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"I feel like I've been very fortunate in that I've stuck like a burr to the dog-leg of the next generation of nerdism. I've been carried into the XXIth century on Bill Gates' pants-cuff."
- William Gibson
 |
| 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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'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
'...then back to their work, though little enough it was on these automatic cultivators.'
'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
