Elerium/Zrbite and M/A reactors

[montypython]

One of the things that I always found interesting about X-Com was the concept of elerium being used as an anti-matter precusor that converts to anti-deuterium when exposed to specific types of radiation (presumably alpha/beta particles). As a matter of course this not only makes storing anti-matter safer (since the elerium precursor is far less reactive than pure anti-matter), it make storing it easier too (since elerium is a solid and thus can be stored as such). Surprisingly other franchises like ST haven't jumped on the bandwagon as such, and why is that?

[Simon_Jester]

The main problem with it is that physically it's complete gibberish.

The twentieth century models of particle physics (which predicted the existence of antimatter in the first place, in a precise fashion, before it had ever been observed) allow for no means by which you can wave a magic wand over a piece of normal matter, say "abracadabra!" and turn it into an equivalent piece of antimatter.

It's like transmutation of the elements, only more so. In terms of things we can reasonably expect our distance descendants to learn how to do, it's the realm of magic, not science.

Now, there's a lot of good science fiction that invokes one or more of the concepts that we now deem "magical." And that's not entirely unprecedented: electricity looks magical by the standards of 1840, atomic energy looked magical by the standards of 1890, and modern computers look magical by the standards of 1930.

But "what if there's a magic element that breaks all the rules we know in [technobabble] way and serves as a super-energy source" is at least partially out of fashion in modern SF. So it's no wonder that the specific magic element type "Elerium" appears only in the X-COM franchise, just as "element zero" appears only in Mass Effect, and so on.

It's a specific literary conceit, not a widespread technological concept the way AI or cloning or for that matter antimatter reactors themselves are.

[Cykeisme]

"Magitech technobabble" was my first impression as well, when faced with the explanation of Elerium in XCOM.

The only way to reconcile it, is that it's not an actual element per se, but rather some super exotic stuff that somehow allows the aliens to have a substance that acts as safe storage of anti-matter without it having annihilation reactions with all the normal matter around it. Until, uh, you bombard it with certain particles so it releases the anti-matter in controllable amounts. Yeah.

The whole point was that it's fuel with super high energy density, and it cannot be obtained or synthesized by humanity yet, only captured from the aliens. So they could've gone with that, or just left it more vague.

Like a lot of other stuff in sci-fi.. they should have just left it vague.

[Starglider]

The most plausible forms of 'solid antimatter storage' are nanostructured materials that act as a honeycomb of tiny magnetic bottles, e.g. the 'fullerened antimatter' in Schlock Mercenary and the 'military hyperdrive fuel' in the Frontier / First Encounters games. In principle this kind of material is physically plausible, although it would still take magic to manufacture more than a tiny amount without inevitably having a multi-megaton industrial accident.

[Cykeisme]

Ah, something like that, yeah.
A nano-scale honeycomb of little magnetic bottles that each contain tiny amounts of antimatter. Maybe it could be designed so carefully regulated particle bombardment could release controlled amounts of the antimatter to be funneled away with more magnetic fields?


Though now that I think about it, depending on how durable the stuff is, I'd imagine simple mechanical stress or extreme temperatures (e.g. hitting it with a big hammer or tossing it in a fire) would also disrupt the tiny magnetic containment structures, and cause a KABLOOOIE

[Sea Skimmer]

If you can make that idea work at all you can probably come up with a way to mass produce it with an acceptable cost tradeoff, considering just how valuable such anti matter storage would be. Also needing to store anti matter suggests a civilization which already has colossal amounts of energy to throw around, so the cost of factory equipment ought to be pretty trivial. Robots building robots out of planets and all that.

Ammunition plants used to blowup all the time and we just learned to spread out the production process massively until no more then one machine could blowup at once. If you built this factory in space you could just have everything miles and miles apart and little shuttles fling back and forth by catapult to connect the machines instead of conveyer belts dog legging around blast walls. Even a 100 megaton blast isn't that big a deal if the next nearest object of note is 50 miles away and has a good sized space rock positioned as a radiation screen.

Piping all the little resulting fuel tanks together might be a real problem though, might need some kind of direct injection system in which the anti matter is shot right into the engine and the fuel tanks themselves are physically swapped.

[Darmalus]

Depending on the trade offs, the fuel tanks might be considered expendable, maybe they are the matter part of the M/AM reaction.

[Purple]

Depending on the trade offs, the fuel tanks might be considered expendable, maybe they are the matter part of the M/AM reaction.

That would probably be it if the game mechanics are to be believed. Honestly I think that is the most likely explanation overall.
Basically, assume that the cells do not transform into antimatter they are just containers for it. And the antimatter inside is just antielerium. So when you bombard them with radiation the shields drop and the cells annihilate with the AM inside them. Instant fuel.

And the reason why we can't make them is because even if we could we could not make the antimatter to fill them. Thus making it an expendable resource.

[Metahive]

In the remake they do say that they might be able to produce Elerium one day, just not within the timeframe the game takes place in.

[avatarxprime]

Umm, what is positron emission?

It is possible for matter to produce antimatter. Now it's certainly not a common occurrence (otherwise it wouldn't be so hard to get antimatter), but it a natural process and one we can increase. Some hypothetically advanced civilization might be able to create specialized matter where the vast majority of it releases positrons. Now that's not exactly turning regular matter into antimatter like in the XCom games, but it's the closest you're likely to get.