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"I went [to the top of] Vehicle Assembly Building and looked down, and tears burst from my eyes. The size of this cathedral where the Rockets take off to go to the moon is so amazing."
- Ray Bradbury
 |
| Bobble (Confinement Sphere) | ||
| A sphere of force that entirely isolates the interior from the rest of the universe. |
| "Confinement spheres - bobbles - are not so much force fields as they are partitions, separating the in- and outside of their surfaces into distinct universes. Gravity alone can penetrate. The Tucson bobble was orginally generated around an ICBM over the artic. It fell to earth near its target, the missile fields at Tucson. The hell bomb inside exploded harmlessly, in the universe on the far side of the bobble's surface.
As you know, it takes the enormous energy output of the Authority's generator in Livermore to create even the samllest confinement sphere... But once established you know that a bobble is stable and requires no further inputs to maintain itself. "Lasting forever," put in old Schelling. It was not quite a question. "That's what we all thought, sir. But nothing lasts forever..." "So, gentlemen, it appears that - like all things - bobbles do decay. The time constant depends on the sphere's radius and the mass enclosed..." |
| Technovelgy from The Peace War,
by Vernor Vinge. Published by Bluejay Books in 1984 Additional resources -
|
Here's an excerpt that gives you some sense of the size that bobbles can be:
For the hemispherical protection of cities, compare to the wall in the air from Rondah, or Thirty-Three Years in a Star (1887) by Florence Carpenter Dieudonné, the lanson screen from The Lanson Screen (1936) by Leo Zagat, the duds from The Fairy Chessmen (1946) by Lewis Padget, the spindizzy from Cities in Flight (1957) by James Blish and the Langston Field from The Mote in God's Eye (1974) by Larry Niven (w/J. Pournelle).
The silver arch of the force field that enclosed Vandenberg and Lompoc seemed to float halfway up the sky. No structure could possibly be so big. Even mountains had the decency to introduce themselves with foothills and highlands. The Vandenberg Bobble simply rose, sheer and in-substantial as a dream. So that glistening hemisphere contained much of her old world, her old friends. They were trapped in timelessness in there, just as she and Angus and Fred had been trapped in the bobble around the sortie craft. And one day the Vandenberg bobble would burst....
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'This robot is a creature... It is a manlike being. Therefore, like any other talking, thinking man, he is entitled to a court trial!'
'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
