6 ms·
Note: this is only for charged particles such as happen in solar flares, and only in space. Your personal shield against bullets and the like is still impossibl
by WJW 3y ago
Note: this is only for charged particles such as happen in solar flares, and only in space. Your personal shield against bullets and the like is still impossible, sadly.
- adrianN 3y agoA few tons of superconductors work very well against bullets.
- Terr_ 3y agoThat's true even without power at room temperature. :P
- willis936 3y agoWho's making a 600 T magnet that weighs only a few tons? https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/115011/how-much-power-would-it-take-to-stop-a-bullet-with-a-magnet#115014 https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/115011/how-much-...
- hobofan 3y agoI think at that point you probably have to worry about the effect such a strong magnet will have on the brain and nervous system, so probably not the best fit for personal protection.
- skhr0680 3y agoI’m no rocket scientist, but I feel that statement holds true for bullets too
- bee_rider 3y agoThe bullets are the problem they are trying to use the shield to solve. If the shield also kills the user, that sort of renders the whole thing moot, right? Not to agree with the actual idea that the magnet is necessarily dangerous, haven’t looked that up…
- Arrath 3y ago> If the shield also kills the user, that sort of renders the whole thing moot, right? Depends, are you the mook hiding behind the shield, or the contractor making and selling a million shield units?
- taway_6PplYu5 3y ago"He was turned to steel In a great magnetic field"
- idunnoman1222 3y agoI think you actually have to worry about your soldier not having any metal objects on him because I don’t know what use he’s going to be naked
- Scarblac 3y agoYou don't need 600 T, just a few tons of superconductor should be enough to stop most bullets. No need run any charge through them, just place them so that most of it is between you and the bullet.
- theultdev 3y ago> just place them so that most of it is between you and the bullet. Easier said than done
- willis936 3y agolol this is true. The 6 order of magnitude resonant eddy current induction looks like the more interesting solution. I could see this being done with a giant beamforming array that would be more practical than a giant steady state magnet. It would be pretty cool to melt a supersonic projectile midflight with eddy currents.
- bee_rider 3y agoIn sci-fi, shields seem to basically evaporate bullets. A shield that melts bullets could be a very cool sci-fi visual; the ship would still need some conventional armor (you still have molten metal flying at you), but it would splat against the armor. Plus it would provide a nice visual for a fresh fleet vs the battle-splattered one that’s seen combat.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mr_toad 3y agoFrom small arms. A heavy machine gun can cut through an engine block and still kill you.
- tzs 3y agoThat’s for stopping the bullet. All I need from a personal bullet shield is to deflect it enough to miss me.
- perlgeek 3y agonot against silver bullets :-)
- theultdev 3y agoor more practically, titanium bullets. the lead in them may be a problem though.
- myrmidon 3y agoA strong magnetic field would affect all (eletrically conducting) bullets, they need not be ferromagnetic. This would work better on silver bullets than steel, actually (because of better conductivity). (This is obviously not practical)
- f4c39012 3y agofortunately software engineers know there is no silver bullet
- scotty79 3y agoNot really. Bullet would just orient itself to minimize eddy currents. People would start using thin disc shape bullets that would slide through the magnetic field without much trouble after orienting themselves in the best direction. https://youtu.be/g0amdIcZt5I?t=735 https://youtu.be/g0amdIcZt5I?t=735
- willcipriano 3y ago> thin disc shape bullets Very powerful fans blowing in the direction of the flat side
- scotty79 3y agoRings then.
- Leo_Germond 3y ago"Just fire discs" well that's easier said than done, and there's probably a tons of reasons nobody uses discs. One of them is already that we have no experience building or using disc-shaped bullets, especially compared to the trove of experience for... bullet-shaped bullets. So that's not a solution as much as it's an indication that this defense mechanism wouldn't be perfect given an adversary with enough time and will. That being said, nothing is ever perfect, and "arms race" are named this way for this exact reason.
- wkat4242 3y agoA few tons of steel is cheaper and also works very well against bullets
- roamerz 3y agoProbably would be more efficient to vaporize a bullet with a directed energy weapon than to stop it with a magnet.
- RedShift1 3y agoMy disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
- theultdev 3y agoWell this may work for future phasers, and ceramic/steel plates work well for bullets. Emit the shield from the plate armor and you'll get protection from both. Bonus points for chainmail or kevlar suits for knives / shots on non-vital areas. Extra bonus points for gelatin to avoid broken ribs / stopping power from bullets. Basically a spartan suit...
- generic92034 3y agoIf you are going that far you might as well think about sending a surrogate [1] instead. :) [1]: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogates
- theultdev 3y agoPorque no los dos? You can jam the remote control for "surrogates". You could do local AI to workaround that, but then ya'know... skynet... Also distance may be a problem, especially if we're talking space warfare. And surrogates would probably look more like the robot dogs or air/ship drones we currently have though, with some human-like ones sprinkled in. Put a remote control operator in a spartan suit to pilot drones nearby!
- g19fanatic 3y agoOne of the benefits of using "human like" surrogates is the compatibility of hardware. Lets say its a spartan type design, if a human needed to be on the front lines for that space warfare to manage things then taking the hardware from a surrogate make all the other things in war easier (fabrication, supply, support, etc...).
- theultdev 3y agoOh and a (shielded) micro nuclear reactor for power! Now how to solve the heating problem...
- VagabundoP 3y ago
- thallium205 3y agoAnd solar flare based weapons systems.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DrBazza 3y agoEverything in space is about distance - want to stop an asteroid walloping the Earth? Nudge it when it is a few million [time or distance] unit away, and it will miss the earth. You could imagine a future spacecraft might have a leading arrowtip also with a field, many miles in front of it to deflect dust and so on.
- euroderf 3y agoA ship moving at a double-digit percentage of light speed, with an ablative pilot craft ahead of it.
- regularfry 3y agoMoving at significant proportions of c makes a very brief light show of pretty much any ablative solid, unfortunately. It's worth doing the maths on, for instance, how much ice at 4K you would need to dissipate the energy released by running into a 5g pebble at 0.2c. It's... not a small volume.
- donkers 3y agoYour comment made me try this out on wolfram alpha. Kinetic energy of 1 gram with velocity of 0.1 C is 452.78 gigajoules. Energy of the Hiroshima bomb is 6.3x10^13 joules. It would take 139.14 grams of matter at a velocity of 0.1 C to have the kinetic energy equivalent to the energy released by the bomb. So wow, yes, stopping even a small amount of stuff at those speeds is no joke.
- grork 3y agoGonna save this post for some arbitrary point in the future to pull out as a point against ‘impossible’. Might have to gift it to my descendants to make sure it’s available for long enough… /s
- Night_Thastus 3y agoCurrently impossible. We have no idea what technology will exist in say, 300 years.
- b33j0r 3y agoIn physics of the impossible (in 2008, I know a lot of our opinions of the author have shifted) Michio Kaku makes a pretty good case that force fields are the least likely phenomenon to exist. There’s just not a field that hangs out in space and forms a repulsive boundary to matter as its interaction, besides matter. The EM field kinda, but no one means big magnets when they think of a practical force field (if so, “QED,” they already exist) :p
- BobaFloutist 3y agoShear-thickening gas? Is that anything?
- blincoln 3y ago3M's mysterious 1980 repulsion field? [1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectroBOOM/comments/9jig1l/can_you_confirmdebunk_the_3m_electrostatic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectroBOOM/comments/9jig1l/can_you...
- b33j0r 3y agoNice! I couldn’t remember the details, but I was thinking of this too as the “maybe.” I’m very skeptical of that story though. You’d think the strength of the electric field would have to be gigavolts/meter. I just said gigavolts because of Doc Brown :p I just know it would be more than a van degraff generator or a tesla coil. Lightning is in the 10k’s V/m. I’m an electrical engineer (ok, ok, 3.5/4 of one. I had already graduated in CS, and quit early for a job). I can’t imagine a static electric field with these properties. The dielectric breakdown voltage of pretty much everything, especially air, would be relatively very small compared to that field, to generate a physical force at that distance. Neodymium magnets can do that at millimeters apart, nothing really does at a few meters. And why weren’t opposite or neutrally charged things sucked into it? Sounds like a really sciency-sounding legend. Maybe there was a small effect and a story grew. — I just realized that the HN link is like 10 hours of everything I just said in the comments (but higher effort, I guess they went all 4-7 years, lol). Haha, anyway. Add me to the skeptics. Life is usually boring :/
- simne 3y agoPlasma could affect bullets and fragments (for example from mines). Just like current dynamic armor, which is just boxes with explosive material, and it's explosion deflect cumulative stream and fragments. Imagine something like multiple-nozzle rocket engine. Sure, existing proof of concept realizations are ugly, but with time they will become better.
- Ferret7446 3y agoThe physics of kinetic weaponry is stupidly simple, and so kinetic defense is also stupidly simple: E = (mv^2)/2 Kinetic "energy shields" (as commonly depicted) are basically impossible, if not literally impossible. You're much better off either dodging or intercepting.