starship-design: Re: Deflecter shield

[Kelly St <KellySt@aol.com>]

In a message dated 12/26/97 9:53:04 PM, you wrote:

>Hi Kelly,
>
>well, you havent Emailed me back yet so I figured I would tell you of my
idea.
>
>This is totally therotical, and I still have to check to see if it works.
Imagine
>a huge curcular tube. Then Imagine two smaller identical tubes. Heres how it
works.
>The smaller tubes send out a magnetic field, say negitive. Now, their field
is
>strong far away from the ship, but week twords the ship. The bigger one is
opisite.
>I still dont know how I will pull it off. Now heres how it works. A
micrometeroite
>is heading for the ship. It stumbles on to the negitive charge given by the
two
>smaller tubes. Thern, it gets negitively charged. When it gets closer to the
ship,
>it then stubles on to the popsitive charge given by the larger one. what
happens?
>It gets repelled away. *(  Preety neat, hunh?)
>
>This is totally theoretical. I am not sure how to make the fields in the
sescription,
>b

I'm not clear how you thought the negativly charged tubes away from the ship
would charge passing junk.  Beyond that, the problem is that not everything
picks up a magnetic charge, and you need to deflect things with a lot of force
to get them clear of the ship.  Also I'm not clear how the tubes are aranged.
For example you can't shove the debres forward, because that would slow down
the ship and take to long.  You want to shove stuff to the side, since that
would take less energy and not slow the ship down as much.

One way to charge things is with heat. If you zap stuff with a laser or
microwaves or something it ionizes.  Ions have electrical and magnetic charge.
The down side is that it could take a lot of power.

Kelly