Science Forums 2

[Jkirk3279]

You don't have to ionize space, just fire charged particles.

Fire hydrogen ions through a particle accelerator: whip the ions up to a really high speed.

The ions will zip out toward your target. Whatever they hit will get zapped.

There are a few problems.

One: throwing ions forward would propel your spaceship backwards. Not a big problem.

Two: Your spaceship giving off negatively charged ions would gradually become more and more positively charged. Eventually the negative ion beam you're emitting would be attracted back to you.

So you'd need to fire a positively charged beam in the opposite direction, thus maintaining your position and your neutral charge.

What would be even more cool would be if you could fire both beams at the same target: hit an opponent's ship on one side with the negative beam and the other side with the positive beam and watch the ship's plating melt !

As for hitting a ground target, the atmosphere would tend to scatter the particle beam. Although at least you'd create a massive lightning storm.