Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post - [Spaceships] Anti-Lithium for Drives

AlexanderHowl · 09-05-2017, 01:09 PM

You would need a much more powerful magnet than 10 Teslas to even trap a gram of antimatter. Just using a back of the envelope calculation, you would need a 1 million Telsa magnetic field to contain a gram of antimatter for a prolonged period of time (the attraction between antimatter and matter is probably one of the most powerful forces in the Universe). Anything less is just as much handwavium as force fields and other forms of superscience.

If you want hard science rockets, helium-3 fusion rockets are probably much more realistic and much more affordable (helium-3 is created in 50% of DD fusion reactions, so we will have more than enough helium-3 for propulsion purposes in a decade or two). Helium-3 fusion creates 207 GJ per gram (around 0.002% of that of an equivalent mass of antimatter-matter), which means that 1 kg of helium-3 contains as much energy as 1 gram of antimatter combining with 1 gram of matter. Helium-3 is much easier to store, its products are much easier to direct using a magnetic rocket nozzle, and it can be used for a number of other uses than propulsion.

09-05-2017, 01:09 PM	#51
AlexanderHowl Join Date: Feb 2016	Re: [Spaceships] Anti-Lithium for Drives – Does this work? You would need a much more powerful magnet than 10 Teslas to even trap a gram of antimatter. Just using a back of the envelope calculation, you would need a 1 million Telsa magnetic field to contain a gram of antimatter for a prolonged period of time (the attraction between antimatter and matter is probably one of the most powerful forces in the Universe). Anything less is just as much handwavium as force fields and other forms of superscience. If you want hard science rockets, helium-3 fusion rockets are probably much more realistic and much more affordable (helium-3 is created in 50% of DD fusion reactions, so we will have more than enough helium-3 for propulsion purposes in a decade or two). Helium-3 fusion creates 207 GJ per gram (around 0.002% of that of an equivalent mass of antimatter-matter), which means that 1 kg of helium-3 contains as much energy as 1 gram of antimatter combining with 1 gram of matter. Helium-3 is much easier to store, its products are much easier to direct using a magnetic rocket nozzle, and it can be used for a number of other uses than propulsion.