Physics Students Devise Concept For Star Wars-Style Deflector Shields 179
mpicpp (3454017) writes in with good news for everyone worrying about the strength of their shields. "If you have often imagined yourself piloting your X-Wing fighter on an attack run on the Death Star, you'll be reassured that University of Leicester students have demonstrated that your shields could take whatever the Imperial fleet can throw at you. The only drawback is that you won't be able to see a thing outside of your starfighter. In anticipation of Star Wars Day on 4 May, three fourth-year Physics students at the University have proven that shields, such as those seen protecting spaceships in the Star Wars film series, would not only be scientifically feasible, they have also shown that the science behind the principle is already used here on Earth."
Good to know (Score:5, Informative)
Larry Niven will be glad to know that since he used opaque shields in "The Mote in God's Eye"
Re:Good to know (Score:5, Informative)
E.E. Doc Smith had a similar concept as well in his Skylark series published back in the 1930s. Known as a "Zone of Force". If you turned it on you were basically invulnerable but you couldn't see aything until you dropped it.
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"The Langston Field is a fictional device featured in the CoDominium series of science-fiction novels, initiated by SF writer Jerry Pournelle."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Field
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But here's the other thing that got me when I read the stories: it's all great that a stasis field would protect its contents from virtually anything... but there is no possible way to turn the field off from inside, since time does not pass.
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Well, in one of the stories, you couldn't turn off the field from the inside. And in others, there was some sort of automatic mechanism. ISTR the field was powered by whatever it was protecting the occupants from.
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field was powered by whatever it was protecting the occupants from
that doesn't sound like a very good idea...sure you can't destroy them, but couldn't you indefinitely imprison your foe in their own shield by just keeping some sort of high powered laser shining on it? or put it inside a magnetic field and pump plasma into it...like the shields from the article...
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that doesn't sound like a very good idea...sure you can't destroy them, but couldn't you indefinitely imprison your foe in their own shield by just keeping some sort of high powered laser shining on it?
Yes, this is mentioned in one of the texts. Dropping a stasis ship into a sun with a long expiration date is a pretty long-term prison.
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Which is just as well. Because breathing and pooping.
Eventually the batteries will run out. Or something.
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There is no furry sex in the Ringworld series.
- A genuine furry. Note the username.
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I'd say ravens are more feathery.
Re: Good to know (Score:2)
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Isn't that how modern humanity came to be? By folding the rest of the sub-species back to the herd, so to speak? And the same - the willingness to meld heritages, both cultural and genetic - has arguably been behind pretty much every great human society. Our very cells contain assimilated micro
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Plasma Shield? (Score:1)
Forget that, I want a Wookie... Most of the fights you get into are close combat and wookies rule in that range.
Anyway, you speak of the wrong fictional universe, I speak for all Anonymous Cowards when I say that the Star Trek universe is far more interesting... Who wants to deal with the Empire (aka your average over-bloated government) when you could be like beam me up Scottie and shit like that in a commie world of tomorrow, with replicators and off world exploration for fun... I mean, which one is more
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which one is more realistic given our trajectory if we ever get past the lame phase of 3D printers?
Evil empire? Check.
Religious fundamentalist terrorists fighting the technologically superior empire, which also happens to be controlled by someone who holds strong religious beliefs? Check.
Ridiculously expensive and often ineffective military hardware only used to fight a handful of Sand People? Check.
The future doesn't look much Star Trekky to me.
Re: Plasma Shield? (Score:2)
I believe The Star Trek world had essentially unlimited energy and of course, replicators. What need would there be for money when most any material item could be had more or less for free?
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You can beam up first. Personally, I'd be with McCoy in not wanting my atoms ripped apart so they could hopefully be reassembled somewhere else maybe glitch-free.
Too many things could go wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW-NiGp1gys
Journalists collectively give up, embrace insanity (Score:1)
Journalists have long imagined themselves piloting X-wing fighters to free the Universe of the Evil Empire. Today, journalists have collectively decided to just fucking give up altogether. Journalists have agreed to basically denounce, forsake, and abandon every last thin thread of reality that they may or may not have been holding onto in order to retain some sort of reason, professionalism, or sanity.
Re:Journalists collectively give up, embrace insan (Score:4, Insightful)
in order to retain some sort of reason, professionalism, or sanity.
They aren't trying as hard as you think they are.
Deflector Shields! (Score:2)
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Why don't you just go strap yourself in...
Ignore me ... (Score:1)
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Yes, any other comment has the same effect. /.ers and there is such a thing as writers block. Once I decide I must post while having no content ready I can't think of content. Usually I post once I have something to say.
However there are many
And half of the time I decide to delete it instead of post it, but that's a different beast.
Ionisphere F1 and F2 (Score:2)
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Yes but every time the sun blasts us with extra rays of energy my mufs get depressed. Never a happy time. :)
Hardly New (Score:3)
This is hardly new, scientists have been playing around with plasma windows & fields for quite some time. They're currently only a few inches in size but could be scaled up to larger dimensions, the problem is power and the pretty powerful magnetic & electrical fields needed to create them.
Sheldon and Leonard... (Score:2)
Have been talking about this for years, I understand they're working with Howard on a prototype but it's a secret so don't tell anyone.
Too much work, here is why (Score:4)
Re:Too much work, here is why (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly, considering where that originates from, it's true.
Channeling a magnetic field through a ferromagnetic metallic "skin" (hull plating) will deflect or scatter charged particle weapons or hazards.
Similarly, one could "paint" one of the various forms of materials whose optical properties can be altered by passing electrical current through it. It could be made to be 100% optically absorbent (the same as using two polarized optical filters set at a 90 degree rotation with respect to each other) in order to prevent you being spotted when you're in space. If someone sees you (since you just passed in-between a light source and them), and they shoot lasers at you, you change the polarization to make the material 100% optically reflective, thereby bouncing the laser off your ship.
Any laser much higher or lower in frequency than the visible spectrum (as in beyond IR and UV, which could also be affected by a very small subset of the materials which handles the visible light frequencies) is fairly difficult and inefficient to produce, therefore making it extraordinarily unlikely to be used as a weapon.
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Polarized hull plating could be effective against anything with a charge, like electron beams, positron beams or black holes that are charged so they can be electrically accelerated (this is the realm of science fiction).
However, cannonballs do not have charge. Lasers do not have charge. They ignore the hull polarization.
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So, more or less like any enemies they encountered in Enterprise, then ;-)
Seriously, it seemed like the hull plating could only ever take one hit without depolarizing.
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Some more plasma physics is needed in their model (Score:4, Informative)
The paper is a one pager of introductory plasma physics. It isn't a serious calculation and it wasn't meant to be. Anyway ...
Their model is as follows. A plasma will reflect all electromagnetic radiation below a certain frequency, determined by its density. The plasma exerts a pressure like a gas and they then assume confinement of the plasma with a magnetic field, balancing the plasma pressure with the 'pressure' that a magnetic field exerts on charged particles. They then say that we can make magnetic fields in the range up to 100 T and working back, estimate the plasma frequency, which turns out to be in the UV. So great, you can deflect lasers into the UV with a modest confining field.
You need to look at some of the other numbers though. .... The other problem is that at such a high density, the collision frequency is very high so that a magnetic field is not very effective at producing confinement. Probably useless in fact.
First, what sort of plasma density do you need to reflect UV ? The answer is something like 10^28 per cubic m. This is enormous - fusion plasmas are about a million times less dense). It's getting close to solid state density eg if a solid has atoms 0.2 nm apart this is 10^29 atoms per cubic m. That is not going to be easy
The other thing to look at is the required plasma temperature. They assume a temperature of 1000 K, Unfortunately, the density of a plasma at 1000 K at thermal equilibrium is extremely low unless the background pressure is huge. So it has to be a lot hotter, in particular, comparable with the ionization energy which is roughly 100 000 K. And really, we need a fully ionized plasma because the magnetic field is not going to confine the neutral gas that we are using to make the plasma so that means we need a 100 000 K plasma. This means that the required magnetic field goes up by a factor of 10.
Would somebody else like to estimate how much power you need to dump into the plasma ?
"the same thing" (Score:2)
shields, such as those seen protecting spaceships in the Star Wars film series
won't be able to see a thing outside of your starfighter.
These two statements are incompatible.
Not even remotely... (Score:2)
Also, they've "proven" or "demonstrated" precisely nothing, as they have tested - and derived results from - precisely nothing.
Finally, the feasibility of this was demonstrated long ago by an "odd" occurrence in a 3M plant making polypropylene film [amasci.com], not to mention the high-strength electro-magnetic fields (or "bottles") currently in
Re:You mean Star Trek? (Score:5, Interesting)
lol, obvious troll is obvious.
"forcefields" have been a staple of pulp scifi and space opera since space opera was first born. Try something like flash gordon, AC.
Personally though, I suspect that getting a magnetic feild itself to behave as a metamaterial would be very effective in blocking coherent light beams, and probably with less power. It is important to note that magnetic field lines are themselves propagated using the same force carrier as the coherent light beam, since both are manifestations of electromagnetic energy.
You dont need to block the incoming light beam, you just need to alter the beam frequency spread so that it stops being coherent and thus disperse it before it can come into contact with the outer surface of the ship. if the shield is projected far enough out away from the craft, this would result in a radical power reduction to square centimeter of ship surface, negating the ability of the laser to in any way damage the hull of said ship. Abusing magnetic fields into acting like metamaterials has been the subject of many interesting papers already.
It would also solve the issue of being unable to see out of the cockpit.
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Another problem is that metamaterials are matter, a magnetic field by itself isn't matter and can only change the polarity of electromagnetic waves, which won'
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Yes, metamaterials. The problem is that the bandwidth is quite narrow as far as I know, covering a broad spectrum of frequency is far from trivial. Here the rule of thumb is that the structures in meta materials have to be smaller than the wavelength, they're supposed to affect. Photonic crystals also have to be created with a very specific bandgap. Another problem is that metamaterials are matter, a magnetic field by itself isn't matter and can only change the polarity of electromagnetic waves, which won't do much. Now you could say that you manipulate the matter around with with said magnetic field, make the former "energy field" into an "energy-matter-field", which raises a problem in space, since space isn't known for its high density of matter. Then you'd have to emit matter and keep it in place around your ship. Thank god Star Trek also invented replicators, eh?
Which is why frequency matters (no pun intended).
The basics of it is that all matter can be repelled using the correct frequency. So by varying the frequency of the magnetic field you can repel various kinds of matter; which of course means that the magnetic shields are not full proof - somethings will be able to get through them if they don't resonate significantly enough with respect to any of the frequencies employed.
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Just modify the phase variance, man!
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Magnetic fields don't have a frequency.
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No, but they can be made to change direction frequently, as the core in any transformer may demonstrate... Not sure entirely what tempoaralbeing was driving at though...
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Magnetic fields don't have a frequency.
No but Electro-Magnetic fields do, and they are just as useful as non-elctro-magnetic fields for this topic.
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Electro-Magnetic fields have no frequncy either.
The only thing with a frequency is the switch that activates the field and deactivates it, or reverses it if necessary/wanted. You kniw every DC current motor has a static same polarity _electro magnetic_ field (in addition to the fields of its permanent magnets).
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No they are not electromagnetic fields. They are electromagnetic _waves_ or photons, however you look at them. In fact the term electromagnetic field is not really used, as the field looks the same like from a permanent magnet, you can not distinguish a magnetic field generated by electricity from one generated by a permanent magnet.
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Your point exactly?
Re:You mean Star Trek? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is extremely difficult to achieve and would require a lot of energy to work as an effective, impenetrable "shield", which would act much like extremely strong white noise generator.
This would explain why getting the enemy's shield frequency is technically valid. (The shield frequency had to be nonrandom, because otherwise you couldn't fire or transport through it.) A lot of problems go away if you wave some magical energy source wand over them.
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It could easily be a random frequency, as long as your random number generator for the shields and for the transporters/weapons use the same seed. It's no different to how 2-factor authentication works.
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I always sort of thought that practical shields would work by using plasma to polarize incoming crap and then repelling it with the same containment that was used to make the shield in the first place. Stopping lasers always seemed like the very hardest part, again assuming a ridiculous source of energy.
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It would also solve the issue of being unable to see out of the cockpit.
If you radically diffuse incoming light, that would also radically diffuse other incoming light as well somewhat like trying to see through a thick cloud. This still leaves you effectively blind unless your shield has a known transfer function that can be reversed by a camera and signal processing... but then your opponent may be able to deduct your shield's transfer function and re-focus their energy beams accordingly.
Another problem is what happens to your plasma shield when it gets hit by a high-power la
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The concept of shields was first introduced in Star Trek: Voyager.
The concept of shields was idealized permanently into mainstream SF culture in "Star Trek: The Original Series".
Re:You mean Star Trek? No, we don't (Score:2)
I know you don't do anything so twentietch-century as "reading novels", but certainly Doc Smith had force fields in the Skylark of Space, published 1928.
mark
Re:Lore (Score:5, Informative)
No, "deflectors" are definately mentioned in A New Hope.
"red leader" specifically-- "bring your rear deflectors on; double front"
source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Isn't it "Stabilize your rear deflectors"?
Re:Lore (Score:4, Informative)
Nerd hat on...
Photon torpedoes are from Star Trek, they are matter/anti-matter missile weapons fired from the ship in a torpedo casing. They have guidance and a warp sustainer engine so if fired at warp they can maintain warp speed for a short period of time. (Phasers are directed energy weapons and thus can't be used at warp)
Proton torpedoes are from Star Wars, they also are a cased missile weapon, much smaller than photon torpedoes, the X-Wing carries 6 of them, 3 per launcher. They are anti-capital ship weapons, unable to target most fighters, they are designed to penetrate thick durasteel hulls and explode inside the ship.
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That scene was in A New Hope, when they are being 'let' escape from the Death "You think that was easy?" Star. In The Empire Strikes Back they hide in the asteroid inhabited by the space worm, and upon eviction, the "one more hit on the rear deflectors" causes them to put all power to the front deflectors and go at the star destroyer face on, buzz the tower and hide on the back of it waiting for them to dump their trash.
I just recently watched the movies for May 4th, so all this is fresh in my mind.
Re:Lore (Score:5, Interesting)
X-Wings (all rebel fighters, actually) had deflectors. There are any number of scenes that mention them. They weren't generally intended to stand up to capital ship batteries, but rather as protection against enemy fighters.
TIE-Fighters (and bombers) did not have deflectors. They were mass-produced, cheap, crappy ships that didn't even possess hyperdrives (unlike the rebel fighters). However, your typical Star Destroyer could carry and man a *lot* of TIE fighters.
In a way, it's actually kind of funny how X-wings were so weapon-heavy when their primary opposition could probably be one-shot-killed by a single reasonably large infantry weapon. On the other hand, TIE fighters were primarily anti-starfighter, wherein "quantity has a quality all its own" makes a fair bit of sense because they could win a war of attrition with cheap fighters. The job of taking out rebel capital ships was usually left up to the (typically much larger) imperial capitals.
X-wings, Y-wings, and B-wings were designed to be effective against heavy targets (A-wings, which traded some firepower for greater agility, were the preferred rebel anti-fighter fighter), and while each one was individually superior to a TIE-fighter, the empire had a lot more TIEs than the rebellion had fighters of any kind. However, rebel fighters could effectively destroy Star Destroyers, and were also far more survivable in combat.
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I though all the [:alpha:]-Wings were designed to increase merchandising revenue for Lucas.
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Reminds me of that awesome game TIE Fighter. Yeah, TIE fighters were wimpy little death traps, and I'd much rather pilot an A-wing. But rise high enough in rank, and maybe you can pilot a TIE advanced, which pretty much blows away anything the rebels can offer.
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Watch the opening scene of the first movie. The stormtroopers boarding Princess Leia's ships are murderously effective. C3P0 wanders across the firefight, and like professional marksmen, the stormtroopers ignore the bumbling droid and shoot around him, targetting the Princess' bodyguards.
Most of the "stormtroopers can't hit" comes from the scenes where they're shooting at Luke, who's got latent force powers stacked on top of regular plot armor.
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Wait, they couldn't hit the ewoks? I can never tell because of all the fast forwarding I'm doing.
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Those are long-service regulars. Later on in the movie they've had to resort to conscription.
Shit, I can't believe I'm trying to make sense out of star Wars.
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Re:Lore (Score:4, Informative)
Those are long-service regulars. Later on in the movie they've had to resort to conscription.
Shit, I can't believe I'm trying to make sense out of star Wars.
If you really want to make sense of the movie, just realize that the scenes where they can't hit anything is where they are actively trying to let the rebel princess escape so they can get onto a ship with a tracking beacon to lead them to the rest base which they really want. That plan couldn't work if the stormtroopers actually hit and killed everybody. Even Leia said the escape had been too easy. face it, all those stormtroopers had orders to miss.
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And because in A New Hope, they were ordered to let the team escape, and in Empire Strikes Back, the plan was to lure Luke into the freezing chamber. It doesn't, however, explain how they failed to hit any of them as they boarded the Millennium Falcon to escape Cloud City.
Re:Lore (Score:4, Informative)
Considering Obi Wan gives props to the precision of Stormtrooper marksmanship, one has to assume they actually had damn good aim.
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Does something similar apply to Stromtroopers and their weapons as well? After all, all they ever hit with those blasters was Luke's aunt and uncle.
They hit plenty when they aren't actively trying to let people escape. Boarding Leia's ship, on Tattoine, etc. they are effectivel fighters. The point they were missing everybody was when the said rebels were escaping to the Falcon. After which Leia said "That was too easy. They must be tracking us." Which they were. The plan from fairly early was to let them escape from the Death Star and follow them to the rest of the rebels. A plan that would only work, if they lived to escape.
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What the hell are you talking about? That certainly didn't get mentioned in the original trilogy, which is all that counts.
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well, yeah you're wrong.
besides, go play x wing and tie fighter again you noob. the thing is, not all the fighters/bombers in the mythos have the shields.
(though now they just pissed the whole franchise away anyways so everything has everything if it saves jar jar.)
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You wouldn't know it from how often ships would suffer a direct hit.
Well, TIE fighters didn't. And remember in A New Hope, the X-wings had all power diverted to front shields and were shot from behind. But in most cases when smaller ships got hit, it was often by capital ships like Star Destroyers. It is reasonable to assume that small, one-man fighters wouldn't be able to power shields strong enough to stop fire from a much larger ship. But even in cases where fighters shot down other fighters, they were never one-hit explosions. Generally they only exploded after bei
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TIE fighters had no deflectors; a single shot usually killed them. The quad rapid-fire weapons of an X-wing were serious overkill for them. A volley of shots like the one that leaked a hit through to damage R2-D2 would have destroyed most imperial fighters outright.
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Conversely R2-D2 was damaged regardless, which tends to imply that the deflectors weren't really enough to save you when someone got you in their sights - TIE fighters could put enough rounds downrange to overwhelm the shields in any situation where the fighter was genuinely bested.
If you assume that the TIE was more manoeuverable, then the logic of mass producing them the way they were makes a good deal of sense.
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True, but at least Luke (and even R2, once he got to a technician) survived *despite* having somebody get a lock on them. The rebels had smaller numbers of pilots; they needed each individual fighter to be as effective and survivable as possible. It also took a second or so of continuous fire for a TIE fighter to kill an X-wing; that doesn't sound like much, but it's that much more time to break lock, have your wingman kill him, etc,
TIEs were cheap in other ways too: no hyperdrive, no heavy weaponry (except
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The quad lasers are there to increase hit probability. They are spaced too far apart for all of them to hit a TIE fighter.
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So the Disney hype has already started, uh?
Yep: any 'Star Wars' reference is guaranteed to get a few hits, and will likely be planted by a Disney marketing drone, somewhere in the evil empire (formally known as Disneyland).
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Not quite: plasma windows [wikipedia.org] exist.
And any protection against lasers is going to be opaque or reflective at the laser frequency, or it isn't going to be very effective.
If you want it to be effective against all frequencies of a Free Electron Laser [wikipedia.org] you need it to be completely opaque or reflective, so you wouldn't be able to see out of it.
Re:Sorry but (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been looking into making one myself as a hobby project, to go with my can-crusher/disc-launcher. So far it's gotten as far as generating a very strong magnetic field (Solonoid, and it draws 500A at 12V - I'm powering it off an ultracap bank). Progress stopped there, because the next part of my design requires a supply of at least fifty kilovolts, DC, and that doesn't rectify easily. It'd need specialised, very expensive parts.
The end goal is to flick marbles at it and watch them bounce off.
Re:Sorry but (Score:5, Informative)
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I'll have to look into that approach. I don't know my current requirements, they would need to be determined experimentally, but my plan is to have a circular (ring) anode and a spherical cathode in the middle, with the electrons thus forced to take a spiral path - much like in a magnatron, except without the vacuum.
I did determine that it's very hard to strike an arc in a strong magnetic field.
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Your method is textbook and certainly will work(even if you use SCRs but triggering them becomes... interesting...) , but I have a very puzzling question... What do you need a 120kV medical X-Ray machine for?
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Re:Sorry but (Score:5, Informative)
Lasers? What lasers?
Those things on SW aren't lasers. One, they travel too slow (you can actually see the gaps in the pulses) and, following on from that, you can see them when they're not travelling right towards your remaining eye.
Also, lasers don't go "pyew pyew!" and even if they did you wouldn't be able to hear them through a vacuum.
Finally, parsecs.
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I can't even think of a movie (other than Gravity) that did this correctly.
'2001' did. When HAL went and cut Frank Poole's airline during his EVA, his death was shown completely silently and I think it had a far greater impact as a result.
Re:Sorry but (Score:4, Interesting)
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Playing devil's advocate...
2001 had music over top of space scenes. You can't hear music in space, never mind Dolby surround sound, so this was wrong. I think there was also music playing on ancient Earth, which is before music was invented.
I've also seen subtitled versions of 2001 (and lots of movies praised for their realism). This is wrong. When people speak in real life, glowing words don't magically appear beneath them.
One can argue that these are cinematic conventions that improve people's enjoymen
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are still moving at a high percentage of light-speed.
Except they're not, not even close. In fact, they seem to moving substantially slower than a high powered rifle round. And a gob of plasma in those dimensions would have a "mass" of something like a fraction of a milligram. You could still be delivering a substantial amount of energy through heat though.
As for sounds, if you really want an explantation the only commonly offered one that makes sense is that the ships simulate the sounds of nearby events to give the pilots an intuitive tactical awareness o
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if it can't block a simple kinetic projectile, it's not a "shield".
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Though both the high magnetic field strengths necessary and the energy loss due to thermal radiation probably make this impractical or impossible to build.
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Unfortunately that wouldn't work against lasers. By the time you see a laser it's already too late.
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If the adversary were clever enough, they would pulse their weapons at the same frequency to bypass your shields.
Hmm, wasn't there something about modulating weapon frequencies and shield frequencies in Star Trek?