Ah force fields and energy shields; those wonderful technologies that dwell in the realms of Star Wars, Star Trek, and countless other Sci-Fis. But, Ive been thinking about something; how would a force field react to an impact anyway? Traditionally, the force is just magically "dissipated" or absorbed in some way. Now, fundamentally, the idea behind force fields is that they are projected electron walls that block everything from reaching the object that they protect. However, by Newton's laws, an object will continue in motion unless acted upon by an outside force; in this case, the impact of a projectile against an energy field would result in a transfer of force to the electron wall-but then what? Where does the force go from there? It cannot magically "dissappear." So, by the laws of physics, this energy would only have one place to go; into the projectors, and back into the ship itself. Unless some extraordinarily strong shock absorbers were in place all over the projector area, and serious structural re-inforcement was also present, an energy shield and force field would only serve to transfer the force into a different location. Kind of a wild tangent to drift on, but hey, what the heck. It should make for an interesting discussion
force fields only seem to be used in the defence of energy weapons... thus.. new laws of physics apply...
the laws of physics apply more to physical objects with mass and weight... energy balls and fields lack this... (to my knowledge... after all i've not played with your energy balls....) I'd like to think of it more like lobbing a water balloon at a car.... it just spreads over the car from the initial point of impact...
We actually have something similar to a force field right now. It's called a plasma window. It's a stream of plasma contained within a magnetic field. It's capable of seperating a vacuum from an atmosphere while allowing radiation to pass. Not exactly the same thing, but still similar. As for impacts I think you need to specify what is hitting it, energy or matter, and what specifically a force field is. I know you stated it's an electron field, but that wouldn't make much sense.
Think of throwing a rock into a body of water. Energy is transfered into heat, sound and waves of energy through the medium. Same-same applies. Energy would be transfered from electron-electron until it is finally dissapated as heat. Well that's my layman's physics.
IIR the Enterprice had this big issue with "ramming", didn't they? They sometimes got "rammed" by other, ner-crippled vessels whilst their shields were still up? . who kows. Maybe force fields would react as water does when you loba apebble into it, letting the energy dissipate? Or, the enterprise does have these mythical "inertial dampeners", maybe they feed the shield into that. woah. I know way more about 'trek than I should.... EDIT: Nice one constructacon. Heat would dissipate real fast in space...like it like it....Make it so.
i guess you would project the elctrons into space. Momentum is transferred to the ship in the other difrection (essentially accelerating the space ship very slightly) - when something comes into contact with the wall, it wont be an elastic collision, it'll be non elastic, meaning both the crashing object and the elctrons will likely stick to gether. More electrons are then projected by the mitted and the colliding objects momentum gets slowed further. Theres not really going to be a problem with speeding elctrons as far as the ship would be concerned, as far as my physics would tell me. But this is really an area where classical physics wouldn't really work so well, you'd have to dig deep into quantum physics (you cant just project electrons into space and hope to stop something. Youd need so many electrons as compared to a single normal even water atom, its miniscule), and i can't tell you much about that
Doesnt mean we know everything about it though. In the future we will undoubtably concieve more knowledge and understanding and be able to put it into technological use.
Perhaps the forcefields use a layer of electrons which are somehow bound together by something? If the forcefield were bound, like in a hydrocarbon chain for example, you could probably withstand a fairly beasty impact without serious damage. If the electrons aren't bound, then there's something going on with them to stop them simply flying away when they get hit by something, perhaps they're projected with massive speed accross a magnetic field? Like a waterfall of gravel or similar, it'd be very difficult to pass through because of the impacts... I can only presume there's some new field of physics we have to start with before we get to forcefields and stuff, let's not forget how many sub-atomic and mediating particles that they blab on about that haven't been discovered, and the fact that the equipment is so massively advanced compared to current technology (a giant dish on the front of a ship that can simply produce virtually any kind of particle at the touch of a button? e.g. a stream of antiprotons)
Presumably the force-feild converts the kienetic energy of the projectiles movement into heat energy. Be a bloody hot forcefeild though.
The thing is that we have labs like FERMI and CERN who need giant long run, miles even, to move a particle enough to manipulate it. Then there's nuclear fission and fusion which needs tremendous amounts of energy to start the reactions. You would need a huge power source and the amount of heat it would dispel would be crazy
Maybe you could turn the heat into a really big fireball and fire it back off at whoever is hitting your force field
