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Tue 9 Jan, 2007 04:06 pm
These are just a couple ideas I had, which I think are original.
1. magnetic deflector shields. traditional cons: requires a great deal of power, and can only deflect electrically charged particles.
idea: use a high-powered laser to induce increased electrical charge in incoming particles, thus allowing the shields to affect previously neutral particles, as well as dramatically reducing the power needed to deflect the particle....and with a fusion power generator like that of ITER being designed, maybe it's feasible after all.
2. tactical high-energy laser. the military has already made the THEL, but it doesn't have enough power to do significant damage unless targeted at a fuel source (and also easily scattered by atmospheric particles).
idea: use antimatter ammunition charges, transported by being suspended in vacuum chambers with magnetic fields. annhilate the antimatter with regular matter to produce enormous ammounts of gamma rays which can be collimated into an enormously powerful laser pulse beam...which could be used to melt an incoming projectile. The difficulty here would be in collimating and directing this light into a laser, without melting the apparatus.
What kind of "star wars" are we discussing? An ICBM shield?
I was not thinking about shielding vs ICBMs specifically, but rather just elevating these two impractical ideas into hypothetically practical technologies. If magnetic shields were able to deflect small asteroids, or bullets, they would become a practical technology. In terms of the anti matter laser, its uses would be many...but it would make laser technology a viable weapon, I think...because I imagine we could build lasers powerful enough to, say, burn a hole through an entire tank in a split second.
Well, gamma-ray lasers are definitely one-shot deals. Much easier to pump them with a nuclear explosion, too. Easier to burn holes through tanks with kinetic energy weapons.
I am pretty sure that we already have gamma ray lasers that aren't one-shot deals.
I don't think we want to be setting off nuclear bombs on our own vehicles to fire a weapon, or anywhere on Earth really, but I would think that the energy released from an antimatter annhilation could be a lot more localized and easily collimated, perhaps made into a portable device. A nuclear explosion creates more than just gamma rays...an annhilation produces only gamma rays..
Kinetic weapons are good but they cannot produce damage that is as precise and localized as a laser could, and they don't travel at the speed of light either.
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