Published On Feb 24, 2019
Shields Up! Real Life Energy Shields
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Did you know that the best kind of armour is the one that is already vaporised?
Hello, I’m Todd and this is AsteronX.
Today we’re going to be discussing real energy shields, and even propose one, maybe two, of our own concepts.
Armour, regardless of whether its protecting against weaponry or the hazards of space travel in general, is limited by its melting and vaporisation temperatures.
It’s a similar problem faced by the nuclear rocket scientists in the 60’s and 70’s, for them, the efficiency of their rocket engines were limited because the reactor would melt if pushed too hard. The solution was radical yet simple: let the reactor melt, in fact, let it vaporize, and then hold it back by means of vortexes or energy fields.
The same can be done for armour!
You know, normally, vaporised armour is kind of useless.
But - hold it in place and keep it dense with magnetic fields, and you get the best armour possible—a kind of basic shield.
In 2014 a group of physics students at the University of Leicester, Great Britain, as part of another project, ran the numbers to see if something like a Star Wars shield was actually possible given our level of technology.
They calculated that a magnetic field of only 5 tesla—similar to the output of an MRI machine—could indeed hold in place plasma dense enough to absorb not only visible-light laser weapons, but it could also be adjusted to a wide array of frequencies.
Though there were a number of problems associated with their concept, they still proved that the idea was worthy of serious research.
Even stronger fields, such as those being developed for fusion confinement, could hold in place plasma dense enough to absorb soft x-rays.
And, there are already experiments generating pulsed magnetic fields of 100 tesla, and some devices that can generate one-time pulses of up to 1200 tesla.
It’s only a matter of time—and not much at that—before we can routinely generate fields with strengths of several hundred, or even a thousand tesla.
Even low-density plasma shields are useful, as while they may not deflect incoming energies directly, they can ionize neutral particle beams, allowing magnetic fields to deflect them.
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CREDIT:
Big shout out to all of our patrons, especially: Walter Matera for becoming a Superlight Interstellar patron. Thank you for your support!
We also want to thank you too for watching!
NASA for their video clips and music (unknown artist).
Wikipedia for their information and images.
Other YouTube video creators for publishing various video clips such as The Expanse.
And to anyone else who we may have left out, thank you.
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RESOURCE:
Students prove real-life Star Wars deflector shield is possible:
• Shields Up! The Physics of Star Wars
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1...
Shields Up! The Physics of Star Wars by J. McGuire, A. Toohie and A. Pohl:
https://www108.lamp.le.ac.uk/ojs1/ind...
https://phys.org/news/2014-05-physics...
1200 Tesla experiment:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/s...
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-world-m...
DARPA’s Excalibur Project:
https://defense-update.com/20140307_s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project...
Nuclear rocket scientists of the 1970s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear...
Research images from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research
Magnetic fusion confinement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneti...
THE LOS ALAMOS 600 MJ, 1500 MW INERTIAL ENERGY STORAGE AND PULSED POWER UNIT:
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltex...
https://phys.org/news/2012-03-magneti...
1200 Tesla demonstration at the University of Tokyo:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/s...
• Magnetic Field Record Set With a Bang...
The Plasma Window at BNL:
https://www.bnl.gov/video/index.php?v...
Experimental study of plasma window:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
Hard Sci-fi energy shields (worldbuilding):
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.c...
Near and far field image:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_an...
