You break it, you buy it

[Salmakk]

Armorer-class Corvette Matthew Lucerne, somewhere in the Mid Rim

“If we can create such destructive weapons, we will need to think of ways to counteract them,” mused Salmakk, gesturing at a rotating holograph of their latest cannon, “especially with the One Sith allegedly employing them extensively, or so it is said.”

Gai absently nodded, “The one people that should never rule the galaxy...”

Azira's fur rippled, and Salmakk briefly wondered if he broached the subject the right way. Gai's fiancee had been killed by a Sith, if inadvertently as a hapless bystander. But it had driven the duros to the height of his intellect, and perhaps his madness. Salmakk pressed his lips together. I must go on now. He cleared his throat, but the soft voice of Azira suddenly flowed into the room.

“Well, none of this technology is new,” noted the alien, “they used to use massive mass drivers to bombard planets in the oldest times of the Republic. Planetary shield generators stopped them.”

“That type of dense energy shield would not be the most practical...” noted Salmakk, “given the inflexibility of their firing ports and size.”

“Oh, I know that,” explained the bothan female, “but you didn't let me finish. The same force field technology hasn't become stagnant just because mass drivers disappeared for a while.”

“Oh?”

“Salmakk,” said Azira, “nearly every ship these days still has to do with things hitting it at relatively high speeds, micro-meteorites, space junk, you name it. Aside from particle shields, what else stops it? And I'm not talking about the hull...”

“An Anti-Concussion Field generator,” mused Salmakk, “though I've never heard of one powerful enough to stop a slug...”

“But there was one, once,” said the woman, “I did some reading...”

Salmakk leaned back, “Leave it up to you to know that obscure piece of knowledge. Tell us about it.”

“Way back when, roughly around the time of the Galactic Empire was at the height of its power, when Palpatine still walked around, there was an entity called the Corporate Sector Authority, sort of a client state of the Empire. They tried to create the most impregnable fortress imaginable, they called it Star's End. And in order to make it in their words 'fool-proof', they installed a number of unique systems. One of them was a greatly enhanced Anti-Concussion Field Generator, which had the ability to absorb and disperse kinetic energy to the point where it could render blasts, collisions, and anything else you name that hit into nothing. It was like it had barely touched the prison.”

“And the catch?”

“Well, it's terribly power hungry, or so the records state,” mused the bothan, “but from what I was able to slice out of a certain library, it need the power equivalent then of a full set of ion engines of a star destroyer.”

“I don't see that energy power requirement changing much. Power technologies have not changed much since then,” stated Salmakk bluntly, “but maybe that's something we'll just have to live with.”

“Oh I agree,” said the bothan, “but what if, what if we were able to transfer power from a different portion of the ship to the field generator just when it was required. Like the ship's engine bank, or maybe its energy shields, or maybe even its weapons?”

“I could see the utility of such a field if that were possible,” admitted the Mon Calamari, “so what's keeping us from doing this?”

“Motivation,” mused Gai.

“Gai,” suggested Azira, “I'm sure Salmakk could be persuaded to have you test such a device by shooting at it.”

“With what?” questioned Gai.

Azira turned to eye Salmakk. The mon calamari's shoulder's slumped back.

“All right Gai, I'll let you shoot it with anything we've got,” said Salmakk, “even the mass drivers...”

“Deal,” said the duros, “so where do we start.”

 

[Salmakk]

“So it's an electromagnetic field?” questioned Gai.

“It's an electromagnetic field, but for our purposes, it's better explained as a electromagnetic field tensor,” corrected the bothan, adjusting the knobs of the holo-projector to better display the formula, “you can see here that there are six cartesian coordinates to this field from this section of the Matthew Lucerne's anti-concussion field. Three of them electric, three of them magnetic. Now that remember that the Lorentz force regards both electricity and magnetism as one phenomema, but for us, they are actually a pair of separate variables where we're concerned about the input of electric power into the system, which in turn creates magnetic field which would counter whatever we're flinging at that shield.”

“I'm with you so far,” dryly noted Gai.

“So then you know then that by Ohm's law, the electric field then is described by its electric potential and electric current.”

“I know,” said the duros, “I had to deal with it making my favorite boom boom.”

Azira's fur rippled, “Exactly, because of your work on the railgun with that law, Salmakk is putting you in charge of the power supply element that can handle that amount of electricity. Don't worry about the programming part, Sparks and I can take care of that, just get the circuitry right.”

The duros glanced at a number at the bottom of the holo, “That is a very high threshhold. I could easily boom boom this up real bad.”

“Please don't,” said Azira exasperatedly, “besides, Salmakk probably won't let you fire any gun if you do that.”

The duros sighed, “Fair point. I'll start working on such an energy transference device. I'm going to need a lot of superconductor materials for it though...”

 

[Salmakk]

“But how does it work once the electricity is at the projector?” questioned an intern.

Salmakk quickly spun the holo around, “Well, the field it creates uses a charged ionic field, that is, the field can either be charged negatively or positively. These electric charges can either attract or repel a charged object to or from it. If Gai gets his wiring right, our system will be able to do both.”

“Both? Why would we want to do both?” asked the young man.

“A fair question,” admitted the mon calamari, “the obvious advantage of a field that repel the object would that it would slow down an incoming projectile, but when such a projectile hits the field, and manages to pierce through it initially, such a field could draw it back to the force field itself and away from the ship, rather than cleanly slicing through. That attraction could also theoretically rip such a projectile apart into many parts as the field's force would apply a great many vectors to it. So it all comes done to guessing the incoming charge of the projectile right, or employing a dual layer that is both positively and negatively charged. That sort of thing will likely have to be handled by the ship's shield operator, or someone with similar skills.”

“And if the object isn't charged?”

“Everything is charged in one way or another,” noted the mon calamari, “it may have a neutral charge overall, but it's composed of subatomic particles such as electrons and protons that do carry a charge in and off themselves. Electric charge is a conversed property of these subatomic particles. Such a overall neutral charged object then would be ripped apart by all of the electromagnetic forces pulling its component particles away from it, destroying it and vastly spreading out the kinetic and chemical energy into a wide area which can be more easily handled by conventional force field technology, also known as particle shields. In essence then, an Anti-concussion Field Generator then negates not the physical impact of such a slug, but rather disperses the impact across a wide area to negate it's ability to pierce particle shields. Does that make sense?”

“I guess,” said the intern, “sorry, you've got a mechanical engineer here, not an electric one.”

“Ah, but your part in this will come soon, my young friend.”