Standard GUT drive
image ©
Dieter Ludmann
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Standard GUT driveimage ©
Dieter Ludmann
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| Standard GUT drive - Data Panel
Basic Propulsion: Reaction Specific Impulse: 0.5 - 10 million (depending on efficiency of conversion; ideally up to 30 million) Reaction Mass: any baryonic matter (most commonly hydrogen) Minimum Technology Required: Picotech, with some femtotech elements Matter Manipulation: femtotech Planckscale Controller required: dedicated hyperturing, with subordinate non-sentient routines First Introduced: Early First Federation period by first singularity ai Used by: most prosperous polities, large megacorps, and sephirotic affiliates in the Nexus, less so in worlds connected by cycler only, less so again in isolated polities. Also, quite popular with some hi-tech hider clades and various xeno civilizations. Used in: relativistic warships, large fighters, relativistic commercial liners, sub-relativistic to relativistic middle to large scale freighters, luxury yachts, high grade exploration neumann probes, autowars and biowars Advantages: very high efficiency, can use any baryonic matter, very high isp enables sub-relativistic and in some vessels relativistic velocity Disadvantages: large heavy drive unit, can be unstable, requires careful slaved hyperturing maintenance Construction Costs: Expensive (dedicated hyperturing controller) Running cost: Fairly cheap Normal Acceleration: up to 5G Normal top/cruising speed 0.8 C, but good (mostly higher toposophic) GUTships can reach high relativistic velocities |
All of the main power generation systems rely on converting matter into more tightly bound forms. During this process, the "binding energy" is released, and it's that which we use. For example, hydroelectric power works on gravitational binding energy - the water falls, becomes more tightly bound to the Earth, and releases energy in the form of kinetic energy which we use to drive turbines. Burning hydrocarbons or other molecular reactants works by making states that are more tightly bound by the electromagnetic force. Nuclear fission and fusion work by making more tightly bound nuclei, exploiting the fact there's a binding energy maximum around iron so we can fuse small nuclei or fission large nuclei to make more tightly bound states and release heat.
The basic GUT reactor works in the same sort of way, but with grand unified force binding energies. The thing with the exchange of X and Y grand unified bosons ("leptoquarks") is that they interconvert quarks and leptons. GUT reactors usually use a type of catalysed proton decay reactor - atomic nuclei are fed into extreme reaction conditions in the reactor core which then outputs positrons and neutral pions. The kinetic energy of the positrons is captured, and finally they are annihilated through combining them with electrons to squeeze out the last bit of rest mass energy, while the pions decay into gamma rays. Some of the energy is then used to keep the reaction conditions right.
The GUT drive and antimatter drive have the same sorts of characteristics, because one is converting protons and electrons by various steps into gamma rays and the other is converting protons, antiprotons, electrons and positrons into gamma rays. The difference is that with an antimatter drive one needs to produce antimatter first
The advantage of amat drives is that they are much simpler - one does not need the large and complex proton decay reactor. Some GUT-ships use some of the proton decay energy to produce antimatter to power missiles or remotes.
Amat drives turn matter+antimatter into energy and GUT drives turn matter into energy. The latter is a very important step forward. For example, to refuel an antimatter ship away from amat supplies requires fusing large amounts of hydrogen to produce small amounts of antimatter. To refuel a GUT ship, you just fill the tanks with hydrogen, which is a huge advantage.
