Antimatter bullets....oh the potential

Currently we are making antimatter 1 atom at a time; its been said that a gram could cause some SERIOUS damage to the earth (It converts to 100% energy). I was thinking, what if they were able to implement this stuff in bullets? Imagine that, a 2 inch bullet having the power to blow up a damn tank!

How would you make the bullet? After all, when matter and antimatter collide they annihilate one another.

Can you just gently set antimatter down on matter and avoid total annihilation?

reply to post by Acelet

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if it converts to pure energy i dont think you would use it to take out a tank. you would probably take out a whole city with one bullet of antimatter.

i for one am glad it is taking them one atom at a time.

see the problem of using antimatter bullets, is that you'd have to contain the antimatter. That means insulated tubes of supercooled liquid, lots of cables, etc. for the magnetic field... if you see where I am going with this, then you will also realize that it is much more economically feasible to just take that same mass in steel and lob it towards your foe (him not being in my sight) in the shape of a giant artillery shell.
namen.

ya its impractical

thats why we should focus more on beam technology

like , Ion blasters

if you could lob a gram of antimatter at something it would be very powerful, on the order of 20 kilotons yield. Getting antimatter contained inside something bullet-sized is unlikely though, barring radical changes in the way antimatter is stored. Also the stuff is incredibly difficult and expensive to make, on the order of quadrillions of dollars a gram over billions of years at current prices.

We already have nuclear weapons that fit in artillery shells, and nuclear artillery shells have been tested all the way down to 155mm, though I don't think any that size were ever produced in numbers.

reply to post by mdiinican

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Antimatter's destructive power is highly over-rated, folks. I blame Star Trek, and other space opera for it. Just for fun, let's run some numbers, shall we?

The famous (or infamous) relation that we're looking for is E=mc^2. In standard units, Energy is measured in Joules, mass in kilograms, and c is in meters per second. So, the energy released by conversion of a gram of antimatter would be E= 0.002 * 89,875,517,873,681,764 = 179,751,035,747,363.5 joules.

TNT has an energy density of 4.6 megajoules / kilogram, so, dividing the joules released by 4,600,000 (correcting the unit magnitude) gives 39,076.3 kg of TNT equivalent.

Admittedly, that's a hell of a bang out of 2 grams of input (1g antimatter, and the 1g of matter it takes with it), but it's three orders of magnitude less than 20,000 tons. If you want both sides in Kt, that would be 0.004Kt.

Sorry...the physics geek in me couldn't resist

We have yet to create an amount of antimatter REMOTELY CLOSE to a gram. We also have yet to successfully contain antimatter before it reacts with surrounding matter to release energy.

I checked again; your math is wrong somewhere. By E=mc^2, 1 gram of matter is equivalent to about 9x10^13 joules which is roughly equivalent to the energy released by 21.5 kilotons of TNT. Now of course, a gram of antimatter will also annihilate a gram of matter, doubling this, but much of the energy will be released in neutrinos and won't really do anything towards exploding things.

A kilogram of TNT would release about 20-30 megatons of explosive force, not beyond the capabilities of modern nuclear weapons, but certainly from a smaller package, if you don't consider the no doubt building-sized amount of equipment it would take to hold the stuff; something we can't currently do.

reply to post by mdiinican

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Whoops, the last paragraph should read

"A kilogram of antimatter would release about 20-30 megatons of explosive force"

not

"A kilogram of TNT would release about 20-30 megatons of explosive force".

Obviously a kilogram of TNT would release a kilogram TNT equivalent explosive force. Too late to edit.