Shields, what are they, how do they work?

Lily from anim.o.v.e

Lily from anim.o.v.e
So, after shields

cannot protect my ships from the magical sandsurfing in space making my paint wear of faster than it can dry.
cannot even protect from the fartfumes of thargs.
cannot proect me from hatch breaker limpets.

So what weird handwaveium are weapons made of, that they can be "deflected?" by shields, while basically evertyhing else can't?

Also, what are they? What is that forcefield made of? Is there any officiel lore science explaining that? When we can burn off the corrosive effect by heating the ship up, the shields surely can not be made of something that is hot, otherwise the fartbubbles would never enter the area within the shield. How can we even land with shields without them not getting shut down or us bouncing off the surface? Or enter exit the ship as a person/SLF/SRV/limpet without having to shut it down? Also, don#t tell me this is "speed" related, if so msisile catching me with hardly any higher speed than me would pass as well.

So do we have a proper non handwaveium explanation on how they work and what they are?
 

Trollymctrollerson

T
Probably not. It's all bullocks. Why isn't a collision classified as kinetic damage? How does an incendiary bullet have no inertia? Why is projectile velocity not additive with ship velocity? The answer? Because video game. Stop thinking about it. It's not a physics simulator despite what some local egg heads might try to tell you.
 

Noctover

Noctover
Good questions. Also; why when i plumit into the toaster rack at 300ms is my ship fine but shields drop yet i curb a rock in my SRV and lose 20% of my hull when my shields are unaffected!
 

pzykozomatik

pzykozomatik
Space magic. We can spare ourselves the discussion though and just look up the exactly same thread on the fandom pages of any sci-fi universe.
 

Stealthie

Stealthie
Well, at the risk of giving this more thought than it deserves...

Presumably our weapons fire things (both lasers and projectiles) that are fairly consistent in nature; ammunition made from the same components, lasers collimated in similar ways etc.

That being the case, maybe our Shields are calibrated to absorb those specific things?
Maybe a "broad spectrum shield" would draw a huge amount of power so the only way to make Shields practical is to tune them to absorb specific things?

That'd explain why they can negate the effects of some stuff but not others.

It also means you could, theoretically, make bullets out of space-dust which'd completely bypass a Shield but I guess nobody in the ED universe has figured out how to do that.
 

Mephane

Mephane
Lily from anim.o.v.e said:
So, after shields

cannot protect my ships from the magical sandsurfing in space making my paint wear of faster than it can dry.
cannot even protect from the fartfumes of thargs.
cannot proect me from hatch breaker limpets.

So what weird handwaveium are weapons made of, that they can be "deflected?" by shields, while basically evertyhing else can't?

Also, what are they? What is that forcefield made of? Is there any officiel lore science explaining that? When we can burn off the corrosive effect by heating the ship up, the shields surely can not be made of something that is hot, otherwise the fartbubbles would never enter the area within the shield. How can we even land with shields without them not getting shut down or us bouncing off the surface? Or enter exit the ship as a person/SLF/SRV/limpet without having to shut it down? Also, don#t tell me this is "speed" related, if so msisile catching me with hardly any higher speed than me would pass as well.

So do we have a proper non handwaveium explanation on how they work and what they are?
Click to expand...

Don't forget the skimmers' ability to magically turn off shields and thrusters of any spaceship on even the gentlest of physical contacts...
 

Eliza

Eliza
Okay...let's see, what I can make up...

Shields consist of pure Energy and thier purpose is to absord high-energetic em-frequencies. Therefore shields are most effective against energetic attacks and less effective against "slow-moving" projectiles such as missles, limpets, space dust, etc.. An exception are high-velocity kinetic projectiles, such as multi-cannon rounds. Their high amount of kinetic energy comes near to an appropriate em-frequency that a shield is able to absorb to some degree.

Just reminds of the personal shielding in David Lynch's: Dune. In that movie, slow moving targets could get through the shielding and high velocity projectiles will be reflected. (opposite shielding effect as discribed above)

so much for my techno-babble ;)
 

Lily from anim.o.v.e

Lily from anim.o.v.e
DustyArne said:
Realism vs Gameplay..
Click to expand...

the issue is immersion. I am not asking for realism here, but the ingame universe here has such a low consistency it is just all wildly slaped around individual made gameplay aspects it doesn't even fits in any "mechanic" anymore. and then it stats breaking immersion when stuff happens just because a gameplay element is supposed to work. But so far the game feels so unimmerwive due to all these special inconsistencies tha there seems to be no explanaition possibel anymore.

Eliza said:
Okay...let's see, what I can make up...

Shields consist of pure Energy and thier purpose is to absord high-energetic em-frequencies. Therefore shields are most effective against energetic attacks and less effective against "slow-moving" projectiles such as missles, limpets, space dust, etc.. An exception are high-velocity kinetic projectiles, such as multi-cannon rounds. Their high amount of kinetic energy comes near to an appropriate em-frequency that a shield is able to absorb to some degree.

Just reminds of the personal shielding in David Lynch's: Dune. In that movie, slow moving targets could get through the shielding and high velocity projectiles will be reflected. (opposite shielding effect as discribed above)

so much for my techno-babble
wink.png
Click to expand...

why does the sheild then block hitting roids and other objects if we are slow?
Why would people not have developed weapons that utilise this? All i woudl need is some limpets with laser drills or explosive charges flyin through the shields and then explode, or drill holes into the hull.

tbh FD should just implement mechanics basd around simple things, it would make a better space experience, and also make a newbies Life easier.
 
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Cmdr Nemo

Cmdr Nemo
I've never been able to and their probably isn't any answer as to how a shield can allow a ship to fire a weapon at another ship yet deflect or absorb another ship identical weapon being shot at them.

I mean if I stand on one side of a brick wall no one can hit me using their fist for example, yet some how I'm able to hit them with my fist.
 

Stabby_Dave

Stabby_Dave
Trollymctrollerson said:
Probably not. It's all bullocks. Why isn't a collision classified as kinetic damage? How does an incendiary bullet have no inertia? Why is projectile velocity not additive with ship velocity? The answer? Because video game. Stop thinking about it. It's not a physics simulator despite what some local egg heads might try to tell you.
Click to expand...

If I knew how to rep you on an iPhone, I would. Spot on.
 

Bigmaec

Bigmaec
Shields are a number of zeros and ones in the framework of even more zeros and ones.
All those zeros and ones help us to procrastinate and ignore our first world problems.

You're welcome :p

(Searching for scientifical explanations in a game with faster-than-light travel is futile, too)
 

JohnRoberts

JohnRoberts
We don't have the science today, to be able to adequately explain the science of tomorrow. Michael Faraday (a great mind of his time) would not have been able to explain the operation of a Transistor (something so ubiquitous today, we all own and use 100's of millions of them on a daily basis) using only what he knew in his life. I would not claim that it would appear as magic to him, but I'm fairly certain his reaction would be "how little I knew!".

Its only a 150 years since Faraday passed. Imagine how inexplicable the modern world would seem to people from the 8th Century - literally in the Dark Ages.
 

Morbad

Morbad
Lily from anim.o.v.e said:
So do we have a proper non handwaveium explanation on how they work and what they are?
Click to expand...

No, because, as far as we know they are impossible.

Closest thing would be a plasma window, but even if we could create arbitrary shapes that didn't just cover some aperture, it wouldn't have the fantasy properties of the shields in ED or most any other franchise that features anything similar.

Trollymctrollerson said:
How does an incendiary bullet have no inertia? Why is projectile velocity not additive with ship velocity? The answer? Because video game.
Click to expand...

Nothing prevents a game from implementing these things, but many games, including ED, do not. By whatever cost/value estimation Frontier used, it wasn't worthwhile.

Stealthie said:
Well, at the risk of giving this more thought than it deserves...

Presumably our weapons fire things (both lasers and projectiles) that are fairly consistent in nature; ammunition made from the same components, lasers collimated in similar ways etc.

That being the case, maybe our Shields are calibrated to absorb those specific things?
Maybe a "broad spectrum shield" would draw a huge amount of power so the only way to make Shields practical is to tune them to absorb specific things?

That'd explain why they can negate the effects of some stuff but not others.

It also means you could, theoretically, make bullets out of space-dust which'd completely bypass a Shield but I guess nobody in the ED universe has figured out how to do that.
Click to expand...

Not a good explanation because a shield that doesn't block optical wavelengths would be useless against lasers tuned to those wavelengths, and it's not at all hard to make an optical laser.

Wear and tear also only happens in SC, when ostensibly, the ship isn't even moving.

Mephane said:
Don't forget the skimmers' ability to magically turn off shields and thrusters of any spaceship on even the gentlest of physical contacts...
Click to expand...

It's not the contact itself, its that they self-destruct.

Lily from anim.o.v.e said:
the issue is immersion. I am not asking for realism here, but the ingame universe here has such a low consistency it is just all wildly slaped around individual made gameplay aspects it doesn't even fits in any "mechanic" anymore. and then it stats breaking immersion when stuff happens just because a gameplay element is supposed to work. But so far the game feels so unimmerwive due to all these special inconsistencies tha there seems to be no explanaition possibel anymore.
Click to expand...

I agree.

Gameplay would be much improved with some sort of consistency.

As it is, it's impossible to forecast how aspects of the game work and interact because it's all done on an ad hoc piecemeal basis.

In the real world, or any credible setting, up to and including many far higher-fantasy ones than Elite, there are natural (even supernatural) laws that can be used to predict how things will interact. This is not the case with Elite, which is one giant non sequitur.
 

CMDR KRITIKOSK8

CMDR KRITIKOSK8
"Also, don#t tell me this is "speed" related, if so msisile catching me with hardly any higher speed than me would pass as well"

Yes it's perfectly possible to be an speed issues as most missiles and guided weapons detonate upon proximity and not impact
 
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