Beyond TL16

[Anthony]

Depends on the quantity of antimatter involved. Antimatter's only 40 kilotons to the gram, and actually delivering it to the target can be difficult; point defense works just fine against antimatter warheads.

 

[EvilDrGanymede]

Originally posted by Anthony:
Depends on the quantity of antimatter involved. Antimatter's only 40 kilotons to the gram, and actually delivering it to the target can be difficult; point defense works just fine against antimatter warheads.

Yeah, but blowing up a nuke doesn't set off a nuclear explosion. Blowing up an AM missile collapses the containment field, and the AM touches matter (albeit briefly), and goes boom.

You'd want your point defence to blow them up a LONG way before they reach the target.

 

[Hecateus]

Like a nuke, AM is best when it can slip inside before detonating. If a raw sample simply touches the outer part of the target, then only a small part of the AM is destroyed...the remainder being pushed away by the blast. When inside, the AM will bounce around until totally consumed...or the target wasn't coheseive enough to set off all of the AM.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

> here < is a useful page on the Virus in Travller. There are others, but this was the most useful of the first set of google replies.

[edit: > Here < is something interesting on the Virus.

 

[Anthony]

Originally posted by Evil Dr Ganymede:
Yeah, but blowing up a nuke doesn't set off a nuclear explosion. Blowing up an AM missile collapses the containment field, and the AM touches matter (albeit briefly), and goes boom.

You'd want your point defence to blow them up a LONG way before they reach the target.

Well, your average Traveller warship won't be phased by a megaton-level explosion at a kilometer, which is like contact range on Traveller scales. At a typical standoff distance of 100-1000 km for point defense, you pretty much need continent-busters to do much good.

 

[spank]

according to ff&s a tl-17 antimater reactor would at least 8 cubic meters or just over 1/2 a d-ton. it's energy output would be 400 mw it would require 2 cubic meters of feul per year.

at tl-16 a fusion plant with the same output would mass 30 cubic meters or 2.1 d-tons it would require 40 cubic meters of feul per year.

So suddely the problem is not what to power shields or weapons, but where to put all the weapons.

 

[TheDS]

The problem I see with all this is that Grandfather is TL35, last time I looked, and if you think a paltry TL17 civ's efforts to attack him, or even LOCATE him, for that matter, is going to be noticed, well, you're deluding yourselves.

I can see that maybe a TL17 civ starts to muck things up, maybe they start tapping into the pinching-off of space that's required to make portals work at TL21, and maybe he's worried about his former race the Droyne coming to an inglorious ad sudden end and TL18 would make bad things happen to them... Whatever.

I can see the possibility that he might want to stir up trouble, but there's no way anyone's gonna be able to touch him, and the only people that even SUSPECT he exists are people in a universe in which he is simply a piece of a game.