SA-408 Bearcat Assault Fighter

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CoffeeBot
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Post by CoffeeBot »

I'm going to jump in with my two cents, here.

I've always thought the same thing about shields and weapons that chuck has. If they do have the wierd interaction that klauss mentioned, why can ships pass through one another's shields?

Missiles, too, have bothered me, to the extent that spacecraft have to withstand extreme temperatures -- so why would an explosion effect them? Fire damage doesn't make sense, and I don't think there's a shockwave/percussion blast with no atmosphere. Now, if the missile manages to pierce the armor, and explode from the inside of the hull, that's another thing entirely. Or, the missile is a specific style of radiation that can degrade the hull, or affects the pilot.

Frankly, I'd love to see real projectile weapons that will tear holes through canopies and hulls. Of course, to have them moving at such velocities, the ship firing them would have to suffer some kind of inertial effects...

I would think that these style of guns would be considered archaic, and would be looked upon in the same fashion as someone loading their shotgun shells with rocks and metal scraps, rather than the typical buckshot -- crazy, and bloody dangerous.
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Post by klauss »

CoffeeBot wrote:I've always thought the same thing about shields and weapons that chuck has. If they do have the wierd interaction that klauss mentioned, why can ships pass through one another's shields?
Shielded ships. Paraphrasing JackS: Even a collapsed shield protects the ship from matter-shield interactions.
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Post by CoffeeBot »

klauss wrote:Shielded ships. Paraphrasing JackS: Even a collapsed shield protects the ship from matter-shield interactions.
So, even though it's been blasted away, your shields still provide enough protection from other solid objects? Sorry...I'm a little braindead today, and I'm not completely understanding the comment.
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Post by klauss »

Basically... yes.
But don't take my word for it. JackS is the one to ask.
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Post by Hadrian »

basicaly, no. A Collapsed energy shield means the field strength has fallen below the minimum level in order to maintane a coherent field and so the field nulls out and collapses.

The shield generator cant produce enough energy to put the shield right back up, but instead stores energy in capacitors wich is then fed into the field coils that create the field, once a shield is externaly depleted it means the capacitors have been drained of thier stored charge and must be recharged before they can engage the coils to reform the field. Untill they are recharged, the field does not exist.
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Post by jackS »

CoffeeBot wrote:So, even though it's been blasted away, your shields still provide enough protection from other solid objects?
Well, that wasn't quite exactly what I said - the protection that I mentioned as being offered from a "collapsed" shield was in interactions between the collapsed shield and active shields. Namely, they act to prevent the ship from being turned into confetti when interacting with an active shield source.

@above comment about passing through shields. They really shouldn't, at least not without active cooperation (and we'll eventually deal with that.)

@hadrian - ... (err... not really) ...
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Post by klauss »

But, JackS, if I understood correctly, should a solid touch those collapsed shields, it (the solid) would be turned into confetti, right?
Perhaps not enough to protect you from a collision or a normal bullet (a bullet, be it confetti or not, will still have quite a lot of momentum to deal some damage, same as with collisions), but at least would mess a special-kind bullet (as an armor-piercing one), removing it's special abilities because the thing gets converted to high-speed confetti.
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Post by jackS »

klauss wrote:But, JackS, if I understood correctly, should a solid touch those collapsed shields, it (the solid) would be turned into confetti, right?
Perhaps not enough to protect you from a collision or a normal bullet (a bullet, be it confetti or not, will still have quite a lot of momentum to deal some damage, same as with collisions), but at least would mess a special-kind bullet (as an armor-piercing one), removing it's special abilities because the thing gets converted to high-speed confetti.
Mas o menos. As the shield collapses and the surrounding space becomes less interestingly structured, the "confetti, significantly redirected" effect moves closer towards merely being a "warp and rend" effect. One imagines there could be some room for semantic arguments as to exactly when the shield has "collapsed" and what constitutes "interesting structure". Clearly if the shield generator is completely inactive, then space is normal, and there is no effect. If the generator is active, but it has not imposed a desired organization, we will consider it collapsed, although space is still distorted. How much protection is provided in this state for a given interaction will depend on a fair number of factors.

But yes, suffice it to say, collapsed shields are still capable of mangling things, if in remarkably less interesting ways than non-collapsed shields.
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