(Aquatic) torpedo

This technology is already in place. It doesn't need a submission.

Perhaps, but I don't see any mention of it anywhere (especially some of the more "non-conventional" warhead types like the fish food, the Pirahnas! and the graffiti artist droid ). Come to think of it, I don't see much of anything (other than the occasional submersible starship and references to swimming) relating to watercraft or aquatic activity.

You know I have to bring this up:

How would water (and I'm talking about like oceans and stuff) affect the performance of starship weapons? Since it's rather dense at the greater depths I am imagining that some weapons would not work very well if at all.

If it hasn't been addressed already, that is.

That depends on the weapons. "Starships weapons" is extremely vague. For beam weapons, of course water could absorb energy as it evaporates.

Wes said:

That depends on the eapons. "Starships weapons" is extremely vague. For beam weapons, of course water could absorb energy as it evaporates.

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Yeah, I mean like energy weapons, positron guns. Solid ordnance would probably be fine though I'd have to ask if they're rated for underwater use if they're not specifically designed for it.

Firing a positron gun underwater is a good way to blow yourself to bits.

Um, why? I'd also would like to understand why positron/particle weapons supposedly don't work in a planet's atmosphere.

Firing an anti-matter weapon in the atmosphere (which is matter) would create an anti-matter/matter explosion at the location the weapon was fired. Thus, you'd basically be subjecting yourself to an explosive force greater than a hydrogen bomb.

You mean that it's going to come into contact with 'air' (oxygen and other gases and random molecules) and blow up?

Wouldn't something subspace encased just travel through it like, say, a solid bullet would? I mean, is the Sakura used it's positron railguns to fire down on a planet like Rufus was going to, that'd mean the fired shots would never reach the surface but rather would explode impotently up in the atmosphere.

The mass would have hit, at a slightly(Marginally infentessimaly really, the A/M flying through the atmosphere would lose it's upper layers of particals due to friction, nothing much else.) lesser density then it would have been when fired, though that would be minute. ~_~

An A/M gun fired in open air is somewhat dangerous due to radiation and heat splashback, but not out right deadly to the firer(Otherwise why the hell are there naked A/M munitions for land tanks?). There's not enough mass/matter in open air to cause what you're saying Wes. Aside from that, most A/M munition launchers are protected by either a magnetic field inside the device to prevent a M A/M conversion, or, as people have said before Buckey-balls.

Check this: 1 kilogram of antimatter contains 42.96 megatons of destructive force. That's almost as much as Tsar Bomba (50 MT) or two simultaneous Mt. St. Helens eruptions (48 MT). Remember the Bravo test, one of the Bikini Atoll bomb tests. February 1954, was, at 15 megatons, the most powerful bomb ever detonated by the United States.

Anti-matter annihilation expresses its energy as a burst of high-frequency gamma radiation and high-speed neutrons. Drop a pound of antimatter on the floor and you'll see a bright flash of light and then nothing else for the remainder of your very short life! The difficulty in getting antimatter to "blow up" is one reason why the US never developed an antimatter bomb.

Source

That's the thing. Anti-matter has to interact with matter for mutual annilation and conversion. Firing it through a gas (which while being matter, isn't as solid as solid matter), like air, won't cause a total conversion. It may cause a minature conversion, aka, a rad spike, but I honestly doubt it'll instantly annilate itself after it's fired from a gun.

Water is much more dense than air. As I recall, positronn weapons are designed to produce an explosion on impact by annihilating most of the electrons at the impact site, resulting in the positively charged atomic nuclei repelling each other away. This is what would happeen right in your face, rather than just the M/AM interaction itself. A neutral antiparticle beam weapon (usually achievedd by adding positrons to beam of negative anti-ions as it leaves the weapon, creating a beam of neutral antiatoms) woud be somewhat safer for underwater use.

There is also a problem with the concept of the antimatter railgun, that being that the antimatter projectile would be in contact with the rails while being accelerated down the "barrel" of the railgun (and you can't use arcs to bridge a tiny gap between the projectile and the rails, unless you're willing to replace the rails after each shot). Either the rails would have to be made of antimatter or the projectile would have to be sheathed in matter (at least where it touches the rails, if not everywhere). A matter sheath would also allow the projectile to be fired into or within a planetary atmosphere or even a higher-density matter environment, such as underwater, without any matter/antimatter interaction until the projectile hits something. A projectile consisting of a collection of buckyballs filled with antimatter and somehow bound together as a macroscopic object would also work (I can't remember whether buckyballs are conductive, but if they aren't you would also need some conductive material - the projectile is part of an electricl circuit in a railgun).

An antimatter coilgun (a.k.a. Gauss Gun/Rifle/Cannon), in which the projectile would not have to be in contact with any part of the weapon, could also work without annihilating itself in the process of firing.