Submitted by Nihilblistic t3_z2p0pk in askscience
I was just wondering if you'd have to take account of planetary magnetic fields when designing and building for different planets. Do electric motors work at different efficiencies on Mars? Are radios less reliable on Jupiter's moons? Does power transmission have to be handled differently on moon without a magnetosphere versus a planet?
bkinstle t1_ixkns5z wrote
They did on CRT tubes. When I worked at Apple we had a big enclosure made of coils with a wooden desk in the middle. There was a map on the wall of the earth and you could pick any location, read the parameters from the chart and type them into a control panel to filter the Earth's magnetic field in that location inside the chamber.
When we still made CRT monitors they were calibrated for certain geographic regions and we tested that calibration in this machine. There was always a push to make fewer monitor calibrations but the best we ever got to was northern and southern hemisphere models