That defeats the purpose of storage. If you have to go right beside a star to get it when you need it what difference would it make? You could just leave the antimatter where it was and mine it later when you needed it and it would have the same effect.
No, I'm MAKING it with the Statite. It has a particle accelerator on-board. Oh, you meant STORAGE. Sorry. I'd keep it frozen, in vacuum, suspended by magnetic fields. If I need any I vaporized off some with a laser and use more magnets to move it around.
You don't need a Large Hadron Collider to make antimatter. In fact that's one way to NOT get antimatter, because at that amount of energy, things start to go a 'lil batshit. Make it a a fairly large particle accelerator weighted for quantity of collisions rather than energy of collisions. The hard part would be trapping the antiprotons and the positrons that are moving very, very close to the speed of light, without them hitting anything, or you even knowing where they're headed or how fast they're going! (I would nerd out on that summore but i'm lazy and it would result in Starbound being Dwarf Fortress:Now With Particle Physics!) The point is, is that all you'd need is a particle accelerator attached to a nuclear reactor, and you'll have a small-scale antimatter factory going. As for the laser? Yeah, mining this stuff with a laser would be very, very hard to do. Optical Tweesers are used on proteins and occasionally portions of DNA, not on asteroids. I think there's a means of doing it with much less power and using a similar concept. (Maybe cutting a chunk off with a laser then using your ship's gravity manipulation to gravitate it toward your container? Unless Starbound is going hard sci-fi, and you float around your ship while its in orbit, or your ship spins (neither of which seem to be happening in the previews)
what Science aside, using antimatter like this is entirely unnecessary. If you have the "great technology" to get it, you don't need it. Your power needs are already being met by something else. You've played the whole game using something else to generate power and it may not have even constantly demanded rare fuel to feed on. And of course, the obvious 'fun point' is using it as a weapon. Using it as a bomb can be diplomatically called "terraforming", less diplomatically called "novelty", and non-diplomatically called "grief central". You're one person or a small crew of people, not the owner of the Ishimura. There is no need for a bomb to flatten entire mountains or crack a planet open. Using it on a smaller scale is pointless because it might as well be an equally powerful weapon of a different sort that doesn't require materials implicating kiloton explosions. Perhaps it'd work as fuel for a jump gate network or something. But if you're going to do that, a fictional rock that won't annihilate ecosystems or trivialize any challenging enemy would do the same job better.
You don't need great tech, just a lot of energy. And it's a pretty good storage medium for said energy.
I think Antimatter would be a nice way to generate a renewable resource. If you have a massive energy-hungry warp gate or factory running on another planet, you'll have to find a way to fuel it. Now you could go and load up classic fuels into it, but that would be a tedious and time consuming process, it would become more and more frustrating as your ambitions scaled up. Or you could have a particle accelerator give the laws of thermodynamics the finger and generate infinite energy via antimatter. Some of that energy would be pumped back into the accelerator, while the rest could be used to power whatever it was that you wanted to power. Sure the stuff's dangerous, but it is very difficult to maneuver and transport. I don't think that you would ever encounter just blocks of antimatter lying around, even in the most exotic of locales, all of it would be tightly sealed in magnetolevitational containers that are about as indestructible as you can get. I think that antimatter would never, ever be found in amounts of more than a gram or two, because just one gram of antimatter would end up releasing 89,980,000,000,000 joules of energy (AKA a lot. 1.4 times the power of the little boy bomb.) One way to balance it is to say that long-term storage is impossible (or gets exponentially harder), and you only generate a few nanograms a minute, so anyone with the time and resources to invest in creating an antimatter bomb would probably be really disappointed to get banned from whatever server he was on, as it would probably be an extremely late-game investment. Or you could simply not allow bombs to be made in the first place, as the containers for antimatter could be designed such that they will simply leak their payload into the container wall at such a rate that it would only create a slightly-larger-than-normal sized explosion rather than a massive antimatter one capable of leveling planets.
It's time for me to enter the conversation again! I've already spoken about magnetism and antimatter on one of my earlier posts. It would have to be a magnetic form of antimatter making 9/10 of the antimatter you find useless. I know starbound is DEFINITELY not going to be hard sci-fi but I like talking about this particular subject. Your info is correct and you have proven that you could do it but my next question is why you WOULD do it? The firs use explained in the thread is you could make energy from it. Due to the principles of energy conversion it would be more effective to not use a nuclear reactor to make antimatter but instead use the reactor to make energy. If you are going to argue it would take less space to store antimatter THINK OF THE STORAGE DEVICE! As I've said the storage uses vast amounts of energy and the container you store the antimatter in is HUGE! The only other use of it is to be used as a mass griefing tool which could be used to destroy player built cities in seconds. Point being antimatter needs more uses before I consider it in any way useful.
Or you could build ordinary magic science generators and make energy forever without bringing in something that necessarily explodes catastrophically if mishandled in any way. What advantage does this have over making a rare magic science crystal a component of high-end generators? Antimatter demands its own special treatment, leaks away when you're not looking, and complicates something that doesn't need to be complicated. And then you have to handwave away its amazing ability to blow everything up.
Why not just magnetize the antimatter as you go? All you need is a ferrous element of antimatter and a constant, strong magnetic field(Which is what the miner would be anyway, right?)
Please refer to previous posts about why this wouldn't work. Well this is a game about the future so might as well get the facts we can get straight well, straight.
Yes, I did just mention perpetual motion, I said that this in-game particle accelerator gives the finger to the laws of Thermodynamics. I didn't mention perpetual motion because that's how to best emulate accelerators, I mentioned violating the First law of Thermodynamics because it would add a good gameplay element, differentiate antimatter from other fuels, and make it useful in certain situations where other fuels would not work.
You keep thinking that antimatter is nonmagnetic. Is it because you're assuming it's anti-hydrogen? We're making it in a particle accelerator anyway(or mining them for novas), why not fuse them up to iron?
Well, everything is magnetic, just to varying degrees. Though really one would probably want to store the antimatter not using magnets (unless it's powerfully diamagnetic, which is unlikely.) Probably the best way to store it would be to hold the payload using really powerful lasers. They're used in Inertial Confinement Fusion to compress the fuel to be so dense that it reaches ignition, lasers make the densest bits of matter on the planet, with a density of a whopping 1,000 grams per cubic centimeter, I don't think that weak lasers would be a problem. With the technology that we can expect a Starboundian player race to have, these lasers would be so insanely powerful that I doubt that the antimatter is going anywhere. Even if there's power loss or you somehow get through the indestructible container, which I linked earlier. But it's worth it to link it again.
PHOTONS not PROTONS, protons are part of atom, photons are things that make light There are no "anti-photons" and so you can't do "antimatter laser", but you could shoot other kinds of particles like positrons using just magnetic field, non-charged particles pose a problem (as you could push them by using laser but your laser would probably had to be more powerful than resulting antimatter explosion), but it could be solved by making anti-atoms first and not just shooting raw particles. The problem would be in making and storing it, and in surviving gamma-bursts any matter-antimatter explosion would produce. If it could be forged (or found in "nature") into heavier atoms it would be much easier to store (it's much easier to trap metal ball in magnetic field than just some particles, or hydrogen gas)
...Huh. I was of the impression that ICF used the lasers to compress matter via photon pressure; basically bumping the atoms in place with photons, not making solid matter out of photons. Maybe fuse antimatter up to iron, sans positrons(strong negative charge), then use a combination of magnets and electromagnets to hold the stuff? You only need the electromagnets to hold the "gate" areas, so to speak, thus saving energy(though you'll need strong magnets. Monopoles or heavy shielding too, unless you like a slight jar essentially EMPing all of your electronics.)
