From: Tony Christney <tchristney@t...>
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 12:06:12 -0800
Subject: Lasers vs. StarLite, was Re: Further thoughts on hitting with lasers
> Chad wrote: If the laser was powerful enough to easily cut through the hull, then you wouldn't want to be rotating. That would create a huge hull breach, which otherwise would be a relatively small hole. Unless... > Heck, make your ship round and out of ice. Have it rotating and This idea reminds me of a new material developed by some old English fellow. ( I forget his name at the moment...) It's called StarLite plastic, and it has almost no thermal conductivity, and is essentially non-combustible. I saw a program about it on the CBC. Several tests stand out quite clearly: 1. A small cube of the stuff was subjected to an oxy-acetylene welding torch for several minutes. The plastic suffered no damage, and the cube was picked up with a bare hand _immediately_ after the torch was removed. 2. An egg was coated in a StarLite gel (~1-5mm thick - it was smeared on by hand). After several minutes under the torch, the egg was still raw... 3. A CO2 high powered laser was cutting through a 1" steel sheet like butter, ie. several inches per second. However, after more than 30 seconds, StarLite only suffered a small brownsmudge on the surface ( I think that it was less than.2% gone). Note that this was _not_ a commercial. It was a news story and all of the tests were conducted by independent engineers and scientists in an independent lab. There is some stuff on the net about it, but I forget the URL. It seems to me that this stuff would render the idea of using a laser as a weapon void. Supposedly you can make the stuff at home in a blender (it's just that only one person knows how...) with ~14 ingredients. You can even make clothes out of the stuff (soon they will be making upholstery and aircraft interiors out of the stuff). Mix it in with paint, and you have a laser-proof car, tank, jacket, house, whatever! Since this material is _not_ science fiction, I think that soon lasers as weapons in science fiction will be a thing of the past. What this means as far as GZG is concerned, only Jon can tell...