Shroom Man 777 wrote:I know, but it's sci-fi, so it could work.
It could, but you'd need a reason to use radar instead of thermal sights.
Yeah, but those aren't "fancier sensors". If his sci-fi badguys use radar on the ground, then plasma cloaking will be good. And his tank has ways to counter thermal (active cooling system).
I beg to differ. Thermal sights are much fancier than a radar system. Radar simply bounces EM waves off of things and waits for a response. IR and UV sights have to convert said frequencies over to visible light. Meanwhile, this device provides a fairly narrow range of protection against a technology developed in the earlier half of the century.
Really? Fuck... I kind of thought it meant like "average background temperature". Gah. Well, we could make it an optional add-on.
Especially in a desert where nights get really cold, it would be very noticable. Not nearly as much as an active tank, mind you, but enough to be picked up by, say, a thermal scope on a helicoptor like an apache or a cobra.
It all depends on the plasma, of course. The more effective plasma shields are denser ones, which have additional limitations and will increase average heat.
It is possible to stick your hand inside of cold plasma, though again, depending on the type, it's not generally a good idea, as they use room-temp plasmas to sterilize things by breaking down cellular structures.
Mmm... good point. We could reduce the disruption by having the railgun fire a slower round, a round equipped with a rocket-motor or something. But bah, that's contrieved.
Or potentially by using the plasma shield to dampen the EM field. I'm not sure of the physics behind room temperature plasmas, but I know that superconducting solids have a tendancy to match fields naturally (the levatating magnet you can sometimes see in some textbooks).
Yeah, but I did mention something about sensors that stick out of the plasma field. They could just be sticks that stick out a few inches out of the thing.
If the sensors that stick out are as big as a baseball, that won't really register to enemy radar.
True, but again I have to question really heavy enough use of radar in ground warfare to make this level of protection necessary.
Handwavium. That, and it's the 24th century.
Or by having the field be disrupted every time a shot is fired, requiring time between firings to re-establish the plasma sheath. Maybe even include the ability for the stuff to flow along with the field during the path of the shot, I'll have to re-establish my knowledge of the Lorenz force.
That said, the application of the technology to the tank can work, though maybe not entirely the way you first envisioned it doing so.
By the way, it's still useful for air warfare ;)