Meson alternatives?

[MrBackman]

As we all know, the Mesons in Meson guns doesn't quite work the way Marc thought they did way back in the early mists of Traveller youth. I need a replacement for my Travedller universe and I have no intention of changing canon etc, just coming up with something more believable for my Traveller.

Does anybody who is knowledgeable in particle physics know another porticle that would fit the bill?

I need a neutral particle that decays rapidly through the weak nuclear force and can slip right through matter? Neutrinos certainly slip through matter and we 'know' that the Imperium can easily detect them and presumable send them too. Too bad that Neutrinos don't decay as far as I know.

I envision a 'meson gun' as a paerticle accelerator ´that also fires a nuclear damper pulse and as the particles slip behind the nuclear damper pulse which travels at lightspeed, they rapidly decay, hopefully inside th target. The trick is to tune the pulse length with the normal decay time to ensure that the particles won't decay before or after the ship. 'Meson screens' are nuclear damper beams fired at the attacker to throw this timing off.

IMTU all ship defenses are called 'screens' ever since Solomani took over in the Second empire, even lasers firing at missiles are called missile screens.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by MrBackman

Does anybody who is knowledgeable in particle physics know another porticle that would fit the bill?

There are way too many problems with meson guns to fix by simply replacing with another particle, though your closest candidate is probably muons -- while they are charged particles, they don't have strong force interactions so at extremely high energies they'll pass through quite a lot of matter.

[MrBackman]

Originally Posted by Anthony

There are way too many problems with meson guns to fix by simply replacing with another particle, though your closest candidate is probably muons -- while they are charged particles, they don't have strong force interactions so at extremely high energies they'll pass through quite a lot of matter.

Meson guns are a bit too closely tied to the canon to just let go off, at least for me. Deep meson sites, the Solomani winning the war against Vilani by inventing Meson guns first etc, but I do see your point.

Too bad the muons are charged and thus make an even unlikelier candidate for'meson' replacement as they would just disperse as quickly as possible in space very much like plasma guns i space. Luckily I have gotten rid of plasma guns for space warfare a long time ago. I'll have to keep digging then, maybe they are shooting those elusive WIMP particles the dark matter crowd believe in yet fauil to detect. WIMPs must obviously be very stable but maybe the guns work in reverse; Fire a pulse of WIMPs near light speed towards your enemy. Fire ashort intense pulse of nuclear -anti-damping to ahve the WIMPs decay inside the ship? Weakly Interacting MAssive Particle has a cool ring to them but also kind of sort of feels like just another bucket of handwavium.

Thanks for the response!

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by MrBackman

As we all know, the Mesons in Meson guns doesn't quite work the way Marc thought they did way back in the early mists of Traveller youth. I need a replacement for my Travedller universe and I have no intention of changing canon etc, just coming up with something more believable for my Traveller.

If you can bear to change the technobabble you can use a suggestion Chris Thrash came up with several years ago.

"Meson guns" would be based on Jump technology rather than particle accelerator/nuclear dampers. You project a small quantity of matter through Jump space and it comes out as an explosion of undifferentiated mesons.

This works much better than decaying particles shot out of a gun. It explains why they go through anything and all go boom at once.

If you do go with decaying particles you need a _double_ pulse of nuclear damper energy. One to keep _any_ of the particles from decaying until they reach their target and then a second to make _all_ of them decay after they do. Otherwise they are going to decay on a half-life curve.

A plasma that replace electrons with negatively charged mesons could be very dense and thus penetrate well because of that but it would burn through things rather than be ghost-like.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

If you can bear to change the technobabble you can use a suggestion Chris Thrash came up with several years ago.

"Meson guns" would be based on Jump technology rather than particle accelerator/nuclear dampers. You project a small quantity of matter through Jump space and it comes out as an explosion of undifferentiated mesons.

This works much better than decaying particles shot out of a gun. It explains why they go through anything and all go boom at once.

That's ingenious!

If you do go with decaying particles you need a _double_ pulse of nuclear damper energy. One to keep _any_ of the particles from decaying until they reach their target and then a second to make _all_ of them decay after they do. Otherwise they are going to decay on a half-life curve.

Yeah. Anything having a definite life rather than a half-life is most un-quantum-mechanics-like.

[MrBackman]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

If you do go with decaying particles you need a _double_ pulse of nuclear damper energy. One to keep _any_ of the particles from decaying until they reach their target and then a second to make _all_ of them decay after they do. Otherwise they are going to decay on a half-life curve.

If you send a particle with say, 2.6 * 10^-10 halflife, with a pulse of nuclear damper it won't decay until the after the nuclear damper pulse has outrun it (I assume nuclear damper pulses travel at the speed of light while the particles only nearly so) and all of a sudden the decay rate goes back to normal giving us a nice decay curve after that) the decay will go back to its normal rate and, if my calculations are right, half the particles wil decay every 8 cm of travel or so.

Think of the nuclear damper as something that slows down the clock of the particles and when the pulse leaves the particles behind (inside the target hopefully) the clock goes back to normal.

Luckily, I think I have found my particle while googling this example:
The Lambda Baryon with a restmass somewhat more than a neutron (giving it at least as good DeBrglie wavelength as neutrons) and has no charge so it can be used in space combat. Best of all is its relatively slow decay of 2.6 10^-10 seconds thanks to it decaying through the weak force! Yeah, there it is, with all the properties I wanted!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_baryon

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

A plasma that replace electrons with negatively charged mesons could be very dense and thus penetrate well because of that but it would burn through things rather than be ghost-like.

A plasma that replaces electrons with mesons will disperse slower bt still be uselessly thin at space combat ranges and it will, as you point out, also need to penetrate armor normally with none of the penetrating capabilities of the fabled meson gun. Shooting charged mesons at a target will be no better than firing protons and we know from canon that they already have neutron guns.

What of the gun name then? Well, maybe the Solomani called the gun a 'meson gun' during research and the codename stuck when the meson gun came into use? Tanks are called tanks because the Britsh factory workers were givn a cover story about them being water tanker vehicles. The name stuck when they came into service, that is at least one of several etymological explanations for the term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank

If you can bear to change the technobabble you can use a suggestion Chris Thrash came up with several years ago. "Meson guns" would be based on Jump technology rather than particle accelerator/nuclear dampers. You project a small quantity of matter through Jump space and it comes out as an explosion of undifferentiated mesons.

I wouldn't want meson guns as part of jump technology for several reasons:
Jump drives are troublesome as they are and they certainly don't need more things to explain.
Tha hardest and most unbreakable rule of jump drives is (to me at least) that a jump always take 1 week regardless of distance jumped so how come the meson gun particles only spend a couple of seconds at most in hyperspace? Wouldn't the Imperium and others spend every Credit they could spare on reducing time spent in jump to days, hours, minutes or maybe seconds. An Pony X-press network of jump ready ships could go from Capital to the marches in a couple of minutes if time spent in jump could be shaved that hard.

Still, anyone can come up with whatever works for them in their Traveller universae including of course to simply stick with the canon explanation of meson guns actually firing mesons.

For a similar discussion how the (to me at least) strange rule of 100 planetary diameters, its problem and a possible solution you may look at this article:
http://vectormovement.wordpress.com/...ameters-limit/

Thanks for all the help, I was surprised of the response time! I thought everyone was over at CotI these days. I'm restarting my Traveller campaign with my kids (who are now 18 and 15) and it feels really great that the SJG Traveller forum is still alive. I consider the GURPS version of Traveller was the best ever quality and rules-wise.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by MrBackman

Luckily, I think I have found my particle while googling this example:
The Lambda Baryon with a restmass somewhat more than a neutron (giving it at least as good DeBrglie wavelength as neutrons) and has no charge so it can be used in space combat.

It's a baryon and thus subject to strong force interactions, which means it will have trouble getting through atmosphere (less than 1% should reach the ground), let alone rock or water. You could try a Z boson, but its half life is so short that anything blocking the nuclear damper will cause it to expire effectively instantly. One of the heavier neutralinos might do the job, assuming they exist.

[MrBackman]

Oh, that awesome Lambda Baryon I mentioned should probably be no better at penetrating armor than neutrons. Also, the muon plasma might actually work if one somehow fired muonic atoms (a antimuon and an electron) with their half life 2.2 microseconds and great penetration depth they might work as well.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Anthony

There are way too many problems with meson guns to fix

No Traveller fan worth his salt worries about having way too many problems to fix.

Thank you, thank you! Try the veal.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by MrBackman

. Also, the muon plasma might actually work if one somehow fired muonic atoms (a antimuon and an electron) with their half life 2.2 microseconds and great penetration depth they might work as well.

I was assuming negative mesons and protons or heavier nuclei. Replacing the electrons allows for phenomenal density.

It's obvious that the lower tech Traveller "particle beam" has to fire both positive and negative charged particles (probably accelerated separately and then combined) to attain its' great ranges.

Shooting uncharged particles would have to rely on repulsor technology and I am not sure that is truly robust enough even after the Fifth Frontier War, much less at the point of the meson guns development in the Interstellar Wars period.