D'deridex-class Overview

[Captain Seafort]

Under what conditions though? We can heat steel so it runs like water, but we can't do that to enemy ships' hulls.

[Mark]

Dunno

To quote Q

"I'm an idea man!"

[Lt. Staplic]

yes starfleet can manipulate matter into new forms...however we've never seen their process for making/harvesting anti-matter AFAIK.

changing the charge of matter is more difficult than simply rearranging it into a new compound

[Mark]

True, but you wouldn't think it would be to far beyond the scope their abilities if they were actually pursuing that line of development.

[Lt. Staplic]

not necessairily, we've been persuing hand-held lasar guns for decades, we've barely been able to start creating massive lab grade military lasars, it'll be decades more before we can get something out that doesn't necessairily have to be vehicle mounted....and lasars are far easier than manufacturing anti-matter, which is far easer that manipulating the charge of only anti-matter.

[Mark]

I can accept that, BUT anti matter has been around for 200+years Trek time, and they KNOW it can be done. They MUST have SOME kind of sensor logs of the DM's ray, and how it worked. Building off of that, Starfleet had about a century to come up with that weapon if they wanted it.

[Teaos]

For all we know getting antimatter is shit easy. Hell there are clouds of it in our own galaxy.

They either harvest it from natural sources or they produce it.

Anti Matter is just matter made of from a different combination of quarks, I forget the exact combination but a Proton is made up of something like 2 up quarks and one down, a anti proton is made up of 2 downs and 1 up. So to make anti matter you just need to swap out one quark in a bunch of protons.

We have no idea how hard/easy that is.

Harvesting it may be no harder than using a giant vacuum cleaner for them.

[Deepcrush]

Or it could be a matter of storing it. Look how often antimatter kills things in ST.

[Mikey]

Supposedly it can be produced from matter - hence, bussard collectors and the quest for deuterium. However, creating it in controlled conditions and doing so in a weapons capacity, in the heat of battle, at range, are two hugely different things.

[Lt. Staplic]

we are actually producing anti-matter right now...one way to do so is to smash a bunch of protons together...after a milisecond some of the quarks will have rearranged themselves into different anti-matter particles that can then be harvested.

and yes, that's my point, looking at how we create anti-matter now is much different than what happenned with the DM....the wepons some how reverses the charge of one quark in a particle (or whatever they need to to change the charge if it's not just protons). and it does all this without affecting the regular matter between the ship and the am pod.

[Sionnach Glic]

we are actually producing anti-matter right now.

Source?

[Tsukiyumi]

we are actually producing anti-matter right now.

Source?

Here's one.

And another.

I'm sure there are more. They don't create very much, but we are doing it.

[Sionnach Glic]

Ah, thank you.

[Lt. Staplic]

I read it in an article about the Higgs-boson that their looking for at the LHC in France...and that their also creating small amounts of anti-matter there.

[Mark]

Then some kind of a pulse designed to alter the atomic structure of the anti matter should do it. Just adjust the quarks a bit, and suddenly it's not anti-matter anymore.