Created Saturday 21 July 2018
Knights
How much do you think a spear costs? Or even a sword, among the most costly-to-craft melee weapons?
All right, now how much--relative to that--do you think armor costs? Armor so finely crafted that you could run and jump onto your horse to gallop off, seated for a charge? (with a spear). Armor (a "most highly valued piece of armour") made a knight. And cost so much, only landed gentry could afford it that good. Cloth (or paper!) ain't bad, but still: Wouldn't you choose steel instead if you could?
The age of energy weapons, then, will be the age of knights again. (That and the income disparity, and the need for armor as cutting edge as the high-accuracy-and-range energy weapons themselves.)
Purposes
As I suspect hs always been true, the two main parets of armor being worked on are reflectance and absorption. Back when generally every blow was only as strong as a human arm, reflectance wasn't as big an issue: padding and steel absorbed a lot of whata a person could do. (I guess maybe "refelctance" could be part of stopping penetration, but--yeah--maybe pentration matters, too.
- Anyway, reflectance would benefit from the same general line of research as that on lenses. The insides of lenses would likely be mirrored so that they could help focus a beam through that one facet that's best aimed at the target. Work on the reflectance of armor would be geared toward making including waves bounce back out. In gas battles, this would also mean often trying to get the air to bloom--and to bloom away from the armor-wearer (yeah, seems like it'd be hard to do, but why not try?). So armor would likely have a bit of a shininess to it to visible light that's held over from it being shiny to higher frewquency waves. It's also probably be really smooth--certainly at least not wrinkly.
- I think for absorption there isn't much original to say. You try to have the aromor spread the energy over as large an area (mass) as you can
- Maybe have it sink out into the ground or air if you want it to bloom
- (and maybe bloom more in one area than another).
- I guess you could try to have it instead be absorbed by batteries so you can use their energy eventually against them.
- Pretty standard ideas, though, really.
- Maybe have it sink out into the ground or air if you want it to bloom
Time-Reversed Deflection
- When hit by a γ-gun, radar, etc., the "armor" sends it back exactly as it hit, disabling guns or confounding sensors:
- https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-created-time-reversed-waves-of-light
- Or be an otherwise untraceable signalling technique between two sources
I do think in general that armor against energy weapons would be lower mass than armor against missiles. Maybe more sophisticated, maybe not. But for Humans at least, cheaper to send through a jumphole. So, physical weapons may actually be pretty good in some ways, especially for intrasystem battles home to neither belligerent.