Meson weapons: you make a meson, maybe by crashing protons together or something, or maybe by TL11 they've figured out the physics enough to induce mesons in some way - who knew we could do lasers in 1880? You get it up to relativistic speed - cause the thing's lifespan is in fractions of microseconds; likely you did that in the process of making them, cause you really, really didn't have much time for that. You get it over to the target; takes a fraction of a second 'cause, after all, you just accelerated this thing to relativistic speed. It decays, most likely into gamma photons (and other stuff, but I don't want to get complicated). The gamma photons go out and interact with the matter in the area, making it very unhappy.
So here's the thing: a lot of the energy you spent went into getting the thing to relativistic speed, no? The thing decays into gamma photons ; it doesn't care how fast it's going when it does it. Energy cannot be lost, but a photon is a photon - it won't go faster, it just gets more energetic. Do we now have a directional event? Is the near-C meson going to decay into gamma photons all traveling in one direction? How are these very high energy gammas interacting with the local atoms - electron-positron pairs and wildly accelerated emiting nuclei? Are those atoms in turn being accelerated to speeds that will smash other atoms?
Near as I can tell, we're basically looking at a roughly bell-curve-shaped area suddenly incandescing into radioactive plasma.
So here's the thing: a lot of the energy you spent went into getting the thing to relativistic speed, no? The thing decays into gamma photons ; it doesn't care how fast it's going when it does it. Energy cannot be lost, but a photon is a photon - it won't go faster, it just gets more energetic. Do we now have a directional event? Is the near-C meson going to decay into gamma photons all traveling in one direction? How are these very high energy gammas interacting with the local atoms - electron-positron pairs and wildly accelerated emiting nuclei? Are those atoms in turn being accelerated to speeds that will smash other atoms?
Near as I can tell, we're basically looking at a roughly bell-curve-shaped area suddenly incandescing into radioactive plasma.