invunerability fields

[dragon]

Was wondering which universes have a form of invuneralbity or near invunerability.

1. Slaver Statis fields from ringworld series
2. white and black globes from Megatraveller
what else is there?

[Starglider]

Ur-Quan slave shields are nearly invulnerable in their own universe. They block nearly everything and the only known method for getting rid of them is a long tedious procedure involving a huge grid of satellites.

[Stark]

The StarCon universe also features the Yehat shield, which can protect the ship briefly against anything, and the Utwig shield, which not only makes them invincible but also collects power from impacts.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Bobbles from several of Vernor Vinge's works; spheres of stopped time that last for a predetermined duration.

One of the short stories set in Sabrehagen's Berserker universe had a field that sent anything that entered it "at right angles to the speed of light", according to the theory that described it. No one knew what that actually meant ( it was a failed attempt at a faster than light drive ), they just knew that anything that entered it was never seen again. Used as a protective shield it was invulnerable - except to FTL projectiles, it turned out; even those it slowed down to well below lightspeed.

Honorverse impeller drive wedges are invulnerable to anything manmade in-universe save a wedge of around it's strength or bigger.

The universe of David Weber's Path of the Fury/In Fury Born has two forms. The OKM shield carried by the biggest ships, which renders them invulnerable but also blind and unable to fire or maneuver. And, the Fasset Drive which can stop any attack it can be interposed against - it's an artificial black hole.

I can't find my copy, but I think that one of the flawed superweapons in Arthur C Clarke's Superiority was an invulnerability field.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Disagree on the Black Globe; it was an energy collector described as a "Free electron laser in reverse"- it did absorb the energy of incoming weapons and transferred to onboard capacitor banks for the ship's own use, but nukes in particular made it frighteningly vulnerable to overloading and the capacitor bank detonating in an electrochemical explosion that usually tore the guts out of the carrying ship.

This was well within the limits of normal combat, there was nothing particularly special about the amount of firepower it took to break one. Relying on armour and point defence was probably a damn' sight safer.


What about 40K's void shields? They have that huge gaping low- speed hole, torps and bombers can simply slide through them, but high speed, high energy attacks do get reliably stopped. They take the hit and go down, but they can be set up again, and I don't think there's anything that can overpenetrate through a void shield, is there? Warp based attacks, maybe.

[Nyrath]

The Traveller black globe generator is obviously based on the Langson Field featured in THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE.

In Sir Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority", the Exponential Field was sort of invulnerability.


The final weapon was something so fantastic that even now it seems difficult to believe that it ever, existed. Its innocent, noncommittal name - The Exponential Field - gave no hint of its real potentialities.

It seems very difficult to explain the operation of the Field to the layman. According to the technical description, it "produces an exponential condition of space, so that a finite distance in normal, linear space may become infinite in pseudo-space." Norden gave an analogy which some of us found useful. It was as if one took a flat disk of rubber - representing a region of normal space - and then pulled its center out to infinity. The circumference of the disk would be unaltered - but its "diameter" would be infinite. That was the sort of thing the generator of the Field did to the space around it.

As an example, suppose that a ship carrying the generator was surrounded by a ring of hostile machines. If it switched on the Field, each of the enemy ships would think that it - and the ships on the far side of the circle - had suddenly receded into nothingness. Yet the circumference of the circle would be the same as before: only the journey to the center would be of infinite duration, for as one proceeded, distances would appear to become greater and greater as the "scale" of space altered.

It was a nightmare condition, but a very useful one. Nothing could reach a ship carrying the Field: it might be englobed by an enemy fleet yet would be as inaccessible as if it were at the other side of the Universe. Against this, of course, it could not fight back without switching off the Field, but this still left it at a very great advantage, not only in defense but in offense. For a ship fitted with the Field could approach an enemy fleet undetected and suddenly appear in its midst.

[Bedlam]

What about 40K's void shields? They have that huge gaping low- speed hole, torps and bombers can simply slide through them, but high speed, high energy attacks do get reliably stopped. They take the hit and go down, but they can be set up again, and I don't think there's anything that can overpenetrate through a void shield, is there? Warp based attacks, maybe.

Persumably any continus beam weapon would hit the target once the shield collapsed.

In Epic there were misiles with warp drives that skipped past the sheilds to hit there target and some pychic powers also avoided sheilds.

[Patrick Degan]

Potentially, the Infinite Improbability Drive —seeing as how it turned a pair of missiles into a bowl of petunias and a very surprised sperm whale when Arthur Dent hit the button.

[Themightytom]

Was wondering which universes have a form of invuneralbity or near invunerability.

1. Slaver Statis fields from ringworld series
2. white and black globes from Megatraveller
what else is there?

Stargate Atlantis, they have a personal shield that is apparently invulnerable until the power supply runs out.

[Revy]

What about the Ancient Personal Shield used in Stargate Atlantis? It was prone to being drained, but whilst it worked nothing was observed to be able to penetrate it (discounting the fact that the wearer had to breath, and thus could be suffocated - if used on a robot or somesuch this wouldn't be an issue).

That surfboard shield the 9th Doctor in Doc Who installed on the TARDIS was said to be able to withstand 'almost anything' - fact that he'd rather Captain Jack hadn't admitted to the Daleks. It could survive being at ground zero to a planet blowing (seeing as it was supposed to be used to ride the destructive shockwave out).

[Vanas]

Potentially, the Infinite Improbability Drive —seeing as how it turned a pair of missiles into a bowl of petunias and a very surprised sperm whale when Arthur Dent hit the button.

Equally the SEP field. Just don't think about it too hard and that Nova Cannon is Somebody Else's Problem.

[Revy]

I'd also add a Tesseract field from Andromeda - there was one episode even when a killer robot/dude used Tesseract tech to phase through missile attacks and survive all the gunfire the crew could throw at him. They couldn't really hurt him and only even survived because Trance used her quasi-magical powers to bend time and trap him/it in a time loop.

[Patrick Degan]

Potentially, the Infinite Improbability Drive —seeing as how it turned a pair of missiles into a bowl of petunias and a very surprised sperm whale when Arthur Dent hit the button.

Equally the SEP field. Just don't think about it too hard and that Nova Cannon is Somebody Else's Problem.

No, the SEP field renders something effectively invisible. It does not confer invulnerability.

[Admiral Valdemar]

The Inhibitors were made from something akin to a Bose-Einstein condensate, so one giant superatom. Individual units could be blasted apart, like Lego bricks, but the actual components themselves had no atomic granularity to affect.

[Teleros]

The Skylark series features some near-magical shielding:

1. "Fourth order" barriers are, if powered, completely and utterly impervious to physical matter and various types of energy weapon, such as light and gravity. More, the power requirements don't seem to rise if you attack it a lot. They were also good at cutting through physical matter. They could be defeated by 4th order weapons however, and bypassed by higher order weapons completely.

2. Sixth order fields (I think it was 6th anyway) absorbed the energy from lower order attacks, so that said attacks were in fact beneficial to the ship.


And in the Lensmen series, an inertialess ship was, until the development of the (FTL, beam-projector-slagging) "primary beam", impervious to weaponry unless it was held in place - any beam or missile that struck the ship or its shields would simply push the ship away. Not quite invulnerability, but without some very powerful tractor beams it practically is.

[Nyrath]

The Skylark series features some near-magical shielding:

1. "Fourth order" barriers are, if powered, completely and utterly impervious to physical matter and various types of energy weapon, such as light and gravity. More, the power requirements don't seem to rise if you attack it a lot. They were also good at cutting through physical matter. They could be defeated by 4th order weapons however, and bypassed by higher order weapons completely.

Yes, but it was based on science that was so obsolete, you would have expected the Skylark to be fueled with pure phlogiston.

In Skylark, things like light, ultraviolet rays, radio, and so forth are caused by vibrations in the luminiferous aether. This is why Doc Smith calls them "etheric weapons".

A fourth order ray screen creates a barrier to etheric rays by setting up a stasis in the ether. In other words: it grabs all the particles of ether in the region of the screen, and prevents them from vibrating. No vibration = no etheric rays.

Of course, fifth order rays were "sub-etheric", they were caused by vibrations of particles even tinier than the particles composing the ether. So they could penetrate fourth order ray screens.

The Michelson-Morley experiment gave a killing blow to the Ether, and Einstein added the final nails to Ether's coffin.

[Atlan]

In the Perry Rhodan series of novels there's a few shields that infer invulnerability from normal weaponry:
Paratronfields, which partially place a ship in it's own little "access by invitation only" universe, and can only be breached by weapons utilizing extremely high bands of hyperspace. Observation and firing OUT is still possible by opening windows in the fields.
ATG fields. These take the Paratron field one step further, and actually move the entire affected area a short time into the future, continuously. The drawback is extreme high energy consumption, and the inability to act outside of the field.

[Darth Onasi]

The Iron Curtain from Command & Conquer: Red Alert that could temporarily provide total invunerability to a group of vehicles or a building once sufficiently charged.

[Revy]

Oh, didn't one of those Trek games have one as well? I seem to recall the Enterprise-E in the Armada games had a Corbomite special ability, which was a short term super-shield that rendered it impervious to all attack.

[Teleros]

Yes, but it was based on science that was so obsolete, you would have expected the Skylark to be fueled with pure phlogiston.

I never said it was a sensible idea for one, just that it worked in-universe .

The Iron Curtain from Command & Conquer: Red Alert that could temporarily provide total invunerability to a group of vehicles or a building once sufficiently charged.

I seem to remember the old game manuals mentioning something along the lines of making the target vibrate or something, which was the cause of the invulnerability. Damned if I can find the manual for a quote though .

[Darth Onasi]

I seem to remember the old game manuals mentioning something along the lines of making the target vibrate or something, which was the cause of the invulnerability. Damned if I can find the manual for a quote though .

I don't remember that, besides the visuals in both Red Alerts show the target being covered in a red force field for the duration of the effect.

[Manus Celer Dei]

The Traveller black globe generator is obviously based on the Langson Field featured in THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE.

In Sir Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority", the Exponential Field was sort of invulnerability.


The final weapon was something so fantastic that even now it seems difficult to believe that it ever, existed. Its innocent, noncommittal name - The Exponential Field - gave no hint of its real potentialities.

It seems very difficult to explain the operation of the Field to the layman. According to the technical description, it "produces an exponential condition of space, so that a finite distance in normal, linear space may become infinite in pseudo-space." Norden gave an analogy which some of us found useful. It was as if one took a flat disk of rubber - representing a region of normal space - and then pulled its center out to infinity. The circumference of the disk would be unaltered - but its "diameter" would be infinite. That was the sort of thing the generator of the Field did to the space around it.

As an example, suppose that a ship carrying the generator was surrounded by a ring of hostile machines. If it switched on the Field, each of the enemy ships would think that it - and the ships on the far side of the circle - had suddenly receded into nothingness. Yet the circumference of the circle would be the same as before: only the journey to the center would be of infinite duration, for as one proceeded, distances would appear to become greater and greater as the "scale" of space altered.

It was a nightmare condition, but a very useful one. Nothing could reach a ship carrying the Field: it might be englobed by an enemy fleet yet would be as inaccessible as if it were at the other side of the Universe. Against this, of course, it could not fight back without switching off the Field, but this still left it at a very great advantage, not only in defense but in offense. For a ship fitted with the Field could approach an enemy fleet undetected and suddenly appear in its midst.

What happens to stuff trapped in the field when it's turned off?

[Luzifer's right hand]

ATG fields. These take the Paratron field one step further, and actually move the entire affected area a short time into the future, continuously. The drawback is extreme high energy consumption, and the inability to act outside of the field.

The ATG is more a "I'm somewhere else" type defense-system than an invulnerability field. The ship, station or star system in it is just not in normal space anymore.
The ability to fire while under ATG has been introduced in issue 1986, anti-ATG systems much earlier.

[Argosh]

Invulnerability sphere, Doom. Temporary invulnerability, users vision goes black&white.

[Darksider]

Oh, didn't one of those Trek games have one as well? I seem to recall the Enterprise-E in the Armada games had a Corbomite special ability, which was a short term super-shield that rendered it impervious to all attack.

Star Trek Armada II

It doesn't make the ship completely invulnerable to attacks though. Just reflects something like 70 percent of the damage.