, though; our people were at and below ground level, and if the rocket didn’t hit something, it would keep going on forever, amen. They did score a hit on one of the gigawatt lasers, though, and the concussion that filtered down to us was strong enough to make me wish we had burrowed a little deeper than twenty meters.
     The gigawatts weren’t doing us any good. The Taurans must have figured out the lines of sight ahead of time, and gave them wide berth (the Taurians dropped some nova bombs, and the local temperature rose above superconductor levels. The gigawatt lasers froze in position, unable to aim at the enemy). That turned out to be fortunate, because it caused Charlie to let his attention wander from the laser monitors for a moment.

     “What the hell?”
     “What’s that, Charlie?” I didn’t take my eyes off the monitors. Waiting for something to happen.
     “The ship, the cruiser—it’s gone.” I looked at the holograph display. He was right; the only red lights were those that stood for the troop carriers.
     “Where did it go?” I asked inanely.

     “Let’s play it back.” He programmed the display to go back a couple of minutes and cranked out the scale to where both planet and collapsar showed on the cube. The cruiser showed up, and with it, three green dots. Our “coward,” attacking the cruiser with only two drones.

     But he had a little help from the laws of physics.

     Instead of going into collapsar insertion (wormhole transit), he had skimmed around the collapsar field in a slingshot orbit. He had come out going nine-tenths of the speed of light; the drones were going 0.99c, headed straight for the enemy cruiser. Our planet was about a thousand light-seconds from the collapsar, so the Tauran ship had only ten seconds to detect and stop both drones. And at that speed, it didn’t matter whether you’d been hit by a nova bomb or a spitball.
     The first drone disintegrated the cruiser, and the other one, 0.01 second behind, glided on down to impact on the planet. The fighter missed the planet by a couple of hundred kilometers and hurtled on into space, decelerating with the maximum twenty-five gees. He’d be back in a couple of months.

     Something had been bothering me about that holographic replay. Now, with the battle’s lull, I knew what it was.
     When that second drone crashed at near-lightspeed, how much damage had it done to the planet? I stepped over to the computer and punched it up; found out how much energy had been released in the collision, and then compared it with geological information in the computer’s memory.
     Twenty times as much energy as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. On a planet three-quarters the size of Earth.
     On the general frequency: “Everybody—topside! Right now!” I palmed the button that would cycle and open the airlock and tunnel that led from Administration to the surface.

From THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman (1975)
DEADLY FUSION POWERED SPACECRAFT

      "I never thought the Arms was a grand idea," said Luke. "I think they're necessary. Absolutely necessary. I joined because I thought I could be useful."
     "Luke, if flatlanders (people living on Terra) need thought police to keep them alive, they shouldn't stay alive. You're trying to hold back evolution." (Smoky lives in the Asteroid Belt)

     "We are not thought police! What we police is technology. If someone builds something that has a good chance of wiping out civilization, then and only then do we suppress it. You'd be surprised how often it happens."
     Smoky's voice was ripe with scorn. "Would I? Why not suppress the fusion tube while you're at it? (fusion tube is an easy way to make fusion rocket engines and fusion power generators) No, don't interrupt me, Luke, this is important. They don't use fusion only in ships. Half Earth's drinking water comes from seawater distilleries, and they all use fusion heat. Most of Earth's electricity is fusion, and all of the Belt's. There's fusion flame in crematoriums and garbage disposal plants. Look at all the uranium you have to import, just to squirt into fusion tubes as primer! And there are hundreds of thousands of fusion ships, every last one of which—"
     "— turns into a hydrogen bomb at the flip of a switch."
     "Too right. So why doesn't the Arms suppress fusion?"

     "First, because the Arms was formed too late. Fusion was already here. Second, because we need fusion. The fusion tube is human civilization, the way the electrical generator used to be. Thirdly, because we won't interfere with anything that helps space travel. But I'm glad—"
     "You're begging the…"
     "MY TURN, Smoky. I'm glad you brought up fusion, because that's the whole point. The purpose of the Arms is to keep the balance wheel on civilization. Knock that balance wheel off kilter, and the first thing that would happen would be war. It always is. This time it'd be the last. Can you imagine a full-scale war, with that many hydrogen bombs just waiting to be used? Flip of a switch, I think you said."

     "You said. Do you have to stamp on human ingenuity to keep the balance wheel straight? That's a blistering condemnation of Earth, if true."
     "Smoky, if it weren't top secret I could show you a suppressed projector that can damp a fusion shield from ten miles away (damp the fusion shield on an operating fusion tube, and the tube immediately turns into a thermonuclear explosion). Chick Watson got to be my boss by spotting an invention that would have forced us to make murder legal. There was—"
     "Don't tell me about evidence you can't produce."

From WORLD OF PTAVVS by Larry Niven (1966)

Ramming Speed

In science fiction books, movies and TV the crew knows that even if all your weapons are impotent against your opponent, ramming always works.

Understand that technically ramming requires that the ship is crewed. If it is uncrewed and programmed or remotely controlled, it is basically a missile.

Several thousand years ago naval combat was mostly a matter of getting close enough to the enemy ship to enable the soldiers to hop on board and start close quarters combat. This is because the state-of-the-art was not advanced enough allow ship-killing weapons that could be carried on a ship.

But soon the ancient Greeks and Romans managed to build oar-driven galleys big enough to mount a metal ram. These are huge metal beaks of bronze weighing about half a metric ton, which could really do some severe damage to anything it rammed. The target would at a minimum be disabled, shearing off all the oars on that side. If punctured it was on a one-way trip to Davy Jone's locker, straight down that-a-way. One of the more famous battles featuring rams was the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE.

The age of sail made the ram worthless, because they do as much damage to you as they do to your target. The shock of impact would snap off all your masts and turn your rigging into something resembling the tangled mess of marionette puppet strings in your child's toy box. Ship cannons were ineffective as well, so boarding with hand-to-hand combat came back into favor.

SHIP CANNONS ARE EFFECTIVE

(ed note: Bill McHale reveals that I do not know what I am talking about when I said "ship cannons were ineffective as well")

      The first point is that guns were effective, especially in the later part of the Age of Sail. Keep in mind that during the Napoleonic Wars, the standard Ship of the Line would be rated for 74 cannons, and a first rate would be rated for more than 100 cannons… and it was a poor captain indeed who only mounted guns up to the ships rating. On a ship of the line, a majority of the crew during a battle would be manning the guns. This strongly argues against the notion that the guns were ineffective. Indeed, one can find plenty of accounts of actions where a ship struck her colors long before the other side ever closed to boarding range. What is true though is that the relatively short range of the cannon combined with economic incentives made boarding actions rather popular. A ship taken intact could make the captain and crew quite a bit of prize money (far more than their salaries). The less damage done to the other side, the more it would be worth.

     The second point is that breech loading cannons did not, in and of themselves give ships the ability to sink the enemy outside of ramming range. Indeed, breech loading cannons preceded the development of the Iron Clad warship. It was this latter innovation that almost brought the ram back as a naval weapon… what stopped the ram from rising again was the development and deployment of explosive shells which could help ensure that the cannons were able to damage the Iron clad hulls.

From Bill McHale (2019)

The age of steam brought rams back into favor because there were no masts or rigging to worry about and the cannons were still pretty ineffective. Especially ineffective because steam powered warships could carry anti-cannon armor. But the advent of the breech-loading cannon meant that enemy ships could be sunk several thousand meters before they got into ramming contact, so rams once again became obsolete. Except for weird Rube Goldberg warships like torpedo rams, which were never particularly popular.

Ramming more or less died out as a tactic, except for oddities like ships in World War I ramming and cutting in twain German submarines, and Japanese Kamikaze in World War II. In Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea the main weapon of the submarine Nautilus was a huge steel ramming spike, used to puncture ships below the waterline. This is because Verne never came up with the idea of a submarine launched torpedo. But what did you expect for a novel written in 1870?

TROPE-A-DAY: WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION

Ramming Always Works: Mostly averted. At the distances at which most space combat happens, you’re lucky to be able to set a course with accuracy enough to make ramming work, and the other ship has plenty of time to either evade you or explode you. This makes it a tactic most useful to AKVs (see Action Bomb) which have run out of ammunition and as such are working as k-kill missiles, right then.

Could be played straight in some limited-range encounters, as seen in planetary orbit or at choke points (meaning, primarily, stargates), but then the other problem results which is, well, it does actually work too well – the usual result is a total kill of both ships involved in the collision, extravagant fireballs included, and lots of highly dangerous debris moving in unpredictable vectors, right next to the asset defining the choke point. This is rarely an economic or admiralty-approved tactic, since starships are expensive, starship crews more so, and cleanup most of all – and let us not even mention Kessler Syndrome.

COINCIDENT IN SPACE-TIME

      We'd been decelerating at two gravities for almost nine days when the battle began. Lying on our couches being miserable, all we felt were two soft bumps, missiles being released. Some eight hours later, the squawkbox crackled:
     "Attention, all crew. This is the captain." Quinsana, the pilot, was only a lieutenant, but was allowed to call himself captain aboard the vessel, where he outranked all of us, even Captain Stott. "You grunts in the cargo hold can listen, too.
     "We just engaged the enemy with two fifty-gigaton tachyon missiles and have destroyed both the enemy vessel and another object which it had launched approximately three microseconds before.
     "The enemy has been trying to overtake us for the past 179 hours, ship time. At the time of the engagement, the enemy was moving at a little over half the speed of light, relative to Aleph, and was only about thirty AU's from Earth's Hope. It was moving at 0.47c relative to us, and thus we would have been coincident in space-time" — rammed! — "in a little more than nine hours. The missiles were launched at 0719 ship's time, and destroyed the enemy at 1540, both tachyon bombs detonating within a thousand klicks of the enemy objects."
     The two missiles were a type whose propulsion system was itself only a barely-controlled tachyon bomb. They accelerated at a constant rate of 100 gees, and were traveling at a relativistic speed by the time the nearby mass of the enemy ship detonated them.

From THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman (1975)
NEEDLE SHIPS

(ed note: Isaac Asimov took his inspiration from the Battle of Salamis)

      In two hours, the Lhasinuic demand for surrender had been scornfully rejected and the hundred ships of the Human squadron spread outwards on the expanding surface of an imaginary sphere—the standard defense formation of a surrounded fleet—and the Battle for Earth was on.

     A space-battle between approximately equal forces resembles in almost every detail a gigantic fencing match in which controlled shafts of deadly radiation are the rapiers and impermeable walls of etheric inertia are the shields. The two forces advance to battle and maneuver for position. Then the pale purple of a Tonite beam lashes out in a blaze of fury against the screen of an enemy ship, and in so doing, its own screen is forced to blink out. For that one instant it is vulnerable and is a perfect target for an enemy ray, which, when loosed, renders its ship open to attack for the moment. In widening circles, it spreads. Each unit of the fleet, combining speed of mechanism with speed of human reaction, attempts to slip through at the crucial moment and yet maintain its own safety.

(ed note: the important point being that the etheric inertia shields will stop energy weapon fire, but will do nothing to stop material objects like bullets and shells.)


     The fencing match was approaching a climax. Two flashes blazed into being, almost simultaneously, and Sanat groaned. One of the two had been a Human ship. And three times there came that disquieting hum as Atomo-engines in the lower level shot into high gear—and that meant that an enemy beam directed at their own ship had been stopped by the screen.
     And always, the co-ordinator kept the enemy flagship centered. An hour passed; an hour in which six Lhasinu and four Human ships had been whiffed to destruction; an hour in which the Wheel turned fractions of a degree this way, that way; in which it swivelled on its universal socket mere hair-lines in half a dozen directions.
     Sweat matted the co-ordinator’s hair and got into his eyes; his fingers half-lost all sensation, but that flagship never left the ominous spot where the hairlines crossed.
     And Sanat watched; finger on trigger—watched—and waited.

     Twice the flagship had glowed into purple luminosity, its guns blazing and its defensive screen down; and twice Sanat’s finger had quivered on the trigger and refrained. He hadn’t been quick enough.
     And then Sanat rammed it home and rose to his feet tensely. The co-ordinator yelled and dropped the Wheel.
     In a gigantic funeral pyre of purple-hued energy, the flagship with the Lhasinulo Admiral inside had ceased to exist. Sanat laughed. His hand went out. and the co-ordinator’s came to meet it in a firm grasp of triumph.

     But the triumph did not last long enough for the co-ordinator to speak the first jubilant words that were welling up in his throat, for the visiplate burst into a purple bombshell as five Human ships detonated simultaneously at the touch of deadly energy shafts.
     The amplifiers thundered, “Up screens! Cease firing! Ease into Needle formation!”
     Sanat felt the deadly pall of uncertainty squeeze his throat. He knew what had happened. The Lhasinu had finally managed to set up their big guns on Lunar Base; big guns with three times the range of even the largest ship guns—big guns that could pick off Human ships with no fear of reprisal.
     And so the fencing match was over, and the real battle was to start. But it was to be a real battle of a type never before fought, and Sanat knew that that was the thought in every man’s mind. He could see it in their grim expressions and feel it in their silence.

     It might work! And it might not!

     The Earth squadron had resumed its spherical formation and drifted slowly outwards, its offensive batteries silent. The Lhasinu swept in for the kill. Cut off from power supply as the Earthmen were, and unable to retaliate with the gigantic guns of the Lunar batteries commanding near-by space, it seemed only a matter of time before either surrender or annihilation.
     The enemy Tonite beams lashed out in continuous blasts of energy and tortured screens on Human ships sparked and fluoresced under the harsh whips of radiation.
     Sanat could hear the buzz of the Atomo-engines rise to a protesting squeal. Against his will, his eye flicked to the energy gauge, and the quivering needle sank as he watched, moving dowm the dial at perceptible speed.

     The co-ordinator licked dry lips, “Do you think we’ll make it, sir?”
     “Certainly!” Sanat was far from feeling his expressed confidence. “We need hold out for an hour—provided they don’t fall back.”
     And the Lhasinu weren’t. To have fallen back would have meant a thinning of the lines with a possible break-through and escape on the part of the Humans.
     The Human ships were down to crawling speed—scarcely above a hundred miles an hour. Idling along, they crept up the purple beams of energy; the imaginary sphere increasing in size ; the distance between the opposing forces ever narrowing.
     But inside the ship, the gauge-needle was dropping rapidly, and Sanat’s heart dropped with it. He crossed the gunlevel to where hard-bitten soldiers waited at a gigantic and gleaming lever, in anticipation of an order that had to come soon—or never.
     The distance between opponents was now only a matter of one or two miles—almost contact from the viewpoint of space warfare—and then that order shot over the shielded etheric beams from ship to ship.
     It reverberated through the gun level:

     “Out needles!”

     A score of hands reached for the lever, Sanat’s among them, and jerked downwards. Majestically, the lever bent in a curving arc to the floor and as it did so, there was a vast scraping noise and a sharp thud that shook the ship.
     The dreadnaught had become a “needle ship!”
     At the prow, a section of armor plate had slid aside and a glittering shaft of metal had lunged outward viciously. One hundred feet long, it narrowed gracefully from a base ten feet in diameter to a needle-sharp diamond point. In the sunlight, the chrome-steel of the shaft gleamed in flaming splendor.
     And every other ship of the Human squadron was likewise equipped. Each had become ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty thousand tons of driving rapier.

     Swordfish of space!

     Somewhere in the Lhasinuic fleet, frantic orders must have been issued. Against this oldest of all naval tactics—old even in the dim dawn of history when rival triremes had maneuvered and rammed each other to destruction with pointed prows—the super-modem equipment of a space-fleet has no defense.
     Sanat forced his way to the visiplate and strapped himself into an anti-acceleration seat, and he felt the springs absorb the backward jerk as the ship sprang into sudden acceleration.
     He didn’t bother with that, though. He wanted to watch the battle! There wasn’t one here, nor anywhere in the Galaxy, that risked what he did. They risked only their lives; and he risked a dream that he had, almost single-handed, created out of nothing.
     He had taken an apathetic Galaxy and driven it into revolt against the reptile. He had taken an Earth on the point of destruction and dragged it from the brink almost unaided. A Human victory would be a victory for Loara Filip Sanat and no one else.
     He, and Earth, and the Galaxy were now lumped into one and thrown into the scale. And against it was weighed the outcome of this last battle, a battle hopelessly lost by his own purposeful treachery, unless the needles won.
     And if they lost, the gigantic defeat—the ruin of Humanity—was also his.
     The Lhasinuic ships were jumping aside but not fast enough. While they were slowly gathering momentum and drifting away, the Human ships had cut the distance by three-quarters. On the screen, a Lhasinuic ship had grown to colossal proportions. Its purple whip of energy had gone out as every ounce of power had gone into a man-killing attempt at rapid acceleration.
     And nevertheless its image grew and the shining point that could be seen at the lower end of the screen aimed like a glittering javelin at its heart.
     Sanat felt he could not bear the tension. Five minutes and he would take his place as the Galaxy’s greatest hero—or its greatest traitor! There was a horrible, unbearable pounding of blood in his temples.
     Then it came.

     Contact!!

     The screen went wild in a chaotic fury of twisted metal. The anti-acceleration seats shrieked as springs absorbed the shock. Things cleared slowly. The screenview veered wildly as the ship slowly steadied. The ship’s needle had broken, the jagged stump twisted awry, but the enemy vessel it had pierced was a gutted wreck.
     Sanat held his breath as he scanned space. It was a vast sea of wrecked ships, and on the outskirts tattered remnants of the enemy were in flight, with Human ships in pursuit.

From BLACK FRIAR OF THE FLAME by Isaac Asimov (1942)
THE SKYLARK OF SPACE

(ed note: Our heroes in their starship have discovered the planet Osnome, inhabited by beings that look just like humans except their skin is green. The protagonists are rescued by the virtuous (but warlike) Kondalians from the treacherous (but also warlike) Mardonalians. During the rescue, our hero's starship the Skylark has its four-foot-thick steel armor hull damaged.

In Kondal, the Kondalians reveal their armor made of "Arenak". Arenak is a handwavium wonder-metal, a tenth of an inch is harder to pierce than fifty inches of our armor steel. They cannot make as much armor as they want, because its manufacture requires the rare compound "sodium chloride" aka table salt. The entire planet of Osnome has but a few micrograms of salt. Our heroes give the Kondalians about thirty pounds from the Skylark's kitchen supplies, much to the Kondalians' delight. Kondalian warships only carry an inch of arenak, but they decide to repair the Skylark by replacing its four feet of steel armor with four feet of arenak. Otherwise they'd have to re-design all the openings and hatches. They've got plenty of salt so it is no problem. Of course this hull is harder to pierce than 600 yards of armor steel but so what?

After the job is finished, Kondal is unexpectedly attacked by a Mardonalian flying battlefleet. Our heroes leap to the defense )

      Seaton dropped his microphone. ‘I’ve got it doped,’ he told Crane and DuQuesne. ‘The Skylark’s faster than any shell ever fired, and has infinitely more mass. She’s got four feet of arenak, they have only an inch. Arenak doesn’t begin to soften until it’s radiating high in the ultra-violet. Strap down solid – this is going to be a rough party from now on.’

     Again the Skylark went down. Instead of standing still, however, she darted directly at the nearest warship under twenty notches of power. She crashed straight through it without even slowing down. Torn wide open by the forty-foot projectile, its engines wrecked and its helicopter screws and propellors useless, the helpless hulk plunged through two miles of air to the ground.

     Darting here and there, the spaceship tore through vessel after vessel of the Mardonalian fleet. Here indeed was a guided missile: an irresistible projectile housing a human brain, the brain of Richard Seaton, keyed up to highest pitch and fighting the fight of his life.

     As the repellors dripped off, the silent waves of sound came in stronger and stronger. He was battered by the terrific impacts, nauseated and almost blacked out by the frightful lurches of his hairpin turns. Nevertheless, with teeth tight-locked and with eyes gray and hard as the fracture of high-carbon steel, Richard Seaton fought on. Projectile and brain were, and remained, one.

     Although it was impossible for the eye to follow the flight of the spaceship, the mechanical sighting devices of the Mardonalians kept her in fair focus and the projectors continued to hurl into her a considerable fraction of their death-dealing output. Enemy guns were still emitting streams of shells; but unlike the waves, the shells moved so slowly compared to their target that very few found their mark. Many of the great vessels fell to the ground, riddled by the shells of their sister-ships.

     Seaton glanced at his pyrometer. The needle had stopped climbing, well short of the red line marking the fusion-point of arenak. Even as he looked, it began, very slowly, to recede. There weren’t enough Mardonalian ships left to maintain such a temperature. He felt much better, too; the sub-sound was still pretty bad, but it was bearable.

     In another minute the battle was over; the few remaining battleships were driving at top speed for home. But even in flight they continued to destroy; the path of their retreat was a swath of destruction. Half-inclined at first to let them escape, Seaton’s mind was changed as he saw what they were doing to the countryside beneath them. He shot after them, and not until the last vessel had been destroyed did he drop the Skylark into the area of ruins which had once been the palace grounds, beside the Kondal, which was still lying as it had fallen.

From THE SKYLARK OF SPACE by E. E. "Doc" Smith (1928)
ONE-MAN SPEEDSTER RAM

It would be many hours before the full strength of the Solarian fleet could be brought to bear on the enemy. They were not able to retire and await their arrival, for they must delay the Nigran fleet. If even one of those great ships should safely reach the two planets behind them—! (the enemy fleet's death rays can kill everyone on Terra and Venus in about five minutes flat)

But within a half hour of the original signal, the Rocket Squad had thrown itself into the battle with a fervor and abandon that has given that famous division a name that will last forever.

The small fliers of the Nigrans were beginning to take an appalling toll in the thinning ranks of the Solarians. The coming of the Rocket Squad was welcome indeed! They were able to maneuver as swiftly as the enemy; the speedsters were harder to spot than the Solarian ten-man and thirty-man boats. The Solarian speedsters were even smaller than the comparable Nigran craft, and some of these did a tremendous amount of damage. The heat ray was quite ineffective against the ten-man ships, even when working at full capacity, when produced by the small generators of the Nigran one-man boats. The cruisers could absorb the heat and turn it into power faster than the enemy could supply it (turning heat into power violates the laws of physics, but I'll give the legendary John W. Campbell a pass on that). Beams from the monster interstellar liners were another matter, of course.

But the one-man speedsters had a truly deadly plan of attack against the liners. The plan was officially frowned upon because of the great risks the pilots must take. They directed their boats at one of the monster ships, all the power units on at full drive. As close to target as possible the man jumped from his ship, clothed, of course, in an altitude suit equipped with a radio transmitter and receiver.

Death rays could not stop the speedsters (because the pilot has abandoned ship), and with their momentum, the invaders could not make it less deadly with their heat beam, for, molten, it was still effective (the kinetic energy equation does not give a damn if the mass is solid or molten). A projectile weighing twenty-two tons, moving a hundred miles a second, can destroy anything man can lift off a planet! (about 2.58×1014 joules, roughly 62 kilotons) Their very speed made it impossible to dodge them, and usually they found their mark. As for the risk, if the Solarian forces were victorious, the pilots could be picked up later, provided too long a time had not elapsed!

From THE BLACK STAR PASSES by John W. Campbell (1930)
FOOTFALL

(ed note: Footfall is arguably the best "alien invasion" novel ever written. The aliens show up in a titanic Bussard ramjet mother-ship carrying an entire fleet of fusion drive spacecraft and proceed to conquer Terra.

They immediately discover that they have kicked a hornet's nest.

They set the starship into a medium orbit and use the secondary spacecraft in the long drawn-out process of attempting to pacify Terra. They even drop a huge asteroid which obliterates India but that just makes the humans even angrier. They are in it for the long haul, until one fine day they see something huge, armored, and covered in weapons rising from the surface on a series of nuclear explosions.

It is a freaking Orion-drive spaceship loaded for bear, and boy is it pissed! Along with an arsenal of x-ray laser spurt bombs, gun turrets straight off the Battleship New Jersy, and fighter spaceships; it carries all four Space Shuttles.

The aliens would immediately forget their potty training if they knew why the humans named the warship the Michael.)

     ChunkChunk. Roy Culzer, in Shuttle Four, named Atlantis in a more peaceful era, felt the prongs unlock at the nose. The main tank was moored to Michael by the same matings that in gentler times would have gripped solid fuel boosters. Now only the aft matings were still attached, and Atlantis’s nose pointed beyond the overhang of Michael’s roof.
     Jay Hadley had the motors going. Blue flame played down the flank of the Brick. The aft prongs released, and Atlantis was free.
     The sky was a hot green. (alien weapon lasers)
     “Turning. Stand by.” The Shuttle turned as it pulled away. Earth and Michael were behind, the violet-white flame of the prime target ahead (the alien mothership). Four, five green spotlights sank below window view. “Okay,” Jay Hadley said, “now they’re only heating the main tank. We’ll burn that fuel before the tank blows up.”
     For nearly eight hours Michael had been in direct sunlight. The pressure in the main tanks was already too high, and rising. Have to live with it.
     Shuttle Three, Challenger, was already lost to sight. Roy caught sight of a gunship’s yellower flame just before it disappeared into a missile explosion.
     “Maneuvering. Stand by.”
     Roy’s sense of balance protested as Jay turned the Shuttle. “What have we got?”
     “Missiles. We’ve got five miles per second on those snout ships. The missiles only get one pass. They can’t hit us if we keep veering.”
     “You hope.”
     “Semper fi, mac. Let me know when you think you have a shot at something.”
     “Yeah, sure.” The missiles were in the main compartment, and the big bay doors weren’t open.
     The ring of green lights dropped away aft. “Go, baby, go,” Roy prayed. Talking to the ship. Why not? What else can I do? “Maybe we should open the bay.”
     “No point.” The dreadful green lights were fading. “Our missiles can’t reach them either. Save ‘em for Mommy Dearest. How long before we’re in range?”
     “Maybe an hour, if we don’t get hurt, and they don’t get more acceleration.” Roy poked numbers into Atlantis’s computer. “Looks to me like they’re pouring on all they have.”
     “So are we. Roy—”
     “Yeah?”
     “General Gillespie said Michael might not make it.”
     “Yeah. I heard.”
     “That leaves it up to us.”
     “Well, there’s Challenger.”
     “Heard from Big Jim lately?”
     “No.” Big Jim Farr. Six four, only he managed to lose two inches in the official records. Laurie Culzer and Jane Farr and five kids were sharing a house in Port Angeles. “Think he’s had it, Joe?”
     “I think we act like he’s out.”
     “Which leaves us.”
     “Which leaves us. Maneuvering. Stand by.”

     There were no digit ships now (alien fusion-drive secondary ships). Atlantis’s screen showed only the prime target — unmistakably the Mother Ship now, short and wide, as in the last transmissions from Kosmograd, and riding a spear of violet-white light. The drive flame was swinging around.
     “Trying to lose us,” Jay Hadley gloated.
     The Shuttle’s thrust dropped suddenly. Roy started violently. “Relax,” Jay said. ChunkChunk: the empty main tank was free. Attitude jets popped, and Atlantis eased back until the Mother Ship was behind the main tank.
     “They can’t get loose now. They can’t turn fast enough. We’re on intercept and in missile range. Let’s see what happens. Are you going to open the bay?”
     “Not just yet. We’re too fragile with the bay open. You know damn well what they’ll do when we’re in range.”
     “They’re doing it now. I saw missiles before I turned us.”
     “Yeah?” Intercept. Roy couldn’t make himself feel surprised. He’s going to ram. He didn’t even ask me.
     The Shuttle main tank was a green-edged black shadow, growing brighter. Big Mama had its own defenses. The main tank must be boiling. And suddenly the main tank’s black shadow vanished in half a dozen simultaneous flares. Missiles were homing on the explosions of other missiles. The Shuttle turned, and Roy felt the solid thumps of fragments impacting the tile shielding. There would be no reentry for Atlantis.
     Jay reached down to move lever arms that protruded through the floor. These were new: they connected to petcocks in the lower level. Water that had been ice at takeoff was jetting from vents in the Shuttle’s nose. The cloud of debris ahead thickened with water vapor.
     It might hide Atlantis… but there was no hiding Big Mama. Her drive flame must be visible across half the world. Jay was firing the EMU motors, the smaller jets that connected to the Shuttle’s onboard tank.
     “Still on intercept?”
     “Yeah.”
     “Opening the bay. Let’s get closer before we loose the birds. If you did everything right—”
     “They’ll think we’re dead.” Jay laughed.

     Big Mama was close, close. The drive flame, the dark cylinder at its tip — the sudden green flare, the firefly lights of missiles pouring from four points along her flank. “Firing,” said Roy.
     “I’ll wait.”
     “Good. Missiles one through five away. Getting target acquisition for the next group. We’ve actually got a few minutes don’t we?”
     “Say two minutes before the missiles get here …”
     “Missiles six through ten, away.” The green light had dimmed. Big Mama’s lasers had found more interesting targets: Atlantis’s own missiles.
     “—But we’re heating up. Oh, f**k it. We won’t be taking it long. How you doing?”
     “Target acquired, missiles eleven through fifteen away; that’s all of them. Turn us! Now!”
     Motors popped on. Atlantis turned, belly toward Big Mama. Roy opened the petcocks again. A cloud of water vapor might slow a missile or confuse its poor brain. Something slammed them against their seats. Again. “Reentry is going to be a problem,” Jay said, and laughed. “It isn’t atmosphere you’re—”
     The Shuttle twisted: an explosion against one wing. Jay brought them back with attitude jets.
     “—thinking of entering. I wish I had a view.”
     Nothing showed beyond the window save stars and a hail of green. The reentry shield was boiling under Big Mama’s lasers. “Are we still on target? I’d hate to miss after all this.”
     “Big Mama’s a big target,” Jay said. There didn’t seem to be a hell of a lot more to say.

(ed note: Meanwhile on the Michael)

     “You got it, Harry, get the hell out of there!”
     “Coming.” Turn, you bastard. Turn. His foot hurt like hell. Forward was the black of space, cool. If I wedge in that hole I can get leverage. He moved forward. One quick look outside.
     The Mother Ship was far ahead, still too far for details; but the drive flame was a spear, not a dot. She had turned sideways. Trying to dodge. To dodge one of the Shuttles. Harry could see the familiar triangular silhouette limned against the flame, easing forward, past the flame…
     Flame burst from near the center of the cylinder. They rammed, Harry thought, and they did it right. Big Mama’s drive flame veered, and suddenly there was a brighter streak in the violet-white. Yellow and orange, and the wavering flame was veering back into line, but down the violet-white spear ran a stream of bonfire-colored flame.
     “Jeff—”
     “Yeah? Harry, get out of there!”
     “In a minute. Jeff, tell the boss. Shuttle Four. Atlantis. They rammed. They hurt that mother, they hurt her. I can see it did something to the drive. They hurt her—”
     “Harry, are you all right? Get out of there!”
     “Yeah, they rammed! They damaged her! They damaged the drive! Now we’ll catch her. Something inside the drive is boiling away, you can see it in the flame. And the impact point, it’s a pit, and I bet I can see — four layers deep. Big Mama must be built like a Heinlein Universe ship, for spin, you know? Layers wrapped around a freefall axis. We hurt her.”
     “Yeah—”
     “Tell Gillespie, damn it!”
     “You tell him! Come on, Harry!”
     Harry shined his light down. The small jet from his left ankle was pink. The gauges showed that he had five minutes of air. It was cool out here, most of him outside the hull. His legs were inside. It was hot in there. Go back in there?
     Five minutes. It takes three or four to get through there. And it’s hot …
     “Maneuvering. Acceleration. Stand by.”

     WHAM

     In there? With acceleration?
     “Incoming. Harry, move!”
     “Can’t move, Jeff. Anyway, I’m leaking.”
     “Harry! I’ll come get you—”
     “Bullshit! Get your goddam hero medal rescuing somebody else.”
     “Harry—”
     “Incoming. Missiles.”
     “Harry — oh, s**t! Maneuvering. Stand by.”
     “More missiles coming. I think they’ll hit,” Harry said. “Tell Gillespie. We hurt them. Tell him.”

From FOOTFALL by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1985)
TRIPLANETARY

(ed note: in the tabletop spacecraft combat game Triplanetary, it is possible for one ship to attack another by ramming.)

STEVE JACKSON:

The question arose of why there is no E result on the ramming table (i.e., when attempting to ram there is a chance of no effect and a chance of damaging both ships. but there is zero chance of both ships being destroyed). Certainly a ram at spaceship speeds would have a good chance of obliterating both vessels. I think the reason is just "having somebody completely wipe you out with a ram is no fun."


KEN BURNSIDE:

I have a better rule for ramming. I've published it in my space games.

In order to ram, you must secretly record the intention to ram before plotting movement for the current turn.

When it's clear that your plotted attempt to ram could succeed, you must stand up and give the oration the captain is giving to the crew, explaining why, under the current circumstances that they must throw their lives away in certain death to do this.

Everyone else in the room, whether playing the game or not, including the victim of the ram, but not the person ramming, listens to the oration, and gives a simple thumbs-up/thumbs down vote.

If a majority of them vote thumbs up, the ram proceeds. Both ships are destroyed.

If there is not a majority vote for ramming, the ramming ship's crew has mutinied, the ship will continue on its current vector for two turns. At the end of turn three, roll a (six-sided) die:

  • On a 1-2, the ship continues on its existing vector with no course changes; roll again next turn.
  • On a 3-4-5, the ship is restored to the owning player's control.
  • On a 6, the ship may alter course but must make the least expensive route (including delta-v) to the nearest Patrol base to hand the crazed captain over for justice.

Mutineers always win ties.

post by Ken Burnside (2017)

Relativistic Weapons

For relativistic combat between Bussard Ramjet starships, go here.

Relativistic weapons are kinetic-kill weapons where the projectile moves faster than 14% the speed of light (42,000 kilometers per second or so) although the real fun doesn't start until about 90% the speed of light. Refer to the gamma chart. They are sometimes called "R-bombs." Such weapons do incredible amounts of damage, but by the same token they require absurd amounts of energy (refer to second equation below). They are very likely to remain science-fictional for centuries to come.

Even more so than kinetic-kill weapons, an actual warhead adds very little to the total damage inflicted. Note that at 86.6% the speed of light the amount of kinetic energy is equal to the rest mass, which means that the projectile will inflict upon the target the same energy as if it was composed of pure antimatter. Well, actually it will just contain that much energy, as Ken Burnside mentions about kinetic penetrator effects, in many cases the projectile will penetrate the target and exit the back of the ship while still containing joules of damage it failed to inflict on the target.

At such speeds, the kinetic kill equation is no longer accurate. Instead, the following equation is used. Remember that this not only tells how much kinetic damage the projectile will do to the target, it is also the minimum amount of energy the weapon will consume when it fires a round.

Again, to get some idea of the amount of damage represented by a given amount of Joules, refer to the Boom Table.

Ker = ((1/sqrt(1 - (V2/C2))) - 1) * M * C2

Ker = ((1/sqrt(1 - (V2/9e16))) - 1) * M * 9e16

Ker = ((1/sqrt(1 - P2)) - 1) * M * 9e16

where:

  • Ker = relativistic kinetic energy (Joules)
  • M = mass of projectile (kg)
  • V = velocity of projectile relative to target (m/s)
  • P = velocity of projectile relative to target (percentage of c, e.g., three quarters lightspeed = 0.75)
  • C = speed of light in m/s = 3e8

And as before

Wp = Ker * (1 / We)

where:

  • Wp = power required by weapon to fire one projectile (Joules)
  • Ker = kinetic energy of one weapon projectile (Joules)
  • We = efficiency of the weapon (0.0 = 0%, 1.0 = 100%)
Example

How much damage would the 7 kilograms of used kitty litter from Sneaky the cat's litterbox inflict if it was traveling at a velocity of 90% c?

Ker = ((1/sqrt(1 - P2)) - 1) * M * 9e16

Ker = ((1/sqrt(1 - 0.92)) - 1) * 7 * 9e16

Ker = 8.2e17 Joules, about 195 megatons.

Not bad, for kitty litter.

But a civilization that does gain the ability to create relativistic kinetic-kill weapons becomes a deadly threat to any and all alien civilizations in range.

Poor Man's R-Bomb

Iain Paterson did some calculations which produced some surprising results.

I had this image of putting a relatively small payload on top of a bloody massive conventional booster and firing it of -- the poor mans R-bomb i guess -- but after looking at some calculations this doesn't look likely.

From the kinetic energy equation and Tsiolkovsky's equation you get:

E = 1/2 * Mpayload * (Vexhaust * ln(R))2

E = 1/2 * (Mtotal / R) * (Vexhaust * ln(R))2

Differentiating with respect to R and setting equal to zero gives the mass ratio that gives the maximum energy. Canceling terms gives that:

R = E * 2

Vfinal_Ideal = 2 * Vexhaust

This is rather surprising to me though I suppose it makes sense: at higher velocities there is a greater kinetic energy per mass but it requires a huge amount of fuel to get to that velocity. After reaching this velocity any additional acceleration REDUCES the energy impacted on the target so you might as well shut off the engines and let it coast.

I worked it out for other cases as well, for 2 ships that are approaching each other before one fires a missile you get

R = e(2-γ)

where γ (gamma) is the ratio of the approach velocity to the exhaust velocity although this again gives that the missile should impact with a relative velocity of twice its exhaust velocity.

The final case is for relativistic velocities (although being fired from ships that are stationary with respect to each other otherwise the maths is really nasty!) and you get:

R = ((c + Vexhaust) / (c - Vexhaust))2

Vfinal_ideal = 2 * Vexhaust / (1 + (Vexhaust / c)2)

note that for V«c, Vf = 2 * Vexhaust. And for V~c, Vf = c.

So is it just me or does this completely defy the concept of the poor-mans R-bomb so that instead it requires some sort of some handwavium total-conversion drive?

Also this shows that to be effective a kinetic-missile must have a high exhaust velocity, not just a lot of fuel. While I suppose in order to evade point defense they need to be going faster but every extra second of thrust would reduce the damage inflicted to the target.

Iain Paterson

Mr. Paterson is optimizing a more plausible scenario. His "poor man's R-bomb" is constrained by a particular exhaust velocity, and the question is how to squeeze the maximum kinetic energy into the payload. I'm not sure whether his analysis is correct, but it seems plausible.

The optimum energy efficiency would actually be reached at an terminal velocity equal to the exhaust velocity. But that doesn't seem to be the objective of the poor man's R-bomb. The poor man's R-bomb seems to be limited by loaded mass rather than energy budget. You don't use any sacrificial propellant at all, you just use pure fuel at the maximum exhaust velocity you can manage all the way.

Mr. Paterson writes: So is it just me or does this completely defy the concept of the poor-mans R-bomb so that instead it requires some sort of some handwavium total-conversion drive?

His conclusion is essentially correct, if we assume the poor man's R-bomb must be internally powered.

Still, this is nothing new to those of us who have seriously considered the problem of fast interstellar propulsion. We gave up on the idea of internal power for fast interstellar propulsion years ago, on the pretty obvious grounds that no fuel has a sufficient (usable) energy density. If you want to reach high relativistic speeds, you should use external power--either in the form of a laser beam or particle beam or "runway" track or relativistic kinetic impactors.

Isaac Kuo

The Killing Star

From The Killing Star by Charles Pelligrino and George Zebrowski (you really should read this book):

All the energy put into achieving that velocity had transformed the Intruder into a kinetic storage device of nightmarish design. If it struck a world, every gram of the vessel's substance would be received by that world as the target in a linear accelerator receives a spray of relativistic buckshot. Someone, somewhere, had built and was putting to use a relativistic bomb -- a giant, roving atom smasher aimed at worlds...


The gamma-ray shine of the decelerating half was also detectable, but it made no difference. One of the iron rules of relativistic bombardment was that if you could see something approaching at 92 percent of light speed, it was never where you saw it when you saw it, but was practically upon you...


In the forests below, lakes caught the first rays of the rising Sun and threw them back into space. Abandoning the two-dimensional sprawl of twentieth-century cities, Sri Lanka Tower, and others like it, had been erected in the world's rain forests and farmlands, leaving the countryside virtually uninhabited. Even in Africa, where more than a hundred city arcologies had risen, nature was beginning to renew itself. It was a good day to be alive, she told herself, taking in the peace of the garden. Then, looking east, she saw it coming -- at least her eyes began to register it -- but her optic nerves did not last long enough to transmit what the eyes had seen.

It was quite small for what it could do -- small enough to fit into an average-sized living room -- but it was moving at 92 percent of light speed when it touched Earth's atmosphere. A spear point of light appeared, so intense that the air below snapped away from it, creating a low-density tunnel through which the object descended. The walls of the tunnel were a plasma boundary layer, six and a half kilometers wide and more than 160 deep -- the flaming spear that Virginia's eyes began to register -- with every square foot of its surface radiating a trillion watts, and still its destructive potential was but fractionally spent.

Thirty-three kilometers above the Indian Ocean, the point began to encounter too much air. It tunneled down only eight kilometers more, then stalled and detonated, less than two-thousandths of a second after crossing the orbits of Earth's nearest artificial satellites.

Virginia was more than three hundred kilometers away when the light burst toward her. Every nerve ending in her body began to record a strange, prickling sensation -- the sheer pressure of photons trying to push her backward. No shadows were cast anywhere in the tower, so bright was the glare. It pierced walls, ceramic beams, notepads, and people -- four hundred thousand people. The maglev terminal connecting Sri Lanka Tower to London and Sydney, the waste treatment centers that sustained the lakes and farms, all the shops, theaters, and apartments liquefied instantly. The structure began to slip and crash like a giant waterfall, but gravity could not yank it down fast enough. The Tower became vapor before it could fall half a meter. At the vanished city's feet, the trees of the forest were no longer able to cast shadows; they had themselves become long shadows of carbonized dust on the ground.

In Kandy and Columbo, where sidewalks steamed, the relativistic onslaught was unfinished. The electromagnetic pulse alone killed every living thing as far away as Bombay and the Maldives. All of India south of the Godavari River became an instant microwave oven. Nearer the epicenter, Demon Rock glowed with a fierce red heat, then fractured down its center, as if to herald the second coming of the tyrant it memorialized. The air blast followed, surging out of the Indian Ocean -- faster than sound -- flattening whatever still stood. As it slashed north through Jaffna and Madurai, the wave front was met and overpowered by shocks rushing out from strikes in central and southern India.

Across the face of the planet, without warning, thousands of flaming swords pierced the sky...


Then out of no where -- out of the deep impersonal nowhere -- came a bombardment that even the science fiction writers had failed to entertain.

Just nine days short of America's tricentennial celebrations, every inhabited planetary surface in the solar system had been wiped clean by relativistic bombs. Research centers on Mars, Europa, and Ganymede were silent; even tiny Phobos and Moo-kau were silent. Port Chaffee was silent. New York, Colombo, Wellington, the Mercury Power Project and the Asimov Array. Silent. Silent. Silent.

A Valkyrie rocket's transmission of Mercury's surface had revealed thousands of saucer-shaped depressions where only hours before had existed a planet-spanning carpet of solar panels. The transmission had lasted only a few seconds -- just long enough for Isak to realize there would be no more of the self-replicating robots that had built the array of panels and accelerators, just long enough for him to understand that humanity no longer possessed a fuel source for its antimatter rockets -- and then the transmission had ceased abruptly as the Valkyrie disappeared in a silent white glare.

Presently, most of the station's scopes and spectrographs were turning Earthward, and Isak found it impossible to believe what they revealed. The Moon rising over Africa from behind Earth was peppered with new fields of craters. The planet below looked like a ball of cotton stained grayish yellow. The top five meters of ocean had boiled off under the assault, and sea level air was three times denser than the day before -- and twice as hot...


The sobering truth is that relativistic civilizations are a potential nightmare to anyone living within range of them. The problem is that objects traveling at an appreciable fraction of light speed are never where you see them when you see them (i.e., light-speed lag). Relativistic rockets, if their owners turn out to be less than benevolent, are both totally unstoppable and totally destructive. A starship weighing in at 1,500 tons (approximately the weight of a fully fueled space shuttle sitting on the launchpad) impacting an earthlike planet at "only" 30 percent of lightspeed will release 1.5 million megatons of energy -- an explosive force equivalent to 150 times today's global nuclear arsenal... (ed note: this means the freaking thing has about nine hundred mega-Ricks of damage!)

The most humbling feature of the relativistic bomb is that even if you happen to see it coming, its exact motion and position can never be determined; and given a technology even a hundred orders of magnitude above our own, you cannot hope to intercept one of these weapons. It often happens, in these discussions, that an expression from the old west arises: "God made some men bigger and stronger than others, but Mr. Colt made all men equal." Variations on Mr. Colt's weapon are still popular today, even in a society that possesses hydrogen bombs. Similarly, no matter how advanced civilizations grow, the relativistic bomb is not likely to go away...

From The Killing Star by Charles Pelligrino and George Zebrowski

Space Fighters

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Culture

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Efficacy

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Role

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In Fiction

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Alien Technology

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Plasma Weapons

Silly as they are, plasma weapons are a popular SF concept that just won't go away. They are encountered in such diverse places as the original Star Trek TV series, the Traveler role playing game, and the Babylon 5 TV series. They play the role of a futuristic flame-thrower.

Their main draw-back is that they won't work.

Plasma is the so-called "fourth state of matter", and is basically hot air. That is, it is a gas heated to temperatures comparable to the interior of a star or the center of a thermonuclear explosion so that all the atoms are ionized. Unfortunately, according to the virial theorem, the plasma wants to equalize its internal pressure with the external, i.e., it wants to expand into a diffuse cloud of nothing.

Dr. Rodolphe D'Inca is a physicist and researcher of fusion energy at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. He was kind enough to answer a few questions on the topic for me. Looking at the concept, it was his understanding that a plasma weapon is a gun that ejects a ball of plasma, a plasmoid, at high velocity to destroy the target through kinetic impact.

I asked him if the plasma would expand and dissipate its energy due to Coulomb repulsion, the same problem suffered by charged particle beams. Rodolphe explained:

Most plasmas are neutral: you have a Debye shielding where the cloud of electrons screen the effect of the ions: above a given length called the Debye length, the plasma can be considered neutral. So unlike a charged beam, the Coulomb repulsion doesn't play a role. That's why plasmas a relatively insensitive to electrical fields except for the boundary layer (which is of course of one Debye-length thick).

The Debye length is about 10-4 meters for a Tokamak fusion container (0.1 millimeters) down to about 10-11 meters for solar core plasma (0.01 nanometers). Which means if your plasmoid is larger than a speck of dust you do not have to worry about Coulomb repulsion.

I asked him about Ideal gas laws. Since the plasmoid was basically a hot gas in a vacuum, would it expand and dissipate its energy like, well, a hot gas in a vacuum. Rodolphe explained that yes indeed, due to the virial theorem a plasmoid with no external forces would expand at the Alfven velocity or the ion acoustic velocity due to internal plasma (fluid) and magnetic (electromagnetic) pressures. The Alfven velocity depends upon things like magnetic field strength and total mass density of the charged plasma particles, it is typically something like 500 km/s to 5000 km/s.. This means that after the plasmoid travels for one second, its diameter will be approximately five thousand kilometers, i.e., it has dissipated into nothing.

Well, you might ask, what about adding some external forces to prevent this? Sorry. If you use matter, you are basically trying to make an armored shell capable of containing a thermonuclear explosion in its interior, and having it somehow break apart when it hits its target. This is more or less impossible. And if it was somehow possible using some kind of handwavium, there is nothing preventing your opponents from armoring their combat spacecraft with the exact same thing. It would be much simpler to just use a missile with a thermonuclear warhead.

And if you try to use energy, in the form of a magnetic field or something, you have the same problems. Plus the new problem of somehow making a self-sustaining magnetic ball powerful enough to contain a thermonuclear explosion.

Rodolphe did note that things were different if you were shooting plasmoids inside an atmosphere. In the lab next to his office they are trying to create ball-lightning (page is in German, use Google Translate).

Finally I asked him if the thermal glare from the hot, brightly energetic gas would interfere with tracking your target. Rodolphe explained:

Aiming at the target through a plasmoid shouldn't be too difficult: it will have an average thermal signature which can easily be discriminated from the target.

Dr. Rodolphe D'Inca

He went on to say:

Plasmoids are a very interesting topic and we see that the question of the plasma weapon is not as trivial as expected. I was thinking of two other examples relating plasmas and kinetic energy: the nozzle of the VASIMR engine where you have a magnetic detachment and conversion of plasma pressure into kinetic energy. And the laser-ablation propulsion where a plasma is created at the back of a capsule and, through its expansion, exerts a force on the capsule.

Dr. Rodolphe D'Inca

So there you have it.

For further analysis of the worthlessness of plasma weapons with a focus on Star Wars and Star Trek, I refer you to Stardestroyer.net.

And please note that the jet from a Casaba Howitzer, while it is a plasma, it is not a plasmoid. In any event, it is a very short-ranged weapon.

WEAPONIZE BALL LIGHTNING

Two hundred years ago this week, the warship HMS Warren Hastings was struck by a weird phenomenon: "Three distinct balls of fire" fell from the heavens, striking the ship and killing two crewmen, leaving behind "a nauseous, sulfurous smell," according to the Times of London.

Ball lightning has been the subject of much scientific scrutiny over the years. And, as with many powerful natural phenomena, the question arises: "Can we turn it into a weapon?" Peculiar as it may seem, that’s exactly what some researchers are working on — even though it hasn’t even been properly replicated in the laboratory yet.

The exact cause and nature of ball lighting has yet to be determined; there may be several different types, confusing matters further. But generally it manifests as a grapefruit-sized sphere of light moving slowly through the air which may end by fizzling out or exploding.

In the mid-’60s, the U.S. military started exploring ways that the phenomenon might be weaponized. Take this 1965 Defense Technical Information Center report on Survey of Kugelblitz Theories For Electromagnetic Incendiaries, (Kugelblitz is German for ball lighting). The document summarizes and evaluates the ball lightning theories then prevalent, and recommends "a theoretical and experimental Kugelblitz program… as a means of developing the theory into a weapons application." This led to an Air Force program called Harness Cavalier, which seems to have ended without producing anything conclusive.

However, some years later scientist Dr. Paul Koloc was looking at methods of containing high-temperature plasma during nuclear fusion. There are many schemes for containing plasma in donut-shaped magnetic fields using a device called a Tokomak. Koloc’s insight was that, under the right conditions, a donut-shaped mass of moving plasma would generate the required fields for containment itself. No Tokomak would be required for this "plasmoid," which would be completely stable and self-sustaining. It is a very close equivalent of the smoke ring — another type of dynamic "vortex ring," which remains stable over a period of time, unlike an unstructured cloud of smoke.

Koloc also theorized that if a donut-shaped plasmoid was created accidentally — say, during a lightning strike — it would remain stable for a period of seconds of minutes. This he believes is the explanation for ball lightning. He has a lot of competition from other, wildly different theories of ball lightning, though, from nanobatteries to vaporized silicon to black holes. There is no scientific consensus.

In the ’80s, Koloc’s team succeeded in creating small, short-lived plasmoids from "chicken egg to softball" size in the laboratory. It was a good start, but not enough to convince the world that he’s right about ball lightning. Ultimately the work might lead to a means of containing nuclear fusion… but there were some engineering challenges to tackle. Moreover, the scientific mainstream has not bought into the concept. While giant programs to achieve controlled fusion like ITER are sucking up billions, Koloc has found it much harder to attract funding. This is not like cold fusion or bubble fusion which has been challenged on scientific grounds, but it’s been very much sidelined in favor of other "confinement concepts" for fusion power.

However, in 2002, Koloc’s company, Prometheus II, briefly obtained funding from the Missile Defence Agency. The aim was to create stable ‘magnetoplasmoids’ a foot in diameter which would last between one and five seconds. In the subsequent phase, the magnetoplasmoid would be compressed and accelerate to two hundred kilometers a second. This "encapsulated EMP bullet" would make an idea anti-missile weapon, generating an intense electromagnetic pulse on impact which would scramble the guidance system and any electronics, as well as causing thermal damage.

Koloc called the weapon "Phased Hyper-Acceleration for Shock, EMP, and Radiation" — PHASER.

"It can be used for a range of purposes from stunning personnel to destroying the functionality of electronically operated devices, smaller rockets, vehicles and packages that represent an immediate threat to the United States," he wrote. "This dial-able PHASER weapon can be set on ‘Stun’ or dialed down, selecting a non-lethal level for persons needed for later interrogation… One mundane application for law enforcement would be the disruption of the engine electronics to stop vehicles that would otherwise be the target of a high-speed chase. Dialable versions of the PHASER will be available for use in civilian encounters."

Nothing seems to have resulted after the Phase I contract, so I contacted Koloc to see how his research had progressed. He confirmed that they had successfully formed plasmoids a foot in diameter, but that these could not be made sufficiently stable.

To make it work and overcome the stability problem, they need a device known as a "fast rising parallel plate transmission line." There was not enough funding for this and the company is still trying to raise funds.

"Once the re-engineered formation system becomes operational, we will proceed to form plasmoids of approximately 35 to 45 centimeters in diameter with a stable lifetime of from one to thirty seconds," says Prometheus II Vice President D. M. Cooper. "The plasmoids should be rugged and energetic, and should attain quiescence (thus becoming very stable) within two or three milliseconds of the formation pulse. The plasmoids will be useful for energy applications even if the military applications are not pursued."

So a ball lightning weapon remains tantalizingly out of reach –- or does it? As I noted in a previous article on military ball lightning, the USAF’s Phillips Laboratory examined a very similar concept in 1993. Again, this involved accelerating a donut-shaped mass of plasma to high speed as an anti-missile weapon in a project called Magnetically Accelerated Ring to Achieve Ultra-high Directed Energy and Radiation, or  MARAUDER. Based on the Air Force’s awesome Shiva Star power system, experiments spat out plasmoids at ultra-high speed that were expected to reach 3,000 kilometers a second by 1995. But nothing was published after 1993, and MARAUDER was classified, disappearing into the black world of secret programs.

Ball lighting is still mysterious 200 years later… and the next time a warship gets struck by weird fireballs they will probably be as baffled as were the sailors aboard the HMS Warren Hastings.

Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology (and it's extension nanorobotics) is the concept of molecule sized machine. The idea is attributed to Richard Feynman and it was popularized by K. Eric Drexler. It didn't take long before military researchers and science fiction writers started to speculate about weaponizing the stuff. A good science fiction novel on the subject is Wil McCarthy's Bloom.

There are many ways nanotechnology could do awful things to a military target. One of the first hypothetical applications of nanotechnology was in the manufacturing field. Molecular robots would break down chunks of various raw materials and assemble something (like, say, an aircraft), atom by atom. Naturally this could be dangerous if the nanobots landed on something besides raw materials (like, say, an enemy aircraft). However, since they are doing this atom by atom, it would take thousands of years for some nanobots to construct something (and the same thousands of years to deconstruct the source of raw materials).

But using nanobots for manufacturing suddenly becomes scary indeed if you make the little monsters into self-replicating machines (AKA a "Von Neumann universal constructor") in an attempt to reduce the thousands of years to something more reasonable. Suddenly you are facing the horror of wildfire plague spreading with the power of exponential growth. This could happen by accident, with a mutation in the nanobots causing them to devour everything in sight. Drexler called this the dreaded "gray goo" scenario. Or it could happen on purpose, weaponizing the nanobots.

Drexler is now of the opinion that nanobots for manufacturing can be done without risking gray goo. And Robert A. Freitas Jr. did some analysis that suggest that even if some nanotech started creating gray goo, it would be detectable early enough for countermeasures to deal with the problem.

What about nanobot gray goo weapons? Anthony Jackson thinks that free nanotech that operates on a time frame that's tactically relevant is in the realm of cinema, not science. And in any event, nanobots will likely be shattered by impacting the target at relative velocities higher than 3 km/s, which makes delivery very difficult. Rick Robinson is of the opinion that once you take into account the slow rate of gray goo production and the fragility of the nanobots, it would be more cost effective to just smash the target with an inert projectile. Jason Patten agrees that nanobots will be slow, due to the fact that they will not be very heat tolerant (a robot made out of only a few molecules will be shaken into bits by mild amounts of heat), and dissipating the heat energy of tearing down and rebuilding on the atomic level will be quite difficult if the heat is generated too fast.

Other weaponized applications of nanotechnology will probably be antipersonnel, not antispacecraft. They will probably take the form of incredibly deadly chemical weapons, or artificial diseases.

Some terminology: according to Chris Phoenix, "paste" is non-replicating nano-assemblers while "goo" is replicating nano-assemblers. Paste is safe, but is slow acting and limited to the number of nano-assemblers present. Goo is dangerous, but is fast acting and potentially unlimited in numbers.

"Gray or Grey goo" is accidentally created destructive nano-assemblers. "Red goo" is deliberately created destructive nano-assemblers. "Khaki goo" is military weaponized red goo. "Blue goo" is composed of "police" nanobots, it combats destructive type goos. "Green goo" is a type of red goo which controls human population growth, generally by sterilizing people. "LOR goo" (Lake Ocean River) nano-assemblers designed to remove pollution and harvest valuable elements from water, it could mutate into golden goo. "Golden goo" are out-of-control nanobots which were designed to extract gold from seawater but won't stop (the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" scenario). "Pink goo" is a humorous reference to human beings.

ACE Paste (Atmospheric Carbon Extractor) designed to absorb excess greenhouse gasses and covert them into diamonds or something useful. Garden Paste is a "utility fog" of various nanobots which helps your garden grow (manages soil density and composition for each plant type, controls insects, creates shade, store sunlight for overcast days, etc.) LOR paste: paste version of LOR goo. Medic Paste is a paste of nanobots that heals wounds, assists in diagnosis, and does medical telemetry to monitor the patient's health.

MALIGNANCY

MOST SECRET (ULTRAVIOLET) / EYES ONLY UNGUENT SANCTION

NEED-TO-KNOW ABSOLUTE
HARD COPY ONLY/NO TRANSMISSION
ORIGINATOR-CONTROLLED DISSEMINATION
TRACKED-COPY DOCUMENT
NOCONTRACT
NOFORN
SPECIAL SECURITY PROCEDURE BASILISK FIDELIS

Proceed (+/-)? +

EXECUTION:

STRATEGIC ACTION MESSAGE ONLY
IMPERIAL SECURITY EXECUTIVE ONLY
FIFTH DIRECTORATE VETO
X-THREAT ONLY

SUMMARY:

[SSP image elided from file]

The Existential Threats Primary Working Group has maintained in secure storage a number of sub-black level threats, and has access to two black-level threats, of type BURNING ZEPHYR – i.e., unlimited autonomous nanoscale replicators (“gray goo”).

Case UNGUENT SANCTION represents an extremal response case to physically manifested excessionary-level existential threats. It is hoped that, in such cases, the deployment of an existing sub-black level or black-level existential counterthreat may ideally destroy or subsume the excessionary-level threat, replacing it with one already considered manageable, or in lesser cases, at least delay the excessionary-level threat while more sophisticated countermeasures can be developed.

Note that as an extremal response case, deployment of CASE UNGUENT SANCTION requires consensus approval of the Imperial Security Executive, subject to override veto by vote of the Fifth Directorate overwatch.

WARNING:

Communicating ANY PART of this NTK-A document to ANY SOPHONT other than those with preexisting originator-issued clearance, INCLUDING ITS EXISTENCE, is considered an alpha-level security breach and will be met with the most severe sanctions available, up to and including permanent erasure.

Proceed (+/-)?

From MALIGNANCY by Alistair Young (2015)
GRIST-BASED WEAPONS

Nanotechnology
The manipulation of materials and processes on a nanometer level using tiny robotic machines (that is, machines controlled by programming) which are themselves made of only a few molecules. Nanotech was the big technological revolution following the biotech revolution.
Grist
Nanotechnological construct that incorporates the Josephson-Feynman graviton detector invented by Raphael Merced. This nano, disseminated throughout the Met, enables instantaneous information transfer over any distance that the nano is dispersed. Grist is also a word used to describe nanotechnological constructs in a general way, whether or not instantaneous information transfer is involved.
Grist-mil
Grist used for a military purpose. Many safeguards built into normal grist are removed in these constructs.
Merced Effect
The instantaneous transfer of information between locations set at any distance apart by the use of quantum-entangled gravitons.
Aspect
The biological, bodily portion of a normal person.
Convert
The algorithmic "extra" computing and memory storage portion of a normal person.
Pellicle
The nanotechnological grist that permeates a normal person. The pellicle mediates between aspect and convert portions of a person.
DIED
The Department of Immunity Enforcement Division is the collective name for the Met armed forces and the internal police force

From
Grist-based Weapons
Federal Army Field Manual
Compiled by Forward Development Lab, Triton
Gerardo Funk, Commandant

Section I: Introduction

1. Purpose and Scope
This manual is a guide for the military use of grist (grist-mil)—its use as weaponry, for the destruction of obstacles, and for covert and time-delayed attacks. Both conventional and guerrilla tactics will be considered.
2. Grist-based weapons
AKA grist-mil weapons. Grist-based weapons incorporate Josephson-Feynman nano-technology as either a means or an end to the destruction of areas, structures, materials, or people in order to achieve a military objective. They have both offensive and defensive uses. A grist-mil weapon normally consists of a nanotechnological mechanism and an algorithm, either sentient or dumb, that is in control of the deployment of the grist on a molecular level.
3.
The type of attack desired and the method of stealth employed for concealment are two complementary elements in design of these weapons and their use in the field.
4. Comments
Field users of this manual are encouraged to submit feedback for its improvement. Comments should reference section and subsection, and should be forwarded to Commandant, Forward Development Lab. Knit address: 33 Echo Replication Charlie Toro.

Section II: Tactical Considerations

Military grist is effective for both attack and defense, and for demolitions.

Direct Assault

For many applications, grist-mil can be used as-is. These weapons generally perform one or all of the following tasks:

  1. Dissolve physical integrity of defender, leading to destruction.
  2. Disable algorithm of defender's grist, leading to destruction.
  3. Sunder defender from command and control, leading to confusion and ineffectiveness on the battlefield.
  4. Subvert defender's grist to attacker's use for one of the above functions.

The general purpose is the immediate destruction of the enemy.

Delayed Assault

Often a delayed or timed assault is called for. Multiple function weapons can wait until conditions are ripe for activation. They may also carry out a series of assaults over the course of their use. When primed with a controlling algorithm of sufficient intelligence, such weapons can adapt themselves to changing battlefield conditions and prove many times more effective than "dumb" weapons.

Fortification and Defense

Defense applications include:

1. Fortification
A grist perimeter serves as both a warning device and a frontline defense against enemy assault. Such deployment is made at a company, command, or theater level.
2. Mines and minefields
See below.
3. Anti-Information Zones
Grist-mil can be deployed to cut or confuse all communication, whether grist-based or otherwise, in a given area or system (such as, for example, the human nervous system).

Direct Demolition

Grist-mil is highly effective at destroying physical facilities and cutting lines of communication. Uses include:

1. Reserved demolitions
These are preset charges of grist useful for destruction of facilities in the event of strategic withdrawal or retreat. These generally incorporate, and are under the control of, fully sentient free converts who keep them in "safe" condition until needed.
Reserved use also includes land and space minefields armed with sentient or semisentient individual devices
2. Deliberate demolitions
These are used when enemy interference is unlikely and there is sufficient time for placement. Deliberate demolitions are economical in their use of energy and computing resources, and can thus produce a much larger effect for the effort involved.
3. Hasty demolitions
These are used when time is limited and speed is more important than economy. Common sense should be exercised as much as is possible to prevent waste. In these demolitions, special care should be given to the placement of each grist-mil charge, and each charge should be primed with its controlling algorithm immediately. Even though this will take longer than normal deployment, this will make more likely a partial success of the demolition objective should the enemy interfere.

Delayed Demolition

Delayed grist-mil demolition charges are useful for the same reasons as other delayed grist-mil weaponry. Timed and delayed charges can catch an enemy off guard. Such charges can be deployed behind enemy lines for devastating effect. In this regard, they are particularly effective when combined with a stealth feature.

This use also includes land and space minefields. In addition to their use in defense and fortification, such devices can also be used as a passive means of attack if seeded behind enemy lines.


Section III: Stealth Types

Concealment

Physically concealing a weapon or demolition charge is sometimes the only option, and can be very effective when the enemy is not actively using grist-mil detection means. Weaponry grist concealed within other weapons can provide a devastating secondary attack.

Camouflage

Grist conceals itself extremely well. Sentient and semisentient grist can be made translucent to electromagnetic radiation. Isotropic effects can be used to prevent detection by other means. Generally speaking, only specialized detection grist can locate a camouflaged grist-mil weapon or demolition device.

Mimicry

Mimicking a structure, area, or person for a length of time is extremely effective and often devastating to the enemy. Sufficiently complex military-grade grist can incorporate itself into a structure or system—become a load-bearing wall, say, or white blood cells in an enemy soldier's body—and lie in wait in such circumstances. It will then activate itself for military use when conditions are ripe.


Section IV: Delivery Systems

Grist-mil delivers itself. The methods used are a sub-microscopic version of transportation systems in the visible world.

1. Mechanical transport
Grist-mil travels on wheels, legs, pseudopods. It slinks, crawls, travels by grist-made railway and highway systems that destroy themselves behind the main grist.
2. Subversion of existing transportation
Conventional transports can deliver grist-mil. In addition, grist can take control of other transportation systems—an enemy streamer bead or even an enemy's nervous system, for instance—and use that means to transport itself.
3. Physical viral transport
Grist-mil can infect like a virus. It often infiltrates enemy positions through random or partially random physical transmission.
4. Superluminal viral transport
This is perhaps the most insidious and powerful means to use grist as a weapon. An algorithm traveling instantaneously through the virtuality can overcome and subvert controlling programs at a given destination, then manufacture its own grist substrate. If security measures can be overcome, grist weapons can be delivered anywhere within the solar system instantly. This is often easier said than done, however, as security countermeasures are usually in place.

Section V: Types of Weapons and Devices

Grist-based weapons and demolition devices are rapidly changing. To cover in detail all such weapons is beyond the scope of this manual. Forward Development releases all new weaponry with tutorial and dedicated teaching converts that can conduct classes or, in extreme situations, can provide step-by-step instruction in real time as the device or weapon is being deployed. Always keep in mind that, except in the case of very complex weaponry, individual teachers are merely semisentient programs and are not free converts. Common sense should prevail when acting on their recommendations.

ASSAULT

Grist Grenades and Rockets

Grenades come in a variety of forms and are either thrown by individual soldiers or rifle-launched. Rockets are self-propelled, usually by means of a small Casimir drive engine. They can have a range of several meters to many thousands of kilometers. In ways other than propulsion, rockets are similar to grenades.

Grenades consist of a hardened containment envelope and an inside swarming with grist-mil. Often they are combined with other explosives for maximum dissemination and a multiply devastating effect.

1. Antipersonnel grenades
These contain grist-mil that attempts to attack an enemy's grist pellicle, gain access to the enemy's aspect, and then destroy the enemy by a variety of chemical, biological, or physical means. The most common type of algorithm is a simple vibration loop for the grist within the enemy. This generates enormous heat extremely quickly, vaporizing the enemy in a flash. Most grenades contain a chemical and biological backup in case the first method of attack fails to kill.
2. Antimatériel grenades
These are designed to breach minor fortifications and physical defenses for egress by attacking forces. They contain demolition algorithms that physically disassemble a given target molecule by molecule. They can also be used effectively on humans.
3. Bangalore torpedoes
These are self-propelling devices used to breach larger fortifications and grist defenses. The algorithms they employ are "smarter" than those of simple antimatériel grenades. They are used for cutting through command-or theater-level defensive grist. They are also useful for cutting through complex swaths of molecular-diameter razor wire.

DEFENSE

Zip Wire

This is molecular-diameter razor wire that can be deployed either as a single strand or in barbed-wire-like emplacements. It will cleanly slice through any material held together by normal chemical bonds. This includes flesh, bones, metal, and diamond. Septembrinni Coil is a special form of zip wire that is encoded with an algorithm that attempts to prevent reassembling of the sliced bodily portions by the enemy's pellicle. Extreme care must be taken in setting up Septembrinni Coil, as mishandling could result in irreparable decapitation or worse.

Mines

Mines vary in size and intelligence. They deploy antipersonnel grist-mil when activated, often coupled with a physical explosion for greatest effect. They have a variety of sensors for activation—usually including constantly deployed grist "outrider" scouts that collect information in a given area. Most mines have an activation range about six feet in diameter.

"Sticky mines" are devices designed not to kill instantly, but to creep into the enemy's pellicle and be carried along with the enemy to create mayhem later. See "infiltration weapons" below.

Minefields can consist of individual mines, individually triggered. More often, they are controlled by an overall "smart" algorithm. Larger minefields are controlled by a full free convert and a complementary key convert, a sentient program without a copy, residing in, and voluntarily confined to, the grist of command headquarters. Use of this key allows passage through the minefield.

Complementary minefield keys always have the rank of captain or above.

ANTI-INFORMATION WEAPONS

One of the most effective uses of grist weapons is to set up anti-information zones, often called AIZs. These can range from simple areas of message disruption—say, of brain synapses or electromagnetic transmission—to complex, self-evolving containment algorithms that do not kill, but confuse and sometimes subvert enemy forces. Enemies trapped within a complex AIZ may wander for what seems years to them. They may be subjected to hallucinations and delusions, and their mental and physical makeup may be transformed by infiltrating grist-mil. Portions of their subconscious minds may be dissociated from their personas and used against them. In fact, their interior mental landscape can be transformed into what they perceive as a wilderness or jungle—a seemingly physical place full of deadly threats.

The hallmark of this weapon is its complexity and rapid adaptation to defenses against it. Large amounts of grist-mil must go into the construction of AIZs, and the concomitant energy and matériel expenditure is considerable. The use of the weapons is therefore limited, but AIZs are extremely effective when deployed.

INFILTRATION WEAPONS

Another use of complex grist, usually under the control of a near-sentient algorithm, is for attacks behind enemy lines. This is accomplished by infiltrating grist, which takes up position either camouflaged or mimicking something else. The grist can go through various transformations itself as it is transported toward its ultimate destination. The ability to transform and remain concealed calls for long-range planning on the part of engineers and, often, high complexity within the grist itself. At times, however, even a relatively minor transformation can serve the purpose—a load-bearing wall, the severed finger or toe of an enemy, quickly regrown before the enemy is aware of the replacement. Grist-mil successfully placed in such a tactical position can contain code that activates it as a weapon when the appropriate conditions are met. Often, all the grist-mil must do is dissolve and disappear in order to wreak havoc.


Section VI: Weapons-Grade Grist

The intelligent soldier will consider the physics of the object or enemy he or she wishes to destroy. Is the target held together by ordinary means or does it use a macro version of the strong nuclear force, as does the Met cable structure and most DIED ships? Grist-mil weapons that come from Forward Development have a simple S,M,L coding on them standing for the words "small", "medium", and "large", in Basis. S class is used against individual enemy soldiers and small fortifications. It is usually a single-method weapon. M class means a weapon that is more complex—one that employs multiple attack methods in a more intelligent fashion than the S class. L class is usually under the control of a secondary copy of a free-convert soldier who is incorporated within the weapon and expects to be destroyed with its use.


Section VII: Conclusion

Military grist is deadly material and should be handled with extreme care. Its effectiveness in modern warfare is proved. Individual soldiers should become familiar with each new grist-mil weapon as it becomes available. Forward Development is intensely involved in creating more powerful military grist. All Federal Army grist-mil is fully tested, but not all has been used under battlefield conditions. Field commanders should remain alert to areas of use not covered in the supplied tutorials and teaching modules. Remember, a half-sentient teaching program is no substitute for the common sense and good judgment of the fighting soldier.

From SUPERLUMINAL by Tony Daniel (2004)

X-Ray Bomb

Mid 2018 this interesting article turned up:

X-RAY BOMBS: WHEN CONVENTIONAL EXPLOSIVES JUST WON’T DO

WASHINGTON — We’ve all been there … well, some, at least: You have a pile of chemical or biological weapons you want to destroy, but you don’t want to risk spreading the toxic mess over a wide area.

What do you do?

You could be extremely careful, making sure no stray missiles hit something other than their target. Or you could use X-rays.

The U.S. Defense Department is researching how to use an X-ray bomb to neutralize chemical and biological weapons without damaging the structures that hold the weapons, New Scientist reports (article is behind a paywall).

Although the technology behind such a bomb isn’t publicly available, the article notes that researchers have looked at using conventional explosives to compress aluminum or helium to the point that the compressed material emits bursts of X-rays.

However, to be effective in destroying either chemical or biological materials, an X-ray bomb would have to produce radiation tens of thousands of times stronger than the typical chest X-ray. This would not just destroy the weapons, but would also kill anyone unlucky enough to be standing near the X-ray burst.

Do note that Terra's atmosphere is pretty opaque to X-rays (so much for Superman's X-ray vision). So on the one hand this would limit collateral damage, but on the other hand such a weapon would have to produce vast amounts of X-ray energy or it will not damage the target at all.

A pity that the main article is behind a paywall. However, an expert of my acquaintance who goes by the handle of Kerr opined:

MIMS

"the article notes that researchers have looked at using conventional explosives to compress aluminum or helium to the point that the compressed material emits bursts of X-rays."

This shows that what they are using is, in all likelihood, MIMS (metastable innermost molecular states) which can emit from soft EUV up to hard x-rays, and do so very efficiently.

40% conversion efficiency from the compressions kinetic energy to x-ray energy has been demonstrated in some experiments.

This is opening up quite a few possibilities, ultra-compact x-ray laser, and coherent nuclear-pumped lasers being the most notable ones in this case.

We are talking about effectively an x-ray free electron laser with energies in the kilotons. (egads!)

by Kerr (2018)
METASTABLE INNER-SHELL MOLECULAR STATE

Metastable Innershell Molecular State (MIMS) is a class of ultra-high-energy short-lived molecules have the binding energy up to 1,000 times larger and bond length up to 100 times smaller than typical molecules. MIMS is formed by inner-shell electrons that are normally resistant to molecular formation. However, in stellar conditions, the inner-shell electrons become reactive to form molecular structures (MIMS) from combinations of all elements in the periodic table.

MIMS upon dissociation can emit x-ray photons with energies up to 100 keV at extremely high conversion efficiencies from compression energy to photon energy. MIMS is predicted to exist and dominate radiation processes in extreme astrophysical environments, such as large planet cores, star interiors, and black hole and neutron star surroundings. There, MIMS is predicted to enable highly energy-efficient transformation of the stellar compression energy into the radiation energy.

The below schematic illustration shows the proposed four stages of the K-shell MIMS (K-MIMS) formation and x-ray generation process. Stage I: Individual atoms are subjected to the stellar compression and ready for absorbing the compression energy. Stage II: The outer electron shells fuse together under increasing "stellar" pressure. Stage III: At the peak pressure, via pressure ionization K-shell orbits form the K-MIMS, which is vibrationally hot and encapsulated by a Rydberg-like pseudo-L-Shell structure. Stage IV: The K-MIMS cools down by ionizing ("boiling-off") a number of pseudo-L-shell electrons and subsequent optical decay by emitting an x-ray photon. The dissociated atoms return their original atoms states and are ready for absorbing the compression energy.

MIMS also can be readily produced in laboratory and industrial environments, such as hypervelocity particle impact, laser fusion and z-machine. MIMS can be exploited for highly energy-efficient production of high intensity x-ray beams for a wide range of innovative applications, such as photolithography, x-ray lasers, and inertial fusion.

From the Wikipedia entry for METASTABLE INNER-SHELL MOLECULAR STATE

Neutrino Gun

Ian Mitchell is an acquaintance of Rob Davidoff (the gentleman who I brainstormed with to develop Cape Dread). He was reading an interesting paper entitled Potential Hazards from Neutrino Radiation at Muon Colliders and got an idea. I agree with him that his idea is unobtainium not handwavium. Meaning it is not forbidden by the laws of physics, it is just a bit beyond our technological capabilities. As yet.

It is also interesting that Hirotaka Sugawara et al have calculated that ultra-high energy neutrino beam (about 1000 TeV) can detect and destroy the nuclear warheads.

As a humorous aside, Randall Munroe did a "What If" analysis on the topic of deadly neutrino flux from supernovae.

THE NEUTRINO GUN

This is crazy, but much less than it sounds! There are three basic reasons why I think this is something that’s actually doable, perhaps with some unobtainium in the mix. It doesn’t require any fundamental breakthroughs in physics that I am aware of, just doing what we already do…but better.

First of all, we can already generate neutrino beams. There are multiple experiments right now that monitor beams of artificially generated neutrinos sent through the Earth for scientific purposes. Of course, these beams are harmless, but it proves that it’s possible.

Second, however, we have ideas for generating really intense beams of neutrinos. For the past ten or fifteen years, a number of researchers have been working on a so-called “Neutrino Factory,” a specialized particle accelerator complex that would generate very intense neutrino beams. The trick is to accelerate muons, like in the muon gun that Luke Campbell mentions, in a straight line. As the muons decay, they produce neutrinos that have a large fraction of the momentum of the muons and hence form a mostly forwards beam. The scientific rationale for the Neutrino Factory has been somewhat undermined by events (that I have played a very small and peripheral role in), but work continues on developing the basic technologies for the future.

Third, we have ideas for generating really energetic neutrinos. Also for the past ten or fifteen years, people have been thinking about post-post LHC colliders, and their conclusion has been that for extremely high energies, in the hundreds of TeV range, lepton colliders will have to use muons, since various sources of energy loss (especially synchrotron radiation) scale very inversely to particle mass, so using heavy muons instead of light electrons greatly increases the “bang for buck”. This means that these colliders would produce beams of muon neutrinos, a pencil beam for linear colliders and a disk for circular colliders. In principle these could probably be built this century, but the funding situation (the whole world will only chip in for one, maybe two colliders at a time) and construction time means that they probably won’t be.

In of themselves these three facts would not mean much, except that in studies of the latter very-high energy muon colliders a very strange and interesting phrase pops up: “neutrino radiation hazards”. If you read papers such as the one linked, you’ll find that a very high-energy circular muon collider like the one described above could supply a dose of up to several milliSieverts per year to someone living in just the right—or wrong—place.

Still not much of a weapon, upping someone’s cancer risk. But, that’s where design (and science fiction) comes in. These same papers dismiss the radiation hazards from even larger linear colliders because the spot size is small enough that there’s little probability that it will intersect anything interesting. But when I read that I thought ”that sounds like it could be weaponized!”.

In principle, if you could increase the energy and intensity of the muon beam enough, the resulting neutrino beam could deliver a quickly (or slowly) lethal dose to someone. In of itself, the resulting weapon would not be especially interesting, since it would require an accelerator 100-1000 kilometers long using existing methods, some method of creating a muon beam at least 100,000 times more intense (luminous) than the ones discussed in the linked paper (that should increase the dose above 10 Sv/hr, well above LD50), and at least many gigawatts if not terawatts of electricity, all of which could presumably be used in a far more powerful conventional particle beam, or in other conventional weapons. Still, all of those are merely unobtanium, not handwavium; in principle there’s no reason you couldn’t do all of these things, or even improve on some of them and produce a more powerful and damaging beam. I myself am not an accelerator physicist, so by and large I don’t know whether there are any particular techniques that could be successfully applied for these purposes, or whether it would require science-fictional breakthroughs to enable, I can merely say that if you could generate such an intense and energetic beam, then you would have a neutrino gun.

What makes this interesting compared to an ordinary particle beam is how a neutrino beam works. It doesn’t work by the neutrinos themselves supplying a radiation dose; that would require a supernova in a bottle. It works by the neutrinos interacting with nuclei in matter around the target and sending them flying with high energy, like primary cosmic rays. Those particles then interact in the usual ways to supply a radiation dose. And of course only a small fraction of neutrinos interact with any given slice of material, so the armor “penetration” is quite good. At this energy, it’s not quite as bad as the oft-cited “light years of lead,” but we’re still talking a sizable fraction of the initial beam—enough to still cause fatal radiation poisoning—penetrating hundreds or thousands of kilometers, possibly all the way through a planet.

The upshot is more armor = more damage for a neutrino gun. Someone in a spacesuit who happens to float in front of the beam will take a very small dose, since the atoms in their body that are getting hit by neutrinos don’t have the chance to interact with the other atoms in their body, whereas someone in a bunker a mile underground quickly gets a fatal dose. Even computers and AIs will be killed given enough dwell time on target. This makes it absolutely perfect as an anti-fortification weapon, since anything that’s fortified with tons of armor against other weapons is intensely vulnerable to the neutrino gun. The neutrino gun will kill submarines, bunkers, and anything else buried underground, while other weapons can be used to take out other surface positions, all without having to slag your target planet or even do much more than slightly muss the hair of the ecology (well…except whatever’s living in the sea). It’s also potentially quite good as a fixed weapon, since again it can kill anything attacking it (at least the computers and people controlling the attackers) with no real defense, though just chucking dumb kinetics or huge numbers of disposable drones at it might be able to overwhelm it.

What are the downsides? Well, the size and cost, obviously. It is a hundred+ kilometer long spaceship that requires a gigantic power plant, after all. It’s also virtually immobile short of having teleportation or something akin to it, again due to the size. Beam divergence, and hence range, would likely be an issue as well; the heuristic nature of muon decays means that the resulting neutrinos will have a fairly random spread of momenta, and will not be as well collimated as one would like. And this would only be compounded by the inevitable divergence of the muon beam itself, considering that you would have to let it travel over some distance of free space before decaying. Still, if worse comes to worse you could in principle continue increasing the beam intensity until it has your desired intensity at your desired range, provided you can supply the weapon with sufficient power. For an empire that makes a habit of conquering planets, it would certainly be…interesting.

Incidentally, this is one case where firing antimatter at your target makes logical sense, as you would need to use free space as your “decay pipe” or see your ship become very much larger. To avoid the beam blowing up from Coulomb forces, you would need to neutralize it, and that would be very much easier if you could inject electrons (as with an antimuon beam) instead of positrons (as with a muon beam).

by Ian Mitchell (2017)

Hafnium Bomb

Consider an electron buzzing around an atomic nucleus. If it is as close as it can get to the nucleus (i.e., it is in the lowest unoccupied energy band structure) it is in its base energy state. This means it is "at rest", or at least as close as an electron gets to being at rest.

Anyway, if the electron absorbs some energy, from a photon or something, it can no longer occupy the base energy state. It has to rise to a higher energy state. In scientific terms, the electron has become "excited." This is not a stable situation, eventually the electron spits out the extra energy (generally in the form of a photon) and falls back into its base energy state.

Nuclear physicists immediately wondered if the protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus could also become excited. As it turns out, indeed they could. When a nucleon becomes excited, the nucleus becomes a nuclear isomer.

Most nuclear isomers decay back into the base state in a fraction of a second. However, one or two can stay excited for years. Tantalum's isomer Ta-180m has a half-life of 1015 years, which is much longer than the age of the universe. But then there is Hafnium's isomer hafnium-178m2, which has a half-life of 31 years.

Storing Energy

By now you are thinking "So what?"

Well consider this. Excited electrons contain the energy of chemical reactions. For example: a stick of dynamite. Excited nucleons contain the energy of nuclear reactions. For example: a nuclear weapon. Not so boring now, are they?

So converting ordinary hafnium into hafnium-178m2 would be the equivalent of revving up a rechargeable battery with nuclear energy.

One gram of pure hafnium-178m2 (the same mass as a paperclip) contains about 1330 megajoules of energy. This is the equivalent of 317 kilograms of TNT, about the same as the warhead on a Tomahawk cruise missile (TLAM-C). Now you know why people started to talk about a "nuclear hand grenade." (as Alan Bellows puts it: "the most appealing aspect of isomer triggering was its potential to shoehorn yet more death and destruction into convenient 'fun size' packages")

There was also speculation about using hafnium-178m2 as a power source. A suggested application was a nuclear isomer powered airplane. The popular term was "quantum nucleonic reactor".

What was even better is the fact that the energy emerges not as visible light photons, not as ultraviolet photons, not even as x-ray photons. This stuff spits out freaking gamma rays! In other words, it just might be the key to constructing a gamma-ray laser.

The US military was also interested in the fact that hafnium-178m2 could be used to circumvent the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Tremendous energy release, intense gamma rays, but it ain't a nuke.

The Problem

The trouble is that it is a worthless weapon if it takes thirty one years for half of the energy to slowly leak out. For a weapon you want it all to burst forth instantly. Therein lies the rub, nobody knew how.

That is where the controversy started.

Enter Dr. Carl B. Collins of the university of Texas. He figured that hafnium-178m2 could be triggered to release its energy by irradiating it with carefully tuned x-rays. The process is called induced gamma emission.

In January of 1999, Dr. Collins lead a team to explore this possibility. They put a tiny smear of hafnium-178m2 on the top of a styrofoam coffee cup, and used a scavenged dental x-ray machine to bombard the sample. After several weeks, the team studied the results. They concluded that there was a teeny-tiny increase in gamma rays measured in the data, which they interpreted as proof positive that they had succeeded. Or at least opened the possibility that there might be some magic frequency which would make the hafnium-178m2 create the desired explosion.

As always in science, if one has extraordinary claims, one had better have extraordinary evidence. And the sad fact of the matter is that Dr. Collins' evidence was pretty pathetic. Many scientists were uncomfortable with his outlandish claims and his experiment's large margin for error. Indeed, his findings were somewhat at odds with the laws of physics given that nuclei are thought to be practically unaffected by electromagnetic radiation.

The US military didn't want to provide funding to a crack-pot, but didn't want to miss out on nuclear hand grenades either. So they asked the Jason Defense Advisory Group (a panel established in 1960 to advise the government in matters of scientific controversy) to make an assessment. The Jasons concluded that the results fell into the former category: the data did not prove that induced gamma emission had occured, and even if it had a successful triggering event would not start the necessary chain reaction due to energy dissipation.

Meanwhile the Argonne National Laboratory used their own powerful x-ray machine in an attempt to reproduce Dr. Collins results. They failed: no induced gamma emission was recorded. Dr. Collins said it must be because your machine is too powerful. The skeptical Argonne scientists tried again using Dr. Collins' specifications. Still nothing was seen. Collins again ascribed the problem to experimental minutia, but by now the Argonne scientists had better things to do with their time.

Dr. Collins' work is more or less totally discounted nowadays, but there is a small group of true believers that still dreams of nuclear hand grenades.

Subnuclear Bomb

The old-fashioned "atomic" bomb or "A-bomb" uses the awesome might of nuclear fission. When a uranium 235 atom is split, about 0.1% of the rest mass is converted into energy (202.5 MeV per fission). The new and improved "hydrogen" bomb or "H-bomb" uses the even more awesome might of thermonuclear fusion. When a deuterium nucleus fuses with a tritium nucleus, about 0.7% of the rest mass is converted into energy (17.6 MeV per fusion).

In 2017 physicists Marek Karliner and Jonathan Rosner were aghast to discover than if two bottom quarks "melted" together, the blasted things would convert a colossal 4.0% of the rest mass into energy (138 MeV per melt). It was 5.7 times as efficient as fusion and 40 times as efficient as fission.

With visions of an Armageddon full of subnuclear bombs that would make mere thermonuclear bombs look like wet firecrackers, Karliner and Rosner were ready to suppress the discovery. After some calculation they reassured themselves that the reaction had no practical applications and certainly no military ones.

Personally I think the physicists were being somewhat optimistic that suppressing their discovery would have any effect, since when it is Steam Engine Time lots of independent researchers are going to make steam engines. By the same token their assessment that the reaction is impractical for power generation depends upon some assumptions. These are very good assumptions, and very unlikely to change. But if any of them do, things are going to get tense.

From the standpoint of a science fiction writer, they can change an assumption by virtue of Author Fiat to get things started.


What's the problem with subatomic power? Well, the fuel. Specifically the availability and stability of the fuel.

Fission typically uses uranium-235. You can go to uranium mines to dig the stuff up, you do not have to make it. So it is available. And when you have some, it is not going to evaporate before your eyes because it has a half life of 703.8 million freaking years. As long as you do not pile enough together to make a critical mass it will be stable.

Fusion typically uses deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is usually extracted from seawater, you do not have to make it. True, tritium has to be manufactured but this is relatively easy to do by neutron activation of lithium-6 and it does not use much energy. So it is available. Deuterium is totally stable, while tritium has a half life of about 12 years. So they are reasonably stable.

Quark melting uses Lambda Baryons. This is the problem.

There ain't no lambda baryon mines. They do not occur in nature, short of a supernova or something. They must be manufactured. The particle accelerators used to make the little monsters have efficiencies measured in microscopic fractions of one percent (meaning you need gigawatts of power to make a miserable few lambda particles). So they are NOT available. The tiny manufacturing efficiency makes the quark melting worthless as a power supply, you'd be better off disconnecting the particle accelerator from its power supply and using the power directly. Meaning that the particle accelerator would gobble gigawatts of electricity while producing only enough lambda particles to generate a fraction of a watt plus gigawatts of worthless waste heat. The only reasonable use is for propulsion which needs incredibly concentrated fuel … or as a bomb warhead.

Which is where the second problem makes the stuff worthless. Lambda baryons containing a "bottom" quark have a lifespan of (1.429±0.024)×10-12 sec or one-and-a-half picoseconds. You can't make a chunk of the stuff, put it in a bomb, let the bomb sit in a weapon stockpile for a few months, move it to a bomber spacecraft, and drop it on an enemy city. A particle decays into something worthless one pico-jiffy after the particle accelerator makes it, you have 0.0000000000015 second to use it or lose it. So it is NOT stable.


With respect to science fiction, off the top of my head the "easiest" solution is to handwave some item that can freeze time for the lambda baryons or otherwise prevent them from decaying. The trouble with such a solution is anything operating on something so fundamental is going to have tons of unintended consequences. Larry Niven had that problem with his time-stopping "stasis fields." Every new technical problem he put in his stories had to be examined to see if it would be trivially solved by using a stasis field.


HOW DOES IT WORK?

If you could care less about the nitty-gritty details, you'd best skip this section.

An example of nuclear fission is when a uranium-235 nucleus is split by an incoming neutron. The end result is two fission fragments (e.g., a nuclei of barium-141 and a nuclei of krypton-92) plus two neutrons (141+92+2 = 235). If you weigh all the particles before the split and then after the split, you'll see that the total mass after is less than the total before. The discrepancy is the "mass deficit" or "binding energy", this creates the "boom" of the atom bomb by the magic of e=mc2. The mass deficit is 0.1% of the total "before" particles.

An example of nuclear fusion is when a deuterium nucleus and a tritium nucleus merge or fuse. The result is a helium-4 nucleus and a neutron. The mass deficit in this case is 0.7% of the total "before" particles.

In both fission and fusion the starting particles are atomic nuclei, which are balls composed of protons and neutrons. The end result may be two nuclear balls of protons/neutrons, or one ball; but the point is that the protons and neutrons do not change. The only thing that changes is which nuclear ball they are considered to be part of. For instance, a proton that was in a uranium-235 nuclear ball might end up in the barium-141 nuclear ball. But it is still a proton.

With quark melting, the nuclear particles do change. The reaction is not happening the nuclear level, it is happening at the sub-nuclear level.

Let's take a closer look at the nuclear particles. Protons and neutrons are what we call baryons. All baryons inside are composed of three quarks. Since protons and neutrons are dull, boring, commonplace baryons they are composed of the dull, boring, commonplace quarks. These are the so-called "up quark" and "down quark." A proton has two "up" quarks and one "down" quark. The neutron is the opposite, with one "up" quark and two "down quarks."

As you probably have suspected there exists more exciting, interesting, and rare quarks. These are the "top", "bottom", "charmed", and "strange" quarks (named by whimsical physicists). Which can be used to compose more exciting, interesting, and rare baryons. The important point here is that the "top", "bottom", and "charmed" quarks ("heavy quarks") are much more massive than the commonplace quarks (by one to three orders of magnitude). The "strange" quark is about the same mass as the commonplace quarks ("light quarks").

For reasons I am not even going to try and explain it is impossible to split a baryon into its component quarks. But it is possible for two baryons to briefly splat together into a virtual 6-quark cluster, quickly swap quarks, and separate into two new types of baryons. If heavy quarks are involved, there will be a mass deficit, and energy will be released.

Baryons containing only up and down quarks are called "nucleons", or "dull, boring, commonplace baryons". Baryons that contain two commonplace quarks (ups and downs) plus an exotic quark are called "Lambda" (Λ). And baryons with a single commonplace quark plus two exotic quarks are called "Xi" (Ξ).

Dr's. Karliner and Rosner examined the charmed Lambda (Λc) and the bottom Lambda (Λb). Λc has up, down, and charmed quarks. Λb has up, down, and bottom quarks.

If two Λc slammed together into a virtual 6-quark cluster, lambda 1 could give lambda 2 a down quark and receive in trade a charmed quark. Lambda 1 would then become a charmed Xi (Ξc, one up quark and two charmed quarks) while lambda 2 would become a neutron (one up and two down quarks). This releases 12 MeV of energy from the mass deficit.

In the same way two Λb can slam together and transform into a Ξb, a neutron, and 138 MeV.

QUARK-LEVEL ANALOGUE OF NUCLEAR FUSION WITH DOUBLY HEAVY BARYONS

ABSTRACT

The essence of nuclear fusion is that energy can be released by the rearrangement of nucleons between the initial- and final-state nuclei. The recent discovery1 of the first doubly charmed baryon , which contains two charm quarks (c) and one up quark (u) and has a mass of about 3,621 megaelectronvolts (MeV) (the mass of the proton is 938 MeV) also revealed a large binding energy of about 130 MeV between the two charm quarks. Here we report that this strong binding enables a quark-rearrangement, exothermic reaction in which two heavy baryons (Λc) undergo fusion to produce the doubly charmed baryon and a neutron n (), resulting in an energy release of 12 MeV. This reaction is a quark-level analogue of the deuterium–tritium nuclear fusion reaction (DT → 4He n). The much larger binding energy (approximately 280 MeV) between two bottom quarks (b) causes the analogous reaction with bottom quarks () to have a much larger energy release of about 138 MeV. We suggest some experimental setups in which the highly exothermic nature of the fusion of two heavy-quark baryons might manifest itself. At present, however, the very short lifetimes of the heavy bottom and charm quarks preclude any practical applications of such reactions.

THE SUBATOMIC DISCOVERY THAT PHYSICISTS CONSIDERED KEEPING SECRET

A pair of physicists announced the discovery of a subatomic event so powerful that the researchers wondered if it was too dangerous to make public.

The explosive event? The duo showed that two tiny particles known as bottom quarks could theoretically fuse together in a powerful flash. The result: a larger subatomic particle, a second, spare particle known as a nucleon, and a whole mess of energy spilling out into the universe. This "quarksplosion" would be an even more powerful subatomic analog of the individual nuclear fusion reactions that take place in the cores of hydrogen bombs.

Quarks are tiny particles that are usually found clinging together to make up the neutrons and protons inside atoms. They come in six versions or "flavors": up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm.

Energetic events at the subatomic level are measured in megaelectronvolts (MeV), and when two bottom quarks fuse, the physicists found, they produce a whopping 138 MeV. That's about eight times more powerful than one of the individual nuclear fusion events that takes place in hydrogen bombs (a full-scale bomb blast consists of billions of these events). H-bombs fuse together tiny hydrogen nuclei known as deuterons and tritons to create helium nuclei, along with the most powerful explosions in the human arsenal. But each of those individual reactions inside the bombs releases only about 18 MeV, according to the Nuclear Weapon Archive, a website devoted to collecting research and data about nuclear weapons. That’s far less than the fusing bottom quarks’ 138 MeV.

"I must admit that when I first realized that such a reaction was possible, I was scared," co-researcher Marek Karliner of Tel Aviv University in Israel told Live Science. "But, luckily, it is a one-trick pony."

As powerful as fusion reactions are, a single instance of fusion on its own isn't at all dangerous. Hydrogen bombs derive their enormous power from chain reactions — the cascading fusion of lots and lots of nuclei all at once.

Karliner and Jonathan Rosner, of the University of Chicago, determined that such a chain reaction wouldn't be possible with bottom quarks, and, before publishing, privately shared their insight with colleagues, who agreed.

"If I thought for a microsecond that this had any military applications, I would not have published it," Karliner said.

To spark a chain reaction, nuclear bomb makers need large stockpiles of particles. And an important property of bottom quarks makes them impossible to stockpile: They wink out of existence just 1 picosecond after they're created, or in about the time it takes light to travel half the length of a single grain of salt. After that time span, they decay into a far more common and less energetic kind of subatomic particle, known as the up quark.

It might be possible to generate single fusion reactions of bottom quarks inside miles-long particle accelerators, the scientists said. But even inside an accelerator, one couldn't assemble a large enough mass of quarks to do any damage out in the world, the researchers said. So there’s no need to worry about bottom quark bombs.

The discovery is exciting, though, because it's the first theoretical proof that it's possible to fuse subatomic particles together in ways that release energy, Karliner said. That's brand-new territory in the physics of very tiny particles, made possible by an experiment in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the massive particle-physics laboratory near Geneva.

Here's how the physicists made this discovery.

At CERN, particles zip around a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) underground ring at near light speed before smashing into one another. The scientists then use powerful computers to sift through the data from those collisions, and strange particles sometimes emerge from that research. In June, something especially strange turned up in the data from one of those collisions: a "doubly charmed" baryon, or a bulky cousin of the neutron and proton, itself made up of two cousins of the "bottom" and "top" quarks known as "charm" quarks.

Now, charm quarks are very heavy compared to the more common up and down quarks that make up protons and neutrons. And when heavy particles bind together, they convert a large chunk of their mass into binding energy, and in some cases, produce a bunch of leftover energy that escapes into the universe.

When two charm quarks fuse, Karliner and Rosner found, the particles bind with an energy of about 130 MeV and spit out 12 MeV in leftover energy (about two-thirds of the energy of deuteron-triton fusion). That charmed fusion was the first reaction of particles on this scale ever found to emit energy in this way, and is the headline result of the new study, published yesterday (Nov. 1) in the journal Nature.

The even more energetic fusion of two bottom quarks, which bind with an energy of 280 MeV and spit out 138 MeV when they fuse, is the second, and more powerful of the two reactions discovered.

So far, these reactions are entirely theoretical and haven't been demonstrated in a lab. That next step should come soon though. Karliner said he expects to see the first experiments showing this reaction at CERN within the next couple years.

Collapsing Rounds

Fission warheads (old-school A-bombs) are an old favorite. Basically the warhead creates a nuclear explosion by rapidly assembling a critical mass of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.

It is a pity that the smallest warhead will be about 20 kilograms, with a yield of about a kiloton. Not exactly bullet-sized.

A simplistic mechanism is inefficient at converting uranium into bang, so you need lots of uranium. A fancy mechanism with explosive lenses and everything can get the same amount of bang with less uranium. Alas, all the fancy mechanism adds more mass to warhead.

So mad scientists figured that the key was to find some isotope with a far lower critical mass than U235. The rumors from the conspiracy theories was that the element Californium would do nicely.

This report says that Californium-251 has a very small calculated critical mass of about 5 kg. That's where things become murky, since 5 kg is not exactly bullet-sized either. If my slide-rule isn't lying to me, that would be a sphere 4.3 cm in radius. Of course you'd want a geometry that was more dispersed, since a sphere is critical mass. 251Cf has a half life of 898 years.

The idea was to make each Californium round in the shape of a dumb-bell. That is, two sub-critical hemispheric masses connected by a tab, and surrounded by an explosive charge designed to crush the Californium into a sphere. Even better if the explosive charge can be omitted, but that probably means it could only be used in a hypervelocity weapon, and only targeting hard objects such as tanks or buildings.

Things get even more murky. The various sources can't even agree on which isotope to use. Some say 252Cf has a critical mass of only 2.6 kg, that has a much shorter half-life of 2.645 years. A russian publication said 252Cf critical mass was only 0.0018 kg, but that sounds too good to be true.

In the Traveller role-playing game, they suggest that collapsing rounds be stored inside a handwavium nuclear damper boxes. Otherwise the Californium will decay into uselessness too quickly. I dunno, that does not seem to be a problem with a half-life of 2.645 years, and certainly not with 898 years.

COLLAPSING ROUNDS

      C. Collapsing Rounds: Collapsing rounds are much smaller than standard rounds; this is made possible by using very unstable fissionable materials, such as californium, and by omitting the reliable but bulky detonation system found in standard rounds. Instead, they rely on impact with vehicle armor or a hard structure to collapse the hollow round quickly into a critical mass, resulting in unreliable performance.

     Collapsing rounds may only be fired from high or hyper-velocity chemically-propelled-round guns or mass drivers. They may only be fired at vehicles or structures.

     Unlike other nuclear rounds, they have a die roll to hit, a penetration value, a burst area, and a fragmentation penetration value. If a round does not hit it has no effect. If it hits, roll one die. On a roll of 1 or 2, the round has detonated properly, and the explosion has full effect. On any other roll, detonation was incomplete; subtract 8 times the die roll from the penetration, half the die roll (rounded up) from burst size, and twice the die roll from the fragmentation penetration. The explosion does damage in the same way as an HE round (high explosive), except that all targets in the burst area are automatically hit.

     Collapsing rounds, because of their short useful half-lives, must be carried in damper boxes; see Book 3. Because of the high radiation risk collapsing rounds pose to crews, they are generally used only in drone vehicles (short half-life = high radiation flux).

From STRIKER by Frank Chadwick (1981)

Meson Accelerator

In the science fiction role-playing game Traveller, the most potent starship weapon of all is the dreaded Meson Accelerator (MA). Before MA technology is developed, warship designs have lots of armor to protect them from hostile missile, laser, and particle beam weapon fire. After MA, warship designs omit armor in favor of more weapons, because armor is utterly worthless against MA fire. There is also a tendency to make lots of small warships instead a few large ones, in the pious hope this will prolong the life of your fleet. Or at least prolong it longer than the life of the enemy fleet.

As with all powerful Traveller starship weapons, MA are typically installed as a "spinal mount". MA are also marvelous as a planetary defense weapon. You can put MAs several kilometers below the planetary surface and still shoot at hostile orbiting spacecraft. The spacecraft will not be able to shoot through several kilometers of solid rock (unless they too are armed with MAs).

Later a star nation can develop the technology for the meson screen, which renders MA powerless (much like Kryptonite's all-or-nothing effect on Superman). Then warship design goes back to normal, except all designs must include a meson screen.

Why are meson accelerators so deadly? Because their method of action is so sneaky.


Some background. Nuclear physicists love to play with atom-smashers, particle accelerators, cyclotrons, and the like. These create subatomic particles (i.e., the component particles that atoms are made out of) and make them move really really fast in beam form. Yes, if you weaponize this, you have a particle beam weapon. Anyway, some kinds of particles are unstable, they have a short life-span. After a few nanoseconds they decay into other particles, radiation, or both.

Einstein's relativity, besides forbidding faster-than-light starships, also says that at speeds close to that of light, time will slow down. At about 90% the speed of light (0.9 c), the slowdown is about 2 (called the "gamma factor"). So if a particle has a life-span of 10 nanoseconds when sitting still (relative to you), when the particle is travelling at 0.9 c (relative to you) you will time it as having a life span of 20 nanoseconds or twice what it should be. At 0.95 c the life span will be 30 nanoseconds, at 0.98 c it will be 50 nanoseconds, and so on (see table here). This is yet another bit of weirdness from the screwy world of Einstein's relativity. Thanks, Albert.

Now in physics 101, you'll learn that distance equals rate times time. Our particle moving at 0.9 c has a rate of 269,813,212 meters per second. It has a time (life-span) of 20 nanoseconds or 0.00000002 seconds. Multiplying will show you that the particle will move a distance of about 5.396 meters before it decays. At 0.95 c, it will move 8.544 meters. At 0.98 c it will move 14.690 meters.

Your eyes are probably glazing over by now. The point is by altering the speed of the particle you alter the point in space where it decays.


So how do we weaponize this? Say we have a particle that easily passes through most matter in general (and starship armor in particular) but will eventually decay into a spray of deadly radiation. You aim your particle accelerator at the enemy starship, calculate the range between the accelerator and the enemy, then adjust the speed of the particles such that the point where they decay into deadly radiation is inside the center of the enemy starship. It is like teleporting a burst of radiation into the enemy ship's guts.

Now you see why the meson accelerator is so deadly.

Why the "meson" in "meson accelerator"? Because the people who wrote the Traveller RPG figured that the particle called the neutral pi-meson (pions) would work. They have a mean lifetime of 0.000000084 nanoseconds, and decay into a splendidly nasty spray of gamma rays, electrons and antimatter electrons.


Unfortunately, the meson accelerator shares the same problem with plasma weapons: they won't work. Anthony Jackson points out:

  • Pions are stopped by armor (because they are affected by the strong nuclear force)
  • Pions do not have a life span of exactly 0.000000084 nanoseconds. That is the half life. This means along the entire beam pions are decaying, by the time you reach 0.000000084 nanoseconds half of the pions in the beam have decayed. So there is not a pin-point dot where the pions decay, it is a gradual decay along the whole beam.
  • If you can accelerate pions to such high velocities that the "decay point" is in a ship several million meters away, the particles will have so much energy that you don't have to use pions. At that energy, a beam of garden variety electrons will instantly vaporize any armor that is made out of matter. The gamma factor will be about 1016. This means every single one of the zillions of subatomic pions will have a blast energy of 2.16 × 105 joules. That's right, each single subatomic particle will have the energy of an antipersonnel land mine.

In defense of the authors of Traveller, much of this nuclear science had not been discovered at the time Traveller was written. Later version of the Traveller game try to retcon this by saying the meson accelerator was invented by George Meson, and it actually works by some hand-waving way, and has nothing to do with pions at all.

MUON GUN

To amplify what Anthony said:

Pions interact via the nuclear forces. A beam of pions traveling through a material will have a chance of hitting an atomic nucleus. A nucleus has an effective cross sectional "size" of about 1 × 10-30 m2 for high energy particles. A cubic meter of solid or liquid matter with atoms spaced about 0.1 nm apart (a typical atomic spacing) will contain 1 × 1030 nuclei. The total combined cross sectional "area" for the beam to interact with is thus about 1 × 10-30 m2/nucleus * 1 × 1030 nuclei = 1 m2 — the same cross sectional area as our cubic meter of matter. Thus, a beam of particles interacting only via nuclear forces can expect to hit a nucleus after going through about 1 meter of solid or liquid matter (or about 1000 meters of gas at atmospheric density, since gas is about 1000 times less dense). Note that this distance is not affected by relativistic time dilation — there are just as many nuclei in your path no matter how fast you go.

When a pion hits a nucleus at these energies, the nucleus will either have a chip knocked off — a proton, neutron, alpha particle, deuteron, or triton — or shatter into fragments. These nuclear pieces will have considerable energy of their own, hit other nuclei, cause more fragmentation, and so on, while those pieces that are charged will also lose energy to ionization. The pion may or may not be captured when it interacts. If it is not captured, it keeps going (although with less energy) and can knock into more nuclei.

Note that these nuclear interactions are not tunable to some precise distance — they occur throughout the path of the beam as pions and fragments encounter nuclei.

Also, the time to decay is random. A pion might live on average 8.6 × 10-17 seconds in its own rest frame, but this means that half of your pions will have decayed before 8.6 × 10-17 seconds is up, and half are still around. After 17.2 × 10-17 seconds, you still have one quarter of your original number of pions still waiting around to decay, and one-eighth of the pions after 25.8 × 10-17 seconds. If you turn these into a beam of relativistic particles to delay their decay time, you still get them decaying at random all along their beam path, not at one specific point.

Now there is one possible retro-fit justification to this conundrum. At the time Traveler was written, particle physics was still figuring out a lot of the stuff we know about today. Today, meson means a particle composed of a quark and an anti-quark, but back then a meson was a particle with a mass significantly more than an electron but significantly less than a proton or neutron. One of the "mesons" was the "mu-meson," which we now categorize as a sort of heavy electron and not a meson at all. Muons, as they are now called, do not interact via the strong nuclear force but they are charged. Charged particles lose energy at a well defined rate as they go through matter (depending on the particle's charge and speed, the density of the matter, and some details on the chemical and electronic properties of the matter like how hard it is to knock electrons off). Since all the particles in the beam are losing energy at the same rate, they all have nearly the same energy at any point along the beam as they go through matter. In particular, this means they all come to a stop at more or less the same point. If it is a muon, it will decay after it stops into a highly energetic electron plus a couple of neutrinos. The highly energetic electron will dump all its energy into the surrounding material very rapidly. Meanwhile, muons themselves are extremely penetrating — muons from cosmic rays have been known to penetrate not only the entire atmosphere but over a kilometer of rock. By tuning the energy of a beam of muons, and with a good estimate of how thick your target is and a rough idea of its density and composition, you can choose an energy so that all the muons come to a stop in the middle of the target due to ionization losses and then dump a lot of energy there with their decays. You can only do this because muons do not interact via the strong nuclear force, so they do not hit nuclei like mesons or neutrons or protons would — this makes muons far more penetrating.

Alas, muons have a lifetime of about 2 microseconds. If you are tuning the energy to choose how deeply into the target the muons decay, you can't boost the muons up to ultra-relativistic energies to give them enough time dilation to reach distant targets (that would give them so much energy that they would seriously overpenetrate). With a maximum time dilation of maybe 10 for practical purposes, this gives a muon gun a maximum range of around 6 km — less for thinner targets that need lower energy muons if you want the beam to stop in the middle (more precisely, you will have lost half your muons at 6 km with a time dilation of 10 — the beam still goes on a bit further with diminished intensity, but after a few multiples of 6 km, the beam will have been attenuated so much that it will not do anything significant).

Luke Campbell

Strangelet Bomb

Subatomic particles such as protons and neutrons are classified as hadrons. Unlike leptons, hadrons are composed of smaller particles called quarks, you may have heard of them.

Quarks come in six varieties, though pretty much all the matter you have ever come into contact with contained only "up" quarks and "down" quarks. The other varieties are charm, top, bottom, and strange. The other varieties all have more mass than the basic up and down quarks, so other quarks tend to decay into basic quarks.

Strange quarks are only a little bit more massive than up and down quarks. In all known strange-quark containing hadrons, the strange quark quickly decays as expected. But physicists Bodmer and Witten have formulated the Strange Matter Hypothesis, which implies that the decay may not happen if one has a large collection of quarks (a "Strangelet"). The theory predicts that the stable state would be an equal number of up, down, and strange quarks; instead of just up and down quarks. This is due to the Pauli exclusion principle, which I won't bore you with. Whether the Strange Matter Hypothesis is true or not depends upon the surface tension of strange matter. If it is large enough, the hypothesis is true. So far physicists have been unable to determine the value of its surface tension.

"So what?" I hear you grumble irritably. Well, this what:

Strangelets can infect ordinary matter, transforming it into more strangelets.

Does anybody remember the fictional Ice-nine from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle? Drop a piece of the stuff into the Atlantic and soon all the water on Terra becomes solid and everybody dies. The word you are looking for is "chain-reaction."

If strange matter has a large enough surface tension, a larger collection is more stable than a smaller. In contact with ordinary matter, that matter will move to the more stable energy state, i.e., it will transform into more strange matter. And when matter moves to a more stable state, the excess energy is released (which is basically what powers a nuclear warhead).

Dr. Luke Campbell points out that for a chain reaction, the strangelets have to be negatively charged or neutral. If they are positively charged they will be repelled by positively charged atomic nuclei, and therefore cannot get close enough for infection.

So a speck of strange matter dropped on Terra will gradually consume it, converting it (and everybody living on it) into a hot lump of strange matter.

This is the reason why everybody was screaming about the the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) experiment at Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. They were afraid one of the experiments would spit out a strangelet with results indistinguishable from a visit by Galactus. Most scientists think the possibility is far fetched, and the fact that you are alive to read these words shows that nothing has happened. So far.

Until the value of strangelet surface tension can be determined, we will not know if strangelet bombs are possible or not. But the idea has already been used in several science fiction stories, so the idea at least is close to being mainstream.

The Burning of Litash (4)

CS Unyielding Order, Litash high orbitals.

“Grid configured.”

“Special package CALYX HOLLOW on the rails, launch when ready.”

“Permissive action set, authentication 0x991AC38575AA0D0E. Admiral, do you wish to deploy the weapon?”

“Deploy it. Right in the starport center, Mr. mor-Calarek.”

“Aye-aye, ma’am. Right in the center.”

90,000 miles above the surface of Litash, battered in places but still mostly untouched, a near-imperceptible thrum was felt aboard the battlecruiser as one of its axial missile tubes opened and spat out the CALYX HOLLOW package, a tiny cylinder of gray-painted metal. Twin flashes of light, one upon the ship’s hull and one upon the package, marked the invisible beam of a plaser reaching out from the ship and burning off a fragment of the package’s ablative propellant; and at this touch of thrust, it began to accelerate downwards into Litash’s gravity well.

CALYX HOLLOW was a weapon almost trivial in design. No trigger or detonator was needed, and no guidance system fitted. Once it had been launched, the weapons package simply tumbled on a ballistic trajectory into Litash’s atmosphere. A few surviving ground weapons attempted to engage it, without hope of success with the orbital and ground sensor networks both smashed, but even had they been able to target it, it would have made no difference to the outcome, for the best they could achieve would be to fragment the casing early.

But the tough casing remained intact, cloaked in the plasma shock of its uncontrolled reentry, until only a few miles above the planet’s surface the stress of burn-throughs ripped it apart, shattering the delicate containment system within it and exposing its contents to the planet’s air.

Strangelets. Unstable particles, kept artificially intact within the weapon; generated in nature in tiny quantities, harmless due to the speed of their decay. But this was no single strangelet generated by a cosmic-ray impact; within CALYX HOLLOW’s containment was a mass of strangelets calculated to cause immediate prompt criticality. As they spilled into the relatively thick baryonic matter of Litash’s air, they merged with nearby nuclei, catalyzing their immediate collapse into more strangelets, and more, and more…

From the Unyielding Order, light flared over the target, blossoming instantly from a blue-white pinprick to an eye-searing flare hundreds of miles across, driving a visible miles-deep ripple of atmosphere before it, only to crash back into the hollow remaining as the flare itself collapsed – and the display blinked out and filled with sensor failure warnings, while the particle detectors screamed and fell silent as the radiation wavefront swept across them.

Caliéne Sargas’s throaty chuckle filled the silent bridge. “Ha! Well, Cyprium, now we know the damn thing works.”

“Indeed. Although I’m considering passing a note along to the design team about their stand-off range estimates – that was a bit closer than I’d’ve liked.”

“Captain, damage reports as soon as possible, and contact the rest of the squadron for theirs. And have the Surgeon-Lieutenant report to the bridge with his rad-test kits.”

She paused, then added, “And get someone out there in a cutter to find out if the planet’s still there.”

The Burning of Litash (5)

“These images are taken from the records provided by the command vessel of the fleet that carried out ‘Operation Ruby Gauntlet Sable’, the Unyielding Order…”

The ravaged planet hung in the center of the Conclave amphitheater, surface black and charred save for its fiery disfigurement; a crater over a thousand miles wide, filled with a sea of magma welling up through the world’s cracked crust, belching steam into the wracked air at its edge where it intersected the former coast. Newborn volcanoes shouldered their way into the sky at its fringes and along radiating cracks, as the world heaved in the orogenic aftershocks of the detonation.

“These are simply the primary effects of the strangelet bomb deployed by the Empire’s task force. The detonation set the atmosphere of the planet ablaze. Firestorms driven by the pressure wave swept around the world, incinerating not merely everyone who escaped the initial blast, but the entire planetary ecology. The direct radiation and particle showers produced by the bomb have rendered much of the planet radioactive. That alone will render Litash unhabitable for a thousand years.”

~~~

“Ah, ni Korat, sit down. I’m surprised you wanted to be seen meeting at a time like this.”

“We’re already so close to you in the public eye, it’ll hardly matter. And all of us are nervous right now – everyone’s counting on me to find out what’s going on.”

~~~

“Technically, this is not a violation of the Accords as written. Litash was not a signatory to any of the Accords, nor has there been any specific prohibition on the use of strangelet weapons. Litash was a world which supported piracy, slavetaking, and other crimes against Accord members; a general threat to all the Worlds. None of us here would quibble with the right of any Accord member to destroy the Litashian fleet with no quarter given, nor to prosecute general warfare against the Litashian government. But this! This is the destruction of an entire world, its entire population, its entire ecology. This cannot be tolerated by the galactic community, surely. If a smaller polity of the Accord had done this, it would be subject to the most severe censure, and it must therefore be so even if one of the Powers.”

Absorbic Bomb

This little nasty weapon is from The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. It isn't quite forbidden by the laws of physics, but it sure looks questionable.

When you get right down to it, the basis of most bombs is Einstein's good ol' E = mc2. A little bit of matter is convereted into lots and lots of energy, which causes an explosion and inflicts damage on the target. This applies equally well to a bomb based on dynamite, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, or antimatter.

Pellegrino and Zebrowski wondered what would happen if you ran the equation in reverse? BOOM! and lots of energy is sucked up from the blast radius and converted into a bit of matter. Ground zero would suddenly be at zero Kelvin, with a bit of extra dust floating in the air. Behold the power of m = E / c2

They called it an "absorbic bomb."

THE KILLING STAR

(ed note: the Intruder aliens have killed everybody on Terra via relativistic bombardment. Now they are mopping up the survivors. Colonists on Sargenti-Peterson comet have flown the comet into the solar corona in order to hide, and mask their neutrino emissions. They use "absorbic bombs" as coolant.)

”I think I have most of the rough edges smoothed out of our cooling system,” said Anjin. "You're going to love this.”

“I expect I will," said Tam. "It had better be good.”

Tam did not interrupt the engineer as he explained the production and detonation of the little "absorbic bombs” that now made human survival possible near the bottom of the solar corona. The instantaneous conversion of energy to matter: the bombs were so childishly simple that it would have taken an Einstein to think of them, or an alien invasion forcing the redesign of Anjin’s brain chemistry to quicken him into seeing the obvious.

"Detonated in tandem, just below the comet's surface, they form a cold barrier through which none of the Sun's heat can possibly seep… unless we want it to—"

Tam was well aware that the temperature outside was comparable to standing within a half kilometer of the Hiroshima bomb. Removing all that heat before it could wear away the comet's outer layers of rock was going to create a constant buildup of mass—which, according to the chart taking shape in her imagination, would, over the course of many years, drag the comet down into violently rising and falling columns of gas even if the accumulation rate was only a few grams of matter per minute. But Tam found comfort in the certainty that she could not possibly be the first to imagine the problem, and guessed that Anjin had already found a way to thwart what seemed an inevitable and irreversible progression.

”I would never want to make a gross claim that my absorbic bombs alone can keep us alive. In fact, without some very careful fine-tuning we could easily be floating in this room at near absolute zero right now, frozen to death even as we go into the circle of hell. Now, two things are happening to us as we ride through the solar atmosphere, neither of which is very good for sustaining orbit."


(ed note: an Intruder ship follows the comet in, and starts shooting it with magnetic bottles containing flecks of frozen antimatter hydrogen. The Intruders get a surprise.)

The first attempted shelling of Sargenti-Peterson (with antimatter bottles) had been held off by a cluster of absorbic bombs racing in the opposite direction. Tam guessed that the Intruders must have smugly expected to chip away with impunity at the comet's stern, then punch through to the core by throwing just one stream of antimatter containers down the long, narrow corridor. She grinned, wishing she could have known what went through their minds as stores of precious antihydrogen detonated halfway to their target; and she recalled with a small measure of pride one of her more hair-raising theories about what would happen when an absorbic bomb met an antimatter bomb and they detonated side by side. It had seemed unlikely from the start, but if that particular speculation had turned out to be true, the antihydrogen, upon converting from supercooled ”white cake" to energy, would have been reassembled instantaneously in the heart of the absorbic bomb as supercooled antihydrogen … until it struck the Intruder ship head-on and briefly created a second sun within the Sun.

But judging from all the available evidence, the antimatter had been resurrected as ordinary matter. It did not kill the bastards, Tam told herself, but it sure as hell gave them something to think about.


"That could be a mistake for them," Anjin said. "Do you know What happens when an absorbic bomb detonates without an accompanying nuclear explosion? I'll wager they've never seen anything like this before!"

A small voice in the left side of Tam’s brain began reciting conversion formulae, and her right brain began running motion pictures of an absorbic bomb exploding near her home town on Earth. For twenty kilometers in every direction, she pictured the inverse of a nuclear explosion… a dark wing instead of a burst of light cutting across the sky as the temperature plunged to absolute zero and the air crystallized instantly…houses, trees, cars, and the people inside frozen to the rigidity of a child's sand castle, and about to be scattered just as easily… a massive implosion instead of an explosion as air from the surrounding countryside rushed in to fill the vacuum .


25. The battle within the Sun is, of course, pure fiction, constrained only by the hard facts of magnetic field projection, solar physics, and orbital mechanics. The absorbic bomb, through which energy can be converted instantaneously into matter (the inverse of a conventional nuclear explosion) does not yet exist, and may never exist unless, according to Powell and Pellegrino, a sufficient number of magnetic monopoles can be found, or created in atomic accelerators and brought together in just the right geometry to produce … Well, perhaps we're all better off not dwelling on how to create this particular nightmare.

From THE KILLING STAR by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski (1995)

Eldraeverse

Trope-a-Day: Weapon of Mass Destruction

Weapon of Mass Destruction: Per the Ley Accords (i.e., the Laws and Customs of War), in descending order of aargh, you’ve got:

  • Star-Killing Weapons
  • Planet-Killing Weapons
    • large/fast kinetic impacters, including asteroid drops, planet-targeted strangelet bombs, and relativistic k-kill weapons
    • extremely large [strategic-plus] energy-burst weapons, including nucleonic and antimatter warheads
    • self-replicating planetary-scale war machines [berserker probes]
  • Uncontrollable Self-Replicating Infoweapons and Memetic Weapons that affect systems beyond their legitimate targets, propagate themselves widely across the extranet, and lie dormant in archives to come out and kill innocent people ten thousand years later.
  • Ecocidal Weapons
    • merely large [strategic-plus] energy-burst weapons or ongoing bombardments with same
    • general bombardments with small kinetic impactors [smaller asteroid drops, de-orbited satellites/stations, or orbital k-kill systems]
    • uncontrolled self-replicating weapons [autonomous goo, unchained bioweapons, technophages, and clanking replicators]
    • global ecoweapons and phage weapons
    • the use of persistent ecoweapons and bioweapons
    • salting nucleonic weapons [say, cobalt bombs]
    • chemical weapons likely to permanently damage or accumulate in ecosystems

Using any of the first three types anywhere, or the fourth on a garden world, will get your entire polity blasted and governance wiped out even if it takes the use of otherwise prohibited technologies to do it; these are technologies that eliminate habitable worlds – and those are really goddamned expensive – or tend to run beyond any reasonable control. Ergo, they’re the galaxy’s primary do-not-f**k-with list.

Mere tactical-to-strategic nucleonic/antimatter weapons, non-persistent chemical and biological weapons, incendiary weapons, cerebroergetic weapons, and nanoweapons are not covered by this treaty, or considered the equivalent of WMDs. Not enough mass. They’re all fair game.

Ridiculous Handwavium

Tractor Beams

Attractor beams are laser-like beams of energy that pull the target closer to your ship, while pressor beams push the target away. Pressors are also called "repulsors", "repellors", or "deflectors". Often a unit that can emit both attractor beams and pressor beams is called a "tractor" beam (though sometimes that term is just an abbreviation for attractor beam). Some authors call tractor beams "Traction Beams", which doesn't look right to me. Sounds like a ray you'd use on a patch of black ice to prevent your car from skidding.

These more or less totally science fictional (if you disregard things like using microscopic laser beams as optical tweezers to move microbes around) (maybe I spoke too soon. See articles below). Tractor Beams are like super-duper electromagnets, but much better. Electromagnets can only attract ferrous objects, while tractor beams can both attract and repel objects made of any material.

Magnets broadcast their attractive effect in all directions, all ferrous objects in the vicinity are drawn in. Tractor and pressor beams are beams, any object not actually struck by the beam is unaffected. Tractor beams can pluck one object out of a group and leave the others undisturbed.

Electromagnets attraction strength falls off as the 1/r4 inverse square law, while tractor beams tend to have absurdly long ranges (with the exception of the Geegee fields in Poul Anderson's TALES OF THE FLYING MOUNTAINS. They had a range of a few centimeters, so ships had to touch hulls in order to grapple each other).

Young readers may believe that tractor beams were invented by the writers of the original Star Trek (1966). Even younger readers may believe it made its first appearance in the movie Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). I've got news for you, the first example I found was the "Attractive Ray" featured in Edmund Hamilton's Crashing Suns, published in 1928!. "Attractor" and "Pressor" beams appear in E. E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space (1929). The term "tractor beam" appears to originate in E. E. "Doc" Smith's Spacehounds of IPC (1931).

In James White's novel Star Surgeon (1963) we find a weaponized version of the tractor-pressor beam, the so-called "Rattler." These weapons attract then repel the target at 80 gravities, several times a minute. When used on an entire ship, the hapless crewmembers are shaken like the dried beans in a baby's rattle. If focused down to just affect a small spot on the target's hull, the shear forces can rip the hull like it was wet cardboard. This was also used on C.C. MacApp's nearly forgotten and definitely underrated novel Recall Not Earth.

In the Exordium series by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge, "ruptors" fire unpolarized gravitons to shake their target to pieces. If you polarize the gravitons you have a tractor beam.

In E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series, tractor beams are used to anchor the inertialess target so it can be damaged by weapon beams (otherwise the weapon beam pushes the intertialess ship away at lightspeed but does not harm it). In response, the enemy developed "tractor beam shears", which were planes of energy capable of "cutting" a tractor beam. Of course if your ship had more tractor beam projector than the target had tractor shears, the target was out of luck.

Doc Smith also implies that if you hit a ship with a attractor and a pressor beam, you can pin the ship at the distance where the force of the two beams balance. He also thinks that you can move the pinned ship laterally left and right by swinging the beam projectors, but that doesn't make sense to me.

Also in Doc Smith's Skylark series, the Osnomian hand guns are very silent, since bullets are propelled not with gunpowder, but by "force-field projection." So logically if one has tractor beams, one also has the equivalent of a railgun or coilgun. In MacApp's Recall Not Earth, tractor beams are used to launch torpedoes out of their tubes.

If you want some nice technobabble, a tractor beam can be hand-waved as a sort of laser using gravitons instead of photons.

GURPS: Lensman

Tractor Beams
     These beams pull their target to the beam generator, and vice versa. They are used for a wide variety of purposes, such as cargo handling, fine maneuvering and grappling in combat.
     The effect of a critical failure on any tractor beam use varies with the use. Most tractor beam mounts are reinforced to support the full weight of the ship under heavy acceleration, so it would be difficult (but hardly impossible) to tear the beam generator out of its mounting. If neither the beaming installation nor the grappled object mount screens, a collision is likely.

Pressor Beams
     Pressor beams (sometimes called repellors) are exactly like tractor beams, except that they work in reverse, pushing instead of pulling, and they cannot be cut. They are the same cost and weight as a tractor.
     Tractors and pressors are an integral part of the Chung (so-called "tensegrity") doctrine of space strategy, used to link massive formations of ships of the line into integral structures.

Tractor Shears
     A tractor shear is a modified pressor that is targeted at the enemy's tractor beam, and sets up an interference pattern which breaks the tractor's grip. The shear does not need to be held on the tractor; even momentary interference is sufficient to cut the beam. The tractor operator may immediately attempt to re-establish a lock, but he must begin anew.

Tractor Zones
     Immediately upon the invention of the tractor shear (above), the scientists of the Patrol began development of the "uncuttable" tractor. What they devised was a biphase version of the meteor screen, a globular shell of force that absorbed all momentum imparted to it and transferred it to the projector and its mounts. While a meteor screen only affects incoming matter, the tractor zone works in both directions.
     The tractor zone is formed uniformly around its generator. All matter contacting its spherical shell of force loses all radial momentum, and stops moving inward or outward. (Any angular momentum remains, and the matter slides around the shell.) Tractor shears, designed to interfere with beams, have no effect on this area of force.
     The target's radial momentum is transferred directly to the mounts of the projector, so those mounts must be constructed to withstand the most violent inert impulses the target can impose, or major damage will result.

From GURPS: Lensman by Sean Barrett (1994)
Rattler 1

By the fourth day the attack showed no signs of diminishing. The rattlers on the outer hull were going almost constantly, their power drain making the lights flicker.

The principle which furnished artificial gravity for the floor and compensated for the killing accelerations used by the ships also lay behind the weapons of both sides — the repulsion screen, originally a meteor protection device, the tractor and pressor beams, and the rattler which was a combination of both. The rattler pushed and pulled — vibrated — depending on how narrowly it was focused, at up to eighty Gs. A push of eighty gravities then a pull of eighty gravities, several times a minute. Naturally it was not always focused accurately on target, both ships were moving and taking counter-measures, but it was still tight enough to tear the plating off a hull or, in the case of a small ship, to shake it until the men inside rattled.

There was no fine diagnostic skill required in the treatment of these rattled men. It was all too plain that they suffered from multiple and complicated fractures, some of them of nearly every bone in their bodies. Many times when he had to cut one of the smashed bodies out of its suit Conway wanted to yell at the men who had brought it in, "What do you expect me to do with this. . ."

But this was alive, and as a doctor he was supposed to do everything possible to make it stay that way.

From Star Surgeon by James White (1963)
Rattler 2

The main screen showed a line of heavy cruisers playing ponderous follow-the-leader along the first section of the incision, rattlers probing deep while their pressers held the edges of the wound apart to allow deeper penetration by the next ship in line. Like all of the Emperor class ships they were capable of delivering a wide variety of frightfulness in very accurately metered doses, from putting a few streets full of rioters to sleep to dispensing atomic annihilation on a continental scale. The Monitor Corps rarely allowed any situation to deteriorate to the point where the use of mass destruction weapons became the only solution, but they kept them as a big and potent stick — like most policemen, the Federation's law-enforcement arm knew that an undrawn baton had better and more long-lasting effects than one that was too busy cracking skulls. But their most effective and versatile close-range weapon — versatile because it served equally well either as a sword or a plowshare — was the rattler.

A development of the artificial gravity system which compensated for the killing accelerations used by Federation spaceships, and of the repulsion screen which gave protection against meteorites or which allowed a vessel with sufficient power reserves to hover above a planetary surface like an old-time dirigible airship, the rattler beam simply pushed and pulled, violently, with a force of up to one hundred Gs, several times a minute.

It was very rarely that the corps were forced to use their rattlers in anger — normally the fire-control officers had to be satisfied with using them to clear and cultivate rough ground for newly established colonies — and for the optimum effect the focus had to be really tight. But even a diffuse beam could be devastating, especially on a small target like a scout ship. Instead of tearing off large sections of hull plating and making metallic mincemeat of the underlying structure, it shook the whole ship until the men inside rattled.

From Major Operation by James White (1971)
FANTASY INTO SCIENCE, OR REALIZING THE IMPOSSIBLE: TRACTOR BEAMS

Short of destroying a whole world with planet-breaking weapons, the most action-filled moments in science fiction come when opposing spacecraft clash. As phasers fire and missiles launch, ships frantically maneuver, attack, or spectacularly explode. But sometimes the aim is to capture a spaceship intact, or if she has superior speed, to grab and hold her while battering down her defenses. That is the space version of a fighting technique from the days of wooden sailing ships, which is to pull an enemy ship close and hold her with grappling hooks and ropes, then board her, or pound her into wreckage at point-blank range.

In space, this tactic needs a futuristic version of hooks and ropes – a tractor beam. Like the force of gravity in nature, a tractor beam pulls things toward its source; but in science fiction, it is stronger than ordinary gravity, and unlike gravity, it can be aimed. Tractor beams first showed up in the Buck Rogers stories and the “space operas” of Edward E. “Doc” Smith from the 1920s and 1930s. They still appear in Star Trek, the film District 9 (2009) and other contemporary science fiction.

Gravity may feel all too strong when you are jogging uphill, but technically it is the weakest of the universe’s four fundamental forces (in descending strength, the others are the strong nuclear, electromagnetic, and weak nuclear forces). Gravity’s pull takes on real power only when it arises from a massive object like a planet or a star. The mass of even the biggest spacecraft could not generate enough force to yank in another spacecraft. Going beyond this to create a powerful, directed artificial gravity needs a technology we do not yet have a clue about.

But there is another way to manipulate objects without touching them, using something you would not think has physical impact: light. Light’s intangibility might seem to imply that it cannot affect solid objects. By the weird rules of quantum mechanics, however, light is both an electromagnetic wave and a flock of particles – photons – that carry energy and momentum. As Isaac Newton worked out long ago, a change in momentum produces a force; and so, no differently from baseballs or billiard balls, when photons hit something and thus change their momentum, they exert a small force called radiation pressure.

On Earth, the radiation pressure from sunlight is 50 million times weaker than atmospheric pressure, but a laser can intensify the effect to a useful level. In the optical tweezers method, developed at Bell Laboratories in 1986, a focused laser beam suspends small biological objects like bacteria and DNA molecules in mid-air and can be used to manipulate them. On a larger scale, the Sun’s radiation pressure can drive a spacecraft, if the ship is outfitted with a big sail that can capture the push from many photons. In 2010, the IKAROS spacecraft launched by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) deployed a sail with an area of 200 square meters and headed off toward the planet Venus, accelerated by sunlight.

These applications may not be all that surprising, because it is easy to picture tiny bullets of light pushing an object. But could light possibly attract rather than repel a body, and would that be of any earthly use? To NASA, the answer to both questions is “yes.” The agency envisions “unearthly” uses such as cleaning up the orbital debris ringing our planet and pulling an incoming space rock off course before it hits the Earth; but like those imaginary space battles, these efforts would require strong forces and will happen only in the future if at all.

However, NASA also wants to pull in smaller things like tiny extraterrestrial particles that can carry valuable information. Obtaining such samples is a rapidly growing part of space exploration. NASA’s Stardust space probe, launched in 1999, gathered microscopic dust particles from a comet called Wild 2, and returned them to Earth for analysis in 2006. In 2003, JAXA launched its Hayabusa space craft, which retrieved bits of a small asteroid and brought them back to Earth in 2010. And just this last November, NASA launched its Mars Science Lab with the Curiosity rover, which will scoop up samples of Martian soil and analyze them for signs of life processes.

Using light to attract and manipulate small samples in space or from planets and other bodies would complement and extend these kinds of missions, each of which takes considerable effort and expense. Light-based sample harvesting could maybe be done at a lower cost and could also allow continual monitoring, for instance, of a planetary atmosphere. According to recent research and some older results, there is reason to believe this is not just wishful thinking.

In two separate theoretical papers published last month, a group at the University of Central Florida (Negative Nonconservative Forces: Optical “Tractor Beams” for Arbitrary Objects), and another from the Technical University of Denmark and the National University of Singapore (Single Gradientless Light Beam Drags Particles as Tractor Beams), showed how to make an object move backward along a light beam. The basic idea is deceptively simple; because the incoming photons carry momentum, if you can get some of them to bounce or scatter off the object in the same direction they are traveling – that is, in the area where the object would ordinarily cast a shadow – then to balance out the momentum going forward, the object has to move backward toward the light source. This would require a laser beam with a carefully designed pattern of varying brightness across its diameter, which is not easy to create, and so these ideas have yet to be experimentally tested. But NASA has enough faith in the approach that it started to fund research in optical tractor beams.

One other potential optical method goes back almost 50 years. In 1964, Victor Veselago, of Moscow’s Lebedev Physics Institute, theorized about an optical medium with a negative refractive index. In ordinary media like water or glass, the refractive index is a positive number that determines the speed of light in the medium and also how much a light ray bends or refracts when it enters another medium. Refraction is the reason that a stick partly inserted in water seems to break and bend upward at the water’s surface. But in a medium with a negative refractive index, the stick would display “backward” refraction and seem to bend down.

Negative refractive indices as Veselago envisioned them have been realized in carefully designed, artificially constructed media called metamaterials. In an especially intriguing breakthrough, these ideas also led to the creation of the world’s first true invisibility cloak, made in 2006 by David Smith and his group at Duke University.

Veselago predicted another “backward” result that amounts to a tractor effect, which is that a mirror embedded in a negative index material would be pulled rather than pushed by a light source. In 2009, Henri Lezec, of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, described how he and Kenneth Chau tested this theory. They fabricated a metamaterial with a negative refractive index in the form of a tiny nanoscale movable lever, and found that it was indeed pulled toward light from a laser. This would seem to be the first observation of light acting as a tractor beam according to Veselago’s theory, but the results do not fit the predicted behavior in detail. The experiment or the theory may be anomalous, and the experimental result remains under study.

If metamaterials display a true tractor effect that would be fascinating, but it would not be exactly what NASA needs to gather up space debris or interesting space dust, nor would it be useful in future space battles. To reel in a particular enemy ship, some unlucky crewmember would first have to don a spacesuit, venture out, and paint the target with negative refraction paint. If that is the case, we might just as well go back to grappling hooks, ropes, and spacesuit-wearing boarding parties armed with cutlasses.

I MUST FIND THAT TRACTOR BEAM

Membranes placed inside an interferometer could be localized at the minima of interference patterns, which sometimes involved them being pushed toward the laser. But such interference patterns required a mirror to be placed beyond the object being localized. Other, more subtle traps required setups with crossing beams or mirrors or temporal variation to create the needed trap. Nothing was quite like the simple ray gun at a distance from the object being moved.

A measure of the success of the term “Tractor Beam,” in fact, is that headline writers used it to announce developments in Optical Tweezer technology, ironi- cally explaining an existing technology by reference to a familiar but nonexis- tent technologyfi Leik Myrabo has also used the analogy for his work on Laser Propulsion, even using it directly in an article’s title.

All things change, and the nonexistence of Tractor Beams appears to be one of them. When this piece first appeared as an article in Optics and Photonics News, it was correct about tractor beams being imaginary. My reasoning for the non-existence of such devices was that one could visualize a beam of light as a stream of photons, each carrying a quantum of linear momentum, which was directed outwards, away from the source. The light might be redirected, as when dielectric microspheres refract light passing through them. The microspheres are then directed in one direction and the light beam in another, but the photons still have a net outward momentum, and only impart some sideways momentum to the microsphere. You would have to have the particle interacting with a photon in such a way that it pushed the photon forward with more momentum than it encountered the particle in order to have the particle pushed back toward the source of the beam, and that is a case of special pleading—it wouldn’t work on just any object. It would be inelastic scattering, with the photon changing color. And it would require an energy source within the particle itself.

But there are other ways to get around the difficulties. I was surprised to find that my article was cited as a history of the “tractor beam” concept in a paper published in the journal Optics Letters—“On the Concept of ‘Tractor Beams’(paywall) by S. Sukhov and A. Dogarin of the Center for Research in Optics and Lasers and Education (CREOL), at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. As they point out, it has been suggested that one can create an effective tractor beam by using two collinearly propagating beams with a slight frequency shift and appro- priate mode. In this way, one can create an “optical trap” without needing external mirrors. Items will be trapped at the nodes of the interfering beams. By adjusting the frequency difierence, one can then cause these nodes to propagate backwards toward the sources, effectively pulling the object toward the source. My objection to Tractor Beams on the basis of conservation of momentum are answered by using two photons to produce a net, necessarily small, backwards momentum.

(ed note: The article they reference is Tomáš Čižmár, Věra Kollárová, Zdeněk Bouchal and Pavel Zemánek “Sub-Micron Particle Organization by Self-Imaging of Non-Diffracting Beams,” New Journal of Physics 8 (3): 43 (2006). The authors have since gone onto write several developments of the concept. )

Sukhov and Dogariu go on to consider the requirements for nonconservative forces to provide a net inward momentum, all of which seem to require more than one co-propagating beam. They went on to generalize these results in a later paper, “Negative Nonconservative Forces: Optical ‘Tractor Beams’ for Arbitrary Objects.” (paywall) Here, as the title implies, they suggest methods of creating such beams for objects of arbitrary size and shape. The day of Edmond Hamilton’s and “Doc” Smith’s Tractor Beams may be closer than we think.

A new article that covers the history of real, physical “tractor beams” is Aristide Dogariu, Sergey Sukhov, and José Sáenz, “Optically-induced ‘negative forces’,” (paywall) Nature Photonics 7 (1): 24-27 (January 2013).

From HOW THE RAY GUN GOT ITS ZAP ch.39 by Stephen R. Wilk (2013)

Newton's Laws

In any event, pretty much all of the depictions of tractor beams totally ignore the fact that they must obey Newton's Third Law (i.e., the law of action and reaction). There are only two exceptions I am aware of. One exception is in TOM SWIFT AND THE RACE TO THE MOON, where the intrepid teenage inventor Tom uses his repelatrons for the propulsion system of his amazing spacecraft Challenger. Another is in the wargame Vector 3. In that game, your ship can use tractor beams to impose x, y, and z acceleration vectors on the enemy ship. However, due to Newton, your ship receives the same vectors in the opposite direction (e.g., if you give the enemy a +4 z acceleration, your ship receives a -4 z acceleration). Note that this only works if the two ships are of equal mass.

Anyway, Newtons says that if the starship Enterprise uses a tractor beam to reel in a Klingon battle cruiser, the Enterprise will also move towards the Klingon. Both will move towards the point called the Barycenter of the two ship system. In the same way if the Enterprise pushes away the Klingon, the Enterprise will also be pushed away from the barycenter.

The acceleration each ship will experience towards or away from the barycenter depends upon each ship's mass. Simply put: if ship Alfa has twice the mass of ship Bravo, it will be accelerated half as fast as ship Bravo. If an Imperial Star Destroyer tractors the Tantive IV, it will be accelerated about 1/110th as fast as the Tauntive. And if the Death Star tractors the Millenium Falcon, its acceleration will be so tiny as to be difficult to detect.

The actual equation is from Newton's Second Law:

a = F / m

where:

  • a = ship's acceleration (m/sec)
  • F = tractor beam energy (Newtons)
  • m = ship's mass (kg)

If you want relative acceleration, use 1 for F and measure m in terms of the other ship's mass.

Example

If the ship in question has a mass of 3.5 times the mass of the other ship, it will experience an acceleration of 1 / 3.5 = 0.29 times as much as the other ship. If the ship has a mass of 1/4 times the mass of the other ship, it will experience an acceleration of 1 / (1/4) = 1 / 0.25 = 4 times as much as the other ship.

Calculating Movement

If you want to open up a real can of worms, you can try calculating what happens if the two ships are moving when the tractor beam is turned on. I am not going to try and calculate the minute to minute effects (because it is way above my pay grade) but the final results after the two ships come into contact can be approximated by the mathematics of a completely inelastic collision. This is the equivalent of figuring the trajectory of two balls of clay that collide and stick together. I will show the equations for figuring this in two dimensions, since I am unsure of my ability to expand it to three dimensions.

Given two spacecraft with masss of M1 and M2, velocities of V1 and V2, and vector directions angles of θ1 and θ2; when they are tractor beamed and drawn together into contact, calculate the combined ships velocity Vf and vector angle θf.

Step 1: Calculate each ship's x and y coordinate displacement
  • V1x = V1 * cos(θ1)
  • V1y = V1 * sin(θ1)
  • V2x = V2 * cos(θ2)
  • V2y = V2 * sin(θ2)
Step 2: Calculate each ship's momentum
  • O1 = V1 * M1
  • O2 = V2 * M2
Step 3: Calculate each ship's momentum in the x and y axes
  • O1x = O1 * cos(θ1)
  • O1y = O1 * sin(θ1)
  • O2x = O2 * cos(θ2)
  • O2y = O2 * sin(θ2)
Step 4: Calculate the combined ship's momentum in the x and y axes
  • Ofx = O1x + O2x
  • Ofy = O1y + O2y
Step 5: Calculate the combined ship's mass
  • Mf = M1 + M2
Step 6: Calculate the combined ship's momentum
  • Of = sqrt( Ofx2 * Ofy2 )
Step 7: Calculate combined ships velocity
  • Vf = Of / Mf
Step 8: Calculate combined ships vector angle
  • θf = arc tan( Ofx / Ofy )

Tensegrity

E. E. "Doc" Smith was a big fan of attractor and pressor beams, using them in many of his space operas. For reasons that he did not go into, but which I think had to do with Newton's Laws, he sometimes had fleets use attractors and pressors to turn the entire fleet into one rigid object. I figure this gives the fleet immunity to hostile attractor beams. A solitary enemy ship trying to use an attractor on a rigid multi-ship fleet will be like you having a tug-of-war contest with a caterpillar tractor, with the cable looped through your nose-ring. The mass difference between the rigid fleet and the single enemy ship will see to that.

Anyway, in my long and misspent youth I was a fan of Doc Smith and a fan of a weird concept called Tensegrity. Tensegrity is where you have compression members (girders) held with tension members (cables) attached to the girder ends. The girders float in the air while not touching each other, held rigidly by the tension of the cables. I realized the two concepts could be combined.

In a tensegrity structure, you replace the girders with pressor beams, and the cables with attractor beams. The ships of the fleet occuply the girder ends. Instant Doc-Smithian rigid fleet! I mentioned this to Sean Barrett and he added it to GURPS: Lensman. It was only a single sentence, but I was tickled pink that it made the cut.

Now actually a tensegrity struture is not absolutely rigid. Under pressure the entire structure regularly contracts then expands. This is called "jitterbugging." This is probably a good thing, since structures that are too rigid tend to shatter instead of flexing a bit.

It is possible to make a minimal tensegrity structure, but this is not a good idea for something going into a combat situation. With a minimal structure, if one single attractor or pressor fails, the entire structure collapses. Best to have some redundant attractors and pressors to allow for combat damage.

Of course in a world without attractors and pressors there is no practical reason to want to make a rigid fleet in the first place. But after all this segment is in the "Ridiculous Handwavium" section.

GURPS: Lensman

Tractors and pressors are an integral part of the Chung (so-called "tensegrity") doctrine of space strategy, used to link massive formations of ships of the line into integral structures.

(ed note: for the record, I read about Doc Smith using tractors and pressors in ship formations in the early 1970s when I was a teenager. I learned about tensegrity in in my college years during the late 1970s, and quickly noticed the possible connection between the two. In 1992 I became aware that Sean Barrett was working on GURPS: Lensman and started corresponding with him to offer my help, since I was sort of a Doc Smith expert. So I gave him the connection. He used it and rewarded me by using my name with it. )

From GURPS: Lensman by Sean Barrett (1993)
Spacehounds of IPC

High in the air, another signal wailed up and down a peculiar scale of sound and the mighty host of vessels formed smoothly into symmetrical groups of seven. Each group then moved with mathematical precision into its allotted position in a complex geometrical formation—a gigantic, seven-ribbed, duplex cone in space. The flagship flew at the apex of this stupendous formation; behind, and protected by, the full power of the other floating citadels of the forty-nine groups of seven.


"All captains, attention!" Finally, in a high latitude, the flagship sent out final instructions. "The Hexans have detected us and our long range observers report that they are coming to meet us in force. We will now go into the whirl, and proceed with the maneuvers exactly as they have been planned. Whirl!"

At the command, each vessel began to pursue a tortuous spiral path. Each group of seven circled slowly about its own axis, as though each structure were attached rigidly to a radius rod, and at the same time spiraled around the line of advance in such fashion that the whole gigantic cone, wide open maw to the fore, seemed to be boring its way through the air.


With the terrific acceleration employed by the Hexan spheres, it was not long until the leading squadron of fighting globes neared the Vorkulian war-cone. This advance guard was composed of the new, high-acceleration vessels. Their crews, with the innate blood-lust and savagery of their breed, had not even entertained the thought of accommodating their swifter pace to that of the main body of the fleet. These vast, slow-moving structures were no more to be feared than those similar ones whose visits they had been repulsing for twenty long Jovian years—by the time the slower spheres could arrive upon the scene there would be nothing left for them to do. Therefore, few in number as were the vessels of the vanguard, they rushed to the attack. In one blinding salvo they launched their supposedly irresistible planes of force—dazzling, scintillating planes under whose fierce power the studying, questing, scouting fortresses previously encountered had fled back southward; cut, beaten, and crippled. These spiraling monsters, however, did not pause or waver in their stolidly ordered motion. As the Hexan planes of force flashed out, the dull green metal walls broke into a sparkling green radiance, against which the Titanic bolts spent themselves in vain. Then there leaped out from the weird brilliance of the walls of the fortresses great shafts of pale green luminescence—tractor ray after gigantic tractor ray, which seized upon the Hexan spheres and drew them ruthlessly into the yawning open end of that gigantic cone.

Then, in each group of seven, similar great streamers of energy reached out from fortress to fortress, until each group was welded into one mighty unit by twenty-one such bands of force. The unit formed, a ray from each of its seven component structures seized upon a designated sphere, and under the combined power of those seven tractors, the luckless globe was literally snapped into the center of mass of the Vorkulian unit. There seven dully gleaming red pressor rays leaped upon it, backed by all the power of seven gigantic fortresses, held rigidly in formation by the unimaginable mass of the structures and by their twenty-one prodigious tractor beams. Under that awful impact, the screens and walls of the Hexan spheres were exactly as effective as so many structures of the most tenuous vapor. The red glare of the vortex of those beams was lightened momentarily by a flash of brighter color, and through the foggy atmosphere there may have flamed briefly a drop or two of metal that was only liquefied. The red and green beams snapped out, the peculiar radiance died from the metal walls, and the gigantic duplex cone of the Vorkuls bored serenely northward—as little marked or affected by the episode as is a darting swift who, having snapped up a chance insect in full flight, darts on.


Onward and upward flashed the gigantic duplex cone, its entire whirling mass laced and latticed together into one mammoth unit by green tractor beams and red pressors. These tension and compression members, of unheard-of power, made of the whole fleet of three hundred forty-three fortresses a single stupendous structure—a structure with all the strength and symmetry of a cantilever truss! Straight through that wall of yellow vibrations the vast truss drove, green walls flaming blue defiance as the absorbers overloaded; its doubly braced tip rearing upward, into and beyond the vertical as it shot through that searing yellow wall. Simultaneously from each heptagon there flamed downward a green shaft of radiance, so that the whole immense circle of the cone's mouth was one solid tractor beam, fastening upon and holding in an unbreakable grip mile upon mile of the Hexan earthworks.

From Spacehounds of IPC by E. E. "Doc" Smith (1931)

Biological Weapons

MIGHTY MORPHIN TRANSFORMERS

      Players may be amused or annoyed by my view of future technology. Radiators doing yeoman duty on a laser thermal engine suddenly transform into mining and smelting equipment. A large rocket with several motors reassembles itself into several missiles with nuclear warheads. A rocket gets a new weapon even though that technology was not available when it left orbit.

     Versatility is a key factor in space, as elsewhere. Energy is abundant in space, but materials are scarce. Thus, rockets that are able to rearrange themselves for every occasion. The game provides the basic raw materials: metals (represented in the game by space wood (foamed titanium)), hydrogen, water, and carbon. Materials have to be recycled, only being used as propellent as efficiently as possible. Hydrogen and carbon are the basis of hydrocarbons, the backbone of the versatile organic molecules. Hydrogen and oxygen can power fuel cells, forming water. Hydrogen is also the universal propellent.

     For instance, imagine a peaceful freighter that realizes that an attack is imminent (in space this means the ship has only a couple of weeks to prepare). Bioengineered spiders spin a framework of advanced organic material, while the onboard vapbot (vapor depositing robot) sprays on a layer of space wood. Within days the fighting mirror is finished, and the freighter is now a fighter.

     Bioengineered insects may have a real role in space weaponry.

     Their exoskeletons are like little space suits, and they can close their spiracles at will (a moisture conserving mechanism). I have seen spiders still moving after the vacuum of the electron microscope chamber.

     There is even a kind of insect, the bombardier beetle, with its own chemical rocket system. Two hypergolic chemicals (hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone) are mixed in an exothermic combustion chamber to boiling temperatures, where they are expelled in pulse jet fashion. This DNA would be useful.

     I foresee a cloud of space moths, navigating upon gossamer wings using light pressure or microwave energy beamed from the mother ship, their antennae seeking the infrared signature of their target. Descending upon the radiator of their hapless prey, they quickly make short work of it using mandibles augmented with diamonds.

From ROCKET FLIGHT rulebook by Phil Eklund (1999)
SHIPKILLER BUGS

(ed note: the good guys are the League of Planets, an interstellar coalition very much like Star Trek's Federation. The Guardians are a thoroughly nasty group of ultranational bastards mostly composed of the the Ku Klux Klan, The New John Birchers, and the remnants of Afkrikaaners in Exile.

After a bit of a war, the League manages to locate the Guardian's capital planet and sends in their main battle fleet to invest the place.

Unfortunately for the League, the Guardians have made a Faustian bargain with a newly discovered alien species they call the Outposters.

Initially the Outposters appeared to be a primitive species with cave-man levels of technology. That is a mistake, only their physics-based technology is crude. When it comes to organic technology they make the human technology look stone age. This is because the alien's internal biology is actually honest-to-Aristotle Lamarckian. On Terra, Lamarckian biology doesn't exist but it is the law on Outpost. For example, if you cut off a given alien's left middle finger, all of its descendants will also be missing their left middle finger. This makes it real easy to learn how to breed their animals to become living tools.

After some trading, the Outposters give the Guardians some horrific anti-starship weapons they bred from scratch. What the Guardians do not know is the Outposters have a double-cross in mind. They plan to hit the Guardian capital planet with several death-plagues that are 100% lethal to humans but harmless to Outposters. After the humans are all dead the Outposters will have all the time in the world to appropriate human physics-based technology, and then embark on their destiny of galactic conquest.)

      If the Impervious could hold together, survive inevitable battle damage—
     She could. Commander Higgins reported only a few more hits, from fairly small and slow-moving armor-piercing missiles of an unknown type. Strangely, the missile warheads didn’t explode. The things just bored into the ship, crashed through a few bulkheads, and came to rest. Sapper teams were taking a look at them.
     It ended in a rout. Both Guardian formations were broken. Within eight hours, the Guards lost twenty-one more ships, including the last tanker. Ten Guardian ships were unaccounted for. Probably all or some of them managed to slip through the debris and confusion of battle away, get far enough out to jump to C2 (their FTL drive). The remainder were chased down, pursued until they ran out of fuel, overtaken and destroyed. Several Guardian ships were invited to surrender. All refused. Not a single Guardian prisoner was taken.
     As of that moment, the Britannic fleet lost one cruiser, four corvettes, five frigates, eight Wombat fighters. Historians might call it a British victory, but both sides were bloodied, and the British had dead enough to mourn and holes enough torn in the chain of command. Fending off a raid is never a triumph.
     But there was time to rest, and heal, and sleep, and patch up the ships. For the survivors, that was victory enough.

     Aboard Impervious, Warsprite, and Mountbatten, the sappers worked on the odd missiles and were baffled to find no warheads there to disarm. Only some odd off-white pellets of various sizes, packed in what seemed to sawdust, that spilled out and floated around in zero-gee. Some of them were small enough to get sucked into air vents, others got caught in odd places, nooks and crannies of equipment.
     By the time they thought to x-ray the pellets, and found they were eggs, the first of them was hatching deep inside
Impervious’s air system. The shell cracked and, in the darkness, a pale, frail, worm-like thing writhed and twisted mindlessly to get free. It crawled away from the egg, clinging to the wall of the air vent with hair-like cilia. It found a plastic coverplate over an airpump.
     It began to eat the coverplate.
     It lay its first eggs two hours later, without pausing in its feeding.
     It died shorting out the pump.


     “Our Navy is going out of its tiny little mind. If this could happen to the Brits, we could be next,” he said, following Mac through the corridors of Survey Service Base. “HMS Impervious and two other major combatant ships were eaten by worms. Not the steel hulls apparently, but every kind of plastic, pressure suit fabrics, graphite structural supports, insulation, you name it. Also any foodstuff—and corpses. They’d eat through something, and lay eggs, and the eggs would hatch and eat something, and lay eggs … one malfunction, then two malfs, then twenty, a hundred at once. And the cute little buggers excrete some kind of slime that reacts with oxygen and foams up. That eats up ship’s air, so pretty soon there’s none left to breath and the blobs of foam block air vents and feed pipes and what have you. There's some sort of poison gas, too, but no one is sure if the worms produce that directly or if it’s a byproduct of the reaction that locks up the oxy in the foam. People dying because the worms ate through reinforced fabric and their pressure suits were swiss-cheesed. Ammo going up because the fucking worms ate through the trigger safeties. Airlocks shorting out and opening pressurized interiors to space. Fuel tanks rupturing. And the worms breed incredibly fast. It took about thirty-six hours for them to wreck the Imp. Captain Thomas—except he'll be an admiral by about next Tuesday because he’s all they’ve got left, there were one hundred fifteen senior Brit officers killed, and some from other planets, too—Thomas finally realized it was hopeless and gave the order to abandon ship. They starting taking crew off and the worms got aboard the rescue ships before anyone figured out what the hell was going on.

     Pete let out a deep sigh, and fell into step besides Mac. “Thomas got out okay, but there were hundreds dead. There’s nothing alive aboard the Imp and the other ships but the foam worms. They wanted to tow the Imp out of orbit before the worms shorted out an engine control and maybe rammed her into the planet, but they’re afraid to get near her for fear the eggs can survive vacuum and one egg might float into an airlock. For a while there was a rumor that the eggs could survive re-entry. Not true, but the people on-planet are going nuts for fear that the worms might get loose on the planet.

     “As I was saying, the Guards only made a few shots at the Brits. But some of those shots impacted on target, and they carried these little wonders, or rather eggs, that hatched and grew into these bastards.” The meter-wide screen was suddenly filled by the image of a foam worm. Its body was a glistening, sickly pinkish-gray, the color of meat that has begun to rot, covered with thousands of stubby hairs, cilia. It had no eyes, no apparent sense organs of any kind. “That nightmare is really only about four centimeters long. It can crawl. It has a toothless mouth that secretes God knows what, but it can dissolve practically anything. It has an anus that excretes nightmares. And it can lay eggs. God can it lay eggs. Asexual. It comes close to laying before it’s finished hatching from its own egg. A generation about every two hours! No one can figure out how it can have that fast a metabolism without literally burning up. They sent a robot camera aboard the Imp, and it radioed back these images. Before the worms ate the camera.”

     The scene shifted again. It was a zero-gravity charnel house, an abattoir, the signs of death all around, lit with the reddened gloom of emergency lighting. A blob of what might be machine oil, or blood, or something else, drifted into a wall and splattered there. Corpses and wreckage floated through the murky, poisoned air. The eye looked for signs of movement, life, in the bodies of the dead that drifted past the camera, and seemed to see it, strangely distorted, until suddenly it was clear what that movement was. Everything, everywhere, was covered with a writhing, twisting, mass of tiny gray-pink bodies that crawled and slithered and fed indiscriminately on human dead and plastic wallboard and clothing. The camera moved in on a swollen, horribly distended corpse—its skin roiling, knotting and unknotting, moving with the horrid mass of things that had eaten their way inside. The camera turned to look up at the overhead bulkhead. Blobs of the worms’ foamed excrement had accumulated over and in an air vent, clogging it hopelessly. The camera found a junction box, and looked at it, its cover eaten away, the wiring inside sparking and melting, shorted out by the corpses of dozens of the worms. And live worms were feeding on the dead. One of the ghastly little destroyers lost its hold and drifted off the pile of its fellows, came floating straight at the lens, wriggling, struggling in midair to find a foothold, turning end over end, closer and closer, until it landed square on the lens, blacking out the scene—

     The tape ended, the lights came up, and Pete suddenly was aware of a gagging noise coming from the office’s head. George was crouched over the toilet, being hopelessly sick. Randall’s skin had turned a greenish-white, and he looked close to joining George. Mac and Driscoll stared, grim-faced, at the blanked-out screen.

     Pete retrieved the tape from the playback unit. “The camera lens was plastic, so the worm ate it.” He shoved the tape in his pocket, turned, and faced the others. “Now imagine how happy and relaxed they are on Britannica right now. It might be an official secret, but try keeping that kind of disaster quiet. The Guard fleet didn't get within three quarters of a million kilometers of the planet itself, but suppose, just suppose, one missile with those things aboard was fired at the planet, or that one egg got out of the Impervious and re-entered somehow, or got aboard a ship that landed and came out on someone’s clothing—how doesn’t really matter, but suppose those nightmares got loose and started breeding on the planet… Hysteria is barely the word for it. And the one piece of good news that makes that impossible is also the worst news. They’ve found out the things can't survive except in zero-gee. They caught some worms and put ’em in sealed glass containers to study in one of the orbital stations. As soon as they carried the worms into the spin section, they died. They've checked it other ways: The eggs can survive massive acceleration, but the worms die in anything but weightlessness.

     “Why is that bad news?” Driscoll asked. “It means Britannica is safe."
     “Because it makes it even more certain that these things are artificial.”
     “The Guards bred them?” she asked.

     “Not bred,” Mac said. “Manufactured. Invented. Those aren't animals. They’re weapons. Bioweapons? I don’t know what the term would be. The old tired joke about designer genes. They decided what they wanted, drew up some blueprints, and either created a whole new creature or vastly modified an existing one. We can modify, say, a cow’s genes enough so that it can digest Kennedy's indigenous plant life. That’s about it. We managed to grow K-cows, but it strained our abilities to the limit—and killed a lot of cows before we got it right. Something like these worms is as far beyond what we can do as faster-than-light drive was beyond the Wright brothers. And if they can grow things that only live in zero-gee, they can grow things that endure gravity as well as we do—or breed an entirely different kind of creature that can attack us in a completely different way."


Barycenter Battle Zone

     Both the Guards and the Nihilists had improved their deployment techniques for the bioweapons since Britannica. The Nihilists had developed ways to delivery adult animals instead of eggs, and techniques to hold the beasts in a kind of suspended animation using a special gas mixture. The Guards had abandoned torpedoes that crashed through hulls and opened compartments to vacuum. Now they used limpet mines that attached themselves to the hull and carefully bored a hole through it. A torpedo could carry a stack of six limpets, and release them when it got close enough to the target ship. The limpets would slap themselves onto the ship, the hull-borers would do their jobs, the bioweapons would be awakened by the fresh air aboard the ship, climb, slither, or crawl aboard, and go to their deadly work.

     And there were new types of bios, each of which could wreck a ship in its own way.

     The USS Benjamin Franklin was killed by a swarm of beetle-like things the size of a man’s thumb. Each beetle, as it crawled, excreted a chain-molecule monofilament thread too thin to be seen by the unaided eye, and dragged the thread behind itself. The tail end of the thread was adhesive, and stuck firmly to the first spot of hull the beetle landed on. Two limpets successfully attached to Franklin, one amidships and one near the engine compartment. The limpets cut their holes through the hull and the beetles wandered off. Almost immediately, one of them sliced through a hydrogen feed line, and the explosive gas was injected into the cabin air mixture. Fifteen minutes later, another beetle caused a spark as its thread cut a high-voltage cable. The ship blew up.

     Europa, pride of that planet’s fleet, was wrecked by a cloud of air-borne micro-organisms that metabolized atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen with most sorts of plastic, and left hydrochloric acid and poison gases behind as waste products.

     Maxwell, a supersophisticated heavy cruiser from Bandwidth, was attacked not only by the foam worms, but by a species of spider-things bred to eat human flesh. The latter murdered the crew before the former could wreck the ship.

From ROGUE POWERS by Roger MacBride Allen (1986)

Protean Weapons

Protean weapons are ones that can transform from one weapon into another.

The Warbots

The Warbots at Critter's Gateway

ca. 7200

The warbot used at Critter’s Gateway was a very capable little vessel, as much spaceship as groundcraft. The soldier, sitting in lotus, was freed of his helmet. From an amorphoid plate at the top of the warbot, he could extrude a battleraft or a head; from two plates at the side he could extrude any of an arsenal of two hundred weapons. The circuitry of these amorphic devices was mostly magnetic and gravitic domains, which could not be altered by any amount of twisting and contorting, so they could be extruded whenever needed, otherwise remaining placid as a puddle of quicksilver in their storage tanks.

Antares, while again the little empire of space, was also the most powerful, for they had over a million of these things strutting back and forth through space.


The Quicksilver Kid

ca. 10,000

By the Eodech (10,000 A.D.) arnorphics had developed a warbot made of nothing but amorphoid metals, memory plastics, solid liquids, contact fields and other prodigies of science. Normally a simple near-globe eight feet big, the Quicksilver Kid looked very much like a glob of mercury when in action. Hands, head, battlecraft and whatnot could be extruded from whatever part of the surface area they would seem to be most useful, and the weapons system had an additional development.

Hidden in the block-circuitry of the hull was a memory center containing records of every science applicable to military purposes, as well as a mechanical design center, so that a soldier need merely size up the situation and inform his warbot to create a weapon equal to it, and hammer away. Powered by antimatter breakdown, the warbot had more than enough power to see this done. No longer were warbots shuttled about by other spacecraft, but had a speed of about one light-year per hour to make its rounds.

There were many wars in the Eodechtic centuries, but none of them especially large on the grand scale. But warbots were used in all of them. For example, the Korel Empire Collapse.

The Korel were human adaptations, two feet tall and looking like toy dolls (behaving much like them, too. Korel were well known for their immaturity). They had a little empire flourishing until 10590, when one of their kings went insane on the throne and attacked the Palaric States, which were then growing into importance. The Korel had a few worthy weapons, which aided in their conquering several planets, and then an ally, the Karpo Regime, a race of hideous gray frogs who had been waiting on the sly for some way to build a little empire. As soon as the Korel had done as much as they could, the Karpo turned on them and soon had a very effective little empire, as well as a full-time occupation in scaring the border stars of the Pale (Palaric States).

An approaching fleet of warbots, after having been ordered to sum up the situation, performed a maneuver which was historical because of its originality. A hundred thousand warbots came together and fused their masses into a thousand medium-sized battleships, which attacked the Karpo fleets. The Karpo fired a salvo at them and broke them all into monolithic chunks of wreckage, which they then went in to investigate. Twisted wreckage, once it surrounded the Karpo fleet, suddenly turned quicksilver, returned to a hundred thousand intact warbots, and destroyed forever the Karpo Regime.

The Korel were chastised mildly. One could never expect much from them in the way of wisdom.

From THE WARBOTS written and illustrated by Larry S. Todd (1968)
Crown of Infinity

(ed note: The Star Kings are the descendants of human beings who escaped from Terra before the planet was destroyed by aliens called "The Masters". Hunted for thousands of years, the Star Kings eventually develop technology to fight the Masters on equal terms. Then they discovered the Master's sinister last plan: to breed other ally alien races who have a higher innovative quotent than humans, and use the allies to create weapons superior to the Star Kings.)

But the Star Kings did not blast them (the Masters) with the awesome weapons the TEMS had given. The TEMS—the mere thought of it sent shivers up and down a man’s vertebrae. When they had learned of the last plan of the dead (Master) leader, all Star King minds had joined together, linked through the C-S headgear. If the Masters managed to breed the beings in their specimen vaults, then they did not have even one generation to find a way to victory.

It was a period of total stress that gave them the answer: a Total Environmental and Mental Simulator. A computer that could simulate or duplicate the mental processes of any actual or artificial being, and through simulated total environmental stimuli create a situation of maximum stress upon that entity. An incredible machine, against which Master and ally were powerless. No matter how much in intelligence potential Master or ally had, the TEMS always came up with a simulated being that was superior. It had no limiting factor as do the brains of living creatures. It could always be added to.


(ed note: The evil race of the Shern are invading our universe through a rip in the fabric of space and time which leads to another dimension. The Star Kings englobe the rip with their super-ships. Until...)

A little closer, thought Carruthers, and then we’ll blow the Shern so far Universes will be born, live and die before any of their kind ever come back!

“That ship!” his wife cried.

“Hadley—Soviet Union! Get back! Get back!” But the ship did not get back. It broke formation and left a gaping hole in the once tight-knit shield of the Star Kings for a tenth of a second—a tenth too long. (Hadley is the first Star King coward, fleeing in fear for his life, abandoning his fellows to their fate.)

(ed note: when a Star King ship is destroyed, it sends out a Death Call. This FTL communication can be heard all over the universe. It only contains the name of the ship that died, and the location. All other Star King ships will rush to that spot to avenge the death of one of their own.

The Star Kings name their ships after location on murdered Terra.)

Carruthers screamed. Ships vaporized left and right. Men cursed and died. Up to the muzzles of the Shem weapons the Star Kings had fought. Now they died beneath those muzzles. Carruthers’ mind reeled at the Death Calls sounding like shots from an automatic weapon: the Calais, the Burma Road, the Troy, the Khyber Pass, the Las Vegas, the Houston, the Honduras of Davies, the Wellington, the Paraguay, the Eurasia, the Coney Island

Carruthers had to blank out his mind. He fought his ship and he unleased the TEMS. Working overtime, that dreaded instrument began thinking and building weapons that the Star Kings had always feared. Now fighting for their lives, they unleashed their devil.

The ship rocked and reeled and shivered. Panels flared, only to be replaced by others. Needles broke and were re placed by C-S directed robot units. Leads broke, fused or vaporized. Grimly, desperately, the handful of Star Kings still alive beneath the Shern weapon muzzles fought. They hurled their own awesome bolts of lethal energies and watched the Shern craft recoil under that fire.

They came warping in.

From a hundred far-flung Universes they came. Wherever the rain of Death Calls had carried, they came. Thousands and thousands and thousands, all the Star Kings alive, came warping in, weapons blazing! (this is an archaic use of the term "Universe" to mean "Galaxy")

Carruthers had no time to pause. He worked his weapons, he fought his ship. Globe after globe of the Shem withered and died. Carruthers saw the last globe flee into the dimensional rift. He hurled the Valley Forge into it. The ship hit an edge and stopped violently. He corrected and lashed out at the Shern globes frying to close the rift. Then other Star King ships were blasting their way through, coming to his aid. The Shern globes withdrew. The Star Kings followed.

But then, as if they had set a trap, trillions of Shem globes closed in over the Star Kings. Surely it was the end of the Star Kings. They had at last met their match. But the TEMS had been unleashed. Untouched for generations because of the undreamed of methods of destruction that it could conceive, it was at last put to work.

“Destroy those vessels,” commanded Carruthers and instantly the TEMS was creating and destroying entire systems of logic and mathematics, creating and discarding scores of new sciences. Before the sensory apparatus of the Shem the Star King ships grew in firepower and defensive capabilities. Weapons were loosed that destroyed entire Universes of the Shern dimension.

From CROWN OF INFINITY by John Faucette (1968)
VAST

There are four telescopes mounted on tracks around the ship’s hull. When two or more are fixed on the same object, their optical signals can be combined, creating an effective lens aperture far greater than any individual scope. At least two lenses are continuously fixed on the alien vessel that has hunted Null Boundary for 150 years.

It’s a Chenzeme courser, an automated warship designed by a race that vanished millions of years before the human species even came into existence. It first appeared when Null Boundary was less than fifty years out of Deception Well. Then, it was moving at close to thirty-nine percent lightspeed, on a course that would take it toward the star cluster called the Committee—opposite to Null Boundary’s vector. Nikko watches its fleeting image, wondering if it will manage to get past the defenses of the human settlements there.

Nikko knows little about the Chenzeme, but he knows this much: Their ships are not powered by conventional physics. The old murderers learned to tap the zero point field, that all-pervasive sea of energy where particles and antiparticles engage in a continuous dance of creation and annihilation. It’s a deadly talent. With the zero point field to power their ships and guns, each Chenzeme vessel has far more energy at its command than any human installation. Their gamma ray lasers can burn away the atmosphere of a living world. Nikko has seen it happen.

A twinge of pain, like the tenderness of a half-forgotten wound, warns him away from memories he does not want to awaken. It’s enough to know the Chenzeme will not be beaten until the frontier worlds own the zero point technology too.

Yet even for the old murderers, energy does not flow in infinite quantity. To catch Null Boundary, the courser would need to swing about and accelerate—a huge investment of both time and energy that can gain it only a very tiny prize. So that first time Nikko sees it, he knows it will ignore him to push on toward the inhabited worlds of the Committee. He has no reason to think he will ever see it again. He aims the ship’s prow at the natural navigation beacon of Alpha Cygni, a white-hot giant star that blazes against a background of dark molecular clouds—and he pushes on, in the direction called swan, where the Chenzleme warships seem to originate. He has set out to find their source, and he will not be distracted. Like a tortured man stumbling vengefully toward his tormenters, he has to know why.

A century and a quarter later, the courser reappears in Null Boundarys telescopes, approaching obliquely, far to the stern.

Now it has closed to 21.6 astronomical units—some three billion kilometers behind them. It’s a luminous object agleam with a white light generated by the membrane of philosopher cells that coats its needle-shaped hull.

Human ships and human worlds were not the original targets of the Chenzeme, but their automated ships have proven adaptive. So Nikko has adapted too. He cannot outrun the courser or match its guns, but on Null Boundary’s hull he has grown his own layer of Chenzeme philosopher cells, forever dreaming their simulated strategies of war and conquest.

The cells are an intellectual machine. Not so much a mind, as a billion dedicated minds in competition, gambling their opinions. Approval means more and stronger connections to neighboring cells. Disapproval means an increasing isolation. Links are made and shattered a thousand times a second and long-chain alliances are continuously renegotiated. Consensus is sought but seldom found.

This is the clumsy system that guides the Chenzeme warships. Nikko thinks on it, and he doesn’t know whether to laugh or to weep in terror.

From VAST by Linda Nagata (1998)

Electromag Catalysis Poison

This one is total technobabble nonsense, but it is entertaining.

In James Blish's The Triumph of Time (fourth novel in the Cities in Flight series) the alien empire The Web of Hercules has spread from the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules to conquer the galaxy. They use the Web to destroy planets: beams of heavy nuclei of antimatter send from about one light-year distant. As they hit the planet's atmosphere, they make weird yellow-green glowing patches as they undergo matter-antimatter annihilation and bath the planet in a lethal bombardment of gamma radiation.

They attack the planet He, but the Hevians have a counter weapon.

The Triumph of Time

     “One question at a time,” Miramon said. “Of course we mount weapons. We never talk about them, because there were children on our planet, and still are, the gods receive them. But we had to face the fact that we might some day be invested by a hostile fleet, considering how far afield we were ranging from our home galaxy, and how many stars we were visiting. Thus we provided several means for defense. One of these we meant never to use, but we have just used it now.”
     “And that is?” Hazleton said tensely.
     “We would never have told you, except for the coming end,” Miramon said. “You have praised us as chemists, Mayor Amalfi. We have applied chemistry to physics. We discovered how to poison an electromagnetic field by resonance—the way the process of catalysis is poisoned in chemistry. The poison field propagates itself along a carrier wave, and controlling field, almost any signal which is continuous and conforms to the Faraday equations. Look.”
     He pointed out the window. The light did not seem to have lessened any; but it was now mottled with leprous patches. In a space of seconds, the patches spread and flowed into each other, until the light was now confined to isolated luminous clouds, rapidly being eaten away at the edges, like dead cells being dissolved by the enzymes of decay bacteria.
     When the sky went totally dark, Amalfi could see the hundred streamers of the particle streams pointed inward at He; at least it looked a hundred, though actually he could hardly have seen more than fifteen from any one spot on the planet. And these too were being eaten away, receding into blackness.
     The counters went back to stuttering, but they did not quite stop.
     “What happens when the effect gets back to the ships?” Web asked.
     “It will poison the circuits themselves,” Miramon said.
     “The entities in the ships will suffer total nerve-block. They will die, and so will the ships. Nothing will be left but a hundred hulks.”

     Hazleton turned back to the dosimeters. For a moment, he simply stared at them. Then, to Amalfi’s astonishment, he began to laugh.
     “What’s so funny?” Amalfi growled.
     “See for yourself. If Miramon’s people had ever tangled with the Web in the real world, they would have lost.”
     “Why?”
     “Because,” Hazleton said, wiping his eyes, “while he was beating them off, we all passed the lethal dose of hard radiation. We are all dead as door nails as we sit here!”

From The Triumph of Time by James Blish (1958)

Medusa Weapons

This is totally utterly science fictional with no basis in reality, but it is too amusing not to mention. Remember the Greek myth about the Medusa? Anyone unfortunate enough to look at the Medusa was turned into stone, such was her extreme ugliness. The science fictional version is an image on a monitor or a sound over a headphone that can kill.

The general idea is a person suffering physical or mental damage merely by experiencing what should normally be a benign sensation.

The closest thing to this in the real world are the flashing lights that can trigger a seizure in a person suffering from photosensitive epilepsy. But that is not quite the same thing as a medusa weapon. You may have read about the Denno-Senshi Porygon episode of the TV show Pokémon, where the cartoon flashed the TV screen in such a manner that several viewers had seizures. Mention of such a seizure-inducing flash can be found in the novel and movie of The Andromeda Strain. In 2008 there was a photosensitive epilepsy attack on the on-line forum for the nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation.

Examples

Blit

In the story "Blit" and others by David Langford, some scientist, who should know better, invents a graphic pattern called a "basilisk" that will cause the viewer's brain to lock-up, killing the viewer instantly. It works much like a computer virus, crashing the brain's operating system.

As the FAQ puts it:

...the human mind as a formal, deterministic computational system -- a system that, as predicted by a variant of Gödel's Theorem in mathematics, can be crashed by thoughts which the mind is physically or logically incapable of thinking. The Logical Imaging Technique presents such a thought in purely visual form as a basilisk image which our optic nerves can't help but accept. The result is disastrous, like a software stealth-virus smuggled into the brain.

David Langford
A Scenario

An atomic rocketship of the valiant Space Patrol fires a warning shot across the bow of the sinister black spaceship belonging to the dreaded Necroscientist of Titan. A signal for parlay is sent, and the foolish Patrol captain accepts a videophone message from the Necroscientist in order to discuss terms. Everybody on the bridge within eyeshot of the videophone monitor keels over dead with the Parrot burned into their visual cortex, as the Necroscientist makes good his escape.

The Cassini Division

In the novel by Ken MacLeod, one of the weapons is the so-called "Langford Visual Hack" (an obvious tip-of-the-hat to David Langford). As a defense, all computer monitors on the ship are designed to contain enough visual static to prevent the visual hack from working.

ST:TNG "I, Borg"

In this episode the valiant crew of the Starship Enterprise plan to kill all the Borg by introducing a lethal computer virus, an invasive program called the topological anomaly. This is a a paradoxical geometric form designed to overwhelm a computer's processing functions by spawning an infinite number of interlocking anomalous solutions.

War Against The Rull

In the novel by A.E. van Vogt, the alien Rull can draw the "lines-that-could-seize-the-minds-of-men". Any human who looks at such a diagram is instantly hypnotized, and will just stand there in a trance.

The Black Cloud

In the novel by Fred Hoyle, a helpful intelligent interstellar nebula attempts to teach a human being its native language with remote controlled audio-visual equipment. This proved to be fatal the the person. The trouble is that humans know to be true too many things that actually are not true. They have to un-learn too much in order to learn the alien language, and the cognitive dissonance is fatal (it causes an inflammation of brain tissue).

Macroscope

In the novel by Piers Anthony scientists discover an alien interstellar broadcast that is sort of a galactic library. Unfortunately for the scientists, the broadcast is overlayed with the "Destroyer Sequence." This is a visual sequence that forces the brain to think certain thoughts it is not able to think, which burns out the brain leaving the hapless victim mentally a vegetable.

Kaleidoscope Century

In the novel by John Barnes, a rogue artificial intelligence can call a person up on a telephone, then use rapidly changing audio signals to reprogram the person's brain, turning them into a brainwashed zombie.

Battlefleet Mars

In the wargame by Redmond Simonsen, a top executive of the Ares corporation is assassinated by a sonic pulse over the telephone.

CHERNOBYL

The 'Elephant Foot' is a 2 ton Corium or chernobylite form in the Chernobyl disaster under the reactor. The scientists who want to observe and monitor the damage found it impossible to come close due the instance radiation, they strap cameras on remote control wagon and drive it around the corner to take picture but the radiation was also too strong for the cameras.

According to some claims they repeat the try but instead of camera the put mirror that reflect the view around the corner. Visible light is reflected by mirror but the radioactive radiation goes right trough. This chunk, the 'Elephant Foot', is also nickname 'Medusa' and while it doesn't kill you by looking of it like the mythical monster it is like the Greek tail could be filtered by reflecting surface as was the shield held by Perseus how used it to observe Medusa and kill it without been effected by her gaze.

From Yoel Mizrahi (2017)

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