Trope-a-Day: Intangibility

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

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@Ru <shearwater@gmail.com> on 2017-05-29 14:26:27 wrote

Two things spring to mind… firstly, that muonic atom nuclei are still things that can interact with normal matter, so a dismounted drive shield’s progress through your ship won’t be unimpeded, and might conceivably be quite destructive. If there’s anything dense between the nose and tail of your ship (like a shadow shield made out of boring old matter because it doesn’t get that hot) it’ll probably hang up there.

Secondly, there’s nothing to stop you making a partially muonic atom (indeed, this has already been accomplished in real life with muonic helium), and such a material would be a useful thing to make the cold side of your drive shields with, for convenience of bonding to boring, normal matter.

(of course, such a thing might be precluded by whatever magic prevents the muons decaying; the hands are yours to wave, obviously!)

@Ru <shearwater@gmail.com> on 2017-06-01 02:00:07 wrote

On further reflection, said drive shield will also be very, very hot… after all, if it were under 3000K you could just use tungsten instead of handwavium. It’ll probably also be quite heavy, and so have a lot of thermal mass. It won’t drift though ghostlike, so much as all-consuming-fireball-like