and of course immediately after I post I think of two more questions:
Why don't the factions weaponize antimatter more often? They clearly have it in abundance, so it shouldn't be that hard to strap AM tanks to missiles or make infernium railguns or something.
It's actually hard to get a big boom out of antimatter, believe it or not. Unlike Nuclear fission or fusion, where it's (broadly) easier to make a bomb than control a power reaction, for antimatter the reverse might be true due to a few things:
1: Reaction cross-section. Put simply, the moment the first bit of Antimatter reacts, it tends to push all the rest of it away, preventing it reacting all at once; so rather than output all it's energy at once, as you'd want in a bomb or warhead, it'd come out in dribs and drabs; in this sense, it'd act more like an incendiary than a straight explosive. Presumably this is why the Antimatter Blaster needs that forcefield bubble mechanism - to bottle the Antimatter up as it reacts, and only 'let go' once an appreciable fraction has reacted, which leads into:
2: un-useful reaction products. We now know that Antimatter reactions do not convert fully into useful energy, but into a bunch of sub-particle types, many of which aren't any good. Some of it turns into Neutrinos, which don't interact with matter and so are worthless for damage. Some of it turns into charged Pions, which do interact, and so are some good; more turns into Uncharged Pions, which don't interact at first, but which, after a short delay, decay into charged Pions as above, and of course some comes out as Hard electromagnetic radation like x-rays, Gamma rays etc, which are ionising and penetrating and so useful for damage purposes.
So as above, to get the most out, you want some kind of delay-on-detonation to maximise the time for un-useful reaction products to turn into useful ones.
3: Identifiability: depending on what antimatter you use, it may leave a recognisable signature that may be used to identify the kind of weapon you are using. For example, Electron-Positron reactions will commonly release most of their energy in the form of Hard Gamma rays with an energy of 511Mev
All of which boils down to: you
can use bulk antimatter as a weapon, and it'll deal damage; in the same way that pouring petrol on something and setting it on fire will cause some damage, but is not comparable to a Fuel-air bomb.
To get more Bang for your buck, you need technical solutions to improving the rate and amount of reaction, and to contain it long enough to extract the most energy, and it may be that for the same amount of investment, a different technology, such as hypervelocity kinetics, get you similar destructive force simpler, easier and cheaper, and saves antimatter for powerplant or engine fuel use, where it's easier to incorporate the needed bulk of control technology.
Depending of course on what Propulsion technology you're using; Antimatter-spiked Fusion wouldn't require very much antimatter use anyway, compared to it's main propellant fraction.
