Experimental Magnetic Shield Against Cosmic Rays 199
stiller writes "British scientists from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have developed an experimental set-up in which a $20 magnet is used to deflect solar-wind-like radiation." Reader Dersaidin points out a slightly more enthusiastic article at Universe Today which emphasizes the possibilities of systems based on this phenomenon to protect astronauts during solar storms, writing
"It's a good start. Hopefully, later versions will be able to protect spaceships from energy weapons. A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of copper. Shields, check. Energy weapons, check. Now we just need a viable interstellar drive, and an energy source to power it all."
Scorched Earth Deflector Shields (Score:2, Informative)
A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of copp (Score:4, Informative)
A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of copper.
Technically, if things are set up, any continuous source of energy can melt just about anything meltable. Just keep the energy flowing, insulate the target, and if the temperature of the energy source (e.g. a lightbulb) is higher than that of the target, then energy will couple in and eventually melt the target. What needs to be mentioned if such a statement is to be of any use, is how long such melting is expected to take.
Re:A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of c (Score:4, Informative)
According to this CERN page [web.cern.ch], in the few microseconds that it takes a beam dump to complete. The circulating kinetic energy of the beam is an impressive 350 MJ, equivalent to running a 1000 watt heater for 97 hours.
Re:Scorched Earth Deflector Shields (Score:3, Informative)
You should try Scorched 3D [scorched3d.co.uk], then.
Very good remake. Good graphics, runs on pretty much any hardware, Linux and Windows version, multiplayer. And seeing half the island disappear after firing something very overkill is really awesome.
From page 2 of linked article (Score:5, Informative)
What needs to be mentioned if such a statement is to be of any use, is how long such melting is expected to take.
That's a very good point, and to answer the question raised by it I RTFAed so you don't have to! Regarding the "dump block" that they use to absorb the LHC beam before it becomes unstable:
Emphasis added. That's one hell of a beam.
BTW, I can't help but recall that the Enterprise D from ST:TNG fires its phasers from a large ring on the saucer section. You can almost imagine the LHC being weaponized and using the same technique that diverts the beam into the dump block to direct it outward towards enemy ships. Though it'd have the rather significant drawback that any damage anywhere on the enormous accelerator ring would take out the weapon. But hey, energy beam!
Re:A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of c (Score:5, Informative)
FTA, testing showed a 1.5 mm beam "burnt" 40 meters into a block of copper in 86 microseconds.
So... napkin calculation...
density of copper is about 9 g/cm^2, so 5600 grams of copper melted per
500 lbs =~ 227 kg, so roughly forty 86 microsecond bursts to melt 500 lbs...
So we're talking roughly 3.5 milliseconds to melt 500 pounds of copper.
That's 70 tons of copper melted per second for a single beam. That's a hell of a lot of energy, but I'm not sure what the standard unit is for energy/time (hiroshimas is just energy; libraries of congress and football fields obviously don't apply). Anyone know what the standard made-up unit is for energy/time?
Re:Scorched Earth Deflector Shields (Score:3, Informative)
so if you slashdot their site do you win?
ah... found it on SourceForge [sourceforge.net]
Re:A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of c (Score:1, Informative)
Elementary my dear: Watts
Popularized unit (Score:3, Informative)
"Hoover Dams" are the units used to represent such things as the power output of the Shuttle main engines. Other popular ones are "enough to light N,000 homes" and "equivalent to N nuclear power stations" (always nuclear, for some reason).
Melting copper takes 13.050 kJ/mol. A mole of copper is 63.546 grams. We'll drop everything to two significant figures, which is probably already more precise than the rest of the numbers. 70 tons is one million moles, so melting 70 tons per second is 13E12 J/sec, 13 terawatts, which is close enough to the 10 terawatt figure for the beam dump that's on the web. Five or six thousand Hoover Dams, then.
Math Nazi Time.... (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, some math errors exist in some of the parent posts.
A 1.5mm diameter beam that is 40 meters long has a volume given by:
V = pi * r^2 * d
If r and d are in cm, then:
V = pi * (0.15/2)^2 * 400
V = pi * 0.005625 * 400
V = 7.07 cm^3.
At 9 g/cm, this gives a mass of 63.2 grams.
If we're melting/vaporizing this much in 86 uS, that gives a rate of
63.2 / 0.000086 = 734,883.72 g/s (or 1,620.14 lb/s).
It's still a bunch of melted (actually, vaporized) copper, but it's nowhere near 70 tons.
All the above assumes that the beam stays perfectly coherent and doesn't have any losses due to heating of surrounding material. In reality, the beam would rapidly diverge, and heat would begin to flow through the copper. Oh, also, ejected copper plasma would at some point begin to interfere with the beam itself before it reached the copper itself. This would rapidly de-focus the beam and absorb energy, so the plasma ejecta would get oh-my-god hot while shielding remaining copper from being damaged.
Re:Drive and Power source (Score:2, Informative)
Well I said "something like", there was a nifty short parody that was set on "The Dentless"
I think it was the Brittania that had the dangerously low shielding on the Q-gun breech. She survived firing it only once, but once was enough even if she was then hunted down and destroyed (booby-trapped self-destruct actually) by the Boskonians. Later Q-Gun designs beefed up the breech shielding considerably - a 20 mile long column of duodec combustion gas was nothing to sneer at.
The Dauntless was the next big ship they let Kinnison play around with. But he sure liked his diesel powered(!), inherently indetectable "speedster"s.
Of course, poor ol Doc Smith did kind of miss out on nuclear power for most of hsi Lensman books. And now we know that "primary beams" will not be showing up on a starship near us - they will just use X-Ray lasers pumped by fusion bombs.
Re:Oblig ... (Score:3, Informative)
We all know the reason they were shook about during engagements with the enemy was due to the fact energy transferred from the enemy's weapon to the shields and finally to the ships gravity plating [memory-alpha.org].