How long before someone makes a bomb using antimatter? CERN's BASE experiment actually carried antimatter using a fucking truck for kilometers. It's easy to transport them using cryogenics but in the wider sense, strapping a small truck to a bomber plane should not be hard for any modern army.I have read a friend's thesis on this experiment and the ion trap they used. I think it will be easy to implement as a bomb given you can produce large quantities of this matter. Maybe that's the limiting factor? >inb4 usa is already doing it
>>16992156Never going to have enough of it to use for a bomb and its probably completely infeasible to contain it.>CERN's BASE experiment actually carried antimatter using a fucking truck for kilometersI'm calling bullshit.
>>16992159sorry bro, they already have done it https://home.cern/base-experiment-cern-succeeds-transporting-antimatter/if you don't trust cern, see screenshot of the thesis in question, I trust my friend when they said it was done.
>>16992169They used a truck because the 1 ton piece of machinery required to hold a measly 1000 antiparticles. They would need many orders of magnitude more antimatter as well as a way to hold it in substantial quantity.
>>16992186I think those things can be achieved over time or a given war scenario if efforts are concentrated for it. Retrospectively, people thought having enough enriched uranium was hard but it was somehow done. I think it's matter of years until someone finds a good way to produce antimatter. Containment is another thing yeah, but i imagine you can miniaturize them too.>picrel it's just bolts n shit
>>16992156Antimatter is far too costly to make to use as a weapon. There are always better and cheaper options available than antimatter no matter what scale of destruction you are looking for. It's also far too bulky to deliver to a target.This article sums it up pretty well>>16992169The apparatus weighs 1000 kilograms and transported 92 antiprotons. To move it any significant distance you additionally need power generators and coolers and additional cryogenics equipment and fluids. A single antiproton has energy of 1.5×10^-10 J, you can double that since you get a "free" protons worth of mass when ever it pops so 3*10^-10J, since you had 100 of those that's 3*10^-8J. A single gram of TNT has energy of 4200J, that's a difference of about 10^13. For reference the difference between a single gram of TNT (4200J) and Tsar Bomba (2.4*10^17J) is about the same at 5*10^13. So you would need to make your thing about 10 trillion times more effective to begin reaching the firecracker territory.>>16992159Why wouldn't you be able to carry few atoms in a truck. The margins of error on the magnetic confinement are like 100x on what a truck could produce and well past where the machine gets scrapped anyways and it's not like antimatter is dangerous it just vanishes if you mishandle it.
>>16992189There is no way to make antimatter that isn't prohibitively expensive. Unless we literally find an antimatter sources in space (2001 nights manga has this which is pretty neat) then we will never have antimatter that isn't extremely expensive. It's simply the way energy works.
>>16992156>>16992156I am convinced that we are never going to have antimatter bomb.Just ignoring the fact that our current method of producing anti particles is extremely inefficient and requires millions of dollars and mega watts of energy to just come up with a few particles, and our engineering is still far behind storing several grams of anti matter for a considerable amount of time...The moat important factor is that it is fatal to work with... The operator or the people who want to deliver it are at the constant danger of getting blown away.You don't have this problem with nukes. With nukes, you need a perfect sequence of complex processes happen with high level of accuracy and synchronization for its detonation, otherwise if you just leave it there, it's harmless.Antimatter bomb is the exact opposite, you need a perfect, synchronized series of complex engineering tasks to prevent it from annihilation, and that shit needs to run 24/7 until the moment of explosion.If your penning trap, or the power supply, or the vacuum level goes slightly off, even for a fraction of a second, it is you who will get blown away not your enemy.
>>16992263Mega watts of power*
>>16992263that is a valid concern with the safety. but you never know if someone can make a denser state of antimatter perhaps even constrained by something intrinsically static power. I still think it would be the ultimate weapon given high enough fluxes of the shit can be produced. I have no sources on this but I bet some glownigger is working on it, just can't prove it.
>>16992193Let's put it this way. You'd need 1/2 gram of antimatter to get the 20kt explosive yield of the Fat Man atomic bomb.A half gram of antihydrogen contains about 10^23 atoms.CERN can now generate around 10^7 atoms per year.We're a LOOOOOOONG way off from that.
>>16992271I get that it is a scarce and very expensive to produce NOW. But I am optimistic that through the sheer amount of government and military interest, the production capabilities and techniques will be inadvertently increased over the coming years. The EU invests a lot on it already, the dept. of energy also does already. The army is contracting people to look into a 2050 goal. https://doi.org/10.21140/mcuj.20251602009 So it will eventually happen, as I don't think it is a fundamental impossibility as time travel into the past for example.
Using antimatter for bombs is like using a black hole as an excavation device. There's much, much easier ways to blow whatever you want up. Like, many many orders of magnitude easier. Just nuke the planet like normal people, honestly.
>>16992271wait, a penny weighs 2.5 grams so you are saying an "anti-penny" reacting with (normal) matter would yield 100kt? wow
>>16992274The main problem is just that there's nothing an antimatter bomb enables that is meaningfully different from a much safer, much simpler hydrogen bomb. As far as combat on earth is concerned we nukes have gotten us to the point of bigger than is reasonably desirable or necessary for explosive yields, and modern combat prioritizes precision and accuracy in munitions much more than broad destructive power.We already have more than enough bombs to destroy the entire planet that we hopefully will never use. Spending billions of dollars to make even bigger significantly more temperamental bombs that we hopefully will never use is just silly.
>>16992425Not going to check the math but the energy density is astounding, yeah. All matter is converted directly to energy. But the problem is containment. You need magnetic traps as any accidental contact leads to a pretty mushroom cloud. It's like weaponised kryptonite, but it's also known to the state of California to give you cancer and spread your body over a certain radius. Consider: chemical bombs are inert. You can literally set modern explosives on fire and they won't detonate without a detonator.
>>16992597>You can literally set modern explosives on fire and they won't detonate without a detonator.I remember this demo from my time in the army. the explosive rod burned quite slowly like some bored plastic, with orange flame, thick black smoke. but this is the state ofthe art at the end of a very long development. nitrocellulose had to take quite a few lives before it was deemed not worth the risk.
>>16992676>but this is the state of the artTNT has been a thing since 1863 and it's completely safe without a detonator. You can literally use it as emergency fuel for a stove if you want.
>>16992156No one needs bigger bombs. What they want is stealthier, smarter bombs and to be able to gather more data on the enemy
>>16992804So, drones... with bombs.
>>16992810Yes
>>16992263>With nukes, you need a perfect sequence of complex processes happen with high level of accuracy and synchronization for its detonationOr for one dumbass to drop his screwdriver.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Harry_Daghlian's_death
>>16992199Shittons of free energy in space. Just go build your antimatter factory on Mercury.
>>16992156There's antimatter in everything. How much are you worried about?
>>16992156With infinite resources and thousands of the best engineers, maybe they could create a weapon grade antimatter thing in a decadeIt's not worth it when we have nuclear fission and uranium is in the dirt outside
