More on Q-Balls

[Drashner1]

Probably another unrelated concern. On Wikipedia and here, they write that q-balls are stable because of charge conservation. If you have positive q-ball with 1E6 - 1E40 elementary charges, it will probably strongly suck in electrons and emit neutrinos and radiate its mass away until it is gone. To isolate such strong charge from other charges seems like extremely challenging engineering problem.

For the same reason, it might be very impractical to shoot the q-ball with protons to obtain energy. If the q-ball is positive, it will be very difficult to get to the q-ball through the Coulombic barrier. (Although if you succeed, you are refilling the q-ball charge, which is good.) If it is negative, it might emit neutral particles and get smaller and smaller as it loses charge. But I guess you can always construct device that would hit the q-ball by neutrons.

Unrelated note: very good defense against q-ball cannons may be to charge the spaceship. Even small charge will repel the q-balls strongly.

This may be a reason why q-balls are used to make monopoles and monopoles are then used to breed more monopoles for various conversion applications. At least at the S2 level. The controlled environment of a monopole forge might allow for preventing or mitigating the issues mentioned with losing mass. At least long enough to make a starter batch of monopoles.

At higher S-levels (S3 perhaps), we might postulate that it becomes much easier to stabilize q-balls and things like Q-guns become an option. Exactly how this is done could be one of the 'magic tricks' of the transapients.

As far as defending against them - While ships and habs could use a charge to protect themselves from pure Q-ball fire - planets/moons/stars/etc. are not so readily protected. In the RL different weapons are used for different applications and targets. It seems likely that this would persist in the OA future. Even in the case of ships and habs, once other weapons do enough damage to knock out the charge protection, a Q-weapon could deliver a killing final blow.

Todd