 June 6, 2017 - 8:27am | Is there an official uniform illustration, or use our own? I'm kind of fond of the 'made up' one I found, and can only imagine the one they had in mid in the 70's. Silver jumpsuits with red gloves and boots, with a big glass helmet to boot. http://starfrontiers.us/files/u23567/UPF_uniforms_2.png |
June 18, 2017 - 10:00am | In their defense: that's pretty much what an Albedo Suit is.  Everything else SF...not so much. Shadow Shack you do make a good point, but : An albedo suit is made from a special shiny flexible material. It will reflect the damage from a laser attack. No color is mentioned, at all, It could be shiny red for all it mattered. My point was, shiny material does not have to be 'silver'. It can be any color you want. It could be multi colored since it's the material, not the color, that reflects the laser. |
 June 18, 2017 - 11:44am | Silver is the absence of color absorbtion. When you see a color on a shiny material, that is the color that is not absorbed by the material. Only the one color is reflected back. What we perceive as silver is the reflection of all the colors. Hence silver is the most effective at reflecting all frequencies of visible laser light. -iggy |
 June 18, 2017 - 3:06pm | Which begs a question: if you paint over a reflective hull (KH), is it still reflective? |
June 18, 2017 - 4:30pm | When I worked for Lumenis we put great effort into building the laser cavities in clean rooms with the technicians in bunny suits. Any dirt that got on the mirrors would burn into the surface and the mirror would cease to be reflective at that location. The result was I would see less power from the laser in my electronics. The optical engineer that sat across from me spent more time on cleanliness issues than on laser cavity alignment issues. So the result of painting a reflective hull would be diminished or no protection on the painted surface. When a laser hit the paint, the paint would chemically bond with the reflective material underneath and make a permament scar. Of course at the power levels we are talking about the event would be femtoseconds of bonding followed by nanoseconds of pitting into the surface, maybe resulting in a full hole through the material. Now, as an engineer I could see the need to mark a reflective hull for identification and to get rid of the pesky reflection of normal light that would make a space ship shine like a star in the night. We don't mind seeing the ISS floating overhead like a little star riding across the sky. However the space navy might think otherwise. I wonder if there could be a stack up of materials on the reflective hull that are meant to vaporize away revealing the reflective hulll when struck by a laser. Here is what I am thinking. Reflective hull is glass coated, then a layer of a noble gas as an insulator, then another glass layer which can be painted. This would make the reflective hull sections that are painted a set of glass tiles filled with the noble gas that are meant to explode when heated by a laser strike exposing the reflective hull below which would reflect away the remainder of the laser energy that made it through (which is most of the energy). The glass tiles would be welded to the glass of the reflective hull. We can't use an adhesive to bond tile glass layer to the reflective hull glass as that would provide material for the laser to make a hole in the glass like in my laser cavity experience at Lumenis. The tiles would be welded by heating the glass tile and the hull beneath until the glass flows together. This would need to be done in a vacuum so that no other debris gets between the layers of the glass. This makes maintance of your pretty painted ship a pain. And, atmosperic reentry might pop some of the tiles. But then a reflective hull might not survive reentry on it's own. Maybe all surfaces of a reflective hull should have these gas filled tiles whether painted or not. One final thought. The tile could swap the noble gas for water and now each tile that pops produces a bit of a masking screen. The laser strike would vaporize the water but that would still be similar to the effect of water dropplets frozen to ice vaporizing in any other masking screen. Now that I say that though I don't like switching to water because it would freeze in the tile and possibly become opaque. I like the noble gas because it isn't likely to freeze and it can still expand enough when heated by the laser to pop the tile. How's that for an idea Shadow Shack? -iggy |
June 18, 2017 - 4:43pm | Well it sounds like my next set of KH miniatures should be polished instead of painted. |
 June 18, 2017 - 5:03pm | I like iggy's ideas. I always imagined the paint using some sort of mateiral similar to Scotch Balls. Those are the things used in the paint on road signs that make them act like corner reflectors. The index of refraction is such that any light hitting it is reflected right back out in the direction it came from. Thus when your headlights hit the sign it is reflected right back to you and you can see the sign brightly since most of the light is coming right back and not be scattered off in random directions. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
June 19, 2017 - 6:41am | @TerlObar, I hadn't thought of reflecting the light right back at the source. Bouncing the light just any direction is fine in space, your so spread out that just getting the light to go somewhere else is sufficient. Bouncing the laser light right back at the attacker is wicked! I'm puzzling about where this is applied, the underlying reflective hull or inside the tiles. This gave me another idea. The top side of the tiles could be colored glass like on bicycle reflectors. This way they reflect more before reaching the energy level needed to pop. So, painting designs on your ship is done with colored glass tiles if you want to preserve your reflective hull. I wonder how much energy is reflected back from a road sign or bicycle reflector? We get that percentage set then we can come up with a mechanic to account for ship movement and speed and the odds that the attacker gets hit back from his own shot. -iggy |
June 19, 2017 - 10:55am | I never thought about it going right back and doing damage, I figured it would be too diffuse. I just see the ships as mostly silver (actually aluminum) with the paint incorporating some sort of techology like scotchballs to maintain the reflectiveness. I always thought of it a paint applied directly to the hull. However, putting it in tiles above the base silver hull would actually make more sense. They would reflect most of the light but if they failed, you still had the raw hull as a fall back underneath. Here are some numbers off the top of my head. Aluminum by itself is about 92% reflective across the visible spectrum (and even better in the infrared). The retroreflector beads works based on varying the index of refaction so that you get total internal reflection so it mostly would depend on the material used to make them but you could probably get close to 95-99% reflection there. Just plain old window glass (BK7) has about a 96% transmission rate which means that 96% of the light would pass right through (in then out). Just under 4% gets reflected naturally and the small fraction (less than 1%) gets absorbed as heat. Other materials would be even better. Although all of this sounds like a bit more than 1000 credits per hull size in cost. Unless a "Reflective Hull" is just a coat of paint with cheap retroreflector balls embeded. (which is why it only reduces the chance of taking damage by 10%. A really good relector would reduce the change to take damage to nearly zero from laser light. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
June 19, 2017 - 1:45pm | Maybe the really cheap 1000 credit reflective hull is just paint with reflective beads in it and what we have come up with here is more expensive reflective tiles that a ship can upgrade to for better performance. -iggy |
June 19, 2017 - 3:20pm | How tyhis thread started : Is there an official uniform? |
June 19, 2017 - 7:40pm | How tyhis thread started : Is there an official uniform? Becaussssssse...albedo suits and reflective hulls are basically the same thing on different scales? |
 June 27, 2017 - 9:48pm | To me, some of the non sequiter discussions are one of the best things about this site. Granted, it is good to stay on topic too, but I see where the discussion started with uniforms, went to albedo suits (i.e. uniforms) and then off to reflective hulls. This is a creative back and forth discussion that bears fruit, though perhaps different from what the post's originator wanted. Joe Cabadas |
