Because if you can't say it in Latin, why bother to say it at all? Anyway, I messed up; I said the humans in my book used Bose-Einstein condensate shielding to protect against the radiation when they're going up on the orbit elevator (fortunately it hasn't directly come up in the book itself). But actually, the radiation encountered entering LEO is ionizing radiation. Which is easier to deal with!
See, all you need to make ionizing radiation go away is a magnetic shield, which we've known how to do for so long, Werner von Braun wrote articles about it. Apparently the way you do it on ships is you line them with toroidal magnet rings. Surely you could just stick a ring of magnets around the elevator-car on the orbit elevator.
Which is interesting, also: I can line my ships with rings of magnets. Anything that makes the ship look cooler, huh?
1 comment:
Had I known there was no Latin word for tea, I'd have left the vulgar stuff alone.
Hilaire Belloc.
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