What's the most realistic possibility for 'energy shields' on a ship...

What if the incoming hazard is a laser

haha, then you are fucked. Photons are uncharged m8. Get a first surface (a special type of mirror) or some sort of ablation / absorber made of VANTAblack perhaps.

The wave equation for photons is linear.
That means two light beams go right through each other without change. Light or magnetism won't stop light or deflect light.

Vantablack is the LAST thing you want. It'll soak up all the energy and vaporize -- or transmit it to the backing structure. Which is what the enemy wants to happen to your ship.

White or mirrored surfaces bounce incoming light away. Unfortunately, they're also lousy at radiating the heat generated within your own ship by the engines, the crew, the drive, the lasers, etc. A perfect mirror would be immune to laser weapons. But you'd cook anyway.

maybe you can work in a gauge such that [math]\hat\Phi[/math] points to a place five meters from the centroid of your ship and then have a generator shunts energy into the [math]\hat\Phi[/math]-channel

There is actual research being done to protect satellites from space debris with a plasma shield around them.

Hide.
If you cant cook them before you are well cooked.

plasma shielding is a lot more reasonable than using strictly a mega tesla magnetic field

I'd imagine a countermeasure could be a battery that shoots dielectric cateyes into the beam's path.

A plasma shield might stop charged particles; cosmic rays and solar flares. They carry (individually) great energy but little momentum.
A plasma shield has little mass and won't stop a bullet.

Started an SF novel wherein ships fire 10 kg masses at each other at 1/10th lightspeed.
Electromagnetic coil guns.
The ranges are such that a shot takes 5 or 6 seconds to span the gap.
Main defense is random "jinking" so the shots miss.
This is so absurd that I'm undecided whether to continue.

What about em or albucarre based "fields". Where the space around the projectile is warped so when the projectile hits the shield space will have expanded and contracted to deflect or change the projectiles path away from the ship.

jinking might work for smaller ships but what about bigger ones? unless the bigger ships look like pic related it's not gonna work.

why not just shoot a mass into the other mass's trajectory to deflect or nullify it?

you got plenty of time to detect, calculate and launch one.

that would create an interesting arms race dynamic, whoever can make the bigger gun wins

Firing 10 kg masses at 1/10th light speed is pretty absurd. If you can do that then why do you need ships? Just fire at your enemies infrastructure which can't move around like ships can.

Of course it's silly.
Though the ships seem to have artificial gravity and, therefore, maybe inertial shielding.

Hitting a missile with a counter-missile? Better than trying to dodge, but still tough.

The attacking ship OUGHT to fire a shell which explodes in shrapnel in mid-flight. Almost impossible to evade and even a ball bearing will go through any imaginable armor at 0.1 cee.

(In the Star Wars movies, the hero moves his lightsabre around so rapidly he can deflect blaster bolts. For some reason, none of the stormtroopers ever aim for the ankles while others shoot at the head.)

Of course, if the physics & tactics were realistic, the book might end right there in chapter one. :(

Yeah, pressor beams would work. If we knew how to generate them.
If you haven't read it, try Arthur Clarke's "Superiority". Short story in a number of collections of his work.

Counter it with a 180° phase shifted laser of your own.

Agreed.
That's why I'll probably give up on the book.

The ships must have a heck of a capacitor bank to store the energy for each shot. You could probably drive a Tesla to Alpha Cent on a single charge.

that only really works if

1) it's a hugeass wavelength that's bigger than your ship

2) the counter beam is launched from behind your ship, through your ship, at the other ship.

That doesn't help. Energy cannot be destroyed. Beams moving in opposite directions pass through each other without attenuation.

did you do the math?

it's the equivalent of about 1 megaton TNT. (Tsar bomba had 200 MT)

I for one would love to see a scifi book that makes sense.

Tsar Bomba was about 50 megatons. If COULD have been 70 or 80 but the Russkis were afraid the fireball would rise clear out of the atmosphere and spread fallout farther than they'd like. So they "dialed it back".

No, I didn't bother. If you're going to have non-rocket spacedrives, gravity control, FTL travel, and ships which move at 20 or 30 percent of cee in "normal" space, I'd already given up on the idea that the author cared about physics.

There ARE solid SF books.
"Mission of Gravity" by Hal Clement
"The Revolution from Rosinante" by Alexis Gilliland
"Firestar" by Michael Flynn
"Saturn Alia" by Grant Callin
"Genesis Quest" and "Second Genesis" by Donald Moffitt

Just glanced at my bookcase. All well-written and not an FTL drive in the lot.

speaking of, how thick would a barrel have to be to make a nuclear gun? hmm.

assuming you have a 500 liter 1KT charge you' need a barrel that withstands ~10 petapascals

>Tsar Bomba was about 50 megatons.

indeed. wolfram lied.

Which is your favourite? they all have meh reviews.

nevermind, wolfram didn't lie, I mixed up my units. 200 petajoules, and you need 4, that's 2% of tsar bomba, which is 50*0.2 = 1 MT.

time 4 bed.

>hiding in space

lol Oh you!

They're all good, IMHO. I appreciate "hard" SF and "play the game" as Hal Clement put it; finding mistakes. Not many authors make it worthwhile. "Mission" is considered a Classic. The most recent editions come with a follow-up article. "Whirligig World", which he wrote to explain how he went about constructing Mesklin. (We now know Meskin doesn't exist. The astronomer who "spotted" it, based on wobbles of the parent star, was wrong. This was in the '40s.) But, starting with his figures, Clements got everything -- physics, chemistry, biology, climate and weather -- right. It's a masterpiece and is considered the Gold Standard in the field.

"Rosinante" is about the politics of running an O'Neil, but the physics is right.
"Saturn Alia" goes deep into realistic orbital mechanics. They have efficient fusion rockets, but it's not like The Expanse where you can pull 1 gee from now until Christmas. They run at a fraction of a gee to keep the required mass-ratio sane. They have to import reaction mass from the moons of the outer system. And getting off Earth is still expensive because you don't want to use a fusion drive in atmosphere. There's also a realistic engineering project to build a probe to enter the atmosphere of Saturn. A manned probe, for well-explained reasons.

>all those brainlet responses

Just have the ship fart out a cloud of particles on that side

Tell me more

It becomes much easier if you have materials held together with strong nuclear force. Look up Bolonkin AB matter, it's total baloney you can't hold neutrons together that way, but it shows what materials held together with strong nuclear force could do.

Shit like making a ship that wouldn't give a fuck about a nuclear bomb detonated directly on its hull.

the only point of a energy sheild would be for deflecting asteriods as realistically by the time we are interplanetary corperations would be the only strong entities and fighting is just costly

>And getting off Earth is still expensive because you don't want to use a fusion drive in atmosphere.
Thats nonsense, its not like the exhaust is radioactive
But I guess all sci-fi writers need their cliches

Neutron radiation from fusion is extremely dangerous but it doesn't go all that far so who fucking cares.

Most would be contained within the ship/engine though, doubtful it would create a meaningful amount of radioactive air/water

mirror or gas
lasers are weak as fuck

Energy shields already are experimented with, and they are based on plasma

I suppose most of what could tell you about phi is in this book:

>The General Relevance of the Modified Cosmological Model
MIRROR 1: vixra.org/abs/1712.0598
MIRROR 2: 2occatl.net/1712.0598v2.pdf
MIRROR 3: drive.google.com/file/d/1sXrFZhMo9OjoauL0SgAvpSxD_8qaAYi0/view?usp=sharing

You could also use a closed cycle fission drive instead, at the cost of worse propellant efficiency (but better compared to modern chemical rockets)

Since neither of you has read the book under discussion, neither of you is qualified to express an opinion.

A fusion rocket with an exhaust of 5 or 10 percent of cee would release a staggering amount of energy to lift a ship massing hundreds of tons.

Specifically, Exhaust 0.1 c Thrust 200 tonnes
Power 29.47e12 watts 7.015 kilotons/sec
That's Hiroshima every three seconds!
You don't want the drive plume touching the ground and you don't even want that heat in the air.

What's a closed cycle fission drive?

You post this in every imaginable thread, relevant or not!
It belongs on /x/. It's not peer-reviewed and no one but you believes in it.

>plasma
is matter not energy

>Lasers

Like any rocket, you can scale down the Isp to increase the thrust

The atmosphere can drink a million hiroshima's a day of energy without any noticeable changes.

Point defense guns

Fraction of the power for better results. Only a retard would bother with energu shielding. The shit you see in fiction is pure fantasy.

ablative armor or a missile that fires an inflatable balloon out of shitty materials and a bit of air to diffuse it.

Yeah thats true. On any scale we would consider for shielding, you would still need some sort of physical armor.

FYI, in universe cannon, jedi are capable of pulling off the shit they do with lightsabers because of their connection to the force letting them predict the future in real time seamlessly. It's part of why you rarely see non trained force sensitives use a lightsaber, and also why even the worst jedi swordsman takes a giant shit on anyone else.

thank you for this patrician tier list of Hard SF SF books

Antigravity. It you can create gravity on a ship like all normie SciFi, you can create shields. It is literally the inverse. Shields simply push away mass and energy instead of attract it.

And they do drop the Isp when landing, even on satellites with fractional surface gravity, to avoid chewing things up too much. One pilot complains his Isp is "a lousy ten thousand seconds" during such manuvers. A take-off or landing can burn more (expensive) fuel than the entire rest of the trip.

Later, a pilot under orders to get to Saturn ASAP sets up a continuous boost program at a quarter-gee. An accounting program warns "Are you sure you want to do this? This course is unnecessarily expensive and wastes valuable resources".

The isn't The Expanse where you can do 1 gee or more until you die of old age. (Didn't Epstein starve, pinned down by 5 gee and unable to reach the "off" switch?)
Even with controlled fusion, there will be economic issues.

So what do they use to leave planets then? Some sort of fusion thermal rocket?

You're all brainlets.
>outside shell of ship should be an ideal one-way mirror to reflect all outside radiation
>inside should be vantablack to absorb all radiation and exchange it to the outside

top kek

Solid light

Yes it's a thing

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_light

>Not hardlight
Stoke me a clipper I'll be back by christmas

"Degraded" fusion drive (as mentioned) for small moons.
We never see anyone leave Earth in the novel, so I can't say.
However, the Saturn probe descends to multiple Earth-atmospheric pressure levels (on balloons! Containing vacuum and carefully engineering so as not to collapse. Not much lift from each one.) and then fires the fusion motor to climb back to where ordinary ships can snag it. So the fusion motor works in atmosphere.

Yeah. And just last week they managed to get THREE photons to stick together. But it still offers no resistance to matter or photons once it gets outside the rubidium cloud.
And it still doesn't stop neatly a meter or two away from the hilt.
Damn George Lucas!

Brilliant!
How, pray tell, does the heat sink get rid of the accumulating energy? Please explain to us brainlets (especially the ones who know thermo.)
No convection or conduction and, since it's covered by a perfect mirror, no radiation.

A "one way mirror" is a thermodynamic impossibility. You could use it to build a Perpetual Motion Machine of the Second Order.

>How, pray tell, does the heat sink get rid of the accumulating energy? Please explain to us brainlets (especially the ones who know thermo.)
>No convection or conduction and, since it's covered by a perfect mirror, no radiation.
Not that user, but have the back of your reflective armor have reservoirs of some super cooled liquid that can boil off and vent back out, releasing a steam cloud which would further act to deflect some of the lasers energy.

For awhile.

The attacking ship better have similar reservoirs so it can dump;
A) the waste heat from the powerplant
B) the part of the energy fed to the lasers which DOESN'T get transmitted

Advantage goes to the ship with the larger mass and larger volatile reserve, not necessarily the one with the biggest laser.

OP that you replied to first, my point was the same as the user that replied to you.
This mechanism obviously can't be held for long, just like most "forcefields".

All it does is stall the damage caused by the opponents. The reason this is used is to buy the defending side time to train THEIR weapons on the attackers, at which point it becomes a waiting game, whichever one gives up first.
In reality, spacewars are quite unrealistic considering even a tiny penetration of the ship's hull would result in enormous damage.

Ships are doing combat from .5-.6 ly apart?

Spacewars are unrealistic.
But the perfect mirror doesn't affect projectiles.
A cannonball punches right through.
And you can't destroy it before it hits because it's also covered with perfect mirror. Once launched, it has no engines, no heat to be dissipated, so it can be completely encased.
Checkmate!

We could play these "what if" games with imaginary technology all day. Unless one side is forced to sit still guarding a stationary object (a planet or a jump-point) the chances of two fleets meeting in the middle of nowhere are roughly zero. They couldn't even find each other.

In the Lensman books, the ships moved faster-than-light, but their detector beams, their communicators, and their weapons moved even faster.
In Poul Anderson's work, hyperdrive vibrations are detectible instantaneously out to about a lightyear. That was a necessity so there could be combat. Then he had to double-talk to explain the absence of FTL radio.
In H.Beam Piper, there are no lasers and no energy shields. Ships slug it out with missiles and counter-missiles and the only reason both combatants aren't immediately blown to Em Cee Squared is that they're armored in Collapsium (which can shrug off almost anything. It also makes good bank vaults.)

Five or six tenths of a light-SECOND apart.
And I've decided the book goes back to the library without reading further.

>We could play these "what if" games with imaginary technology all day. Unless one side is forced to sit still guarding a stationary object (a planet or a jump-point) the chances of two fleets meeting in the middle of nowhere are roughly zero. They couldn't even find each other.
Assuming we're in a space opera universe where we have warships in space and different planets, colonies, space stations, etc then you still have supply lines between planets and outposts. Just loiter in the area, harass their transports, then take off.
As much as I loathe the Naval Warfare in space, the analogy to the age of sail isn't all bad. The difference is, you don't have a horizon things can hide behind.
If we're talking about dreadnoughts in space you have to consider the way they get around, fuckhuge fusion engines? Orion Drives? Okay, sure, why not. But you're not going to sneak up on anyone like that.
And for every weapon and tactic, you're going to have a counter measure. That's just the evolution of warfare.

What happened to the plasma shielding research with the US Air force?

They were making a thin layer of plasma with electromagnets to prevent hull ionization at supersonic speeds.

Attacking supply lines is only practical near the very ends of the route. And only if you have detectors which can spot, lightyears distant, a ship in hyperspace or whatever the FTL is. Space is BIG.

Dreadnaughts.
Weber apes Horatio Hornblower so closely that ships have "tops", "bottoms", and armored "sides". Drake's ships have actual sails. They catch tachyons rather than wind, but sailors still have to climb the mizzenmasts to set them.

Ever notice that, in books, you usually can't go FTL within such-and-such distance of a Sun? Otherwise, A can de-hyper inside the defenses just long enough to bomb B's planet into ash and then disappear into hyperspace again. In the original Spacewar game, the hyperdrive was made deliberately unreliable. First time you used it, 1-in-10 of simply exploding. Second time, 2-in-10. And so on. Can't have battles if the outnumbered side can run away.
Movies and TV ships don't have those limitations because days of maneuvering in "normal" space would slow down the plot.

Every weapon has a countermeasure -- IF the author rigs the pseudo-physics to allow one.
WE have H-bombs, deliverable by ICBM, cruise missile, torpedo, or smuggled in as a cargo of frozen herring. We have counter-measures, none of which work very well. And with H-bombs, you destroy 99% of the attacking forces and you still lose.

Eve Online actually has a relatively accurate representation of how big space is.

You travel between Systems through Gates near which most people actually try to kill others.

Otherwise it is almost impossible to find anyone, since most people just jump from a Gate to some station/planet and drop a random bookmark on the way there. (You can only jump to bookmarks and stations/gates/planets)
If there is a bookmark in the middle of something it is almost impossible to drop one close to it to be able to find them. You have instant directional scanners that show you how many ships are in whatever direction you are looking. And how far away they are. Still combat doesn't happen if one party doesn't want it.

>No, I didn't bother. If you're going to have non-rocket spacedrives, gravity control, FTL travel, and ships which move at 20 or 30 percent of cee in "normal" space, I'd already given up on the idea that the author cared about physics.
Known physics.
We are discovering new things all the time and we're far from over, there could be room for some surprises there.
What's wrong anyway with ships moving a 30% of light speed? (If that what you mean by cee)
It doesn't violate the physics we know.

Same reason we have ships and navies now even though we have H-bombs. You start lobbing relativistic kill vehicles around, you're asking for your planet to be vaporized.

OK. That's one way of getting around the problem
Though it sounds like it doesn't really represent how big the cosmos is. It just ignores most of space.

What I mean: In "The Mote in God's Eye", ships jump instantaneously between a limited number of points. The points are formed by subnuclear processes within stars, so they're reasonably close to suns. A solar system may have one, several, or no jump-points.

Someone comments that the Galactic Empire really doesn't control the Galaxy. All they govern are tiny bubbles, isolated by vast distances where no one ever goes or ever is likely to go.

>There ARE solid SF books

Mind-eroding non-literature, all of them.

>What's a closed cycle fission drive?

Using a fission reactor to heat reaction mass eg hydrogen. The reaction mass never touches radioactive material.

Yeah, "cee" is lightspeed.
And there's no physical law which prevents you from building ships which can travel at 30% lightspeed.

There are a couple of 'minor' engineering problems though.
A) Plowing through interstellar gas at that rate is like standing in the beam of a cyclotron. Dead in minutes from either protons zipping though you or from the X-rays released when the protons stop. So we need force-shields, which is what started this thread.
B) Dust would ablate away any material shielding. A 1" pebble would do more damage than a fusion bomb. Again, force shields needed.
C) The energy required to travel at those speeds is insane. Look at the picture.

A fusion rocket must "burn" over 1200 times its final mass to reach that speed and then stop. The fraction of the fuel converted into energy is tiny, but it still comes to 4.78 tons of matter for each ton of the final ship (Structure, tanks, engines, shielding, and the payload is whatever is left over.) Starships won't be small. Trips still take years, remember. And you're carrying everything needed to build a colony. The Oasis of the Sea displaces 100,000 tons. Say, a fifth of that. 20,000 tons. We set out with 25 MILLION tons of fuel and turn 96,000 tons of that to energy.
That's 7.7946e24 joules, or 13,700 years of the World's total energy consumption (latest numbers I could find.)

That's what I figured. Isp maybe 900 seconds. Twice what you get from chemicals. That would be about right; Makes building space colonies practical. But it you needed bulk materials (hydrogen, for instance) still cheaper to import it from tiny, cold satellites -- in a low-acceleration fusion ship -- than to lift it off Earth.

I was talking about a laser beam. We weren't talking about projectile weapons.

Thin foil whipple shields up front to ionize incoming bit of junk, and powerful magnetic shields to deflect the resulting ions away from the ship. Turn the interstellar debris' relativistic energy against it.

OK. And I was just pointing out that mirrors are not going to turn space battles into endurance contests.

Ever read "Earthlight"? Arthur C Clarke.
He wanted to write a "realistic" space battle.
Energy beams. Deflector shields. The usual.
He said he was inspired by an old novel which featured just such a battle. I don't think he specifically named the book, but it was almost certainly the one I've shown. The points of similarity couldn't be coincidence.

Without wanting to give the Big Secret of Clarke's book away, I will only say that the battle is ultimately decided by a material weapon. (In his original short story the weapon is a technobabble "Polaron Beam". Glowing, scintillating, heat rays aren't visible in vacuum, so he just made something up. But Clarke thought of something which could actually work and used it when he expanded the short into a novel.)

One cubic centimeter of ice is about one gram. At 30% of lightspeed it carries 4.05e12 joules. That's about 1 kiloton of TNT. In a space 1 centimeter across. Atomic explosives don't come close. It's a bit more than foil can handle!
But suppose it does. If the powerful magnetic shields deflect the ions starting from a distance of, say, 1 kilometer, they have to exert 444,000 tonnes of force for 4.5e-5 seconds. Said force being reflected back onto the coils of the field generator and tearing it to shreds.

A whipple shield will shatter a micro-meteorite at 10 or 20 km/sec. It does nothing whatsoever against an impact at 90,000 km/sec. If the ice cube disintegrated, that just means that the ship would be struck by a spear of plasma at about 2/3rds of a Billion degrees Kelvin and not much wider than the original meteorite.

You simply don't realize the energies involved when you travel at a significant fraction of lightspeed!!!

It's not about the foil "handling" it. It's about ionisation. And you don't get cubes of ice in interstellar space. You get very small dust grains at most. Ionising neutral particle streams by foil penetration is a well established principle. Once it's ionised into plasma, we'd deflect if over hundreds of kilometers, not one like in your estimate.

By all means, this may not be a practical way of dealing with interstellar dust at relativistic speeds, but if so I'd like to see actual calculations, not just rough estimates for arbitrary masses and distances.

Ah, I haven't read it before, but I'll make sure to check it out.

In reality a spacewar won't be fought with sci-fi weapons. Ironically enough, all the sci-fi weapons would be used on the ground. In space they'd be far too inefficient. Spacewars would be fought with physical projectiles.

Hell, I'd venture to guess a cannonball would do more damage to a spaceship than a laser beam that'd just cut right through.

Interstellar space isn't empty.
We had an entire asteroid swing past a few months ago.
Now that they know what to look for, they estimate 2 or 3 go by every year. There are curves for spatial objects. The smaller, the more numerous.

Read the BIS's Project Daedalus Project report. They used multiple shields, traveled slower, and acknowledged that there was still a fair chance of hitting something which couldn't be handled.

I used ice because it's not dense and I was trying to err in your favor.
I used 1 km because an appreciable field (one large enough to deflect relativistic ions) can't be made very large without the field-forces at the generator (where they're strongest) tearing everything apart. 1 km was probably pushing it.
Look at the magnets at CERN. Superconductors built and reinforced without regard to weight and the field is confined to a few centimeters across at most.

Look at designs for Bussard Ramjets. Same thing. Fields channeling ions away from the ship (and, incidentally, into a fusion chamber).
The initial optimism faded when it was realized that producing such fields over such an extended volume, hundreds of thousands of km across, required materials MUCH stronger than we could produce. That includes the sort of material envisioned for a space elevator. Note: there are other reasons ramscoops are no longer considered seriously.

Believe me. A great deal of brainpower has been devoted to this problem. Arthur C Clarke "solved" it with a massive shield of ice carried ahead of the ship. But he had a zero-point energy drive so mass was not a concern.

I hope you mean the Clarke.
The Skylark books are fun, but the social attitudes are dated (women exist only to hang onto the heroes arm and/or be rescued) and the physics invokes every ray & force you can imagine (and a few hundred you can't).

But you'll like the Clarke. Unfortunately, his optimistic future seems to have been put on hold. :(

Earthlight of course.
For me personally though, the best source of hard science-fiction are from the USSR.
They didn't have as many typical cliches and "opera"-tier stories. It was typically gritty and depressing, which seems to be the most likely outcome for the future.

50s American Sci-fi was also very good. Modern space science fiction is more about drama than the actual science.
Could you drop a sauce for the Clarke books?

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576514003798

Using plasma as an active part of the magnetic field system appears to greatly reduce power requirements, at least for deflecting protons. The reason CERN has such huge magents is that they're trying to push a charged particle stream into the densest possible space. We're talking about something entirely different.

And I remain to be convinced that large chunks of rock are a realistic threat on interstellar voyages. Yes, if you hit one you're dead. But it's almost impossible to do so.

In any case this is all loose talk. It needs actual calculations to back it up.

Image from Amazon.
You can get "Earthlight" alone or with "Islands in the Sky" and "Sands of Mars".

Virtually all of Clarke's early SF, including the original version of "Earthlight" (the one with the Polaron Beam) is in the fat volume

amazon.com/Collected-Stories-Arthur-C-Clarke/dp/0312878605

A perfect mirror wouldn't be immune to lasers, because you can't make a perfect mirror for all frequencies of light.

What would be more likely is the mirror surface would burn and warp and then be useless.

You'd want layers of super absorbant ablative armour instead. Something to absorb as much energy as possible while burning away, that can be easily replaced.

I've been including actual calculations. With real numbers.
You're the one who's handwaving and introducing irrelevancies. Protection against dust moving at 10 or 20 km/sec and against the usual cosmic ray background is NOT the same as surviving at 30% lightspeed.

One of your charts, for example, shows the proton flux from a flare briefly peaking at 8000 per cm^2-sec. At 30% c, the flux would be about 90,000,000 protons per cm^2-sec.

The next chart says the protons reach Earth 5-10 minutes after the flare begins. That means they traveled at 40 or 50 percent of cee. That's about right. 100 MeV corresponds to 42% cee. So we're talking comparable energies, but more than 10,000 times the flux and lasting, not for minutes or hours, but for years on end.

Even when you see the numbers you don't appear to appreciate the magnitude of the problem.
Crank out figures yourself and start a new thread if you feel they support your position.

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/ and centauri-dreams.org/ are good sources of information.

amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html?utm=email

Some sort of electric field like the one in 3m plant.

Ooops! Decimal point error.
The flux would be 9,000,000,000 protons per cm^2-sec or more than a MILLION times the worst of a solar flare.
So you'd die 100 times faster than previously estimated.
Sorry. :(

Very interesting.
You'd need over 100 million volts to repel the protons.
And then the free electrons would smash into the front of your ship at at least 100 million volts and you'd die from X-rays.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung

>It was typically gritty and depressing, which seems to be the most likely outcome for the future.
Speculative fiction behind the iron curtain was one of the few literary avenues authors had to get around party censorship. Since it takes place in the future, and doesn't specifically deal with government you have a much freer hand. Meanwhile in the west science fiction was stuff for kids and pulp magazines so it's always had an uphill battle for legitimacy.

It's different nowadays, people can see their race being ethnically cleansed from their own countries, even a liberal will have a pessimistic view of the future in these conditions

>50s American Sci-fi was also very good.
Pfffft you're like a little baby
Seriously though, Stapledon is great and you'd never believe their age if you didn't check the publishing information.

centauri-dreams.org/2009/02/09/dust-up-between-the-stars/

>But there is nothing to prevent us from refining these technologies, while magnetic shielding and dust particle ionization is well within the realm of conventional physics. So there are ways around the dust and radiation problem if we do venture between the stars.

You're quite right, Centauri Dreams IS a good source of information.