Well now that you mention it, how do our lasers and munitions get through the our own shields? Are the shields like the airplane propellers on WWI biplanes, connected to our guns via a chain so that our the shields quickly blink off when our bullets pass through? And if so, then I'm a sitting duck when firing my beam weapons for minutes at a time! Very confusing... [wacko]
How do hatch-breaker limpets get through shields?
- Thread starter Verlaine
- Start date
Well now that you mention it, how do our lasers and munitions get through the our own shields? Are the shields like the airplane propellers on WWI biplanes, connected to our guns via a chain so that our the shields quickly blink off when our bullets pass through? And if so, then I'm a sitting duck when firing my beam weapons for minutes at a time! Very confusing... [wacko]
Thats why when I slowly ram my ship at 1m/s the shield doesnt st- Oh wait.
Its because apparently pirates don't blow up ships and when a ship blows up the wreckage magically doesn't contain any cargo. In other words the usual people moaned and moaned and moaned some more so now if we are to play a pirate we are to do so in a gentlemanly fashion.
Oddly enough it wasn't like this in the original Elite of 1984.
I wondered about this a little bit, too. I think it's a combination of things.
For solid projectiles it probably *is* like airplane propellors. For beam weapons I think it's an "energy signture" thing - beams and shields can both be coded to obstruct or pass through each other. Your own shield and beams are configured to a particular frequency/wavelength/whatever which allows them to pass through, but since other ships do not have your particular configuration, their weapons are obstructed.
This also sort of explains things like "phasing sequence" and "concordant sequence" special effects. Phasing sequence would be like a brute force password hack where the beams are continuously shifting calibration such that some portion of the energy always overlaps with the configuration of the enemy shields, allowing the beams to occasionally pass through. Concordant sequence would be you and your wingmates sharing beam and shield calibration data such that the beams could be configured to bolster shield energy.
by osmotic synchronization of the temporal phase modulation of the shield.
pretty basic stuff really...
Maybe shield bubbles aren't rigid, but behave more like a sac of non-newtonian fluid? Smaller points of contact vs larger points of contact, as well as velocity, would dictate how it reacts. Any high velocity impact to the shield will be met with rigidity, smaller, slower objects would initially distort the membrane in a local spot and then pass through, while large surfaces, such as other ships, space station walls, etc, would uniformly compress the bubble along one side but never pass through.
Possibly they are only one way, just like in Star Trek. It's sort of like an invisible stream of magic being blown outwards so as to stop things getting in but not going out. Like an extremely powerful air stream (but without the air).
Doesn't explain the limpets though, or why SRV shields behave differently to collisions than a ship's shields.
I like this as an explanation for the limpets.
Edit: I thought this would auto-merge with my last post... didn't that used to be a thing?
Limpets self-destruct all the time, the resulting explosion is a bit underwhelming. Now if limpets could carry mines... every other guided projectile would become obsolete.
You are not thinking big enough, let it hack the cargo hatch and self destruct inside!
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Yep, exactly. I could remember the premise of the slow knife penetrates the shield but I couldn't remember the movie.
I was going to use a modern day ballistic vest as my example and had a link at the ready to support my position.
Dune works better!
+Rep
Because they make it up as they go along.
How do you know that?
IDK, maybe in 3300 they found a field that only allows objects exiting it to pass through?
Because if you enter a Starport's docking cylinder with no life support or canopy, but active shields, you can suddenly hear and breathe again.
You also heat up just as easily from being in proximity to stars with shields enabled.
Yet here you are in this thread...