eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 01:43pm on 2005-02-26

(Awake, but not really "here" 'cause I have to run out and take care of an errand. Wanted to squirt this onto the wires before I had time for it to slip my mind. More of that dangerous shower-thinking, if you're curious.)

I'm looking for a substance that would be incredibly difficult to penetrate mechanically but transparent to electrommagnetic radiation at nearly all frequencies (at least all non-visible ones). Something about which clueful folks might intelligently say, "We have no way to cut, drill, or break that." My first thought, of course, was diamond (this was originally going to be an entry asking whether diamond is radio-transparent), but hey, people cut diamonds all the time by fracturing them, so what would stop someone from smashing a diamond box by hitting it hard enough to break it along planes of the crystal?

Ideally, I want something non-metallic (see note about transparency to non-visible EM), which rules out adamantium, and besides, I'd rather a) use a real-world substance if one exists and b) avoid swiping someone else's fictional substance unless it really makes things a lot easier on the reader (assuming I ever get around to writing the story-idea that came to me in the shower). [Edit: I've just rememberd that General Products hull material would work, except that my comments about preferring a real-world substance and being hesitant to use someone else's fictional substance still stand.] I've already got an idea for what to do if I have to make something up with a bit of technobabble. Expense is not a factor; I'll just assume that the person building an enclosure out of this material is incredibly wealthy. And possibly very patient. The box made of this stuff will be a cubic meter or so, and able to survive having the building it's in catch fire and collapse.

Transparency in the 1GHz-100GHz range is required; RF below 1GHz would be useful, as would 60Hz, but if it's opaque or severely attenuates the lower frequencies I can work around that. Opacity at near-IR, visible, and higher frequencies is desirable but not required. And I know so little about materials-science that I'm not even sure where to start to construct a Google search string. Anyone know what I'm looking for, or should I go tune my technobabble?

There are 13 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
twistedchick: watercolor painting of coffee cup on wood table (Default)
posted by [personal profile] twistedchick at 06:56pm on 2005-02-26
I may be waythehell offbase, but there was a project a few years ago to find non-war uses for Soviet tank armor, and it fit a lot of your requirements. (It's also incredibly dense, incredibly heavy, and smells like a closetful of wire coat hangers.)

Sorry I can't come up with something better. Perhaps look for a metallurgic website?
 
posted by [identity profile] darwiniacat.livejournal.com at 07:02pm on 2005-02-26
Shower thinking is dangerous. Or so I hear anyway! ;)
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 05:18pm on 2005-02-27
As I think I've mentioned, the thoughts get all slippery, and slide into places they're not supposed to.
 
posted by [identity profile] juuro.livejournal.com at 07:10pm on 2005-02-26
For a meter box, 60 Hz is not EM. When the long dimension of the electronically active contents are less than about one tenth wavelength, you are better off with magnetic coupling than trying to make the inherently inefficient antenna couple to the EM field.
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 05:08pm on 2005-02-27
I was thinking of the GHz range for communication, and 60Hz to get power into the box without having to have a hole with a wire going through it. So the 60Hz would be like an inefficient transformer with a coil on the inside, a coil on the outside, and hope I get away with not having an iron core.

Dunno whether that makes much more sense than what you thought I was thinking or not.
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 05:20pm on 2005-02-27
Or is that what you meant by magnetic coupling?
 
posted by [identity profile] juuro.livejournal.com at 05:33pm on 2005-02-27
It is precisely that. However, depending on the thinkness of the wall of the box, you may want to consider a higher frequency. For a given mechanical size, you get a higher coupling factor when frequency goes higher. That's why avionic AC was traditionally on 400 Hz, to get the transformer-type components smaller. To avoid the annoying whine, you may want to choose a frequency more typical of, say, switch-mode power supplies. That is, supersonic.
 
posted by [identity profile] maugorn.livejournal.com at 07:10pm on 2005-02-26
You're looking for a "rock/paper/scissors" solution.
And the sad thing is, that unless you conveniently suspend the laws of chemistry and physics as we understand them, you're left with speculation and fiction, which for speculative fiction is just fine, innit?
So stop worrying and give yourself permission to be implausible. Stop trying to be perfect and cover all your bases and write the dang story already. If the story contains "truth" it won't matter how implausible the stoopid detail is. Nobody doubts Big Bird's credibility, do they?
 
posted by [identity profile] deor.livejournal.com at 07:19pm on 2005-02-26
I have no non-fictional materials to offer, but you could ask the folks over at rec.arts.sf.science. If anyone knows of a real material or plausible fake to fit your parameters, they should.
 
posted by [identity profile] aliza250.livejournal.com at 09:22pm on 2005-02-26
The best real-world solution I can come up with off the top of my head:

Diamond dust (or perhaps larger particles) embedded in an an acid-resistant epoxy substrate.

The epoxy would provide the flexibility to resist shatter attacks, the diamond particles would spoil cutting/drilling attacks.
 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 05:17pm on 2005-02-27
Well, I had been thinking of carbon ... I was considering "inventing" a "diamond glass" that was neither diamond nor glass -- not completely amorphous/acrystalline like a true glass, but maybe an aperiodic quasicrystal so there'd be no cleavage planes?

Tangentially (deflected by the GP hull material thought), I'm now wondering what properties The Grandmother Of All Buckyballs would have -- how tough would a meter-diameter Fullerene, a carbon gargantuamegasupermolecule, be? You'd have to break a covalent bond to cut it ... but would that make it trivally susceptible to chemical attacks (similar to an analogous weakness in GP hulls)?
 
posted by [identity profile] juuro.livejournal.com at 05:42pm on 2005-02-27
The first thing that comes to mind is that fullerenes have an excess of unbound electrons. This is likely to cause problems in the EM coupling. Any even weakly and locally conducting medium is at least an attenuator.
 
posted by [identity profile] pickledginger.livejournal.com at 07:21am on 2005-02-28
What about carbon nanotubes (like buckyballs, but tubular - totally ;-)?

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