Which would you build if you could?

[Spacescifi]

 

 

All things being nearly equal I will try to make this fair.

 

Antimatter thermal rocket SSTO VS an antimatter bomb pusher plate propelled SSTO VS a staged antimatter rocket launch vehicle spacecraft.

 

I will share my thoughts as you may share yours.

Antimatter pusher plate:

 

 

Has this shape, with the pusher plate at the rear. It lifts off and lands horizontally with antimatter thermal methane propelled landing rockets. Lander rockets are closed cycle with heat exchangers, basically an antimatter lightbulb drive. So minimal radiation is spilled out.

It is an SSTO.

Pros: Very powerful. Easy SSTO, small bombs.

Cons: I am not sure if antimatter bombs would leave as much fallout as nukes or worse. Either way I think it WILL leave a hole in the ozone layer. 

Antimatter thermal SSTO tail lander rocket: Uses antimatter thermal liquid methane propulsion.

Pros: Lots of power for SSTO VTOL.

Cons: Radiation spewing out the exhaust. Mostly gamma rays. Your exhaust trail will likely look part rocket plume, part aurora boaralis ray .

 

Staged antimatter rocket launch vehicle: I do not know what you wanna lift with staged ANTIMATTER rocket, but it must be heavy.

Pros: Can lift a lot. Maybe less than a pusher plate though.

Cons: Radiation.

 

So which would you produce in your home country if you were given.permission, and a ton of antimatter to work with, sealed off in kilogram containers that dispense antimatter in pellets that when heated release the antimatter.

I would choose the Orion belly lander SSTO, and just launch it once, and send on a 5 year mission through interesting spots in the solar system, on occasion orbiting earth for ressupply.

 

 

Edited September 4, 2019 by Spacescifi
New pic

[kerbiloid]

An antimatter helicopter with pusher plates on blades to rotate.

[Spacescifi]

3 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

An antimatter helicopter with pusher plates on blades to rotate.

 

Jokes on you. That is suicide.

[kerbiloid]

2 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

That is suicide.

Like the two previous ones aren't.

***

Ok, if u h8 choppers, let it be a pusher-plate antimatter skids.

Upd.
w8... It's a great idea for KSP. An Orion engine on skids...

Edited September 4, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

8 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Like the two previous ones aren't.

***

Ok, if u h8 choppers, let it be a pusher-plate antimatter skids.

Upd.
w8... It's a great idea for KSP. An Orion engine on skids...

 

I do not believe any of the OP ideas are a suicide mission.

Since even though antimatter reactions are hot, one can get cooler, more bearable tempertures that won't melt the nozzle by imcreasing the mass flow rate, which exchanges rocket burn time (ISP) for extra thrust. Which is more or less what spaceship needs to reach orbital velocity anyway.

[kerbiloid]

You don't need antimatter for low-yield explosions or thermal air thrusting.

And any accident with the antimatter in atmosphere would gift us a nice place to film postapocalyptic movies.

Edited September 4, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Spacescifi]

27 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

You don't need antimatter for low-yield explosions or thermal air thrusting.

And any accident with the antimatter in atmosphere would gift us a nice place to film postapocalyptic movies.

 

No you do not need antimatter.

 But it makes SSTO more within reach

And lifting entire starships into orbit fully assembled.

Edited September 4, 2019 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

It makes SSTO a half of surrounding landscape.

Unless you surround it with so thick protective layer that you get a cannon.

[Shpaget]

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

No you do not need antimatter.

 But it makes SSTO more within reach

As long as obtaining antimatter requires no more than reaching towards a nearby shelf. Unfortunately, it's a little more difficult than just picking up a 1 kg bag of it at your local hardware store. 

As for OP, I really don't understand why you are asking us to pick between three unspecified, entirely improbably concepts and decide which is the best. They are all equally implausible.

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, Shpaget said:

As long as obtaining antimatter requires no more than reaching towards a nearby shelf. Unfortunately, it's a little more difficult than just picking up a 1 kg bag of it at your local hardware store. 

As for OP, I really don't understand why you are asking us to pick between three unspecified, entirely improbably concepts and decide which is the best. They are all equally implausible.

 

Just figuring out if pusher plates really do outperform rockets or not.

It does not get more powerful than antimatter in theoretical rocketry, so I wanted to know which has the highest thrust to weight ratio and settle which is more efficient, and safe for an SSTO.... once and for all.

[kerbiloid]

Pusher plate is a design devoted to a particular case of a spaceship. Also, it's not a rocket, it's a shooting cannonball.

It doesn't use a shockwave, it catches a focused jet of plasma produced by an external source. So, it doesn't consume any explosion.
In atmosphere any jet of plasma will be stopped and dissipated by the air, so in the best case you can push the ship out of atmosphere without destroying it. But that's definitely not what it likes.

Pusher plate =/= Explosion
Pusher plate == Gas/plasma jet (jet not in sense of airplane motor, but in sense of focused gas flow)

Edited September 4, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Shpaget]

A popularity vote will not determine that.

Go and find actual studies.

[Spacescifi]

16 minutes ago, Shpaget said:

A popularity vote will not determine that.

Go and find actual studies.

Have.

Which indicate that only the Orion can lift heavy stuff with ease.

So even with power great as antimatter,  pusher plates provide the highest thrust to weight ratio.

 

In other words, virtually any spaceship in scifi using rocketry would be better off with a pusher plate, especially if it is exclusively a space vehicle.

Higher thrust to weight ratio.

Edited September 4, 2019 by Spacescifi

[Shpaget]

3 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Have.

Which indicate that only the Orion can lift heavy stuff with ease.

Which brings us back to my question; why does our personal preference for one or the other design matter?

The math has spoken.

[Spacescifi]

47 minutes ago, Shpaget said:

Which brings us back to my question; why does our personal preference for one or the other design matter?

The math has spoken.

 

Evironmental safety. That is harder to gauge, what with the fact that no antimatter device has ever blown up nor a rocket powered by one flown.

I suppose that too could be calculated for though.

[coyotesfrontier]

A thunderbolt drive: Apparently, it is theoretically possible to build weapons that destroy spacetime itself, so why not take that technology and use it for FTL travel? Forget warping spacetime, tear it at its seams!

Sources:

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/wave-of-death.93654/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pp-wave_spacetime

Not really sources but interesting anyway:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/5062fd4d7f5cb

Edited September 5, 2019 by coyotesfrontier

[Spacescifi]

19 minutes ago, coyotesfrontier said:

A thunderbolt drive: Apparently, it is theoretically possible to build weapons that destroy spacetime itself, so why not take that technology and use it for FTL travel? Forget warping spacetime, tear it at its seams!

Sources:

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/wave-of-death.93654/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pp-wave_spacetime

Not really sources but interesting anyway:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/5062fd4d7f5cb

 

For scifi I am partial to VR (Vacuum Reaction) drives that literally push off the vacuum to propel your vessel.

Not nearly as hazardous as yours for the sake of plot, but useless in atmospheres. Meaning you either need a bunch of staging to get a large vessel into space or... in a strangely ironic use of an orion pusher plate, use a few orion vessels as launch boosters for the ship.

Crazy, but it would also work.

Edited September 5, 2019 by Spacescifi

[sevenperforce]

If I could build whatever I wanted, I would use a pair of air-augmented pebble-bed nuclear turboramrockets, mounted on rotating nacelles, for liftoff and touchdown. Then I would use a magnetic aerospike antimatter-catalyzed pulse fusion drive for vacuum operations. 

[magnemoe]

21 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Evironmental safety. That is harder to gauge, what with the fact that no antimatter device has ever blown up nor a rocket powered by one flown.

I suppose that too could be calculated for though.

No nuclear bombs has gone off by accident, yes it has been some radioactive leaks but as I know you have also never getting one who blew up the high explosives but did not go super critical and just got an flash and an dirty bomb. Yes it has been lots of nuclear test fizzles but none with accidents with nuclear bombs in service. 
I might be wrong here and would be interested in event about this. 

In short nuclear bombs are pretty safe, since they are so hard to sett off. 
Antimatter on the other hand require you to keep the containment field up all the time, yes you can probably set it up to fail safe. as in ejecting the antimatter trough an hatch, this is however not fail safe if you need that dV to brake. 

As I see it it has two uses, one is interstellar missions there you might need it. Its also good ammo, no not as huge bombs or even small ones but as birdshot or even gas as stuff passing trough it will light up.