starship-design: Re: Anti-antimatter

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

Timothy van der Linden writes:
 > >	Idea #2:  Catalyze nucleon decay using captured magnetic 
 > >monopoles.
 > 
 > The mean idea of using a monopole is probably it's heigh energy:weight
 > ratio. Maybe we can find other ways to store energy.
 > For example storing photons in a perfect mirror sphere.

Ken also claimed that the decay results would be "pure energy".  My
initial reaction is that conservation of spin and charge would preclude
complete conversion; not all of the products would be photons.

Anyway, what we want is the best matter-to-momentum conversion, not the
best matter-to-energy conversion.  Converting matter to photons does get
you the most momentum for a given amount of matter, but it's probably
not feasible to convert matter completely to photons.