Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Personal Deflector Shield Dilemma

I was thinking about personal deflector shields. Like in Sci-Fi movies they have personal "aura", if you will. In Star Trek they have shields around the ships too. Ok, those movies/series where they have personal shields, and nothing can penetrate them, I got one question: How do they breathe? How does the shield protect against light beams, phazers and photon torpedos, yet it lets the air through?

In Dune it's explainable in some way. Slowly moving objects pass the shield. So slowly moving air would pass. But Arakis is a desert planet with high velocity winds. How does that work in such conditions? In David Lynch's movie Dune they have square shields (quite impossible to create) so if the high velocity wind doesn't penetrate it, it would go around the shield and create an air pocket of almost still air behind the object. This might be the way to get this to work. But those shields must be round, not square. It would be unusefull and more difficult to create square shields instead of round ones. And round objects would have less of the slow moving air behind them, thus having less possibilities for the air to pass.

But if there's a filter that separates photons and matter from gases, then how about gas weapons? If they would shoot high temperature water in gas form through the shield, they can easily burn the shielded alive. Or poison them with poison gases. If it would have such sophisticated filter, that can quickly enough filter only oxygen, why not make an ozone weapon? Shoot the shield full of ozone. That should do it.

1 comment:

Don KeyShot said...

I thought the shields only became active when an attack was eminent... In outer space... where there is only vacuum...

Oh, yeah, and always check the Flux Capacitor