Sci-Fi Idea
Posted: 2003-01-20 04:44am
Hey, I don't hang around this forum much, but since part of its description is "swap story writing ideas," I thought this would be a good place to air my idea.
Let me preface this: I just came up with this idea for a piece of sci-fi tech, and it doesn't make much sense, but it would be pretty cool in an anime sort of way. This is just for general sci-fi, not really Star Wars or Star Trek. In fact, it's decidedly more low-tech than either of those universes. Well, here it goes.
This device would be a personal shield. It fits over the wearer in an exoskeletal manner. I imagine it as being quite sparse and skeletal, though it could be incorporated into an armored suit. The suit emits a translucent force field around the user, and this force field catches projectiles, physical and otherwise. When a bullet, for instance, is caught by the shield, it would have effects similar to that of the bullets caught by Pierrot le Fou's shield in Cowboy Bebop.
The point of the exoskeleton is that it redirects the energy of the hits into the ground. This could provide for rather dramatic scenes where a character is hit by a bunch of stuff and the floor around him cracks. Users could also have capacitors or batteries or whatever and store a portion of the energy, and then either use it for their weapons or, for extra anime flavor, charge up for mega punches or some shit.
Now, since this is a device for stories, it has to have drawbacks (we don't want to just wank all over the place, now do we?). Obviously, a user would be considerably slower and less maneuverable than an unshielded human. Also, the results of the shield being hit while the user isn't grounded could be painful.
EDIT: An important point is that this isn't an uber invincible shield. I think part of the drama is that it is indeed defeatable, with enough power. Think of it like kevlar on steroids. A user could take a fair deal of small arms fire, but too much, or anything with power grenade-scale or larger will take the user out.
And, to make everything look cooler, you could say that the user needs to have their skin covered and wear a breath mask/oxygen tank (remember how cool that McQuarrie concept sketch of Luke and Vader fighting with masks on is?). This would also allow for the plot device of it only being able to be used for a limited amount of time, due to dwindling oxygen or power.
Maybe I'm just crazy, but this seems pretty cool to me. But I thought I'd ask you guys, just to find out if I am indeed insane.
Let me preface this: I just came up with this idea for a piece of sci-fi tech, and it doesn't make much sense, but it would be pretty cool in an anime sort of way. This is just for general sci-fi, not really Star Wars or Star Trek. In fact, it's decidedly more low-tech than either of those universes. Well, here it goes.
This device would be a personal shield. It fits over the wearer in an exoskeletal manner. I imagine it as being quite sparse and skeletal, though it could be incorporated into an armored suit. The suit emits a translucent force field around the user, and this force field catches projectiles, physical and otherwise. When a bullet, for instance, is caught by the shield, it would have effects similar to that of the bullets caught by Pierrot le Fou's shield in Cowboy Bebop.
The point of the exoskeleton is that it redirects the energy of the hits into the ground. This could provide for rather dramatic scenes where a character is hit by a bunch of stuff and the floor around him cracks. Users could also have capacitors or batteries or whatever and store a portion of the energy, and then either use it for their weapons or, for extra anime flavor, charge up for mega punches or some shit.
Now, since this is a device for stories, it has to have drawbacks (we don't want to just wank all over the place, now do we?). Obviously, a user would be considerably slower and less maneuverable than an unshielded human. Also, the results of the shield being hit while the user isn't grounded could be painful.
EDIT: An important point is that this isn't an uber invincible shield. I think part of the drama is that it is indeed defeatable, with enough power. Think of it like kevlar on steroids. A user could take a fair deal of small arms fire, but too much, or anything with power grenade-scale or larger will take the user out.
And, to make everything look cooler, you could say that the user needs to have their skin covered and wear a breath mask/oxygen tank (remember how cool that McQuarrie concept sketch of Luke and Vader fighting with masks on is?). This would also allow for the plot device of it only being able to be used for a limited amount of time, due to dwindling oxygen or power.
Maybe I'm just crazy, but this seems pretty cool to me. But I thought I'd ask you guys, just to find out if I am indeed insane.
