Planetary Lockdown

[mankind2.0]

Hi guys,

I am thinking in my story I need a way to lock down a planet for two days so no-one can escape or send out communications, I was thinking something like a solar flare, can anyone else think of any other ideas?

 

[Chris Guillory]

A solar flare would be a type of EMP, right? What about other things that cause EMPs?

 

[The Judge]

I was planning on using a solar flare to impede communication in one of my SFs so I shall be watching this thread with interest! Meanwhile, though, this isn't really a book discussion matter, so I'll move it from here to the Science/Nature subforum which is probably more appropriate.

 

[Venusian Broon]

An enormous Solar flare of a long enough duration would definitely do the trick in my mind- especially if the inhabitants of your planet only have 'flimsy' spaceships with no protective cladding that would quickly irradiated their inhabitants if they tried to get into space. Also a massive EMP could possibly knock out most of the safe guards on such events on telecommunications and - possibly more effective in shutting down communication - electricity grids (for a few days before they could replace components etc...) You'd have to make sure that it was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing I think, because if it was a planet where big flares were common, then the inhabitants would harden all their tech to it.

Larry Niven dialled up a monster 'nova'-like solar flare for his story Inconsistent Moon from memory.

More exotic....what about a gamma-ray burster caused by a supernova (at some distance, otherwise every living thing is irradiated dead - but close enough so that a sizable flux of gamma-rays impacts the planet) so that for a period of time the inhabitants have to retreat to the deepest parts of the planet to shield themselves and are therefore unable to use any of their surface technology for communications or for jumping onto travel? The problem with this idea is that you have a bit of an apocalyptic wasteland afterwards... Such an idea though does depend on what sort of culture you have - if they are regular space farers and can easily zip amongst the stars then they should should really know full well that there has been a Supernova in their back yard (the wavefront of deadly radiation only being able to travel at light speed of course.)...

...Engineered plague/disease, a 'large X' is daubed on the planet and it is declared in total quarantine - the authorities cutting down all communications to stop panic spreading to other worlds...

 

[Ursa major]

When you say

so no-one can [...] send out communications

what precisely do you mean? More precisely, what means of communication are available to those on the planet and with whom might they wish to communicate. Are the intended recipients of a message close by (so that speed-of-light messages would be enough to give them time to arrive at the planet within two days) or are they using something akin to, say, sub-space comms or the relaying of messages through wormholes? Basically, do you have to lock the whole planet down, comms-wise, or can your protagonists/antagonists target a small number of pieces of equipment -- relays, ground stations, etc. -- to achieve what they want?

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Pretty nearly impossible in real life, so just make it up and don't go into details.

I have gear in my back garden I can run off a generator and put a signal detectable easily on the moon (search Moonbounce communications). Or to the edge of the solar system if the other person / organisation has a really big dish.
My friend 20min drive away has a massive aerial array able to do about 20W moonbounce and a 3.7m dish (able to work only up to 4GHz so only the same range at same power roughly as my 1.2m dish which does work at 12GHz, it would have twice range at 24GHz, but I'm not sure it's smooth enough. My 1.1m dish though will work at 24GHz.
I don't have any 4GHz 12GHz or 24GHz transmitters, but they are cheap on ebay. I do have 144MHz, 440MHz, 1.2GHz, 2.4GHz and 10.6GHz transmitters . My biggest 144MHz Yagi aerial and power amp can just about manage moonbounce, so anyone ON the moon would get a perfect signal.

To make lower power go further, or succeed where noise is higher than carrier level (solar flare), you just use very very slow wideband pseudo random spread spectrum and the receiver uses Correlation. Unless an eavesdropper is on the same pseudo random sequence and synchronised, they don't even see a signal.

There is comms equipment that can survive and even operate during EMP.

I could even put the gear in a steel shed with a sheet of plastic faked to look metallic as the roof to avoid aerial surveillance.

I think communications lock down can't be done in real life. Make up some fantasy you don't explain.

 

[tinkerdan]

You might talk to Klatu from the day the earth stood still.

Seriously though perhaps do the EMP with a twist that sends a massive charge into the core of the earth and increases the strength of earths magnetic field and with a bit of fudging make it so strong that it blocks much more than it usually does. Or perhaps the process creates a second field that rides the magnetic field to do the nasty deed.

Sort of a Field Shield Magnetic Resonance Theory.

 

[Dave]

Well, if you can't find a science backed solution you might have to find a more human based one:-

• The Ruling Religious Order prevents communications or any work during the two days of the Festival of the ______. You can't send communications without power or launch a spacecraft without dock hands.
• The strict Environmental Legislation prevents communications and spaceflight during the annual two day migration of the Giant _________ beast. This endangered species communicates by radio waves and can be sent thousands of miles off target.
• The "wrong kind of snow" or a general strike for higher wages. This usually is sufficient to shut down London.

 

[ralphkern]

The gamma ray burster (something I'm playing around with using in my next book as an extiction level event) would be a bit overkill.

Plus an obvious, and major disadvantage for this kind of scenario - it would have to be set off however many light years away in years before it was needed... Even if it didn't wipe out all life caught in its beam! (Also, if you could create one, you are talking about a civilisation so powerful they probably wouldn't care about piffling matters on on mere planet... ). They truly are one of the nastiest ELEs out there... The first we would know about it is wondering why the whole side of the planet facing it has been roasted shortly before the rest die of either cancer from the destruction of the ozone layer or one of a million and one other atmospheric phenomena that will wipe us out. As a point of interest it is a contender for the Permian extinction event which wiped out most of the life on Earth. It's unlikely we would have faced the full effect of that one.

sorry, geeky but been researching them this week.

 

[Nick B]

I have warships jamming communications temporarily around a new colony at one point, is something like that viable? Maybe a terrorist organisation or something?

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I have warships jamming communications temporarily around a new colony at one point, is something like that viable? Maybe a terrorist organisation or something?

They can't jam wide band slow data spread spectrum transmissions on Shortwave. But these are probably impractical for interplanetary communication, unless you have extremely large aerial arrays over many acres (could be spotted and blown up).

Microwave and Laser transmissions are typically point to point. You need to know where either end is and be at any location along the 'beam' to jam it. A 0.5 degree wide beam dish can be hidden at ground level, even in a pit with plastic sheet on top. Early 1970s Indian Educational broadcasts use a suitable pit with chicken wire pointed at the USSR satellite used. Top of 800MHz band.

So 4Ghz to 22GHz (cheap today) is hard to find but then easy to jam.
400GHz gear exists today. On same dish the beam is 10,000x narrower than a 4GHz signal so VERY hard to find. Though 4GHz can use mesh, the 400GHz needs very smooth. The holes or smoothness needs to be 300/(10 x frequency) in MHz and micro meters, I think, but I may have formula wrong.

If the beam is wide band spread spectrum and very slow data rate then it would be extremely hard to find, but noise level is lower than at shortwave, so you look for a slight rise in noise. To detect the Space ship needs to be in the beam AND pointing a big enough dish accurately at the source. For more sensitivity you need a larger dish, but x2 diameter must be pointed x4 more accurately, x3 needs x9 better accuracy!

If you use multiple locations of microwave or laser and switch between them about 1 million times a second also using spread spectrum then it's maybe impossible to separate the signal from background cosmic noise unless you know and synchronise to the two independent pseudo random sequences (location and frequency), and are in ALL the beams at same time and pointing your spacecraft dishes.

So you are back to needing a traitor that gives you the schedules, frequencies, locations, hopping codes etc.

 

[Nick B]

Or liberal doses of future handwavium

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Or liberal doses of future handwavium

Yes, the secret then is to be totally non-specific, POV of a normal character. Most people have no idea how most technology works.

 

[chrispenycate]

What is your communication based on?

Electromagnetic radiation (Light, radio, infrared, ultraviolet into gammas - light speed limit, either drop off as the square of the distance (omnidirectional) or are aimed at a very limited area in the sky (collimated, coherent, laser/maser) and can be jammed mainly by overwhelming the signal - theoretically by absorbing it, if you know the wavelength,

Neutrinos - there has to be a better way than thousands of litres of dry cleaning fluid at the bottom of a gold mine for detecting neutrinos, second-hand trinos or even worn out trinos. Anyway, they're restricted to light speed (except on Italian autostrada) and omnidirectional, and generated at random by stars, so not very long range.

Gravity waves - can't be blocked, would love to make coherent gravity waves. Some mathematical physicists believe they travel considerably faster than light, which would severely damage special relativity. We don't have any measuring implements precise enough to test this, though, let alone any way of generating test signals. A pair of tiny black holes rotating fast enough (MHz at least) round their mutual centre of gravity to overcome their mutual attraction?

Wormholes - through which we pump photons. The two ends of a wormhole - or one end, seem from a different perspective - are no distance from each other, even if one is light years away. If the wormhole is not on the surface of a planet - and it seems a bit tough allowing for all the relative velocities involved, putting it into a metal box should stop the energy getting any further. Obviously, if other than photons are used, the means of enclosure might need to change.

Quantum entanglement - Associative magic - things that once came into contact maintain a mutual influence until the end of time. Tickle one of them, and the other, wherever it might be in the cosmos, giggles. This is seriously worrying to relativity, which has no sense of humour. And at the beginning, close to the big bang, just about everything was in contact with everything else, although I suppose we can wait until particles crystallise out , so only a percentage of matter would be in communication. Very difficult to find a way of blocking this. Delay time unknown, possibly zero.

Hyperwave - If an equivalent to electromagnetic radiation can propagate in a universe with either a smaller diameter or a much higher maximum speed limit then I don't know how to stop it.

Ansible - See how much neater fiction is than physics. No way of screening against it - kill the operator, take a sledgehammer to the device. What, there are hundreds of thousands of the gadgets? You'd better get going then, haven't you?

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Quantum entanglement

Sadly can't send information. It's akin to shuffling cards and another remote deck (which you don't know the order in) simultaneously has the same order. As soon as you look at the remote deck order the entanglement ends.
The ansible is nice.

I'm on mailing list for this, which can seriously disrupt communication, but an Infra red laser is hard to find (narrow beam) and won't be jammed by it. Pseudo random location diversity communication by IR laser probably impossible to find and jam.
http://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/