TL9 Antimatter pion rockets

[lexington]

Originally Posted by Sunrunners_Fire

Well ...

1kg of anti-matter should produce about 9E16 joules. One sun-second (assuming Sol) is 4E25 watts. I suspect one sun-second would produce quite a lot of anti-matter (nearly 450 million kilograms of the stuff at perfect efficiency if my notes are right).

Yes, if you trapped 100% of the energy coming out of the sun and turned it into anti-matter with 100% efficiency you'd have a nice supply. You'd also be extremely far into TL11, probably TL11^.

I'll try to make things more reasonable. Lets say you make the machine a disk as wide as the Earth. Now you collect 4.3e-10 times as much energy. I believe the most efficient way to make antimatter from pure energy is by causing pair-production, which should be limited to an absolute limit of 50% efficiency. So you could make .1 kg per second or so. That's fast enough to fill up the smallest possible tank in Spaceships in around four hours.