TL9 Antimatter pion rockets

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by thrash

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27847/
http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.2281

Beamed Core Antimatter Propulsion: Engine Design and Optimization
Ronan Keane, Wei-Ming Zhang
This paper seems to suggest that non-superscience antimatter pion rockets are possible at TL9. Would David Pulver or one of the original playtesters be able to comment on whether the Isp would improve as well?

Of course, antimatter production is always the most difficult part of this technology. Even so, this points to the possibility of hard sf interstellar missions much sooner than previously thought.

Antimatter pion was listed at TL9 in Ve2. David would have tyo say why it's a TL11 tech in Spaceships.

At a guess it might have been the antimatter storage. I don't think the non^ numbers used in UT are that friendly to storage of large quantities of antimatter and I beleive it to be a very significant problem in the Real World..

The distinction between superscience and non wasn't as formal in 3e but antimatter pion was generally considerd hard science in 3e to the best of my memory.

The technobabble in Spaceships describes the exhaust as "near light speed" so no, there'd be no real imporvement over that.

The babble in Ve2 is less specific but I never heard that apion exhaust wasn't goign to be near c so that .33 C simulation probably missed the Gurps community even if it was contemporaneous with Ve2 and/or Spaceships

That said, I haven't reverse engineered the Isp used in any Gurps books.