(11-05-2013, 10:30 PM)Drashner1 Wrote: Hm. Based on this, it sounds like we could say that S2 create monopoles by first creating Qballs and then using them to create monopoles, which may be easier to 'breed' then create from scratch. Later, higher S-levels figure out how to mass produce Q balls and then form them into Q mirrors and such.
Does this work as a progression for this tech or do we need to tweak things a bit?
Todd
Yes, so:
First you make Q balls. Then you use the Q balls to make GUT monopoles. Both catalyze baryon decay, the difference being whether electrical or magnetic charge is handiest in the situation (or both if you make dyons).
Later, you figure out how to make intermediate mass monopoles, which does not produce baryon number violation, and so doesn't catalyze decay. This allows you to make monopolium steel and other ferromagnetic materials with a monopole substrate.
Still later, you figure out how to make intermediate mass monopoles with differing charges. This allows you to make full-on magmatter.
And because we always want to stomp all over those guys on StarDestroyer.net (kidding), we make the Q gun, which is a standard particle accelerator firing Q balls instead of charged particles.
The beam constantly converts matter of the opposite charge to energy, and if you use two beams, with positive and negative Q-balls in each, you can cause a continual reaction by eating both types of charged matter (e.g. the negative Q-balls catalyze protons, the positive Q-balls eat leptons and any leftover muons and electrons from hadron decay) and maybe cause a chain reaction ...
(To be clear, either charge of Q-ball will catalyze hadron and lepton decay, but normal matter will be strongly attracted to Q-balls of the opposite charge.)
Oh, kinda like the MDD "Little Doctor" in Ender's Game (which was a good movie adaptation of the book, BTW, IMHO).
Well, maybe not a chain reaction. But you can probably render anything made of normal matter into its equivalence in energy (and the positive Q balls will cut down the incidence of muon to neutrino decay). And the EM force is pretty long ranged, so matter is going to want to rush to the Q balls (rather than the reverse because Q balls are quite heavy compared to molecules and atoms), the reaction rate limited by the number of Q-balls and their effective charge (once their charge falls below a certain level, they stop violating baryon number in their cores).
Then again, maybe. ;-) About the only limitation on such a weapon are the number of Q balls you have on hand to fire, which mostly determines how quickly your target converts itself to energy and fragments.
BTW, this article http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464e89d70a038 is more plausibly explained using Q balls (strangelets aren't stable, and neutronium is really just a battery for gravitational energy).
Now to go off and figure out how to make stable strangelets.