Unfortunately, it's not the answer we'd like. The nuclear reactor on an aircraft carrier, for example, produces less than 200 megawatts. To melt snow in front of your car, you'd need three of those.
Each Nimitz Class boat has 2 powerplants. Now, the Big-E had 4. That means, it could have melted your snow, and have a powerplant left over to power the screws to keep up with you. The oil-fired carriers could do over 45 Knots, and the Enterprise was the longest naval vessel ever built, so it had to have been even faster than the carriers still in service. 60 MPH is hardly our of the question.
I'd like to thank TanimaL for posting the pages of tech manual.
Sarium-krellide.... A lot of folks were forced to memorize all the symbols of all the elements on the periodic table in high school. I can't remember Sarium or anthing like Krell. For once, I can't blame Hollywood for this crap.
Finding a power source for a space gun ain't that hard. First you can go by process of elemination of powersources we know of in the ST universe: chemical, nuclear, and matter/anti-matter.
Chemical: Nitrocellulose based chemicals are about as powerful as you can get, so your space-gun is only going to be marginally superior to an M1911a1. Scratch.
Matter/anti-matter: What happens if you're weapon gets hit? Mushroom cloud, you're whole company is vaporized. Too dangerous.
Nuclear: Well we have two routes, fission and fusion. Fission produces too many dangerous and detectable by-products, so it's out. Fusion.... It's been done before, but has anyone gone into detail?
What can you learn about nuclear fusion in a couple of hours on Wikipedia, or a lifetime of watching PBS?
You force Hydrogen nuclei together with enough energy to overcome their mutual repelling electro-magnetic force, so the nuclei come close enough for the Strong Nuclear Force to take over, they go "Boom," and you have Helium. Successful experiments have used gigantic lasers to zap little pellets.... Not too promising, but given a few hundred years and nano-technology, this shouldn't be too hard.
The preferred fuel for fusion is Heavy Hydrogen, usually Duterium (
2H), then again, scientists are talking about
3He. This kind of Helium is harder to fuse, but gives a bigger bang. There's a bigger version of H. Tritium (
3He.) Given a larger nucleus, yet the same repulsive charge, it should be easier to fuse.
OK, so now we're still dealing with trying to keep a radioactive, lighter than air gas in the magazine of our small arm. Cumbersome, but not completely unmanagable.... Just how do they do this with all the H-bombs? Lithium-Deuteride. Why not "Lithium Triteride?" Yeah, the folks writing Halo thought the substance would make a better bomb, too.
On the down-side, Tritium has a half-life of only a little over 12 years, so it might be a little hot to handle, but about the right life-span for a weapon that you don't want to fall in the wrong hands. You see, your fuel-cell could fail after reaching a concentration below 95 or 75%, depending on what your story-world fines ideal. If it works until it falls to below 50%, then, the mathematics of the shelf-life are even easy enough for me to do!
The really cool thing is that you can discribe both these materials, and the "Lithium Ion" in the battery of your laptop or cell phone as Lithium Hyderide. This means you can use your nuclear fuel to hold a considderable eletrical potential, as well. Considdering scientists are talking about improving LiH battery performance to near instantainous recharge, this fuel sounds good for holding a nuclear and chemical potential simultaneously.
At this point, it all sounds so simple, somebody should have done it already. Heck, somebody should have descibed it already. The diagram of an "Atomic LASER Pistol" nearly draws itself. Why nobody else has come up with this defies me. I just attacked the problem with logic.
I will note that the tech manuals assign a Tritium power source to the Jem'Hadar weapon, but they didn't think it through. My sci-fi weapons will have "Lithium-triteride power-cells." I put the term "Lithium-triteride" into a search engine, thinking somebody had to have come up with it previously. I was right, but Halo's explanation of the substace is absurd.
BTW, the physicists responcible for our first LiH bomb screwed up, because they didn't take into account that Lithium fissions in the nutron flux of detonation. They got a much bigger "Boom" than expected. I thought it took more energy to split smaller atoms than they would return. Then, I just read that
4He is almost as bad as Fe for being "nuclear ash."
So much for the power of future small arms.
Topic: Hand phaser energy output (Read 12545 times)