Annihilator physics

If you are generating tachyons that have energy, but you also have a positive energy output in the process, where did all that energy come from?

@[S]TheDarkKiller while the acceleration process itself may produce some amount of energy the amount would be insufficient to power the relativistic gravity-lensing and containment fields needed to generate and control the tachyon flow, also note that it cannot generate a constant stream but rather must use short bursts, this indicates that either the process cannot be fully controlled and requires a reset of the initial high-energy internal states before each shot, or it simply tends to create an extreme thermal imbalance within the system that requires additional systems to deal with between shots, or perhaps both.

the tachyon energy heats the weapon up and the power is for the aiming force fields.

Oh dear, we started wading into fluff before I posted. Fault of the anni for being brokenly fluffy I suppose.

isnt a tachyon acelerator using Cherenkov radiation rather then the actual tachyon to cause damage...

more apropriate names would be a tachyon accumulator/generator/focuser(tachyon magnifying glass(you are ant)) canon

:P althout how you would do this i know not(you could probably use [fun stuff] to piggy back over the energy barrier required to produce/colect tachyons)

all the energy it uses is to power the [fun stuff] rather then do anything to the tachyons

:D what fun is studying physics if you dont work hard to break reality?

but yea rename tachyon to particle beam

quote: Are we seriously discussing theoretical quantum physics here?

I'm actually not really, because while there might be some very exotic behaviors predicted by quantum physics, they still obey some fundamental laws like conservation of energy and momentum.

Ok, so I have this idea:

Damage, regardless of if it is caused by missiles, lasers, ballistic projectiles, or whatever, is basically a transfer of energy. So, as a general rule, more energy means more damage. That's why weapons traditionally involve giving a projectile velocity.

So in relation to a theoretical weapon using tachyons, you might be generating low-energy tachyons and raise them to high-level tachyons for doing damage. In which case, because of the funny nature of tachyons, it would actually be a tachyon decelerator. Instead of adding energy by increasing velocity, it's adding energy by decreasing velocity.

Anyway, just calling it a "Tachyon Decelerator" would make slightly more sense, for something that is imaginary anyway.

Call it "Super heavy pew gun".

I should have listened to Saktoth when he told me "fluff leads to suffering."

I whould imagine that taking large amounts of energy away from a body will still result in damaging the body. But since it is much easyer to give large amounts of energy, we do just that by shooting stuff at it.
Now a tachyon intruduses a way to take energy (if it will react with, say, armor) a particle at high speed meets the armor, looses speed and takes the energy. What would happen, I belive, is that the target body will get cooler (and judging by the size of the beam - by a lot). Such a rapid change in temperature will surly result in damage (like freezing hydrolics, or whatever ZK robots use). Big units that can survive a shot like that might: have spectial armor to compensate for heat reditibution, or have sufficient amounts of backup systems to not really care if you loose a couple of power cores.
But what I whould like to see is a change in death animations from sudden explosions to freezing into a metal-ice cristal, then melting onto a pool of reclaimable metal.