Quote:
Originally Posted by Seneschal
So, me and my players are fleshing-out an upcoming TL11 space opera campaign and getting all the world details right. We're going for a slightly comedic campaign set in a relatively hard-sci-fi setting. While the core technologies aren't completely realistic, we're aiming for internal consistency, so I'd like to have clearly defined limits and capabilities for each of them. I'd appreciate if the hive mind here could stress-test them, and see how you would use them most efficiently, what exploits you would find, which technologies have obviously better alternatives that I've overlooked, etc.
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This makes me envision hamster-ball shields. Rather than worry about someone shivving you through the shield, make it deflect everything, but also make it spherical so you can run around while you are in it like a hamster in a ball.
Are the shields transparent? If so visible light lasers (at least) should go through them like they are not even there. If not, how do you see?
Regarding the ability to breathe - a resting human requires about 8.3 grams of oxygen per second. An exercising human could easily require five times as much. A quick calculation of integrating the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution (which gives the speed distribution of a gas) of earth-like air at 300 K (27 degrees C, 80 degrees F) and standard pressure at sea level across the range of allowed speeds finds the following mass fluxes across the barrier at the various speed cutoffs you listed
44.72 km/h ... 0.195 g/s/m^2
100 km/h ... 4.85 g/s/m^2
70 km/h ... 1.17 g/s/m^2
77 km/h ... 1.71 g/s/m^2
238 km/h ... 151 g/s/m^2
300 km/h ... 373 g/s/m^2
thus, to support a resting human, the barrier would require a surface area of
44.72 km/h ... 42 m^2
100 km/h ... 1.7 m^2
70 km/h ... 7.1 m^2
77 km/h ... 4.9 m^2
238 km/h ... 0.055 m^2
300 km/h ... 0.022 m^2
and a human engaging in vigorous exercise (such as combat) would need maybe five times the area.
The human body has about 2 m^2 of skin, so a form-fitting screen would have the same area. If the screen were a sphere of 2 m diameter (allowing maximum extension of the limbs and full freedom of movement) it would have an area of 12.6 m^2. So you can use this to guestimate the cutoff speed needed for respiration.
Luke