h a l f b a k e r y"Not baked goods, Professor; baked bads!" -- The Tick
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Space Flak
Mercury droplets to re-direct Laser beams | |
If GalactiPol is on your tail & you hear the dreaded sound that indicates you've been target locked, Just fire the Space Flak cannon which will emit a shield of mercury droplets to re-direct lasers being fired at you.
With any luck the laser will reflect back into your pursuit.
Actually, I don't
know why all those star pilots don't think of putting a mirrored surface on their ships if they're going to get shot at with lasers.
Retroreflectors
http://physics.ucsd...hy/apollo/lrrr.html
As left on Earth's Moon [csea, Aug 25 2005]
Moon Litter
http://www.mswmanag...mw_0407_beyond.html
space junk is out there! [csea, Aug 26 2005]
[link]
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Cunning. But no use against my asteroid gun, I'm afraid. |
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Reflective droplets will tend to diffuse the incident laser light. What you need is an array of retroreflectors, sometimes called "corner cubes." See [link.] |
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//if they're going to get shot at with lasers.// Because those lasers don't travel anywhere near the speed of light. So who knows what they are really made of. |
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Yep, it's a good reason to keep the old girl buffed up nicely. |
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Sandcasters that shed protective clouds of particles of sand around one's fully operational DeathStar would have the multiple advantages of partially dissipating incoming laser beams, allowing you to see exactly where they are coming from and go some way towards slowing down those pesky x-wings. |
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Whatever you fire back at them would
have to be reflective at the frequency of
light they're shooting you with. Mercury
would work for the visible spectrum but
I have no idea how it works beyond
either end. That's not a 'no' -- that's an
'I don't know'. |
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On a related topic, did anybody notice
that in Babylon5 (nerd moment) part of
the 'defence grid' involved shooting
projectiles back along the path of laser
beams -- effecitively giving the station
very thick local hull plating. |
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Wouldn't the mercury freeze? |
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//who knows what they are really made of.//
If they really were lasers, would they be not visible in space as well? (unless it was pointed at your eyes). |
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[DenholmRicshaw], I thought about the mercury freezing after I posted & was hoping that it is still reflective in a frozen state. |
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//Wouldn't the mercury freeze?// |
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No, it would 'boil'. Still, that would leave you with an large cloud of mercury atoms that would be pretty nasty to run in to at high sub-light speeds. |
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[CF], I believe, you're right. I don't know if this would even work then. I can't find anything specifically dealing with what happens to light passing through mercury vapor.
I wonder if it converts to electricity? |
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[csea], those retroreflectors would work great affixed to the back of a starship. I was looking at the link and wondering .... Did the astronauts just tear the cover off and throw it down on the ground a few feet away? Lunar Littering?
That's insane. I'm thinking about trying to contact Edgar Mitchell (the only surviving member of Apollo 14) and ask him about that photo. |
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[Zimmy], there's a lot of space junk out there! And it's being added to regularly. See [link]. |
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I remember reading somewhere that shuttle launches have to take into account the orbits of many hundreds (thousands?) of earth-orbiting pieces of junk. |
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