Thursday, January 28, 2010

Idle Musings

For newcomers (do I have any newcomers? I'd really like to have newcomers): once in a while I'll toss an idea into the tubes, just to see what sticks. Sometimes the ideas are sticky... and sometimes they just need to be hit by a stick.

A question that occurred to me on the way home from school: what would the story implications be of a science fiction in which the obligatory force field technology had two main flaws: firstly, the force field has to be a sphere, and secondly, the object that produces the force field needs to be outside the area of effect? Other than the obvious - some really interesting design choices for warships - what else would be true? What style or feel of space combat would these limitations produce? What else is not occurring to me?

Post if you've got 'em.

4 comments:

setrain said...

If you put your generators in the area between a regular tetrahedron of spherical shields tangent to each other, they will still be safe from all directions. Either that's a flaw in your changes or the shape of your spaceships. :)

none. said...

Clearly you don't watch enough Star Trek, their forcefields are *not* limited to spheres, at least not that I can tell.

Unknown said...

Planetary defense would be interesting. Because the shield could be generated by a number of orbiting devices that are evoking the sheild. attacking a planet would mean trying to kill all the orbiting doodads before they fight off your invasion.

Scattercat said...

So you couldn't just have two generators, each one projecting a shield around the other? Spaceships basically just being giant glowy gonads hurtling all around the universe?