Meson Bomb

FS2 Tech Description

The TC-Meson Bomb is used solely as a container for Meson Bomb deployments. Each is custom built specifically to hold a Meson Bomb. The container is permanently sealed once the bomb is safely housed within it.

Comments

The Meson Bomb is an experimental demolition warhead developed at the Hideki Institute in Vega. First devised as a large-scale demolition bomb to destroy meteor and asteroid fields, it was first deployed to destroy the Knossos subspace portal in Gamma Draconis to prevent the Shivans from invading Capella. Up to 17 Meson bombs have been produced so far; three were used to destroy the Knossos subspace portal in Gamma Draconis and 14 more were retrofitted in decommissioned destroyers, GTD Bastion and GTD Nereid to collapse the nodes to Vega and Epsilon Pegasi from Capella. Its use as a demolition warhead was first demonstrated at the destruction of the Knossos subspace portal, where thereafter Allied Command commissioned its use in the Capella contingency plan for trapping the Shivans in that system.

Its name refers to the mesons, which are a group of elementary particles called hadrons. All hadron particles consist of quarks that are kept strongly together by another particle called a gluon, but the other hadron group, baryons, consist of three quarks whereas all mesons are combinations of a quark and an anti-quark kept together by gluon. Baryons include the bulk of ordinary matter, protons and neutrons, mesons are much more rare particles. Mesons can be born in certain energy-intensive interactions. For example, cosmic radiation that impacts the Earth atmosphere creates a stream of meson particles called pions.

Mesons are in normal conditions very short-lived particles, they rapidly degenerate into gamma radiation by themselves. Physically most likely explanation for the destructive energy generated by Meson Bomb is that somehow the Meson Bomb makes it possible to contain large amounts of mesonic matter intact, preventing its disintegration by some currently unknown physical phenomenon, or perhaps by slowing time inside the Meson Bomb container by advanced subspace interaction. When the detonation-preventer is then released, the mesonic mass inside the container rapidly turns into radiation, creating same effects as described before - a hot, expanding shockwave with loads of destructive power.

A Meson Bomb's destructive energy could also be the result of some currently unknown reaction that can weaken the bonding gluon between the quark and anti-quark of a meson, releasing a cloud of quarks and anti-quarks in the mesonic matter. More than likely a great portion of quarks and anti-quarks then find each other and annihilate, creating a lot of radiation, which turns the surrounding matter into blazing hot, rapidly expanding cloud of plasma that has a lot of thermal and kinetic energy. This is the obvious shockwave of the explosion.

However, current physics does not know of a phenomenon that could divide hadron particles into separate quarks; in fact, theoretically all attempts to separate gluon-bound quarks from each other just increase the force at which the gluon keeps the quarks together. This is called "asymptotic freedom". When the quarks have been sufficiently stretched apart, the energy density demanded to keep the quarks apart from eachg other reaches high enough level to actually transmute into matter; a new quark/anti-quark pair is born and so we now have two mesons instead of the original one. For this reason, no particle consisting of quarks is actually separable into quarks and gluons; any attempt to do so just creates more hadrons as a result of energy transmutating into matter.

The use of Meson Bomb as a tactical warhead is prohibited by its large size.

The Hideki Institute was named after Hideki Yukawa, a leading Japanese theoretical physicist that won the Nobel Prize for his thoery on meson.