Anergy Afterburner

The Anergy Afterburner is another design from Atomo-Dyne Labs. Like each of their other designs, it’s either powered by nuclear power or depends on principles of atomic theory (hence the name of the laboratory!) The Atomic Bolt is a simple fission engine; the Ion Booster uses electrostatic repulsion to eject high speed ions; the Quark Phaser uses subatomic manipulations to play with the very structure of protons and electrons …but the Anergy Afterburner ups the stakes. Instead of just playing with normal matter, the Anergy Afterburner throws out all of the rules and harnesses the power of matter / antimatter mutual annihilation. When protons meet antiprotons, electrons meet antielectron, and neutron meet antineutron, the particles simply disappear and turn into pure energy. Not every single drop of matter fed into the engine is converted. The engine cleverly feeds in far more matter than antimatter. This is partially - but not just - because antimatter is so expensive to produce. The other reason is that by feeding in lots of excess normal matter, the engine has reaction mass, which is thrown violently backwards out of the Afterburner, thus propelling the unit forward.

The unfathomable forces unleashed inside the Afterburner are held in check only by exotic materials and advanced Toba engineering, and this means that the Afterburner is no common rocket. Most Rocket Dogs have never seen an Afterburner before - but they’ve almost certainly heard stories of the insanely hot purple-white exhaust from the exotic antimatter annihilation that powers it.