Full Power to Shields

[mechaninac]

I see what you mean. If the shield encapsulates a volume of charged particles it would indeed fry anyone within the ship, and short every piece of electronics aboard.

The way I envisioned the shield, it would be primarily a toroidal magnetic shell a few microns thick, and the charged particles riding the field lines would be most abundant at the field "edge", becoming more rarefied as the distance to the effective "skin" increases, to either side of the "skin", so that by, say, 30 cm from the flow the particle density would drop drastically towards the equivalent of background radiation -- by about 1 m the density would be the same as interstellar space; this residual radiation would be absorbed by the ships polarized/ablative armor plating and pose no danger to the crew or ship's systems. There would be no shield intersection with the ship's personnel areas or electronic equipment, other than the generator itself, since the generator cylinder runs the entire draft of the ship, and the shield emitter ports are external... the field exits the positive pole projector outside the ship and returns to the negative pole collector outside the vessel.

Firing missiles would definitely require either a delayed targeting sensor activation to avoid electronic failure (akin to how torpedoes are fired with their proximity fuses delayed so that they can't accidentally home in on the firing vessel), a heavily shielded missile (that causes problem because of the extra mass), or a shield flicker to coincide with the missile(s) passing across the shield wall.

The only problem I see with your torus is that both its outer and inner diameters are entirely outside the ship, with no "logical" projection point; it looks like the shield just is, but a donut is an enclosed volume and if the ship is outside of any point of contact, how can it create the torus. In addition, if the torus exists only to provide a donut shaped plasma field around the ship without contacting same, there must be some form of magnetic manipulator inside the ship that projects the encapsulation field necessary to create the shield. This would bring you back to something similar to what I have, which would be okay; but if, as you've stated, the torus is rotated (spins), the controlling field must also shift directions, and this would bring it (not the torus) across the ships major axis, thereby frying anything in it's path... unless, the projector(s) do not reside inside the ship, but are housed in satellites that orbit the ship.

Isn't it amazing how far one can take this theoretical/sci-fi stuff? As soon as you think you have everything figured out, and making sense, another monkey wrench is thrown in to muck up the works. I'm by no means saying that my idea makes any sense either... I'm sure it has as many logic holes as any of a thousand other concepts. In the end it may be better to just come up with something cool and skirt around the technical stuff and just take it for granted that it works as advertised.

Edited January 23, 2007 by mechaninac