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First, I'm assuming without asking that I can generate a blob of charged particles like the Sun's solar flares plasma. My thought was more directly related to HOW to shoot it? Isn't the real thing twisted out by the sun's wild magnetic fields? Can an electromagnetic railgun be configured to produce the winding, twisting, massive potential that first holds the plasma, then throws it out as though it was a controlled Coronal Mass Ejection?

I'm hoping I can get away with this just enough to shoot the stuff from a space ship in a forward direction and use the plasma as a plow to clear obstacles since my ships hustle at Ludicrous Speeds. My ships generally have rail guns so the tie in/dual purpose would be a big win!

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    $\begingroup$ Your plan if it worked at all would act like a plasma rocket engine and decelerate your ship every time it was fired. $\endgroup$
    – Mon
    Commented Jan 28 at 0:30
  • $\begingroup$ Funny thing of the solar wind: it would require about 1million K, but the outer shell of the Sun is only 6000K... $\endgroup$
    – Gray Sheep
    Commented Jan 28 at 2:15
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    $\begingroup$ Plasma has waaaaaay less density than you're ascribing to it. This would be like using a butane lighter to defend yourself in a snowball fight. $\endgroup$
    – jdunlop
    Commented Jan 28 at 20:31
  • $\begingroup$ Look up Z pinch plasma beams $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 29 at 2:39
  • $\begingroup$ Bad car analogy: Can I use a fan device to spew hurricane force winds to clear obstacles from in front of my car? $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 29 at 19:10

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You absolutely can do that, but I fear it's not going to work for your purpose.

"shoot the stuff from a space ship in a forward direction and use the plasma as a plow to clear obstacles"

The destructive potential of solar plasma isn't actually all that great, unless you can produce Sun-scale quantities of the stuff. While the temperature is very high, the heat is really small; think about putting your hand in a 450 °C oven. As long as you don't touch anything, the contact with 450 °C still air won't trouble you too much.

The plasma would still be a good idea to repel dust and grit; it would get a net positive charge from being hit by the plasma, and then a sufficiently powerful electrostatic field would be able to push it away.

For larger obstacles (pebbles and small rocks), since in order to be able to supply highly concentrated solar plasma (the equivalent of a hot air desoldering gun in my example) at any one point you'll need very efficient tracking systems, an alternate strategy would be to use a lidar to acquire targets and a railgun to shoot depleted uranium pellets in ferromagnetic casings against said targets. Those that won't be vaporized by the impact ought to have their trajectory altered enough to avoid colliding with the ship.

Even larger obstacles (large boulders, asteroids, planetoids) won't be eliminated or significantly deflected by either fields or railguns - you'll need to avoid them or use other magic-like technologies: black holes like Charles Sheffield's Arthur Morton McAndrew, traveling portals like in the Salvation Sequence, or similar.

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  • $\begingroup$ I think you might mean 450°F, not °C. That'd be 842°F, and definitely would not be pleasant to put your hand in, metal contact or not. $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 29 at 16:43
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    $\begingroup$ @FlightDeck0112 no, weird as it might seem, it's 450 °C (723 K). Large specialized ovens (furnaces, really) used for pizza (at least here in Italy). With heating coils off (those radiate at about 800 °C) , if you stick a hand inside without touching anything, you'll feel the thermal radiation from the walls, and the hot air, but you'll not feel discomfort for several seconds (of course, after that your hand will begin to cook and you'll better yank it out). $\endgroup$
    – LSerni
    Commented Jan 30 at 0:29
  • $\begingroup$ Hm, I've worked in restaurants before and those pizza ovens are uncomfortable to even stand near, much less put your hand in unprotected. Could be that it has a much smaller opening than those you're talking about then. $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 30 at 13:56
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Using rail guns? Probably not - well at least not very efficiently.

As per my comment above what your describing amounts to a (giant if its to be effective as a weapon) plasma thruster. If your idea doesn't work don't blame me BTW, blame Isaac Newton. He and Einstein ruin every SF writers fun.

Below in link (1) is a paper discussing the topic and presenting a design for a magnetically accelerated plasma. There's a picture of the design. It's definitely not a rail gun.

Electric rocket.org

The first problem is as per the paper a rail gun would not contain the plasma. A tiny, tiny % of the plasma might accelerate down the exact center of the magnetic field lines in the rail gun but most of it would be expelled laterally. In saying this please note I'm definitely not a physicist just lay person but if you look at a picture of rail gun showing how they work you should see how the magnetic fields lines in each rail move and you'll see what I mean.

Basically if your have rails on the 'left' and 'right' of your projectile almost all if not ALL of the plasma would be accelerated laterally away from the intended line of travel. You want a hose that shoots a jet of water out the nozzle. What you'd get is a sprinkler spraying water out through all the little holes in the side of the hose and a dibble leaving the nozzle. Below is a link with an image explaining 'how rail guns work'.

Rail guns

EDIT: enclosing the rail gun in a solid barrel to 'confine' the plasma won't work either. Plasma 'hot' barrel 'cold'. Also physical interactions between the plasma and the barrel would cause all sorts of disruptive turbulence.

The next problem is range, even if your idea worked once the plasma leaves the gun its no longer confined and will start to spread and dissipate rapidly unless launched at very high relativistic velocities which means enormous amounts of power are required and you generate high deceleration forces. Plus heat. So, so much heat! Which your ship needs to dissipate.

Possible Solutions: 1) Coil guns Look up coil guns, they can also be used to accelerate objects magnetically. 2) Lasers. If the objects your trying to avoid are large use rail guns. If they are small (and closer) lasers have the fastest response time available in the universe. 3) Little rail guns: If you really want to use rail guns use smaller versions. Think the 'machine gun' equivalent of your rail gun 'cannons'

Last point. I suggest you visit a web site called ATOMIC ROCKETS It has all the info anyone could want for building a Hard SF story line.

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Tl/Dr: It takes a lot to plow through space like you want. Far more than is reasonable via rail-gun CME.

Railguns do actually demonstrate a mass ejection when they fire. The plasma which is accelerating the round escapes the barrel at the end of the shot. However, it will be hard to make it do what you want. Coronal Mass Ejections are impressive because they are big and lots of energy gets released. However, when you really get down to it, they're really nothing more than really fast puffs of air. Well, plasma really, but basically air.

How accurately are you tracking objects? From your description of a "plow," it looks like you're seeking a brute force solution. If you were tracking each particle independently, and burping a small mass ejection directly at it, this might lead to a different problem.

Combine these two, and we see the dilemma begin to emerge. The closer a particle is to the ship when it is affected by the CME, the faster it needs to be moved out of the way, requiring more momentum transfer. Increased momentum transfer requires higher speeds or more mass ejected. If we've fixed the speed at CME speeds, the only option left is to simply eject more mass. We know what we call a component that ejects a large amount of mass at high speed to transfer momentum. It's called a rocket engine. You're looking to mount a very large retro-rocket on the front of your craft. Which means that you also have to have a corresponding rocket firing rear-wards, with at least the same thrust, or you will slow down.

How much? Let's say we want to move our pebble away in 1s, and the spacecraft is 100m in diameter. We need an acceleration of $200\frac{m}{s^2}$ (from $x=\frac 1 2 at^2 + x_0$). Maybe the pebble is 0.05kg, so we need a force of 10N on this pebble. Assume the pebble is 10mm in diameter*, so $0.0001 m^2$. This means we need a pressure of $100000\frac{N}{m^2}$. For those of us who use English units, that's around 14 psi... and regardless of where you live, that's about 1 standard atmosphere!

And that takes a lot of mass. We can calculate how much by looking at stagnation pressure: $P_1=P_2+\frac 1 2 \rho v^2$. In our case, $P_2$ is 0 (vacuum), so we only have to consider $\frac 1 2 \rho v^2$. CMEs are predicted to travel at around 450km/s, giving us a density($\rho$) of $10\frac{mg}{m^3}$. If I may arbitrarially pick a 100m diameter ship (call it $10000\text m^2$ for simplicity), we find we need a linear density of $0.0098\frac{kg}{m}$, and at the CME speeds, that's $4444\frac{kg}{s}$. Round it up to $5000\frac{kg}{s}$ for simplicity. For perspective, a Falcon 9 rocket emits $2100\frac{kg}{s}$ during launch, so your ship traveling at ludicrist speeds is emitting the mass of two Falcon 9 rockets, constantly. And it's doing it at much higher exhaust velocities. The exhaust velocity of a Falcon 9 is around 3km/s. We're emitting at 450km/s, so the energy requirements are much higher: about 20,000 times more energy.

What about affecting the particles further away? The further away one affects the particles, the less acceleration and less momentum you need. This is proportional to the square of the distance. If your influenced space-pebble has twice the time to get out of the way, it can get out of the way with one-fourth of the force. This is good, but leads to another dilemma. If you were clearing out the space directly in front of the ship, you only need to plow a ship-sized hole through space. But the further away your effects occur, the more we realize we can't just consider relative positions. We also need to consider relative velocities. Micrometerorites are traveling at speeds measured in km/s with respect to, say, the sun. If you push objects out of your way over the course of 100s, the spatial range of objects to consider is now 100s times, say, 10 km/s*, or a 1,000 km sphere. You have to fill this sphere with CME ejections.

As you can see, efficiency is going to be painful here. We have a continuous CME, so we only need to consider the cross sections. We have a cross section of $1,000,000 \text{km}^2$ to strike a pebble that might be 10mm across - a cross section of $0.0000000001 \text{km}^2$. Efficiency here is obviously limited to 0.00000000000001%. We can repeat the calculations above, with $t=100s$ instead of $t=1s$ and a plow cross section of $1,000,000 \text{km}^2$, to get a number that's 10000x worse. It takes 20000 Falcon 9's worth of exhaust flow rate at 450km/s to fill that gargantuan space.!

What this tells me is that CMEs from railguns is a very ineffective way to clear a path in front of your spacecraft. Now you haven't specified "Ludacris Speeds" so we don't know what sorts of energies are available on this ship, but I think its clear that basically any specialized tool for clearing the path ahead will be so unimaginably more efficient than railgun CMEs that it will almost certainly earn its mass and power budget abord the ship.

What you probably need is a targeting system that identifies candidates to move out of the way, and a more focused approach. Perhaps strike the object with a railgun round. Or use lasers to ablate one side and push it out of the way.

Or if you really want to use plasma, you need to contain it into a focused blast. You need a self-propagating vortex of plasma. Maybe something like this:

Commercial toy air carnnon

*. Chosen to match micrometeoroids in Earth orbit. This is just to anchor the numbers to something. It's back of the envelope

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