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

[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.