EM Wave Amplitudes and Fictional Force Field

[gibberingmouther]

So, my game is coming along.

My psychic energy shielding protects against EM radiation. The energy used for shielding gets depleted based on the type of EM radiation (the wavelength) and according to the amplitude of the radiation the energy shielding is exposed to.

I can't find many numbers for EM wave amplitudes, measured in volts/m. For this, since radiation isn't usually weaponized in my game universe except for lasers, I might not provide an actual set of formulas and instead just give a table of numbers for players to extrapolate from. But if anybody has numbers for EM wave amplitudes and their corresponding effects, I would be very grateful. I Googled but couldn't find much.

I also have a question about lasers. If I made my energy shielding resistant to 450 - 500 nm light, what color would the shielding become? Would I just not be able to see light between 450 and 500 nm?

 

[berkeman]

Does this help?

https://www.rp-photonics.com/optical_intensity.html

 

[member 656954]

If I made my energy shielding resistant to 450 - 500 nm light, what color would the shielding become? Would I just not be able to see light between 450 and 500 nm?

That wavelength is in the blue - cyan part of the spectrum, and presumably, if you are blocking that range the physics shield is not magical enough to discriminate against 'bad' photons - coming from a laser say - and 'good' photons coming from other sources, so the world will change color behind the shield and be lacking blue to cyan.

Now, you do note that the amplitude is taken into account so maybe a shield can discriminate against a laser. However, even with a psychic shield that can discriminate 'bad' photons from 'good' photons, a powerful enough laser is going to kill you before you have time to trigger the shield, unless you have an FTL warning (or contrived scenarios like the beam is sweeping toward you so you see the effect and can react). Lower power lasers may just blind you or burn you, but without some serious magic the psychic shield is not a particularly practical weapon against a laser.

In terms of the color of the shield, that depends on the wavelength(s) reflected by it. That could an arbitrary fixed setting - so everybody has a green shield for example - or you could play with this and base it on mood, or psychic strength, or age...or whatever you like. Maybe it is invisible unless a suitably powerful laser hits it, then it flashes blue/cyan - i.e., reflects those wavelengths you noted.

Finally, the spectrum of a 'laser' is pretty broad, and ranges between 150nm up to 11,000nm. That's ultraviolet up to far infrared, which obviously includes part of the spectrum we can't see. So if lasers are weaponized, two things occur:

1. Without further magical conditions to constrain how lasers work in the game, killing with a UV or IR laser is pretty straightforward because your target will literally never see the beam coming in anything but an entirely contrived scenario;
   
2. If you can weaponize the 'visible' spectrum, what is stopping weaponization of the rest of the EM spectrum? That seems a particularly arbitrary constraint, even knowing you're making a game.

Cheers,
Tghu

 

[gibberingmouther]

Thank you berkeman and Tghu. The information you guys gave me is very helpful. I looked at some military lasers to see their wattage. I used the power use to describe how effective shielding is because I don't know how I'd find out what the actual power of the laser is (and I'm not sure how you would describe that, as it would depend on both the laser's amplitude (volts/meter) and wavelength if I understand correctly).

I probably don't need to go into detail about gamma radiation wave amplitudes and so on since gamma rays don't make good lasers, nor do radio waves and so on, but I feel better knowing there's a formula I can tinker with or include in my game manual.