How could a force field dome be realized in my city?
In relation to this question, how could I create a force field dome over that city?
Specifications of the city:
- 10 x 40 km on the surface
- 1 km in height
- has a city wall of 100 m all around the edge.
What the force field needs to do:
- Hold against artillery barrages
- block line of sight in the city
- does not let anything in or out when activated
- round edges and 2-3 km in height so inside flight is possible
What is, as far as science gets, the closest to real technological solution? I want technical buildings I need to do this, I am sure I need some sort of pylon but what else?
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1 answer
Here you can use an actual physical field to act as a force field - in certain scenarios. Let's say you want to stop a single particle. What can you do? You can trap it. Not deflect it, in the sense you mean, but make it get stuck in a single point in space. Here's how:
If the particle has electric charge or is magnetic, you have a solution: Use an electric field to attract the particle. If this is the primary influence on the particle (discounting gravity), the particle will eventually stop moving in whatever direction it was going before and be "stuck" in the field. The same goes for magnetism - in fact, this might work better for larger objects.
Let's take a look at the requirements for the force field:
- 10 km $\times$ 40 km
- 1 km tall
- Mounted on a 100-meter-high wall
- Dome-shaped
Okay, that doesn't sound too hard. . .
Lets face it: a single magnet at the center of the city isn't going to do squat to an object at the edge of that big an area. 400 square kilometers is nothing to sneeze at here. So you definitely need multiple magnets. My first thought would be to stick a bunch of electromagnets on pedestals around the area, but that's a bit of an oversimplification. Your everyday junkyard car-picker-upper won't do the trick. So we'll take a step up and go to superconducting magnets. These are a lot more powerful. They're also fairly big and need a lot of energy, so maybe we'll change the "pedestals" to small buildings, complete with a power supply.
The bit about the dome is tricky. A magnetic field permeates throughout all of space, but the field gets weaker as it gets further away from the magnet. In other words, having a bunch of magnets lying in a plane won't produce a lot of force on a particle somewhere above the plane. So in order to create a dome-ish shape, the pedestals should slowly gain in height as they near the center of the field.
So to create this field, simply mount a bunch (hundreds, if not thousands - I should have mentioned that earlier) of superconducting electromagnets on some pedestals of varying height throughout the city, hook them up to an enormous power supply, and turn the thing on.
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