Quantum torpedo: black hole bomb?

[Myasishchev]

I floated in the pho-torp vs. q-torp thread a theory regarding the actual operation of the q-torp, and wondered how I might go about verifying whether it could or could not physically work.

Essentially, my theory was that the q-torp is akin to a Ulam-Teller fission-primary fusion device, except instead of a fission trigger and fusion secondary, the trigger is matter/antimatter, and the secondary is a lump of several hundred or thousand kilograms of an extremely dense material. The casing would be a gamma ray mirror (dilithium?) capable of temporarily containing and reflecting the radiation back into the secondary--much as a Ulam-Teller design uses a depleted uranium shell to contain the fission primary's output.

The dense secondary is then compressed by the radiation pressure into a ("quantum," natch) singularity, which in Trek-speak is essentially synonymous with black hole.

The black hole of very small size (for a black hole) would evaporate nearly instantly in intense Hawking radiation, such as (probably) powers Romulan D'D-class warbirds.

The upshot is that you would be converting hundreds or thousands of kilograms into energy for the potential bargain price of a few kilograms of antimatter.

Now, what I don't know is how to calculate the energy requirements for compressing an arbitrarily large or small amount of mass into a black hole. I suspect it would be immense, and that the idea may not be feasible without an unrealistically large amount of antimatter, or perhaps infeasible altogether.

 

[T'Girl]

Now, what I don't know is how to calculate the energy requirements for compressing an arbitrarily large or small amount of mass into a black hole. I suspect it would be immense, and that the idea may not be feasible without an unrealistically large amount of antimatter, or perhaps infeasible altogether

. Similar to early fission bombs where the sub-critical core only needed a good squeeze to push it over the edge. Your secondary would be right on the edge of self collapse, a matter-antimatter explosion generating a symmetrical shock wave would begin the final process of collapse for your super dense matter into a black hole.

The mirror could be a deflector shield or containment field of some kind.

 

[Ronald Held]

If you can compress a mass below it's Schwartzschild radius, you will form a black hole.

 

[Myasishchev]

Yeah, but I'm unsure what the energy requirements for compression are.

Taking a 5000kg mass, the Schwarzchild radius will be miniscule--7.4 X 10^-24m, or 7.4 yoctometers. I had to look up the prefix and according to wikipedia it is the smallest confirmed SI prefix in existence.

I also realize that to create a black hole, the exclusion principle has to be taken into account and the electron, neutron and possibly quark degeneracy pressures have to be overcome.

My problem is that I can't figure out what the actual force is that would be required for overcoming these pressures.

Apropos of nothing, I had another thought about boosting matter/antimatter reaction power in a weapon, again analogous to the Ulam-Teller type design--in thermonukes, it's common to use the neutron flux to fission more materials, including ordinarily unfissionable ones, and the resulting fission reaction boosts the power of the bomb, and it's possible to chain it into a new fusion reaction. Now it wouldn't make sense to call this analogue a "quantum torpedo," but lining a regular photon torpedo with normal-matter deuterium or tritium could conceivably increase the yield since the radiation pressure of the matter/antimatter primary would (I believe) pretty definitely fuse the hydrogen, releasing greater amounts of energy than the M/A reaction alone, and again at a discount compared to expensive antimatter. I'm considering this as a model for the Romulan plasma torpedoes mentioned in DS9... basically a U-T thermonuke with a small antimatter primary instead of fission primary--this may be more palatable than a pure fission/fusion weapon, although I still don't see why they couldn't be competitive, especially economically competitive. (The plasma weapon from Balance of Terror, by contrast, completely defies explanation--no noticeable electrostatic bloom, no reasonable thermal bloom, and faster than light despite no onboard propulsion--or "onboard" at all... it's weird :P )

 

[JarodRussell]

Aren't Photon, Quantum, etc... just designations? A photon torpedo is an antimatter warhead. And the engine glows red. A quantum torpedo is a more sophisticated antimatter warhead, and the engine glows blue.

 

[Myasishchev]

The designation should mean something, though.

"Photon" is really iffy. Technically a torpedo full of conventional explosive mediates its yield through electromagnetic gauge bosons, i.e. photons. But it makes decent sense as describing a matter/antimatter bomb, since you're directly converting mass into photons.

"Quantum" should be at least as related to the actual function of a q-torp... quantum effects are ultimately responsible for the conventional explosive's yield, too, but it would be silly to call a stick of TNT "quantum dynamite."

 

[Crazy Eddie]

You know something? I'm at a point in my Trek life where I no longer believe photon torpedoes are antimatter warheads, or any other kind of warhead. They just aren't powerful enough to do what they're supposed do or work the way they're supposed to work, and there's also the little problem that most of what a torpedo would produce as an antimatter warhead would be gamma radiation and neutrinos, which deflectors can probably shrug off without even noticing.

I have come to believe photon torpedoes are probably a kind of kinetic energy weapon. In this case, picture a bullet wrapped in a subspace field or some type of high-intensity energy field. The forcefield's main effect is to cancel out the repulsive force of the target's deflector shields so it can penetrate to--and through--the hull, not unlike the metal jacket on an armor piercing bullet. Since the torpedo is very small, it would probably use up MOST of its fuel supply in a titanic burst of energy just to burrow through the deflectors and the outer layer of a starship's armor; the torpedo casing itself is just a slug that hits a starship at several hundred kilometers per second until internal forcefields and STI fields soak up the damage.

In light of THIS theory, a quantum torpedo would simply use a different method of penetrating defensive/structural forcefields. It might be a device equipped with some kind of frequency-hopping field jacket that can intantly match the modulation of any shield system it encounters, penetrating all the way the enemy ship's hull without even slowing down. This would give it alot more punch even against heavily shielded vessels, but be only marginally more powerful than ordinary photon torpedoes when used against, say, Jem'hadar battle bugs and small lightly shielded targets.

As to the designation: "photon" and "quantum" simply describes the primary element of their penetrative force fields. Photon torpedoes use a kind of electromagnetic field (conventional forcefield) to penetrate enemy shields; quantum torpedoes would use something more fanciful, like an artificial quantum filament or something like that.

Yes, I know the above theories violate "teh canon" and references to photon torpedo warheads. But canon is so insanely inconsistent on this matter that I can't think of a way NOT to ignore it.

[/2 cents]

 

[JuanBolio]

Aren't Photon, Quantum, etc... just designations? A photon torpedo is an antimatter warhead. And the engine glows red. A quantum torpedo is a more sophisticated antimatter warhead, and the engine glows blue.

Photon torpedoes have been seen to glow blue, red, orange, green.... etc.

I always took quantum torpedoes to be antimatter catalyzed zero-point energy bombs - drawing power for the blast from the fabric of the universe itself.

 

[Myasishchev]

The ZPE theory is indeed the explanation that seems to be most favored... and indeed part of the reason I seek an alternative explanation is that I just don't like the idea of ZPE (in dramatic fiction, that is--if someone comes out with in real life, I think I'll be perfectly fine with it ).

ZPE is also more difficult to describe in a definite manner, since, as far I know, no one actually knows how to access it. In other words, if a q-torp is ZPE-based, it's ultimately as explicable, given today's scientific understanding, as warp drive is, which is to say not really explicable at all.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

Interesting ideea about how a quantum torpedo could work - if only the show's scenarists had put so much thought in the tech aspect of star trek.

I think one could best make matter implode below Schwartzschild radius not through a matter-antimatter primary, but through a warp-field primary.

In star trek, warp fields can warp space-time up to 9.9 (where 10 is infinite speed/distortion). That could translate into some incredibly powerfull gravity/antigravity fields - strong enough to compress mater until it creates a singularity.

PS - If, today, we would know how to extract meaningful quantities of energy from the vacuum, we would be building star trek-like starships, not speculating about them.

 

[Manticore]

Unless you have magical "Red Matter", I don't see how this could work. A black hole has the same mass and the same gravitational pull at the same distance that it did in life (actually less in the case of supernovas, since a large part of the mass is flung away during the supernova event itself). So unless you've got enough mass already on the torpedo to seriously mess up a starship (in which case, why need the blackhole part), it's not going to help too much.

That said, a red matter bomb might be an interesting concept. Presumably, it'd be used in extremely small amounts, but it's not unworkable. Hmm...

 

[Myasishchev]

Unless you have magical "Red Matter", I don't see how this could work. A black hole has the same mass and the same gravitational pull at the same distance that it did in life (actually less in the case of supernovas, since a large part of the mass is flung away during the supernova event itself). So unless you've got enough mass already on the torpedo to seriously mess up a starship (in which case, why need the blackhole part), it's not going to help too much.

The mechanism isn't the gravitational energy, but the mass-to-energy conversion that occurs during the Hawking evaporation process. If there was a 5000kg black hole in the same room as you, you wouldn't know it from the gravity... you wouldn't know it from electromagnetic effects, technically, as you'd be dead too quickly to process it, but the point is the gravitational effects would only become evident if it fell on you or something.

Now, it turns out that a 5000kg mass compressed into its Schwarzchild radius will evaporate due to quantum effects in
a much longer time than I thought--10,508 seconds. I assumed it would be more like 0.001. A 50kg mass by contrast will evaporate in .01508, which is a better fit for what we see, and also less of a hazard to the firer.

In star trek, warp fields can warp space-time up to 9.9 (where 10 is infinite speed/distortion). That could translate into some incredibly powerfull gravity/antigravity fields - strong enough to compress mater until it creates a singularity.

A valuable insight there--I've often speculated that warp is essentially converting electromagnetic energy into gravitational energy without the intermediate step of mass. This would also explain how a quantum torpedo is muy expensive, but not so expensive that just making an antimatter Tsar Bomba wouldn't be better (if cruder).

PS - If, today, we would know how to extract meaningful quantities of energy from the vacuum, we would be building star trek-like starships, not speculating about them.

Or we'd blow ourselves up, like those aliens in that Clarke book (was it 3001?). But good point.

 

[Manticore]

Unless you have magical "Red Matter", I don't see how this could work. A black hole has the same mass and the same gravitational pull at the same distance that it did in life (actually less in the case of supernovas, since a large part of the mass is flung away during the supernova event itself). So unless you've got enough mass already on the torpedo to seriously mess up a starship (in which case, why need the blackhole part), it's not going to help too much.

The mechanism isn't the gravitational energy, but the mass-to-energy conversion that occurs during the Hawking evaporation process. If there was a 5000kg black hole in the same room as you, you wouldn't know it from the gravity... you wouldn't know it from electromagnetic effects, technically, as you'd be dead too quickly to process it, but the point is the gravitational effects would only become evident if it fell on you or something.

Now, it turns out that a 5000kg mass compressed into its Schwarzchild radius will evaporate due to quantum effects in
a much longer time than I thought--10,508 seconds. I assumed it would be more like 0.001. A 50kg mass by contrast will evaporate in .01508, which is a better fit for what we see, and also less of a hazard to the firer.

Fair point; I always forget about the Hawking Radiation.