Always enjoy read your posts Wavinator (and the resulting discussions). Just got couple of points to add, one for shields, one for armour.

I've always wondered why shields don't blind the ship using them. If you have a shield that blocks a laser, then shouldn't it block all visible light as well. Or if your ship uses radar (active or passive) then it should be vulnerable to EM weapons that use similar freqencies. (though it is easy for even a lightly armoured hull to deal with a microwave laser).

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Mote in God's Eye series has the ships being shielded having to extend masts through the shields in order to be able to "see". During an extended battle, the masts would be replaced many times as they were destroyed, and once you ran out, you were blind till you lowered the shields.


There are some circumstances where having less armour may be better than more. If your ship is hit by a hyper-velocity slug (traveling at a significant % of c), then you definatly want less armour. The more armour the slug has to punch through, the more energy it transfers to your ship (and this energy is transfered in the form of superheated armour plasma). A 10kg slug traveling at 10% c will just leave a small hole in a lightly armoured scout ship, but it will hit an astroid base with the force of a small nuke.

Amazing how the weapons thread is on page three while this one is not ;)

Quote:Original post by Korvan

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Mote in God's Eye series has the ships being shielded having to extend masts through the shields in order to be able to "see". During an extended battle, the masts would be replaced many times as they were destroyed, and once you ran out, you were blind till you lowered the shields.

Yep, those shields are a fascinating variant of the absorption shields. On activation, they block the complete EM spectrum, so that the contained ship appears as a perfectly black spheroid. As the shields absorb energy, that energy is distributed to the whole shield surface (no hot spots) and radiated off. If the absorption rate is higher that the emission rate (they fly into the outer region of some cold star, a red giant IIRC), the shield starts to "glow", with an ever increasing wavelength until the shield's capacity is reached and energy is apssed through to the ship.

For game purposes, I would use this as a "panic shield" that can be activated rapidly and allow for a blind escape, like a jump to hyperspace or whatever. It would also seem a pretty good solution to vanish off EM based sensors quickly, but I guess Psi personnell and weapons would see through it. As such, time needed for activation should be rather low, time to recharge long and uptime low to medium.

It doesn't seem quite as effective as the stasis fields used as personal or squad armor in Haldeman's Forever War since it doesn't reduce kinetic energy of objects entering the shield - spears and arrows were quite effective weapons -, but allows normal operation inside the shield.

Quote:Original post by TechnoGoth

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
Yes, I have no problem with tactical questions, but I''m just double checking with you on this one idea. It would be like playing a game where your gun could explode in your hand.

I think that happened to me once in fallout. Think of it as a condition akin to status ailments in RPGs. So the ship takes computer damage and a little indicator lights up singling firing control systems out-synch condition. Then a little dialog box appears and the XO infroms you that you can either deactivate shields or weapons for about 60 seconds to correct the problem or leave it alone and risk weapons impacting on the shields.

You could have a number of conditions that ship can suffer from, and beauty is that these are almost always internal problems and thus require no art. ;)

Computer viruses and corrosive gases/liquids springs to mind. Leech missiles and enemy nanites would also cause "status ailments"

Hmmm... Have you ever seen the anime "The Irresponsible Captain Tylor"? there were a few interesting devices in there.

One was a device that duplicated a ships energy signiture so that on radar it would appear to be several hundred ships, though visually it would still look the same.

As far as in battle, it could be used to startle enemies when it looks like a massive fleet has suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It would complicate battles if ships rely on radar to spot enemies...

Although the idea of having a light shield that turns the ship into a dark bubble and having to use a mast to see seems cool at first, you can't deny that it's a bit too hardcore - it would look really weird in a 3D space combat game :)

What about this idea... the ship's sensors can detect the direction and intensity of any incoming light, and the shield generator can control the intensity of the shield in any point of the shield surface. Think of it like this, the sensor is the eye, and the shield is the pupil: too much light and it closes, except that in this case it's extremely focused, and has a high reflex rate. Acceptable levels of light, like what allows you to see what's happening outside the ship, is allowed through. A laser fired at the ship will be blocked in a very small spot, where you'll see the cool special effects that result from the deflection :)

This allows for nice strategies like, trying to blind an enemy ship by forcing the whole shield to block incoming light, possibly with specialized weapons that focus on spreading the light through a wider area and delivering just enough intensity to trigger the shield; many ships could combine their efforts to blind an enemy from all sides (think a band of fighters trapping a battlecruiser). Besides, although a shield that is not active doesn't use any energy, the more portions of it are active the more energy it wastes, so you need to be careful. The reaction time of the sensor/shield combo can be really important because it's what allows part of the laser beam to go through and heat/damage the ship a bit before the shield responds. Now, hitting an opponent in different areas is important, because the areas that are being blocked are now harder to hit (it's better to target an unprotected area so that part of the laser is allowed through, before that area becomes protected), and because you're basically painting the shield around the enemy ship so it's harder and harder for it to see. Remember that the enemy can't fire through these parts, so by attacking you're already diminuishing its attack. There's also room for a "panic button"; you can activate the whole shield if the enemy's lasers are causing too much damage in the tiny fraction of time before the shield reacts, like hiding inside a shell, but now you're wasting more energy, you're blind and can't fire (could buy some time for a blind escape or quick repairs). Since the ship will always heat a bit whenever it's hit by lasers, it would be useful to vent the heat somehow. You can have the usual cooling systems, plus external cooling at the expense of coolant, and also a sort of a gun that uses heat to fire a laser - if you're inside a fully lit shield, maybe you'd have to risk a small opening to fire that laser and cool down the ship.

I don't think this would be too hard to implement. Each ship has a matrix that keeps whether a section of the shield bubble is being blocked or not. When a ship is hit, the angle of the laser is mapped onto this matrix, which should be trivial (it's just an extension of the system you already have for handling damage direction). If the area is not blocked, a % of the laser is allowed through (because of the laser that goes through before the shield reacts). Whether the area is alredy blocked by the shield or not, the rest of the laser beam still has to deal with the shield so you can apply the usual rules (weak lasers are blocked, others go through...). Of course that if the shield is not working, because of a damaged generator or damaged sensors in that area, the laser's raw power hits the ship.

Ideas for modules/upgrades (ie., factors the influence this system) :
- improving the shield's reaction time (the % of laser allowed through is smaller), through a specialized super-fast computer system (faster computer = less damage)
- harder sensors that are not incapacitated by the heat (because sensors are always vulnerable to the % of the laser beams that is allowed through)
- a computer upgrade that tries to predict where the enemy is going to hit, so the reaction time can be instant (after the first hits, which let some damage through, the computer calculates where the enemy is going to hit next, so the next hits don't let any damage through)

Using the same system for other shields could allow you to have a boreal aurora effect (you know, those lights in the sky that you can see in the poles) when your shield goes through a part of space with some special particles that it reacts to, so some parts of it are activated to protect the ship, creating some interesting patterns (to amaze the players with some more pretty colors and effects :p ). There could be different reactions (color patterns) to different phenomena, and a seasoned ship captain would be able to recognize some of them as warnings to the interesting stuff that you through at him ;) Also, you know you're getting too near a nova when your shields are suddenly activated.