Drawbacks of my Catastrophe Inhibitor

Warning lots of text ahead.

The fluff:

The story uses a Catastrophe Inhibitor (CatIn) to stop nukes, orbital bombardment and other such weapons from being the go-to method of defeating everything on a planet's surface. Additionally it also mitigates the horror of having easily accessible commercial space ships become easy weapons of terror by using its powersource or simply using them as kinetic weapons. The final goal of the system is to give a logical explanation why people would prefer to land invasionforces even in situations where the stragetic value of keeping everything on the ground relatively intact isnt very high.

The mechanics:

How CatIn exactly works is irrelevant, what it finally does is relevant. CatIn creates a field that connects a type of Dark Matter to other types of matter (Dark Matter II because its different from the currently hypothesized Dark Matter). This in effect does nothing yet. When a certain threshold force (say 15 kiloton's of TNT explosion or higher) propagates through the matter within the field the Dark Matter II will suddenly form a temporary 4rth spatial dimension for the energy to escape in, diminishing the size of the blast. To control the maximum size of an explosion a 5th, 6th or even more dimensions could be added at other thresholds. Meaning that a deathstar laser could theoretically have the same AOE as the hiroshima nuclear bomb instead of destroying the planet.

The extra dimension(s) will remain in existance and propogate alongside the explosion until the energy in the blastwave and the debris that is thrown with it reaches 1/xth of the original explosion force where x is the amount of extra dimensions created, then they'll disappear. Should the resulting force still be above 15 kilotons TNT then CatIn will simply lose one dimension and keep functioning until the force is dissipated enough before all extra dimensions cease to exist.

• to prevent people doing things like turning off suns on a whim, about 500 nuclear powerplant size CatIn stations are required to protect an earth-like planet.

• CatIn works if a volume of 1 cubic meter has a sudden change in forces higher than 15 kilotons TNT to prevent small-scale events like chemical reactions being affected.

The actual question:

The exact numbers are irrelevant for this question, with the exception of the first threshold of 15 kilotons TNT (which I can adapt if necessary). I want to know if this system will cause problems for things other than nuclear explosions. I assumed for a short while that CatIn would slow down the planet it is on because the planet moves with a certain force, then realized that it is about the propagation of energy relative to each other. But there could still be similar problems with other physics or things that would happen like launching a space ship. Some things can be prevented by saying you can create CatIn free zone's inside structures, but this doesnt mean that CatIn could be more dangerous than the bombs it is supposed to protect against.

So the final question that needs answering: How dangerous is CatIn to the inhabitants and living style of a space-faring civilization?

I hope the answer is "none" so I can use this theory without people reading the story and going "but why dont they use things by doing x?".

The CatIn more dimensions to reduce power was inspired by this: https://youtu.be/3HYw6vPR9qU

posted about 5 years ago

Demigan‭

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