Keep antimatter safe

Park a loaded Antimatter Container where the gravity gauge reads low, keep it powered through every shadow, and vent it before it ever comes down.

You need this from the moment a container holds its first microgram. An empty container is switched off and needs none of it.

• A ship with an AM-4 or AM-8 Antimatter Container aboard, in space, with antimatter in it. See Make antimatter. The figures below are the AM-8's; an AM-4 draws about half as much.
• Somebody aboard, or a radio link: venting is a tap on the part, and a ship out of contact answers no taps.

Steps

1. Read the gauge. Tap the container. The first greyed line is the gravity gauge, the upkeep it makes and the power that costs right now. The four lamps on the casing show the same reading, one lamp to each whole step.

   

2. Park it high. Upkeep falls as the gauge falls: 0.24 u/s at 100 km over Earth, 0.18 u/s at 2,400 km, 0.09 u/s at the edge of Earth's sphere of influence. A high orbit is also sunlit nearly all the way round. Raise the orbit with a node: see Plan a maneuver node. The gravity gauge has the whole table.
3. Size the arrays for the upkeep. One loaded AM-8 in low Earth orbit takes a whole SP-6 Twin Array by itself, and an AM-4 half of one, before anything else aboard is paid for. The hangar's Power figure does not count it, because a container launches empty and an empty one draws nothing. Add it yourself.
4. Size the battery for the shadow. The trap must never run short, and in a world's shadow the arrays make nothing. A B-400 Battery Bank carries one loaded container in low Earth orbit for 27 minutes with nothing else drawing on it.
5. Stop the converter before a shadow the battery cannot cover. A running converter drinks from the same battery, at 1.2 u/s for an AC-8 or 0.48 u/s for an AC-4, against the trap's 0.24 u/s. Tap it and tap Stop; start it again in the sun.
6. Vent before you come down. Before a de-orbit burn, an aerobrake or a landing, tap the container and tap Vent antimatter. It empties every container aboard at once and harms nothing. The antimatter is gone for good.

What you should see

The container's second line reads Holding 50 μg, with the load you have, all the way round the orbit. After a vent it reads Empty: switched off and a line on the flight screen says AM-8 Antimatter Container: antimatter vented.

If it went wrong

• A line says CONTAINMENT FAILING, 60 s. Vent it or restore power and the sheet reads POWER SHORT: leaking, fails in 49 s. The trap is getting less than its upkeep. Two things are happening at once: it is losing antimatter by the share that is missing, up to 0.02 μg a second, and a one-minute fuse is burning. Stop the converter and anything else you can, or vent. Get the power whole again inside the minute and the fuse goes out; let it run out and the trap opens. In sandbox, time warp drops to 1× the moment this line appears and will not come back on while the fuse burns, so the whole minute is yours at real time. A flat battery is the usual cause: refill it before you warp, because at high rates a minute of game time passes in a moment.
• A line says CONTAINMENT FAILING, 60 s. Vent it or get back to space. The ship has touched air or ground with a load aboard. Same minute, same two ways out: tap Vent antimatter, or climb back above the air. The screen repeats the count every ten seconds, the lamps on the casing flash red, and the sheet counts down.
• A line says containment holding. You made it — back above the air, or the power is whole again. The fuse is forgotten, and the next time starts a fresh minute.
• The container went off. The minute ran out, or something destroyed the container while it held a load: a crash, a hard landing, a collision, an FTS charge. It makes no difference how the case was opened. This is the largest blast in the game by a long way — a full trap is about 20,000 kN reaching 99 m, four times the biggest fuel tank and twice its reach, and it is drawn white and violet rather than orange. Nothing of the ship survives it, and anything of yours parked within a hundred metres goes too. Vent before you come down, and keep the periapsis of a loaded ship clear of the atmosphere.
• The container is empty after a week away. The power failed while nobody was watching and the load leaked out: a full container with no power at all is empty in 2.4 hours. More battery, a higher orbit, or a stopped converter.