Spacesuits and magnetic boots. Why?

[Brian G Turner]

But why would you use iron, Brian? It's just such a heavy material to use.

True, I meant any conducting material, and iron was the first thing that came to mind. I should have thought more carefully before posting.

 

[Vertigo]

I'd wondered about suction pads, but I'm sure Ray is right that suction pads work using atmospheric pressure.

Because it's a science fiction movie, It looks cool, and it's the kind of mistake that the average person wouldn't even notice.

Truth be told I didn't think about that one until you brought it up. It's an interesting point .

To be fair I wasn't just thinking of movies, I have come across it often enough in books as well.

But I wanted the deflection fields anyway.

All this assumes spaceships are built on Earth, or at least the prefabricated bits are shipped up from Earth. If we had a decent size nickel/iron asteroid floated into Earth orbit for raw material, ferromagnetics might be the cheapest solution for building hulls. A bit slower to accelerate, but an ion drive's hardly going to do Ferrari smoking tyres at the best of time:- 0-60 in fifteen hours and a few seconds.

I still think the extra weight, and therefore inertia would make heavy metals impractical at least you wouldn't do it just to make it easy to walk on the hull. Though some interaction with an EM field for shielding does seem a possibility.

But of course, now it will bug me. Thanks a lot.

Sorry but it'll bug me too if that's any compensation!

It's interesting to think of solutions, though that wasn't really my initial question; I was just trying to figure out what I'd missed and it looks like I hadn't missed anything. On the solution front, I think the simplest solution is that we wouldn't bother and instead would use safety lines and manoeuvre using some of compressed gas 'jets.' The safety lines wouldn't be a huge nuisance as they could be self-releasing and in pairs on reels; clip second one and release and reel in first one and so on.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I meant any conducting material

Magnetic Material. Loads of conductive materials don't work (tin, brass, bronze, aluminium, magnesium, copper, lead, silver, gold, platinum). While steel generally works, some steels (particularly some but not all "inox" / "stainless") mysteriously don't work with magnets.

I find Magnets, Static Electricity, electro-magnetism, flowing electricity, high voltages, Electromagnetic waves (LW, SW, VHF, UHF, Microwave, IR, Light, UV and the differing properties) all fascinating to read about and do experiments with. Pairs of polarisers, home made waveguides and transitions for 2.4GHz and 10GHz, Log Periodic aerials, phased aerial arrays, parabolic dish variations etc ...

I bought a load of €1.50 "quartz" clocks to experiment with the miniature 1V driven actuator coils. A little electromagnet pokes the second hand cog once a second, driven by IC chip which is dividing a miniature quartz (glass) tuning fork with two silvered contacts so that piezo electric power keeps the fork oscillating at 32768 times a second. This is divided by 2 fifteen times to give the 1 second pulses. Same "crystal" as used in many LCD watches. Higher frequency quartz crystals are just small wafers using piezo effect to sustain the physical vibrations. An old record player crystal or ceramic cartridge (or gas lighter with no battery) uses piezo effect in reverse to make electricity. The speaker in a tune playing greeting card is a piezo ceramic disc mounted on brass disc.