Shields, the different archetypes and how they work.
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- Опубликовано: 8 июл 2024
- Shields are a classic hallmark of science fiction, one that's changed very little and come to define the combat and style of entire genres and settings. From star trek and star wars to halo and stargate to lesser known settings like Space Battleship Yamato and the honor verse. Shields are an ever-present staple and today I'm going to explain a bit about them and which ones i like the best.
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Honorable mention to Super Dimensional Fortress Macross (aka RoboTech), where the massive carrier/battleship had POINT shields that the bridge defense officers had to crazily spin across the hull with a trackball control to intercept incoming Zentraedi missiles.
That's just a great show in general.
Don't forget it's role in the Daedalus maneuver
Like Pong?
Even better, they didn't even mean for it to exist.
They overloaded their FTL drive and ripped a localized hole in spacetime where their FTL drive used to be, and were able the jury-rig (along with other parts of the ship) this hole in spacetime and redirect it over the hull of the ship as a moving portals into extra-dimensional space.
..and over the course of the overall Macross timeline, they further developed the technology to the point that even Valkyries have it as standard-issue for protection and even use it to enhance their close combat power.
It's ok to be radicalized by the Expanse and Battletech. One thing I think you did miss is that some of the things that use shields in a "boring" way have done so since before CG animation. There's a big difference between "too lazy to animate ships exploding" and "too lazy to literally blow up a 6 foot long physical model that took thousands of dollars and months of time to build". This is why you see zero scenes of Mon Calamari cruisers slugging it out with star destroyers at point blank range at the battle of Endor. It would've looked exactly like the battle of Coruscant, but they would've had to destroy a bunch of physical models to get that effect.
I only know this because someone called attention to it, Maybe EC-Henry, but you can actually see a Nebulon-B slugging it out with the Executor itself at 1:50:53 in RotJ, though while there are bursts of fire, there isn't the actual battle damage we see in RotS.
Battletech does ironically have shield tech, in two instances at least. The Steiner colosseum on Solaris VII supposedly has a lostech shield grid that protects the audience from stray shots. The other one is the Blue Shield Particle Field Damper, which will halve all PPC damage while it's running. Neither one is very practical for military purposes however, the former being to impractical to scale down, the latter for only being able to run for about one minute before the system developed errors from dust sucked into it and shut down.
TL;DR: Battletechs has shield tech, but it is literally too impractical to make any real difference on the battlefield.
It was Eckhartsladder who broke it down. And showed that there's a few scenes Endor Mon Cals trading shots with ISD, with one hold it's own against 3 of them.
Don’t forget the Galactica’s shield. The “lots and lots (Jesus that’s a lot) of flak”
Wall of flak, blessed by thy name
I'm pretty sure Rigel mentions Positive Shield as part of Galactica's going to battlestations sequence. On the other hand I think that might be the armoured blast shield that covers the bridge viewport in combat.
Bubble shields do have a fundamental weakness. They create a much bigger hitbox/bubble over what they protect, so attacks that would have otherwise miss, hits the bubble shield.
They also tend to burn out/overload if hit with too much power at once.
@gbladewarrior6884 it's funny, usually ST had bubble shields, while SW had hull-hugging shields (ray or particle), but now, they both have either option.
Even the more realistic approach of The Expanse doesn't totally do away with the basic ideas. You may not have people shouting shield charge levels, but you do have people shouting how much ammo the PDCs have, and going out of the airlock to repair one ain't much different from what R2 does. It helps to have a way to show that things are getting dicey without actually having to cripple the main characters' ship. Having the Projectiles be just big enough to dramatically kill individual crew members or shred systems without having to blow up a whole ship was a nice touch though.
I really like it when different weapons have their own ways to counter them; Stealth and Electronic Warfare to not get shot in the first place, magnetic deflectors and dielectric armor for use against particle beams, CIWS for use against missiles, dust and/or plasma screens for use against kinetics, spinning the ship/shiny bits to dampen laser weapons, the holy wall of flak (blessed be it's name), etc. It really gives a rock paper scissors lizard spock element to a story, and to some extent mirrors the real-life survivability onion.
Helicopter fires a Laser Guided Missile at your tank...
You pull out a Pocket Mirror and flip the pilot off.
Nice Battleship you've got there, unfortunately, L + Ratio + 4 layers of shields + Maxed Engines + Zoltan Super Shield + Defense Drones + Anti-Drone Drone + Cloaking device + Anti-Ion Field + Rockman Hull Plating + I hacked your weapons + Your Weapons room is on fire. (I am about to get ripped to pieces by angry boarders)
Turn-A Gundam is a fun example where the main antogistic force the Moonrace uses machines so advanced that their society have more or less abandoned ballistic weaponry on their robots. This also means that they rely on much lighter armor treated with anti-beam coatings and i-field barriers which allows for more maneuverability but comes around to bite them in the ass when it's discovered that the Unga bunga rocket propelled grenade of the more primitive Earthrace passes through both with little to no resistance putting both sides on more or less equal footing.
Fully agree here, often times the best solution to a problem is actually the simplest one! If something like shields are going to be used their needs to be proper justification for even having them in the first place!
@@isaacvandam916shields work well when you want your ships slinging overpowered weapons that would cause audience to lose suspense of disbelief that armor can just tank it.
I feel best way to deal with them is as said before have weapons or tech that can get around or at least weaken their effects.
Like you can use rapid fire to momentarily pierce the shields but means weaker hits once through. Otherwise you try to hit as hard as possible to just break it.
Also could do like halo did with the personal shield and have it only tank a few shots before breaking but has fast recharge
7:58 For shields in UC Gundam specifically, "When Minovsky particles are released into the air or into open space, the positive and negative particles spontaneously align themselves into a three-dimensional cubic lattice. Due to the repulsive and electrostatic forces between the Minovsky particles, this lattice functions as a kind of a force field, which is referred to as an I-field. This field has difficulty permeating conductive materials like metal, water, and plasma, and it exerts a repulsive force against mega particles. An I-field is used to deflect enemy mega particle beams. Due to its high power requirements, the I-field generator originally could only be installed in large mobile weapons. When the generator is activated, the I-field forms an invisible barrier around the mobile weapon, protecting it from incoming beam attacks. However, this barrier has no effect against solid objects like missiles and projectiles, and beam weapons can still be used at point blank range within the barrier's boundary. Another weakness is that the I-field generator has an operating limit. An I-field generator consumes a large amount of energy and overheats in around 15-20 minutes. While on the Earth heat can be transferred to water or air, space is a vacuum which means the heat must be given off through radiation, an extremely slow process."
Nearly every beam weapon uses "Mega" Particles in UC Gundam, why the beams bend like that is the shield essentially brute forcing it out of the way, and as seen in Unicorn multiple I-fields seem to have stacking effects as both the Unicorn's shield funnels and the Neo-Zeong both take hits that would be more or less fully capable of brute forcing through a single I-Field the shield funnels take hits from the Neo-Zeong's lasers and come out unscathed completely stopping the attack with their I-fields and each take hits from indiviual lasers and are also unharmed with where the laser passed over having a briefly molten look, and the Neo-Zeong takes multiple direct hits from the Unicorn and Banshee's Beam Magnums,
since on it's front facing alone it has about 4-6 I-field generators, and with all those generators even the Beam Magnums which don't even need a direct hit to critical damage (we see a Sleeves MS get halfway incinerated by a missed shot passing a bit too close) into just flashlights with each shot that hits being completely stopped, but physical projectiles, and presumable also non-mega particle based energy weapons will still penetrate, and most Mega Particle based weapons can be fired while under the I-field to achive penetration,
some Mobile Suits like the F91 Gundam however pack weapons so disgustingly powerful that I-fields just cannot stop them like in UC Engage we get to see the F91 fire those weapons at a Zanscare warship, see the I-field start trying to deflect them, then gets penetrated and the ship is promptly incinerated in instant, along with any mobile suits unlucky enough to be too close to it.
Funfact: In Descent Freespace, the only ships that _have_ shield arrays are small fighters and bombers, maybe the odd civilian vessel or two, while larger ships have to rely purely on heavy armor, since the power draw to shield such a massive ship is _phenominal._
The Sole exception to that rule was the SVD Lucifer... And that ship required _Eight_ wholesale reactors to power it's "Impenetrable shield"... Which do not work in Descent Freespace's version of FTL, Subspace.
Now, the only reason the Galactic Terran Alliance (or GTA) even _had_ shield-tech, was because they managed to acquire and reverse engineer several prototype Shield Generators from the main antagonist mid-way through The Great War... Which meant prior to _that,_ the GTA didn't even _have_ those "bubble shields" for their fighters.
This also meant that Alpha-1, the player character, has to not only deal with a sudden jump in threat level, but also has to deal with new technologies being tossed his way, meaning the whole thing about "Bubble Shields being _boring"_ are the absolute _least_ of his concerns.
Yeah, in cases like Star Trek, "Bubble shields are boring" because they have it _everywhere..._ But if you find ways to limit the factor of Bubble Shields, such as making it so that _only_ small miltech ships could have them, it suddenly raises the stakes to crazy levels.
Why? Because in Freespace, you are _NOT_ a "Hero who saves everyone and everything", you are simply one of many soldiers and pilots inside of a military organization... So that means unlike in Star Trek, which has been full of "Important Characters, and those disposable Red Shirts", *_YOU_*_ Are one of those "Red Shirts",_ and are _expected_ to perish at one point, same with your wingmen!
In fact, the bigger the missions get, the more likely you are to end up entering Subspace _alone_ at the end of the mission, with red empty rings taunting you in your HUD of the squadron you used to have.
Couple of points here:
I remember watching an anime about a quarter of a century ago where this giant ass capitol ship was figting against some army and the shield it had was a tiny disc shaped piece of "nope" about ten meters in diameter that an actual operator had to scroll around the body of the ship using some sort of ball-mouse.
this felt like every hit that actually got through to damage the ship was earned in a sence.
The thing with Bubble Shields i like is how they basically build a narrative about the importance of managing ressources in a space fight. You got a shield that'll save you but if it's down you are dead. Great. now you have to learn to dogfight and evade fire to prolong the active time your shiled is on and use supplementary systems like AMS or stealth to help your shield reactor cool down/re-energize so that you can be relatively safe again.
Also i felt like you have left out the many ways those shields can be bypassed. Say you have a universe where laser weapons are prevalent and most ships have to slug each other untill the shields are down but then you have innovators who use phasing rockets or ion weaponry to disrupt/bypass them quicker.
Freelancer had this whole thing where you could take ion weapons to quickly down shields and then you'd be able to use basic lasers/plasma for general hulldamage or you'd use rockets/torpedos for massive destruction.
Same with mana-shields in roleplaying games like Path of exile or Diablo. You only have a shield for as long as you have mana but if it's disrupted you better have a way to survive. POE especially has stuff like chaos damage that is able to completely bypass a shield.
all in all interesting summarisation but i feel like you have let your personal dislike color your evaluation.
That would be Macross, or Robotech to most Americans. The pinpoint barrier was a desperate improvisation, the first shield the antagonists had ever come across, and was even used offensively.
Personally my favorite battle that show Sci-Fi Shields, Will have to be the battle of the Super Gate in Stargate SG1.
Especially the way the Ori Beams weapons interacted with the Ha'tak and Daedalus Shields.
With them deplating the Shields but the continuing beam afterwords being thiner as it hits the ships hulls.
My second favorite is in Stargate Atlantis when the Daedalus tanks a point blank coronal mass ejection.
I thought the System Lord personal Shields were kind of neat. They are very similar in concept to the shields from Dune. They block high speed or high energy projectiles, but someone can still throw you a granola bar and some water... Unlike the Atlantis personal shield that almost caused Mckay to die of dehydration.
But then again, some crotchety old Air Force veteran could also just yeet a knife through your shield.
I really think Covvie Shields are the best implementation of the "Bubble Shield" approach. For 3 reasons. 1st, as you touched on, The entire point of them is to show the UNSC as the underdog, constantly scrapping upwards against this horrifically powerful unknown. 2nd, The shields aren't invulnerable to UNSC weapons. The UNSC MAC can punch through them, which makes sense as it's quite possibly one of the most powerful and most realistic weapons I've ever seen in Sci-Fi, but the Archer missiles can't. Which leaves the UNSC in this weird spot of "I can kill you, if the Big gun hits" whilst also constantly fearing the Plasma. Oh, and 3rd the Covvies have to drop their shields to fire their weapons, or launch fighters ETC. So it isn't just "Haha, Bubble stop all" because the shields have to be dropped to fire.
What is interesting about how Halo handles shields in at least the older books is that it seems like the tech becomes weaker or less reliable as it gets scaled down to portable size, with those of Elites failing to bursts of 7.62x51mm fire not the sustained fire in games.
In fact the practice of glassing human settlements became so wide spread because while the Covenant had naval superiority their ground campaigns frequently suffer so heavy losses in their lower classes that 'nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure' is as much a life saving measure as it is sound stratrgy from the start.
Let's not forget that in space the MAC gun's not the only thing to take out covenant ships, although the examples tend to be of the sub battleship, dreadnaught, or carrier tonnage. If I remember correctly a good old fashioned nuke has been used from time to time to crack open ships like a sledgehammer to a watermellon, and I'm not conflating the slipspace bomb in the game rendetion of the events at Reach either.
Also can we touch on the detail that covenant bridges tend to not be in the prow or topside but are burried in the area of the ship with the most dense armor as well as mass (meaning everything and everyone else on the ship) to protect it? They looked at the idea of an armored citadel and turned the entire ship into a gigantic fortress with the CIC buried at it's heart. It's a concept older than Halo but reading that for the first time broke some of my suspention of disbelief for Star Treck but especially Star Wars ship design.
Gotta give props to David Weber for a very creative approach to justify naval warfare tactics :)
It also let him make sails on space ships. :D
If the hotlzmann shield nuking you if lasers touch it isn’t mentioned I will be angy
So, exactly how angry are you? 😄
Centurion/renegade legion had a really cool shield. It was completely invulnerable, but keeping it up took exponentially more energy the longer it stays on. Milli or microseconds were the best you could manage. So they were called "flicker shields", turning on and off rapidly. So you had an all or nothing damage scheme... But also, they had laser tagging systems that could decipher the flicker pattern for a short time (before it randomized again) and timed weapons fire to the flicker rate.
So you could use your painting laser to "destroy" the shield for one round. Big kinetic weapons could penetrate just because the whole shell was so fast and big it couldn't fully impact in the time the shield was active, and the shield couldn't form through the projectile, but lasers and missiles were severely penalized. And infantry carried a lot of painting lasers, making them handy to have even in a mostly tank game.
Very cool.
The concept of protective force fields surrounding spaceships can arguably be traced back to the Skylark of Space and Lensman sagas by E. E. "Doc" Smith---the Tolkien of space opera---and his "defensive screens" and "wall shields", circa 1920s-1930s.
Not to mention the Zone of Force...
I love how he described the shields turning different colors before they failed.
Always thought ringworld pioneered the concept.
Lensman is the origin of a lot of Space Opera concepts.
@@Octarinewolf I would say Skylark even more... that's the book that gave us the first starship.
While I have my problems with the 'Honorverse', David Weber understood one thing. Be it ships at sea or in space, there is nothing more epic than a ship firing a broadside.
As much as I like the space battle in 'Return of the Jedi', the best moment was seeing the 350 metre Nebulon B firgate trading blows at close range with the 1,600 metre Star Destroyer. It looks cool and conveys the hopelessness of the situation.
Even the 'Wing Commander' movie has one of it's best moments when the Tiger's Claw fires a torpedo broadside at a Kilrathi ship. The scene is stupid as hell, but it looks so cool.
Any shield or drive system that does not include the possibility of broadsides, has no reason to exist.
David Weber and Steve White are the kings of space battles.
have you read " In Death Ground" ?
@@patrickkenyon2326 Sadly not. I discovered Weber with 'Insurrection' to which the Star Trek movie with the same title was such a disappointment.
It's not that I wanted to see the Federation break apart, but for some foolish reason I had hoped for something more epic.
My main problem back then was that books form the USA were hard to get around here, so I couldn't follow up on Weber until they translated the 'Honor Harrington' series.
These days it's much easier to get the originals, but that also means I have a list of books I'd like to read before I return to Weber.
I still didn't have the time and money to get the Lensmen series in the original.
@@Dreamfox-df6bg "Insurrection" was the first in the series.
If you can find them, I recommend " Crusade" and " In Death Ground"
From my understanding, Mass Effect utilizes kinetic barriers. The principle behind them is basically reversing the mass effect principle used in the universe’s weaponry, thereby slowing and stopping incoming fire. This is why the GUARDIAN point defense lasers, despite following realistic attenuation issues, are actually effective as a point-blank weapon.
Sounds correct.
The in-game codex goes into great details about the shield upgrade in ME2, it basically says that the upgraded shield is a very thin, erratic mass effect field that shreds projectiles.
the more common shields from mass effect are indeed a slow down projectiles approach.
In a way, the experimental shield upgrade transforms it into more of a deflector, sending shredded projectiles everywhere, rather than trying to stop it.
Minor error: in the Honorverse, the side shields are strong, but not invulnerable.
And, of course, if you have a stationary fortress, you don't need to move anywhere, so you just have a full-coverage "sidewall". The "main" propulsion wedges were also opaque to the ship they were coming from, which is an interesting twist.
Also, it's interesting to see how the series' weapon technology develops. Last time I read a book, someone had just deployed the space submarine. Which, ironically, came after "aircraft carriers", unlike real life.
Segmented shields lead to good gameplay. Try to rotate depleted sections away from fire in the defense, try to maneuver and time your fire so you waste as little as possible on full shields in the offense. Throw in energy management to shift between weapons, engines and shield reload and you have a lot of interesting decisions round to round or moment to moment.
That side on side brawl over coruscant is hands down one of my favorite scenes ever put to screen. So glad someone else agrees. You never get to see to leviathan’s just go at it, even better they’re both theoretically carriers and have no business being that close to anything. Also I do love me some Honorverse. This was a great video, thanks.
I do cringe a bit when people bring that up as in starwars there are different shields and those particular weapons would pass through particle shields pretty easily because they carry all that ablative plasma around their shells
If you want something funny in the anime Martian Successor Nadesico the ship's main defensive barrier the Distortion field is hilariously one dimensional. It's good at absorbing energy but terrible at blocking anything physical or stupidily overpowered. For example the shields could be breached by another if it's been shaped to open a small hole or the shield fails if fired at by a black hole artillery piece that was deployed in Russia. Though on the funnier end if powered enough the barrier is designed to protect ships from the show's "FTL" boson jumping if there's no navigator on board.
I have vague memories (from one of the old novels or something) that in Star Wars if two ships go close up broadsiding like the battle of Coruscant the shields of both vessels kind of interfere with each other basically negating each other.
I think you would classify the Dune shields as "Inertial Manipulation" or "Kinetic" shields. Pretty sure I remember in the books that's how they work: Anything coming in contact with the shield moving fast enough gets blocked, while a slow-moving object can slip through. It's a brother of the "suspensor" anti-grav tech in that universe, which also does funky localized things with gravity and inertia. Why the shields explode in a fusion detonation when hit by a "lasgun" (Which obviously isn't a laser gun, it's some other type of beam weapon that's just "called" a lasgun by the universe yokels) is never explained other than "fusion detonation", but they do, and so does the gun firing on it, but suspensors don't do this even though they are similar tech. Why? That's never explained either. But the danger of lasgun-shield detonations is why energy weapons take a back seat in Dune human-on-human conflict, and kinetic weapons and melee still exist.
I'm not ready to cut the cord with having shields, but knowing now what I didn't as a kid (that tech like shields and transporters were utilized in Star Trek out of budget considerations) helps me to distance myself from needing them in a story. However, a lot of love from the viewers of this channel for the holy wall of flak (blessed by its name) but that's just asking for extra debris flying back into your ship.
I completely cut them out of my universe. To be honest, I cut all major handwavium out of my universe except for things that are absolutely necessary (ultra-efficient fusion rockets).
I’d much rather see/read a ship getting broadsided with gorgeous explosions while damage control teams struggle to reach or repair critical systems/personnel than some guy standing behind a computer saying, “Shields at 20%.”
Ion fields/storms severely dampen the use of transporter use in ST, and I do a FB RP page that uses ST tech (amongst others) and transporters aren't used alot in the Storylines (like planetary invasions, ship to ship action) as we use shuttles, breaching pods or droppods (like ODST pods from Halo) to deliver troops. Don't need my soldiers scattered all over a sector of space because some enemy is using an ion field generator to protect from transporter beams, how about a "fuck you" pod, yes? Lol
Again, we use normal "bubble shields", armor and ablative armor coating on our warships, just to make them last a few more minutes in fleet battles.
I really like the Langston field in The Mote in Gods Eye. It absorbs energy, distributes it around the field, and radiates it away. Space battles usually end with one one sides field getting so hot it melts the ship it's protecting.
Your opponent is either dead or fully functional - but no inbetween. Makes the whole surrendering thing an interesting proposition.
I like the Beam Shields in Gundam F91 & Victory Gundam. They takes the same tech used in the setting’s lightsaber-equivalent and instead of projecting a sword they project flat planes of cutting/disintegrating energy.
The most out there shields I've ever read was a old scifi book when I was in college (sorry don't remember the name). Ships had Space-time shields, basically they form a bubble around the ship thats only a Planck length thick. However they can control space-time expansion in it so that when a incoming object hits it, space-time is instantly expanded within that Planck length to near infinite. This means that wars are almost pointless because no one can actually hurt anyone else, there is even personal shields that do the same thing. The only way to kill another ship in the book is when they drop out of FTL early (the good guys have a prototype weapon) the main villains end up next to a super massive star and trigger a super nova. In an attempt to survive it they push the expansion to near infinite and it rebounds collapsing them into a singularity.
@Sci - when you said "multiversal phase torpedo," I thought you said "multiversal phase burrito." My first thought was I should build a missile is Space Engineers and call it such... and then backed up the audio and realized I mis-heard. Still contemplating a burrito torpedo. XD
Realistically, plasma screens could scatter incoming particle and laser weapons thus attenuating their power. Less focus makes the energy spread out across the hull and allows armor to more easily resist impacts. The weakness is that guns would bypass them rather reliably. That said, a powerful enough magnetic field would impact bullets, but given the velocity involved, it would need to be insanely strong to sheer or deflect the incoming projectiles.
i remember the Space Battleship Yamato, they said the shields were a time displacement barrier that shifted time by a few milliseconds that caused anything going though them to be dispersed or shredded apart.
I'm curious where you heard that from. All the resources I can find talk about the special Garmillan armor coating or the wave motion shields that use quantum superpositions or something.
Starfleet Battles has an additional category: Power Absorber Panels.
The extra-galactic species, the Andromedans don't use shields at all, instead, they have panels that absorb incoming damage and convert it into power that can fill the ship's batteries and be used for any ship function except movement.
I enjoy all of SCIENCE INSANITY videos
I made a scifi universe for am RP community. The ships use Point shields controlled by onboard AI. They 'Flash' a deflector screen in the path of an incoming attack. But there's a bit of timelag on each flash, so the weakness of the system is overwhelming firepower.
Most ships use low firerate beam emitters.
Two random things i love about the Halo shields lore (even if its more of a only in the books thing), is that the shields are not only so strong that they can stop MAC rounds cold but the impact can, and will, still send the ship hit spinning in space from Newtons Third Law (something a lot of other syfi worlds never really bring up), but they have to lower the shields in order to fire.
That's right, every time the Covenant fires something plasma, they have to open a hold in their defenses otherwise they would damage their own ship via backblast, which means that if you were to get close enough and plant a nuke on the ship, the energy would double back on itself and destroy the ship.
The most essential part of any sci-fi shield: it fails, it always fails.
My favorite shield recently has to be Stellar Blade’s opening scene. The landing ship deploys a shield covering such a tiny part of the ship that most incoming fire just hit the parts the shield didn’t cover. It failed instantly and spectacularly.
YEEEEESSSSSS! FINALLY, THE HONORVERSE IS MENTIONED IN A SCIFI BREAKDOWN!
I actually saw this video suggesting shields that have to be calibrated to deflect specific amounts of damage and damage types. So you could get through an enemy’s shields by launching frequent attacks of changing intensity or type so the enemy is constantly having to adjust their shields and during those adjustments your attacks can get through.
Allegedly the bubble shield trope started with StarTrek in the 1960s because it was a lot cheaper to use basic fx to create a shield looking thing than to destroy models which took along time to make. The trope stuck and now we are stuck with it.
One of the more interesting aspects of Star Trek: Enterprise was the lack of shielding on the NX-01. They polarized the hull plating and hoped for the best. Some of the cutscenes which showed the Enterprise with large sections of plating blasted away did a great job at conveying the ship was not built for war.
I think the idea of subdividing your bubble shield into an array of zones does make sense since it allows for spreading out damage and shield reduction. If one zone takes too much fire and is close to collapse you do not loose all of your protection and need to change your position to give the weakened shield time to recover. You can't just sit still and take the hits.
True bubble shields have the benefit of you can also protect another smaller ship, by getting said ship inside the shield bubble before you raise the bubble. Though this would potentially come at the cost of maneuverability meaning the enemy will have an easier time pounding a single zone reducing the time of protection.
Bubble shield are like a castle wall in a way in that their time multipliers. The extend the time the ship can remain in combat, but it is not unlimited unless the enemies weapons are so weak as to not matter. But in most cases, there is a distinct time limit with bubble shields, before their reduced to non-effectiveness and then you must rely on other protective options like armor or running away.
Honestly, I think Stargate actually does the Bubble shields.
First, various species have different colored shields that also somewhat indicate their strength. Like, the Orange/Yellow shields the Goa'uld and older Ancients are using are weaker then the Blue/White shields of the Asgard, Ori and more modern Ancients.
Also, different weapons cause a different color when hit, responding to the color of the shot, which I kinda like.
But also, when the shields go down, they show how the shot actually gets through the shield and impacts the hull, especially great with beams.
And, it looks cool when the shields absorb the heat from atmospheric entries. Or the freaking sun!
It's fucking HOT outside
Yes, yes it is. And I cleared brush in it Monday.
Honestly, hot take here, I think the classic bubble shield has its place. When giant space battle cruisers can lob the equivalent of France's nuclear arsenal at eachother, I don't see how armor and damage control are going to help. Space battles would be very short, with glass cannon starships obliterating eachother in single shots. At that point, either go with shields, or don't bother with manned ships at all, which kinda limits the scope of your space opera.
One of my favorite instances of shields in anime is in Turn-A Gundam. The Moonrace looking to recolonize an Earth set back to the Stone Age (technology eating nanomachines) and currently in an era that resembles the begininnings of the industrial revolution arrive with mobile suits(giant robots) centuries more advanced than the technology levels of the Earthlings and start pushing around the Earth forces. A few episodes in, however, the Earthlings have uncovered caches of pre apocalypse mobile suits with "primative" ballistic weaponry, and it's discovered that the advanced Moonrace mobile suits havine developed past provectile based weaponry have actually sacrificed hard armor for lighter anti-beam coatings and i-field energy shields. Both of which provide little to no protection against a slug of metal or an explosive shell bringing them to a stalemate even with the technological imbalance.
I personally prefer the shield bubble as a shield, mainly because I dislike the magic armor needed to explain hull armor being nearly indestructible.
How does it withstand a blast from the sun? Well, it's because they found this unique material you've never heard of, and trust me it is possible to find in space but not on earth. And why did they not overcome it with a more powerful weapon? Well, reasons.
Energy shields are a bit more believable, especially in settings with energy weapons, for you don't have to make fake armor to explain how a ship can survive. You can explain it by the maneuverability of the ship and the amount of energy it can produce.
That said, I think energy shields are underutilized because there are so many creative ways that no one uses.
For example, why has no one gone with the idea of impenetrable shields, in that the enemy can't hit you, but you can't fire back? Imagine a scenario that, due to such shields, the only way to win is to devolve into old naval battles where ships were warships and pure battering rams. Tell me a scenario where starships playing chicken wouldn't be fun or cool.
Another is lean in different types where energy shields deflect or absorb a particular type, and you have to figure out which to utilize in a battle based on enemy-preferred weapon types.
The "shields work both ways" option also tends to go "they open tiny holes in the shield to fire" because it allows for a dramatic scene where someone somehow slips through the hole while the weapons are firing. I want to say I saw this at least once in Trek, but forget the episode. The suspension of disbelief required for either ship to survive a ram at the speeds most things are generally even implied to be moving in sci-fi is also a bit of a hard sell.
As for shield-modulation shenanigans, those are intermittently a thing depending on setting as the capacity to modulate a shield to protect against specific things tends to also imply either the capacity to likewise remodulate weapons (typically negating the point entirely), or that the universe is full of morons that somehow know about shield-modulation but never think to use two separate weapons at the same time with mutually exclusive modulation requirements. See: ant Trek with the Borg, EVE Online, Dual Universe, and the one episode of SGU where they try this against an alien drone swarm and it works for all of the 5 seconds it takes the drones to switch from shooting energy weapons to going kamikaze.
I read a book once where the shield was almost invulnerable, to the extent that when it collapsed, the crew would be dead before they knew it.
But the shield stopped anything going out, as well, and blocked light.
So the crew couldn't see what was happening outside. They had to guess when to drop the shield.
In fleet battles, they could shield up, but not participate in the fight.
So they had to drop the shield, shoot, then raise it again.
@@patrickkenyon2326 That sounds interesting, and glad there are some people with a creative streak.
@@raw6668 I wish I could remember the author, but it was a long time ago, and I read a lot of books.
I really like the shields in the "The Last Angel" series. They all function on the same principels bur each faction has their own way of doing it with different pros and cons. The Compact has the traditionnel "Bubble" shields that are the toughest because the energy hitting it is distributet over a large area but they also take the longest to regenerate when downed. The Principality has a lot of really small shield squares in multiple layers that they move to wherever they are shot at from, they are really weak but regenerate extremly fast. And then there is the Confederacy which has one big shield at each facing of the ship. Regenerate a bit faster then the bubbles and when on fails, the other sides of the ship still have shields.
So I don't remember where it was from, but a friend of mine told me about something he was reading where the shields were a magnetic envelope style deflector meant for dust, someone figured out that for space battles they could fill it with a bunch of magnetic scrap/particulate mater to make people shoot through.
One of the few times the No touchy bubble is used well is in the movie Wing Commander. The shields were full block both ways. So to fire you had to drop the shields for a few seconds before bringing the shields back up.
You know what, this entirely slipped my mind as an idea. You're right, that is a much better implementation of shields, and now that i think about it i remember reading a book where the plasma shields (perfect no touching bubble) worked both ways, and the protagonists slipped a missile through the shield right as it dropped to let the parent ship fire out.
I wish i thought of that in time to make it into the video.
My favourite are the void shields. They are bubble shields that can only take 1 to 3 hits, and that's it. Then they are gone until they can recharge. I imagine them as giant capacitors that automatically dump all their energy to nullify 1 hit. Also they are useless against torpedoes and shuttles. So the cheap easy stuff gets nerfed a little and the big, harder to hit with stuff REALLY fucking hurts! AND they only do one job and only job only. That just makes sense for a warmachine. Also do the star wars scene video. Its awesome.
And losing your voids before you can safely disable them yourself can be worse than just taking a hit. In Titanicus there are a few examples of titans getting their shields blown out catastrophically and practically disintegrating before a follow up shot is even fired.
Well, I'm in this one. Let's start with the topic of Honorverse shields. Basically, the type of shield can be differentiated into two different types caused by the displacement of the ship. One is the impulse edges. Those are vector drivers that generate that beautiful prism of your graph. Up, down and to the side. They are a little weaker.
The other is the Warshawsky sails that act as primary thrusters.
Both types of drives have their bases in the gravitational drive detailed in our own explained gravitational warp drives, theorized by NASA. Notes aside, they are in the testing phase and in general they seem to work.
This style of combat consists of throwing thermonuclear powered laser bombs and antimatter warheads at the other. And that missiles can harmonize with the ships' fields to penetrate them and release their payload of death. All this hoping that they will cause a critical failure in the inertial dampers or cause an overload in the impulse fields and collapse, or that they will incapacitate or kill the rival crew.
The other excuses for this style of combat are insane distances and speeds. Only missiles with their own engines can travel fast and far enough to accomplish anything.
We can say that they are not space magic, but a simplified version of a gravitational distortion fields. Impacts pass and can collapse from overload like a bubble shield.
Another thing this author was also involved with the Starfire novels. That tabletop wargame of the year of Methuselah. The rules of empire building, space combat, and technological development upon which Masters of Orion, Stellaris, and similar games were written. That game is still alive in its sixth version.
End of the turbonerd moment.
And the Laser deciding battles between capitals rarely happen in wars between Haven and Manticore. Both sides had moved away from that even before the war. Hell, a Manty SD class dropped all heavy lasers.
Lasers would be used more often against pirates and Frontier Fleet
I like the shields from Babylon 5 movie Third Space. They are like Star Trek shields but with enough firepower on the front it actually opens a hole in the back.
Oh and Halo, mainly in the books MAC guns that are used to destroy the Covenant ships. Conventional weapons did work so they use massive rail guns to just throw massive metal at really high speeds lol
Babylon 5 is probably the best IP for tech level growth between races and every type of offensive and defensive system.
Keep up the content man, 👌
Interesting take. I break the shields down as follows:
1: Obstruction. This generates a wall of energy, matter, or something else in the path of incoming shots. bullet hits obstruction, not the hull.
2: Deflector: Some kind of energy field (usually electromagnetic or gravity based) surrounds the ship and drags or deflects the path of incoming shots. These actually exist, the earth's magnetosphere being a prominent example, and small scale artificial prototypes are under development in various labs
3: Displacement. Similar to the obstruction shield, it puts something in the path of the enemy shot, but not thing. A portal of some kind that sends the incoming fire somewhere/when else (I believe one iteration of Doctor Who's Daleks used this to send incoming weapons fire to the moments after the Planck Time, rendering most non-temporal weapons useless against them)
I'm down with some harder sci-fi, making all the space combat suicidally dangerous, but these tropes exist for a reason. They're useful storytelling elements.
4 mins after posting, whats up yall? Haven't watched it yet, has Steve been fed?
Great video
I agree wholeheartedly. Deflector shields make sense for a navigational sense, and make fighters make sense by letting the weapons get closer, but otherwise let the gritty armor do the work.
Thank you for mentioning the Honorverse and everything you said about the narrative reasons for the way their impellors & sidewalls work are correct, but the side walls also have an aspect of gravitational based deflector shields to them, since in the Honorverse all tech is based on gravity manipulation. It it is specifically mentioned that their sidewalls bend lasers, and there is a lot of space inside of the impellor wedge so the lasers do not have to be bent much to miss at long range but get your laser emitter closer and a bend of the same number of degrees is not enough to make a the laser miss. Nuke where the missile brings the warhead inside the side wall sound like they should be a hard counter, and they do use this in the second book, but for the most part point defense in super strong and carefully planned, especially near the end of the series where a fleet missile salvo is often multiple thousands of missiles that have to be stopped.
I've been watching your vids for awhile and love them all, but I wanted to thank you for the Honorverse reference. I don't tho k I've heard it mentioned on any other sci-fi channels I watch. You're right though, David Weber himself basically said it was set up to be Horatio Hornblower in space
Have you read the collaboration between David Weber and Steve White?
" In Death Ground"?
¿Honorverse?
@@lucasdure154 A book series by David Weber. The main character is Honor Harrington. Thus, the " Honorverse" is the universe the story takes place in.
In Death Ground is actually part of his Starfire series, but yes, I've read that series, it's different from Honorverse but still awesome. David Weber might have to work to actually write a bad book. There are some I haven't gotten into but none that I've patently disliked
I'll also add that Steve White himself is another awesome sci-fi author
Honorverse comment: Others have noted the Sidewalls act like deflectors in some ways. They bend incoming fire away. The Manticorans did develop sidewalls that work on the front and stern, but at the price of not being able to accelerate while they were active. They also developed a two-stage version of the forward sidewall, one being a disc that would partially cover the bow. It would allow acceleration, but not provide complete coverage of the forward arc. It was considered better than nothing.
The developments in missile technology take a lot of the broadside combat away. Ships still have energy armament, but a lot of later battles are missile duels. Or massacres if it's the Solarian League vs Manticore, since the former failed to tech rush. I think Weber compared it to the development of radar-directed naval artillery. Or maybe that was the Apollo fire control system in action.
There's a VERY old variant of the bubble shield called the Prismatic Sphere, used by Golden Age scifi authors such as E.E. "Doc" Smith (decades before D&D was first published, don't @ me), which was an absolute barrier; if you raised the shield, you couldn't shoot out, and were usually trying to disengage/flee. You could visually tell how much strength it had remaining by what color it radiated when struck...violet and blue meant strong, green and yellow meant middling strength (or reduced from maximum), orange & red meant failing, black was essentially no shield remaining, completely down. This would be much more cinematic and descriptive rather than shouting percentages. The Ebon Globe variant was just as absolute, but gave NO exterior clues as to its strength, up until the moment it overloaded and failed. Good for enemy bosses 👾
One of the best shield systems in sci-fi is seen in The Mote In God's Eye. It's a bubble shield, functionally, but it's opaque black (because if it's got to stop light energy like a laser beam, obviously it's not going to let a visible spectrum through), and as it absorbs energy, whether kinetic or thermal, it radiates that energy and glowing, starting at red and progressing up towards violet until it finally fails and releases ALL the stored energy at once, incinerating the ship inside and anything near it. Battles are races to dump enough energy into an enemy's shield that it outstrips its radiating capacity.
I always loved how Macross as a franchise justified using the "pin-point barrier system" of trackball controlled mini-deflectors. Turns out in the Macross universe, bubble shields don't simply collapse when they're fully saturated. They violently, *massively* explode. The title ship's sole use of its bubble shield left the majority of the Canadian province of Ontario a crater. Humanity's gone out of its way to not repeat that.
Starsector (a Game) has a novel way to make the Bubble Shield actually tense and nail biting.
Incoming damage that's mitigated by a shield gets added to a ship's heat management system (called Flux), a ship has only a certain capacity and dissipation rate for Flux.
Overheat and your ship is dead in the water and has to reboot... while the enemy ships are within firing distance.
Shields are generally directional and take several moments to "Unfold" from wherever the player points their mouse, if it is not a frontal locked shield. A shield that is directional can rotate around a ship independently of the ship, but does so fairly slowly.
The game further specializes shield tech by having three different technology niches for ship hulls. Low Tech, Midline, and High Tech.
Lower tech shields being less efficient on both maintaining and withstanding combat stress, but having more conventional armor and easy access to good ole Dakka guns; high tech ships have the opposite design philosophy, and almost exclusively use hyper specialized energy and missile weapons.
You can also mod a ship to not have shields, increasing the Flux dissipation because you lack a bow-to-stern magic bullshit shield emitter system.
I've come to love using Magnetic fields to hold plasma screens around my ships for shielding. Not only does it melt/soften kinetic projectiles, but it can mess with Energy Weapons allowing for the armor to tank the hit. It's more of disruption/Deflection shield, judging by the examples made in the video.
I had truly never put much thought of this before. Thanks for that. ;)
I actually kinda like gravity shielding. In the star carrier series they came up with a way to use gravity shielding in a unique way. When a warhead detonates near the ship the gravity shield reacts to it, forming a bubble around the explosion and effectively slows down time for the explosion until the shit has safely passed the blast radius
I like the hard sci-fi perspective, interstellar travel sort of necessitates being able to defend against projectiles, so any type of shield that descends from that makes it believable.
YAY! HONOR HARRINGTON REFERENCE! It's silly, but I love it...and the treecats.
@jasoncrowell8863 Nimitz is the goat. Mischievous devil when in a good mood and a 6 legged buzzsaw when angry.
A) Mentions of 'tearing canvas' is now my go-to for living death.
B) As a fan of Honorverse, it always makes me laugh that it's described as 'broadsides in space' but that style of combat vanishes from the series after book 6.
Shields are great for space battles, in that they make them happen more often. Especially in older days, making two ships fight, and actually firing at eachother was expensive.... but making it so the ships actually have to change the model (physical or digital) to reflect hits, and show actual damage, or even change how they fight then... it just is harder to pull off, and create. Now yes, generally a no shield fight might be more memorable and look better... but if you get a third the number, that's obviously a bit of a problem for some shows that just want more fights and conflict.
I can make a basic actor type in Unreal Engine in a few hours, that you can stick any ship model into... and it would give that ship a shield that visually reacts to incoming attacks, and with each ship getting some weapon points I stick on it, bam I can quickly automate battles mostly automatic, just say who fires what when, etc... But having actual damage and hull effects, that takes much more time and it's work redone almost every single fight, unlike for shield systems you do it once, mostly done for the rest of the series/game/project/etc...
And it has freedom for story too, if voyager or other ships can get into scraps more often with actual combat, yet don't just die or break down as the hits stack up, because the shield tanked most of the damage. You'd get a fraction of the fights in some of these if the story didn't let the ship actually take hits of any size.
Now we have some that get past this like battlestar, they rely on cool fighter combat, with no shields, and the holy wall of flack, so they still get a nice visual without actual damage to the ship. And the excuse that the ship has meters of armor plate so some blasts getting through aren't actually as bad as they looked... still, that obviously has it's limits. You either need to block incoming damage, or to have abundant options to repair/refit. Frankly exploratory ships that just have insane repair and construction would be cool, with the crew being in a heavily armored core so you can see the damage, see the lost capabilites during a fight, but as long as they survive and find random rocks or resources and have a bit of time they'll be ok... but then why don't they build an army of drones or other ships or stuff with that tech... it gets troublesome if you go that route...
Shields, are just easy writing, and an excuse to let you have more flashy battles in your story without real consequences to the story as a writer, but that also means those battles lack consequences to the story as the viewer... so they are mostly just visual fluff, sometimes ok, but obviously has it's weaknesses.
Also remembering that option in that one anime, galactic heroes or something, they had a remake more recently, where the giant star fortresses (mini deathstars) have oceans of liquid metal on their surface. And the idea is any lasers that hit it, just vaporize the metal into gas that helps block more, and then it settles back down to the station thanks to it's gravity, and recollects in time. Though if you strap engines to one of these and have it get close enough to another, you can thicken the shield on the front as gravity pools the oceons to the between point, but this could leave the backsides shallow or outright exposed to supporting fleets firepower.
Right in time as I was developing spaceships shields for my story. Thank you SCI
Whatcha gonna go with?
I liked the SGU shields. They didn't really deplete, but kinda worked statistically (until the enemy figured out their frequencies). It just stopped a certain percentage of attacks or in other words had a given chance to stop an attack.
3:30 Er... Where is the soruce that say SW deflector work like that? I thought they operate the same as bubble shield.
Sci the reason shields in space battles exist is to limit the effectiveness of weapons so battles aren’t over in seconds or the creator needs to make everyone in the setting forget that proximity fuses and timed detonations exist. Because 90% of the battles in The Expanse have been over or both sides killed each other if they had proximity fuses.
I like the Niven universe bubble shield (the Langston Field). Flicker shields used in the Renegade Legion game were pretty cool too.
For the most part, shields definitely are a hold over of people not wanting to deal with the actual effects of damage, visually or narratively, but I think they still have their place. Just, they should probably be a lot more nitch than they are. Like, as you said with the covenant, they definitely do serve a purpose of "we out class you", but also they can introduce a new mechanic to things that armor can't: it's a certain amount of damage you can absorbed consequence free. Which can open up all sorts of interesting tactics, like skirmish ships that go in, and duck out to recharge the shields. But that works far better in something like 40k where void shields usually go down and back up a lot in a fight, vs Star Trek where shields at zero mean you are probably dead already.
Even better if they are one of the kinds have rules to bypass them, like needing small openings to fire out of or not stopping things going slow enough.
Not to mention, if you use shields for other things, like protecting an area from bombardment, it can be hard to justify not including them on ships.
Exploiting the weakness and strength of bubble shields with coordinated wave attacks. I like that.
There's also the possibility of planetary shields. Maybe the technology to make them small and put them on ships doesn't exist yet, or isn't worth the cost because armor is more readily available. Or maybe the power requirements are exorbitant.
Also, ships can y'know... disengage. Planets can't.
Bubble shields can be bad in books and movies, but they're awesome in video games, for a very simple reason: they turn the very abstract Hit Points mechanic into something concrete, visible, and intuitive. Most games that use shields also use health, but getting hit on the latter is usually very bad (with no way to recover, or penalties with lowered health) while the shield acts as a buffer allowing risks to be taken to some extent. Shield up? Play normally, enjoy the fight. Shield down? RUN!..but it's still recoverable, where if you only had health, it would be game over.
Bubble shields can work story-wise, but they need to have limits. Typically: only effective against specific attacks (usually lasers or anything with extremely low mass, as point defence and chaff can take care of missiles, which leaves hard and reactive armour to handle common shells and slugs); can only absorb a limited amount of damage before they overheat and must be rebooted, creating a window for attackers and forcing the user to do hit and run tactics around cover (yes, moons count as cover); shields that also stop things from going out and must be lowered before shooting, with a delay before they can be raised again (battles become mind games with commanders trying to guess each other's firing patterns).
Im a fan of the directional shielding, especially when writers know what theyre doing, which they often dont in TV they just scream percentages and move on.
As it is when you get the fun maneuver and positioning based combat and system management that can make for engaging fights in small scale combat. such as moving to stay in a weakened section, rotating to present a fresh side of shielding while the other is repaired or cycled which then may cause smaller strike craft to take advantage of. redirecting power to sections to boost them (or really strengthen a section for a ram). and on boosting power in a direction formations take advantage by having all ships in one area present stronger shields in one direction while relying on others in the formation to do the same.
Also yes less shielding is overall better, though there is something to be said for only having them be a counter measure for energy weapons but a rail gun slug or a missile will still ruin your day.
I suppose I'd generally agree with you on the no shield preference, definitely the result of being spoiled by good hard sci-fi ...
Directional shields that can't be usefully made in to a full bubble and are stuck covering only a single arc are a nice bit of plot, simultaneously explaining away why ships aren't blown to bits by any space-dust in the way while moving at superluminal speeds, why ships need to be anywhere near eyeball-range when fighting (getting around the shield faster than your target can turn said shield), and providing the vaguest technological explanation for things like the glowy transparent shield that lets you see a protagonist's face from the front as they dramatically brace said shield against a storm of small-arms-fire in a narrow corridor. Sadly I haven't seen it used in a long time.
As far as the things mentioned here go...
Grav-shields (when done right) make sense because they become the mentioned "deflector shields". Anyone that's gotten in to a game of gravity-cannon tag in Space Engineers knows you don't need a stupid-powerful shield, a relatively weak one that affects a large area is usually good enough to nudge projectiles far enough off course as to make them miss entirely.
More conventional bubble-shields are generally fairly boring, but I can generally forgive them for the time they save the animators/cgi-artists as long as things stay consistent.
Bubble / Directional shields that worked were divided in old games to 2 types depending on game universe:
1. They stop all Energy weapons that are overall superior weaponry in the setting design to destroy every armor type, hence shields ware developed, but can't stop ballistics or missiles that can pass through them while being mitigated by armor.
2. Cyberstorm type - Shields can stop all and any kinetic weaponry without much of a problem all day long, but are drained by energy weapons that are almost useless against armor, and when dropped ...kinetics are used to deal with the armor.
I think even Starsector used the second type of shield design, in both bubble and directional modes.
One of my favorite shields have to be the Flux Shields of the game Starsector. These shields don't run down like most shields; they count up, increasing in Flux the longer they are on or the more they are struck. If you capacitors completely fill up they overload, and your ship is completely disabled for a time as the Flux overload shuts systems down. In addition most flux shields don't completely cover the ship, they have openings towards the engines, well justifying fighter craft and other fast ships that can get around to these opennings.
Trek oddly had 2 types of shields.
The TNG shields that became common were in part studio budget but secondarily it was more of an advancement of defensive systems with the Deflector running nonstop. However the bubble was not as effctive.
Then you have the TOS series that used a shield system that had the wrap closer to the hull making the armor on the Constitutional class a thing.
I remember reading a science fiction novel as a teenager where two fleets met in the middle of space and used their bubble shields to push against each other. The fleet with the stronger shields would destroy the other fleet's shields and then their ships. I can't remember the name of the book or the author, Clifford D. Simak, maybe?
Battlestar Galactica and Babylon5: YAY! No shields just tons of armor.
Hell yeah Honor Harrington mentioned !
I actually like the implementation of shields in Legend of the Galactic Heroes when it comes to space combat. The ships do have shields but they only really work at ultra long ranges because the laser weapons they use dissipate enough at extreme ranges that the shields they do have can stop them. The end result is ships are forced to get into medium and short ranges to actually do damage leading to a lot of tactical combat between gigantic kilometer long ships. This also makes fighters actually worthwhile since if you want to slap a target from very far away fighters can bring the pain.
I approve the use of the music from "Hardspace: Shipbreaker" in the outro ❤
SC. I, you know anything about Star Citizen? cause id like to hear some stuff from that verse if you know it. I enjoy the jankiness at least.
The anime bending laser system could just be a form of cloaking used for defensive purposes. Basically, real life meta materials that are being developed for stealth technology use some form of magnetic field to bend light around what they’re trying to hide, although in this case they would be used for defending against incoming lasers. In the Castle Federation book series by Glynn Stewart, the primary ship to ship gun used are positron lances (aka antimatter guns) so magnetic fields are used to deflect the incoming streams of antimatter away from the ship. I suppose this would make both cases deflector shields but I’m not 100% certain
Shields, for when you don't want to damage your model. I get what Sci is saying, they can feel like reduce stakes.
Meanwhile Star Trek with any budget: operation return from DS9
@@barrybend7189 True enough, DS9 during the dominion war and the CGI switch chucked the bubble shield visual effect.
@@I.Simmonds yeah as the shields in Trek are more described as fitting to the ships like an extra layer. They were never bubbles even in TOS. As much as games do it for simplified animations. Only if a ship extends the shield would it be a bubble.
Honorable mention to magnetic shields
I like polarized armor plating. It makes sense in most cases because you need to protect the ship from radiation anyway, why not ramp it up if someone starts shooting plasma at you, and pdc's can take care of missiles. But you cant cover every possible surface with armor, so the danger would come from pieces of the ship getting penetrated or blown off.
I think bubble shields work best in things like Independence Day. The shield WAS impenetrable, but as shown when Will Smith's character is dogfighting with them, and when the guy in Area 51 shoots the recon ship it isn't visible until you impact it. This is also shown in the early dogfighting scene where the fighters take a missile, get knocked in the same direction as the missile impact a bit but the shield lights up in a wave around the craft showing that it is dissipating energy.
Basically it stops the majority of the damage the same way a crumple zone on a car does, it spreads the energy out.
My problem is I've fallen deeply in love with The Expanse's gritty depiction of space and all the sci-fi bullshit handwave doesn't feel as good as the fact that the most dangerous weapon is ALWAYS present when it comes to planets: Orbital velocity. Real big rock go fast? Planet go bye-bye.
I like when shields aren’t just walls. Like certain weapons or tactics can be useful to pierce even a fully charged shield.
Daniel from Spacedock would definitely agree with you, I think I remember he specifically stated as a general rule of thumb, no shields for space battles.
I have a different rule: no shields no space battles.
I liked making a distinction between physical and energy. Wards could be sonic shields blocking physical attacks and Barriers ionized shields against energy attacks. I had written these in a personal combat setting but I wonder if it would make ship combat interesting.
You're forgetting the main reason the bubble shield exists in franchises. Models were expensive, and blowing them up every episode would be prohibitively expensive. An interesting example of cost informing and developing genre.
Regarding the Space Battleship Yamato bit, Gamillon ships didn't actually have Shields so much as a special armor/(paint I think?) that basically nullifies energy weapons of "relatively" low outputs, but not the the sheer output of Wave Motion Technology. e.g. Yamato OP until it isn't.
Honorverse sidewalls are basically classic deflectors - they bend laser beams away and scatter them so the armor can take it.
So I'm making some homebrew stuff for dnd to make a mech game, and one way to make shield useful without outright doing what you are saying is they have a certain amount of HP per turn, usually mechs are equipped with enough fire power to pierce through and damage the armor each turn, so in this way it instead is used to mitigate some of the damage, but not all of it. I might make some shields with higher capacity but lower Regen, or shields that reduce all attacks by a small amount. But then what about advanced phase shields, phasing the mech out of existence when a big enough attack crosses the threshold or is detected early, but if the attack is close or fast enough it could clip through the mech part way through its phasing.
Aw yeah this is the stuff.
Preliminary hot take: Shield generators should always be external weak spots if your story is meant to be focused on war.
I've got to give a shout-out to Traveller's Black-globe generator shields, which no one fully understands how they work, or what laws of physics they break, but they absorb all energy forced into them which you then either bleed out through radiators, or cook your capacitors.
They've got a nice bit of balance to them, being that yes, these things will suck all the kinetic force out of a missile, and absorb all that power, but it's a redirection from it to either the ship's radiators or to the ship's jump-drive capacitor bank. The energy has to go somewhere, and when there's no more space, well, you don't have to worry about those pesky pirates taking your stuff any more. Or paying off your ship mortgage.