09-21-2016, 03:11 PM
(09-20-2016, 06:05 AM)Surge Wrote:(09-20-2016, 05:54 AM)Shaadaris Wrote: I have no idea how feasible any of this is, but even if it isn't, it sounds reasonable enough.On a scale of feasible to horseshit it is definitely a 4 or something
Technobabble +1. Level up.
Long as I can convince the average person though I am satisfied.
One of my retro-themed starships had a similar shield though.
It used a slowly rotating magnetic field that on emerging from FTL would quickly gather nearby meteorites and space junk. This would orbit gently around it in a continually thickening debris field, providing an ablative shielding of sorts.
But said ship was also a freighter, and when it went to warp it left behind a swirl of space junk gradually spreading out again since the magnetic field was gone. The shields had to be operating for some time at sublight velocities to have any kind of effectiveness - since it took time for the shield to gather debris. This shield would also capture nearby freight containers interestingly enough, making it rather convenient when loading cargo without a proper space dock because you could fling the container towards it and let the shield capture it, then attach a thruster pack to the container to 'deorbit' it so it would fall into the cargo bay.
I had considered a few times including a mechanism to capture debris from the shield, grind them up and store them inside the ship, then use that material as chaff to prime the shields if it happened to warp into a crisis.
Your plasma system sounds interesting, but I see a very problematic flaw- it would require a specially shaped magnetic field to capture the plasma in an envelope that attracts it to keep it within a certain distance, but then repels it again so it doesn't stick to the hull. My solution to it would be to phase the shields- it operates at one polarity to attract the plasma, then once the plasma has momentum towards the hull, it reverses polarity to repel it and push it away again. Like so the thickness of the plasma belt would be controlled by the frequency- lower frequency means thicker field, but to achieve compression for shielding an incoming shot you would have to change the frequency up and down at regular intervals to decompress and recompress the plasma so it doesn't cool off or get squeezed out.
Feel free to PM me if anything is broken