The Revenge of Frank Chadwick's Mesons

[elbmc1969]

“What’s loaded in the coil gun?” he asked.

“A standard Thud,” Alexander answered. “Kinetic energy submunition round, take out twenty hectares.”

“Marines said the Guardians fled into an underground complex. Unload the Thud, load your Mark Five, and take out those gun-sats. Then load a Thud, but not a submunition round. Give me a crust buster.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Suddenly, Sam felt himself thrown hard to one side against his restraints, and then heard the whooping siren of the hull breach alarm. The bridge filled with the babble of voices, particularly from the left side—maneuvering and engineering.

“Pipe down!” Sam shouted, and the bridge fell silent except for the hull breach siren.

“You’re the crew of a US Navy warship and we’re under fire. This is your real job so get used to it. Now work your stations. Ship status, what’s the damage?”

“Losing pressure in the docking bay and compartments twelve and twenty-two in the habitat wheel, sir,” the machinist mate at the Engineering Two station answered. “A-gang on the way to repair damage. No power loss. Sensors and weaponry still up.”

“Ops,” Sam ordered, “evasive action, but keep us in orbit. The Five Boat’s still on its way.

“TAC, what’s shooting at us?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Alexander answered, desperation in his voice.

“Well, figure it out, and quick.” Sam heard two short blasts of the acceleration klaxon, the warning alarm for lateral thrust, and then felt a tug to the side as the Bay used its attitude control thrusters to displace. It wasn’t much, but with so many of the satellites down, and so much new debris in orbit, the Desties’ tracking and fire direction might be pretty degraded. It might be enough.

Sam pinged Major Merderet in the launch bay.

Yes sir, she answered immediately.

“Major, we took a hit aft of where you are. Better pull your reserve platoon from their jump pods and get them up to their squad bays.”

Aye, aye, sir.

“Captain,” Alexander called out, “it’s fire from the surface. We’ve got a firing solution for a Thud, and we’ve still got that submunition round in the coil gun.”

“Hit him, TAC,” Sam ordered, and Sam felt The Bay shudder with the launch.

“On the way,” Alexander said.

“He fired again!” the sensor tech in the TAC Three chair called out. “Missed us, but look at this.”

The main screen showed an exterior view looking forward over the bow toward the planetary horizon. A momentary flash came and went, almost too quickly to register.

“Show that again and freeze it,” Sam ordered. The image reappeared as a thin, bright line running almost straight up past them. As they looked at it, he felt the Bay accelerate slightly.

“What is that?” Lieutenant Bohannon asked. “A laser?”

“We’re in vacuum, COMM,” Sam said. “Nothing for a laser to interact with out here, so no visible track. Maybe a particle accelerator?”

“From out of an atmosphere and into vacuum, sir?” Alexander said. “I’d like to know how that works. A neutral beam won’t hold together in the atmosphere, and a charged one won’t outside of it.”

“Can you track its origin?” Sam asked.

“Yes, sir. It’s close to the original firing point, but it’s moved,” the sensor tech said. “It’s moving counter-rotation, and I think it’s firing from underground.”

“Underground? Let me see that,” Alexander said and touched his own workstation to bring up the duplicate of the sensor tech’s display. Sam did as well. Assuming it was the same weapon, and that it wasn’t actually moving with respect to the planet surface, but was instead moved along by the planet’s rotation, the only solution was a site on the far side of the planet but underground, maybe half a kilometer.

“Bullshit!” Alexander said. “Who can shoot through a whole planet? It’s crazy.”

“Firing again,” the sensor tech reported. “Missed even farther. The firing track lines up exactly with the previous solution.”

“Tac,” Sam said, “get a Mark Five ready and take out those gun-sats. The blast will keep those sensors blind. Then take out the complex the Guardians retreated into with a crust buster. Ops, keep maneuvering, but get us down lower and meet our PSRV. I want to recover the Five Boat and get the hell out of here.”

From Ship of Destiny by Frank Chadwick

 

[flykiller]

thanks, always good to see the setting depicted.

 

[Straybow]

Mesons don't work that way. They have a half-life, which means far more will decay at the emitter site than at any distant target. Makes for a bad day to be a gunner, or a spinal mount ship.


Invent a magical neutrino-like particle with chi² decay distribution (and a whole lot of particle-of-the-week technobabble to explain such behavior). Then you could at least get the peak decay near your target.


Still wouldn't be good to be anywhere along the path, so no harmless firing through friendlies.

 

[Matt123]

I see there are four in the series. Good reads?

 

[The Oz]

Mesons don't work that way. They have a half-life, which means far more will decay at the emitter site than at any distant target. Makes for a bad day to be a gunner, or a spinal mount ship.


Invent a magical neutrino-like particle with chi² decay distribution (and a whole lot of particle-of-the-week technobabble to explain such behavior). Then you could at least get the peak decay near your target.


Still wouldn't be good to be anywhere along the path, so no harmless firing through friendlies.

I have wondered if meson guns also make use of nuclear damper tech to prevent decay of the mesons until they reach the target.

 

[mike wightman]

My handwavium states that damper tech involves manipulation of the strong force, while meson technology manipulates the weak force as well.

 

[whartung]

Mesons don't work that way. They have a half-life, which means far more will decay at the emitter site than at any distant target. Makes for a bad day to be a gunner, or a spinal mount ship.

And the rules say that meson firing ships and gun mounts don't spontaneously explode, or irradiate, or any other hi tech horror that would make them unusable by troops who learn things from comic books.

So, whatever problem there might be, seems to have been handled.

My handwavium states that damper tech involves manipulation of the string force, while meson technology manipulates the weak force as well.

Maybe, like this.

 

[Straybow]

It seems the original notion of the meson gun was that the neutrinos weren't transforming stochastically. Somebody thought their half-life was more like a fixed interval timer that could be manipulated relativistically. It would be an invisible, non-interacting neutrino beam until POOF the whole stream of particles suddenly become mesons that decay in milliseconds, releasing their energy.


At least Chadwick's description is a continuous beam of neutrinos flipping into mesons and decaying. It still ignores the fundamental problem that the energy released is greatest at the origin of the beam.


It doesn't matter what handwavistic technobabble one introduces. Field manipulation is only applicable in a confined space, for example, between a pair of emitter plates or polarized nodes of some sort.

 

[GypsyComet]

I'm a fan of the theory that the weapon doesn't fire mesons as such, but instead was invented by a guy named Meson.

 

[mike wightman]

CT canon

Meson guns and communicators make use of the properties of a subatomic particle
called the pi neutral meson. Mesons, like neutrinos, do not interact significantly
with other particles, and matter is therefore transparent to them. However, mesons
decay in a short time into other particles which do interact, and which possess high
energy. Mesons are created by the collision of an electron and a positron, in the
converging beams from two particle accelerators. In a meson gun, the beam travels
to the target, where the mesons decay, causing a large energy release. Range is set
by varying the velocity of the mesons. In the communicator, a much smaller beam
travels from the transmitter to the receiver, where a small meson screen (again, a
development arising from an understanding of the strong nuclear force) causes the
particles to decay; the beam carries a signal by amplitude modulation.

 

[Condottiere]

Quantum teleportation?

Since they only interact with the universe at creation and at the destination.

 

[mike wightman]

As does everything else.

 

[Straybow]

CT canon

Yes, exactly that. Mesons don't all decay at once at the specified range as described. It's a typical scifi particle-of-the-week technobabble with little connection to hard sf. Not my cuppa tea.

 

[mike wightman]

How do muons reach the ground? <rhetorical>

We are talking a technology very far removed from anything we can actually explain, a TL12 culture can manipulate artificial gravity, the strong and the weak nuclear forces, they may be able to tamper with the Higgs field for all we know (which may give a handwave for artificial gravity)

Mesons do decay - using time dilation to explain how the majority of the mesons decay inside the target fails to mention the top and tail of the bell curve, you try to make sure that 68% is within the target, the rest is spread out.

Our meson gun incorporates strong and weak force manipulation as well as the electromagnetic acceleration of the electron and positron beam.

I'm not to keen on this either but it is at least a stab at handwavium rather than just slinging quantum foam condensate field manipulation spike projectiles at each other

Or even worse, throw around words like dark energy and dark matter

 

[Drakon]

How do muons reach the ground?

Muons are travelling at relativistic speeds, so for them, not as much time has passed for them to decay out.

Electron and positron beams annihilate in a burst of gamma, that does decay into a plethora of high energy sub atomic particles. Sorting them out can be quite a job. (BTW: you manufacture positrons by slamming an electron beam into a metal target, and cleaning and scraping the collision products to get what you want.)

 

[kilemall]

Couldn't you get around the distance problem by just firing the two PA beams to where they collide near the target?


Eliminates the magic firing from deep sites stuff, but might be more palatable for you gents that want plausibility in your weaponry.

 

[Straybow]

Mesons do decay - using time dilation to explain how the majority of the mesons decay inside the target fails to mention the top and tail of the bell curve, you try to make sure that 68% is within the target, the rest is spread out.

No, decay starts immediately and diminishes over time (distance). That's the only decay mechanic there is.

Even if you can suppress decay with handwavium, it can really only be for a short distance near your gun. The decay happens all along the line of fire, which means that hitting a ship that is a few tens of meters across, at a distance that is thousands or tens of thousands of km, the energy that will manifest inside the target is measured in billionths of the weapon's output. For GJ output it would be like tossing a handful of flash-bangs into the ship, so if you want to startle the crew it's the weapon of choice.

10 GJ starts to look a bit more effective. On the rare chance the beam actually strikes a crewman it would cause a minor injury, unless the victim were unlucky enough to be hit in a vital organ. More likely, but still not very likely, it will hit a piece of equipment and ruin it. If it hit an electrical cable it could cause a short, which could be anywhere from annoying to a real emergency depending on how much power the cable is carrying. I'm thinking that would be the most likely effective hit, but the average hit is going to be a dud.

Oh, and fuel tanks. It could cause an overpressure, vaporizing a small quantity of fuel as it passes through. But I'm thinking that the tanks should have properly vented pressure release valves and a bit of handwavium to keep the rest of the fuel stable while the chillers work to counter the excess heat. There might be a small chance of loosing one tank, but a good design will divide the fuel into dozens of tanks for safety. Maybe if the weapon is in the 100 GJ range it could rupture tanks.

So, I've almost convinced myself that it can one-shot a drive unit or power plant, with a bit of luck, which could make it worthwhile as a weapon.

Now the problem is aiming a spinal weapon over those distances...

 

[whartung]

No, decay starts immediately and diminishes over time (distance). That's the only decay mechanic there is.

No, the decay is constant, the accelerator is used to time the decay by precise choice of relativistic velocities. The speed of the particles effects the local time distortion so that the decay is "delayed" long enough for the bulk of the particle wave to hit the target.

 

[Straybow]

"Constant" in subatomic physics is proportional to the quantity present. The decay over time is an inverse logarithmic rate. The time interval required for half of the particles to decay is constant, which means the decay diminishes over time as the total of particles diminishes.

I shouldn't have to explain that to scifi nerds in the 21st century...

The time dilation changes how the particle experiences time, and dictates the distance represented by each half-life. But since it is logarithmic decay you can't prompt the mesons to suddenly decay more at an arbitrary distance. I suppose you could optimize it to some tiny degree.

The higher the velocity the longer the distance traversed in one half-life, so you want the velocity high to keep the beam energy high at the target distance. But at higher velocity the ratio of the depth of the target to the distance represented by a half-life gets smaller, therefore releasing less energy into the target. There would be a calc to optimize this, but I can't be bothered.

 

[WizWom]

Mesons don't work that way. They have a half-life, which means far more will decay at the emitter site than at any distant target. Makes for a bad day to be a gunner, or a spinal mount ship.


Invent a magical neutrino-like particle with chi² decay distribution (and a whole lot of particle-of-the-week technobabble to explain such behavior). Then you could at least get the peak decay near your target.


Still wouldn't be good to be anywhere along the path, so no harmless firing through friendlies.

From JTAS 13, Charged Particle Accelerator Weapons, pg 6-8

Editor's Note: Dave Emigh is one of
the people GDW consulted in the design
of High Guard. We felt High Guard
players might find his comments on
particle weapons interesting.

MESON ACCELERATORS
A very potent weapon of the future
could be the meson accelerator, or
meson gun. A meson gun is actually
two very high energy accelerators, one
of which accelerates electrons and the
other positrons. Both of these beams are
directed to a point in space, and the two
collide. One of the by-products of this
collision will be mesons, produced in
such a way that most of them will travel
in the direction of the target. Mesons
themselves are relatively harmless, and
do not effect matter in any way, passing
through planets as if they weren't there.
Mesons, however, decay very rapidly
into other sorts of subatomic particles,
which will do great damage. The point
at which the component beams meet
will determine when the mesons are
formed, and where they decay. The
main difficulty with a meson gun is for
the mother ship to correctly calculate
the proper meeting point and energies
of the two component beams in order
to hit the target with the decaying
mesons. Such a system will require a
very large, very fast computing system,
well beyond present day capabilities.
The creation and use of a meson gun
will be a true technological marvel.