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

[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.