Flame Guns revisited...

[ffutures]

Getting back to flame pistols again

http://ffutures.livejournal.com/522696.html

I've somehow got to get enough energy from a small cheap diamond to zap an immense amount of the countryside, and bond energy simply doesn't cut it - it would be about as much as you'd get from burning the diamond or a similarly sized lump of coal with a blowtorch.

Does carbon fusion (as seen in supernovas) seem even faintly plausible as the energy source?

Comments

[armb.livejournal.com]

I assume the way it's written rules out antimatter (not that I can see a plausible means of making cheap diamond work as antimatter containment anyway), so there might not be much choice. Do you actually have to explain it, rather than just saying that a flame pistol extracts an implausible amount of energy in an unspecified fashion?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I think some sort of explanation, no matter how implausible, is always useful. Otherwise it might as well be a magic wand rather than a gun.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Part of the diamond's interior is pressure-reconfigured into buckyballs, which are then carefully injected with anti-protons (the almost-spherical buckyballs can do this via electromagnetic repulsions). The quantities are minute, but then again a flame pistol, for all its violence, is very small potatoes by the standards of a matter-antimatter explosion.

The real problem here? How do you handle the recoil?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I suspect Weinbaum was innocent of antimatter, though it was known to physics in the 1930s. (I'll bet ffutures has been looking at my writings about this.) Certainly everyone was innocent of buckyballs.

Sounds like one wants kiloton-range effects, which probably means hundreds of milligrams of antimatter, however it is stored. Good luck justifying that.

One could smuggle Williamson's seetee asteroids into Weinbaum's solar system, along with hard-bitten asteroid prospectors and their infrastructure of magnetically-coupled seetee-iron mining tools. The asteroids are the remains of a rogue antimatter planet that disintegrated Planet Five in an ancient collision.

Carbon fusion was a creative idea. And it might have been plausible to 1930s physics, given handwaving (though they probably didn't know enough about supernovae yet to predict it). Does it give enough energy to do the job? Plausible confinement is very hard to arrange...

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Carbon-fusion works well too, perhaps some variant that only works with Weinbaumverse physics; perhaps something that might work in our physics too but hasn't yet been discovered (it's getting pretty obvious that positionally-catalyzed fusion is possible, though we haven't yet hammered out a theory to explain how and why).

Containment only has to be good enough to work for a very short while, since the flame gun is essentially a directed explosion. If it flamed for a long while, Newtonian reaction would harm (or at least rapidly move) the firer.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

This works pretty well with the idea that the barrels will conk out more often than not. Obviously the containment fails a microsecond too early.

[ebony-silvers.livejournal.com]

Checked with a physicist friend who said sure - as soon as you figure out a way to contain it so the fusion doesn't melt the gun, the person holding it and the surrounding countryside. Scientist types can really take the fun out of a "sure."

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's almost the easy part. Whatever we assume powers the hot plasma explosion, it would be composed primarily of charged particles (because the heat would strip the electrons right off the atoms). The flame pistol simply has to channel some of its energy into generating a counter-EMP to repel the plasma; the explosion will spray out in the direction of least resistance (which would be away from the refractory material of the barrel). I still wouldn't want to fire one without whole-body protection from the stray backblast, but you could optimize all skinsuits, spacesuits etc. to reflect that frequency.

Again, the main problem I see would be the recoil. You'd be holding a short-lived plasma rocket in your hand. Unless the flare is extremely brief, you should go sailing backward. Or have your hand broken. Or torn off.

I would guess that the flame pistol uses a variant of the spaceships' atomic rocket engines, actually. Much like in Conquest of Two Worlds -- but Edmond Hamilton's space soldiers used that as cannons, not handguns, so the recoil problems were more managable.

[ebony-silvers.livejournal.com]

Agreed on the recoil - that's going to be a bitch. Of course, even a tiny, extremely brief blast of this stuff is going to be devastating to whatever it hits so maybe that's the answer. A nano-second blast or series of blasts (though not too close together or you'll still have recoil issues) instead of any sort of sustained emission?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's described somewhat like a gout of flame from a flamethrower. And yes, recoil would be a real problem.

[sirernest.livejournal.com]

does the energy have to be contained within the diamond? or couldn't you just use it as a focusing cascade? pulling the trigger releases a small electromagnetic chage from a little battery within the grip of the gun (or even one generated by the trigger pull in a generator coil), where that amount of energy is enough to resonate the crystalline grid in the diamond in a way to open a miniscule dimensional fracture through which enormous amounts of energy pour (for as long as that resonance is upheld). Of course, that amount of hot fiery death pouring into it fractures the diamond, which closes the dimensional fracture again (even if you were trying to accomplish a longer resonance time the fact that it all has to occur within the crystalline material sets a hard upper limit)

Don't even know if that idea would mesh with the source material at all

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The diamonds are used up every time - the gun barrel also fails more often than not. I get the impression that the diamond is converted to energy in some way.

[sirernest.livejournal.com]

As I wrote in my idea, the process of channeling the energy occurs within the material structure of the diamond, which causes the diamond to disintegrate and vaporise. So it uses up the diamond every time too.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

How faint is faint?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Think of a small candle in the approximate orbit of Mars viewed from Earth. Only without the flame going out instantly in vacuum, of course...