If nothing else works, you can count on Captain Kirk to do something illogical to save the day!' Landis says, 'Overall, I still think I'd bet on the Enterprise. One thing the two scientists agree on is who would win in a ship-to-ship battle between the Galacticaand the Enterprise. 'If you need, say, a 100-kilogram superconducting magnet to create the fields needed to suspend a 1-gram sphere of antihydrogen, your photon torpedo's going to be a little bigger than a beach ball.' Landis recognizes the challenges, though he points out that since you'd only need a tiny bit of antimatter to create an effective weapon, a photon torpedo could theoretically be smaller a nuke. Also, you would have to confine it magnetically, otherwise it would annihilate with the walls of the container. to produce enough antimatter to light up a light bulb. 'Right now, it would cost many thousands of times the gross national product of the U.S. He says this isn't realistic, given that producing and storing antimatter both require huge amounts of energy. Krauss has a problem with Star Trek's relatively small, coffin-size photon torpedoes. 'At least, right up to the point where the shields are overloaded and Scotty calls up from engineering to say 'the engines can't take much more.' Which seems to happen once per episode, so maybe the shields aren't so good after all.' 'In Star Trek they have 'deflector shields' that seem to be pretty good at keeping the nasty stuff like photon torpedoes away,' he says. Short of some kind of 'magical' technology like energy screens, says Landis, any spacecraft would be toast if it were hit. It doesn't really matter which you use - either one is going to have quite an effect.'ĭefending against either type of weapon would be a huge challenge. 'In terms of weapon effectiveness, though, it's not relevant - an 'ordinary' nuclear weapon is already quite capable of destroying a city. Landis agrees that an antimatter weapon would give 'more kaboom for the kilogram,' but that it's irrelevant for most practical purposes. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, extracts about 1% of the available energy.' 'They turn 100% of the matter energy to radiation, and thus extract all the energy possible for an explosion. 'Antimatter weapons are always more effective, in that they give the biggest bang for the buck,' says Krauss.

Photon vs quantum torpedoes