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KV3000

Sat Jul 29 2006, 04:48PM

Registered Member #100 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:52PM
Location: Austria
Posts: 9

Hi,

I donÂ´t know if this is the right forum to discuss, but IÂ´d like to know if its possibile to built such a particle(beam) weapon like in stargate or all the other scifi films.
I know that a plasma can be accelerated through an electric field, but the weapons in the film seems different.
Is there any other way to accellerate particle bursts or of creating a particle beam?

Greets KV3000

FastMHz

Sat Jul 29 2006, 05:39PM

Registered Member #179 Joined: Thu Feb 16 2006, 02:08AM
Location: Hagerstown, Maryland - Close to Prime Outlets
Posts: 287

I just saw on Science Channel a clip about some uni students who built a prototype nuclear engine where the nuclear energy excites neon gas to turn it to a plasma and then accelerates it out the back. It's certainly not like the weapons in sci-fi as it is only enough energy to slowly accelerate a body in space...but the "exhaust" it technically a particle beam.

Marko

Sat Jul 29 2006, 09:04PM

Registered Member #89 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:40PM
Location: Zadar, Croatia
Posts: 3145

KV3000 wrote ...

Hi,

I donÂ´t know if this is the right forum to discuss, but IÂ´d like to know if its possibile to built such a particle(beam) weapon like in stargate or all the other scifi films.
I know that a plasma can be accelerated through an electric field, but the weapons in the film seems different.
Is there any other way to accellerate particle bursts or of creating a particle beam?

Greets KV3000

Plasma will disperse and cool immediatelly after it has been ''fired'', andfaster it is fired it will disperse more, especially in air atmosphere and etc.

Proposals for accelerating small number of particles to relativistic speeds (with huge particle accelerators) also suffers from similar problems (atmosphere, scattering) and would require insane amounts of energy to accomplish something

There are couple of good articles in wikipedia about problems with practical use of such.

('possibility of ''plasma rifles'' in real world)

Sulaiman

Sat Jul 29 2006, 09:49PM

Registered Member #162 Joined: Mon Feb 13 2006, 10:25AM
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 3140

In the '70s I worked on an accelerator that produced electrons at reletavistic velocities
acceleration was by 80 MW of microwaves in a vacuum.
The beam exited via a thin titanium window and would travel several feet through the air.

During research for this project we came across information about a USSR accelerator
Incredible!

Helium nucleii were accelerated by microwave in an evacuated tube
The amazing thing was that they used massive vacuum pumps and NO window
The pumps produced near vacuum at the sealed end with the other end open
(a high energy alpha beam would destroy any 'window')
I have no documents or proof, but this device it was claimed could
cut the wings off an aeroplane in flight at over 11 km.
The downside was - it was built atached to a nuclear reactor for power supply.
Neither portable nor covert.
Anyone heard of it?

Marko

Sat Jul 29 2006, 10:06PM

Registered Member #89 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:40PM
Location: Zadar, Croatia
Posts: 3145

Helium nucleii were accelerated by microwave in an evacuated tube
The amazing thing was that they used massive vacuum pumps and NO window
The pumps produced near vacuum at the sealed end with the other end open
(a high energy alpha beam would destroy any 'window')

Reminds on tesla's famous 'death ray' proposal...

I have no documents or proof, but this device it was claimed could
cut the wings off an aeroplane in flight at over 11 km.
The downside was - it was built atached to a nuclear reactor for power supply.
Neither portable nor covert.
Anyone heard of it?

And that sounds like all that crap linked with the thing over ages.

Alpha particles could hardly travel over some significant distance trough air.
And even if they do I doubt there would be any superheating effect, but rather just strong radiation...

KV3000

Sun Jul 30 2006, 10:39AM

Registered Member #100 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:52PM
Location: Austria
Posts: 9

Yeah, that sounds really like teslaÂ´s death rays.

Plasma will disperse and cool immediatelly after it has been ''fired'', andfaster it is fired it will disperse more, especially in air atmosphere and etc.

I know; when I tried to launch a plasma-spark with my coilgun I got the same result.
Maybe that problem can be fixed in some time: My ideas were to produce the plasma in a teflon bullet and prevent the plasma so from dispersing for some time or to compress the plasma that its surface is small enough to cut through air.

What about the lauching methode? Is am EM-field the best way to launch a plasma or a particle beam?

I know IÂ´m freaky but I like Scifi and if itÂ´s possibile IÂ´d like to built such a particle(beam) weapon (just for fun).

KV3000

Madgyver

Sun Jul 30 2006, 10:58AM

Registered Member #177 Joined: Wed Feb 15 2006, 02:16PM
Location: Munich, Germany
Posts: 214

What about heavy particles like Fe Ions in cosmic radiation?

Bjørn

Sun Jul 30 2006, 11:59AM

Registered Member #27 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058

The most energetic particles in cosmic radiation has enough energy to kill a person but they never reach the ground. They will hit an air molecule very quickly and convert into a shower of different particles over a large area.

For those that want to experiment, try using a TW UV laser to blast an tunnel through the air before deploying the particle accellerator.

dan

Sun Jul 30 2006, 12:32PM

Registered Member #223 Joined: Mon Feb 20 2006, 06:42PM
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 125

Ha.. After firing a TeraWatt laser there really isn't much use of firing a high energy particle accelerator after it down the same path. I mean everything in its path would have been obliterated by the first pulse. but I guess thatâ€™s your point.

Marko

Sun Jul 30 2006, 12:52PM

Registered Member #89 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:40PM
Location: Zadar, Croatia
Posts: 3145

Except interesting way to deploy accelerated particles there doesn't seem to be much else of tesla's work.
Some of his claims look pretty silly and it is questionable was he sane at all at the time.

The most energetic particles in cosmic radiation has enough energy to kill a person but they never reach the ground. They will hit an air molecule very quickly and convert into a shower of different particles over a large area.

'OMG particles'

are some of such crazy protons seeming even to defy famous Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.
I don't know if it would actually generate enough radiation to kill somebody, but it concludes that even a big bunch of such particles couldn't travel too far trough air.

For those that want to experiment, try using a TW UV laser to blast an tunnel through the air before deploying the particle accellerator.

I don't think that any kind of laser could 'evatuate' air from it's path. It could ionise, heat up and rarify it but there would still be enough atoms to weaken our death beam (maybe your TW laser wouldn't even leave much of a target in for it)

If I had such a laser (actually 2 of them) I would rather channel HV trough ionised air

It could make a neat non-lethal weapon if we could pack up a big GW UV laser inside something size of rifle or bazooka.

You can ask TDU how hard is air ionisation actually to acheive with laser over a considerable distance...

I know; when I tried to launch a plasma-spark with my coilgun I got the same result.
Maybe that problem can be fixed in some time: My ideas were to produce the plasma in a teflon bullet and prevent the plasma so from dispersing for some time or to compress the plasma that its surface is small enough to cut through air.

One helping thing may be shaping plasma into toroidal rotating vortex wich would stop the dispersing, but plasma would anyway cool down in a fraction of second. I think wikipedia also mentions this somewhere.

Tesladownunder on site

tried to make ''ball lightning'' using this technique and it seems that he got some small vortexes of plasma travelling for few meters as maximum, and it was very hard to notice trough all the flash and bang made by 18kj cap bank.

It was accelerated by simple thermal expansion of air inside the cavity.

One could probably use some kind of accelerator to increase it's speed, maybe some kind of 'coilgun' or etc.
Anyway range won't get much more than meters, adn I don't even think that such a vortex would cause anything more than a puff of warm air to target...

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