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Dreams Rant

Shield Generator

Ok… I’ve had a bit of an epiphany… Looking at tesla coil vids, I’ve realized something… With that much energy and plasma, you could make one heck of a shield with it. And now to relate everything to Star Trek for a few. Also, this is all dependent upon being in a vacuum.

Navigational Deflector
It has 2 purposes – to 1, provide an EM barrier to minor dust and rocks and to filter out most cosmic radiation and 2, to charge the ‘shields’ of the ship. It’s composed of a giant tesla coil that fires off anti-protons instead of electrons, and a round ring generator of said anti-protons. It would charge the coil surface with the anti-protons and fire them out in front of the ship, which are then attracted and held in a static placement pattern by the oppositely charged ‘grounding grid’ covering the surface of the ship.

Grounding Grid
This is what you would need to control the flow of those anti-protons wandering all around the ship. it would have to be oppositely charged on the outer edge of where you want the shield to remain, and similarly charged on the ship side of that shield. In essence, it would be 2 grids overlapping and creating a pair of fields away from the hull. This is theoretically impossible if you look at normal physics, which is where shield frequencies in Star Trek come into play. That frequency is how fast that field alternates between positive and negative EM fields. It vibrates the anti-protons back and forth, holding them in place. A simple estimate would say that you would need to cycle this EM field at 2 MHz or faster for fine control.

Power Source
Yes, this will take a lot of energy. Oh, but Star Trek has us covered on that one too. Plasma based power distribution from a cold fusion reactor – yes the impulse engines on Star Trek are cold fusion drives. The raw energy from that alone would be enough – coupled with charge pulse/EM collectors for actual power conversion, and you’ve got more KW than you’ll know what to do with. A side note on this… Most people assume that the plasma in the engines are for coolant… It’s not – it’s used for raw energy transfer into the ship’s systems. Cold fusion runs at a nice cool temperature – about the same as your house is kept for most of us. The plasma power distribution system can also be used to heat the ship in the cold of space, however. And on the note of the warp core fusion systems, that’s another very similar setup the way they have it. If 99% of the energy is collected, there’s no real heat output and no real explosive force at all.

Shield Reactions
You may now be wondering… What does it all mean? How will this protect my spaceship from enemy attacks? Well, what are beam weapons and torpedoes and stuff normally made of? Matter. With electrons. What happens when you mix electrons and anti-protons? they cancel each other out and release raw energy, destroying the atom that either one are attached to. In essence, once an energy beam or object comes into contact with this barrier, it’ll be converted to pure energy and dispersed. Furthermore, the massive EM field generated by a grounding grid powerful enough to control the placement of anti-protons would also filter out that energy and hold it in that same pattern IF it isn’t completely annihilated. As for the raw energy, what goes towards the ship can be collected by the very same grounding grid and fed back into the system to create more anti-protons.

Simple as pie. ^_^

Az