Why can't I add shields to my Cobra? It tells me it's too heavy?
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Hull mass doesn't change at all as I've said above. Seeing as the formula only cares about hull mass it should be pretty clear that cargo mass doesn't affect it. So no, cargo mass doesn't weaken shields.
I would assume the quote above yours answers this. The shield strength only takes into account HULL mass, so you can load the ship up with as much as you'd like and not affect it.
You're right it doesn't make sense, now look at an ASP with an A6 and a Python with A3, does it make sense that Python is stronger with the A3? The "puny" A3 is providing the larger Python with better shielding unless the test results are inaccurate.
http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Shield_Generator?file=ShieldGeneratorRatings.png
IMO making the shield strength based primarily off a magic number encoded in the hull makes no sense and leads to strange balancing issues. Where is the Python's huge shield getting its power from since the shield generator is taking the same amount no matter which hull it's on? That power seems unaccounted for on the power plant. If I were balancing ship shielding I would be basing it on hull mass and internal compartment number and size not a abstract hull value for shields. Larger ships probably should have stronger shields than smaller ones because they have larger power plants and generators (although more surface area to protect), that makes sense.
If your going to have most of the shield come from the hull then rename shield generators to shield boosters or augmentors or something, make the hull take power from the power plant and make a ship still have base shields when no booster is fitted.
I would say "could you imagine if weapons worked this way?!", reading your other post however it sounds like they do!? If I'm reading correctly weapons do different damaged based on what hull they are fitted to as well. Very counter intuitive, I guess it could be explained by the efficiency of conductors in the hull going from power plant to weapon for lasers, rail guns and plasma at least, but makes no sense for cannons, it also means huge energy is being wasted somewhere which should be heat or something.
I realize the realism type explanations doesn't matter for gameplay reasons, but this just doesn't seem logically consistent, is immersion breaking and makes it really easy to get balance wrong (looking at you Python).
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Hey Mike, just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to explain this stuff, and am very glad to hear that we'll be getting some more useful numbers in outfitting. Can't wait.
Hey Mike, just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to explain this stuff, and am very glad to hear that we'll be getting some more useful numbers in outfitting. Can't wait.
+1. Threads like these are like finding a pristine metallic ring
+1. Threads like these are like finding a pristine metallic ring
or a USS with 13 platinum cannisters
I don't understand the logic behind providing a differential between a shields rating, class, maximum mass, optimal mass, and then attaching base shield power to the hull.
It would mean that the generator itself is the minor factor when determining the shield strength of the craft. More a modifier than a provider.
It would seem that the cost of a larger shield on a smaller ship becomes less economical. The base shield strength of a small ship being lower.
This brings up the question "If a larger shield is supposed to be more effective when shielding less mass, but a smaller ship has a lower base shield strength than a larger ship, why bother with mass adjustments?".
It seems like four people all sat in different rooms and came up with the shield system, then piled their work together and called it a day.
None of it makes sense.
Mike already touched on this in one of his posts:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=102277&page=2&p=1584275#post1584275
Essentially, the devs want different ships to be able to have different shield strengths as a property of the ship (this allows them to use a strong or weak shield as a balance factor between ships).
They don't want to have a unique line of shield generator modules for each ship (as this creates a bunch of extra hassle for them to manage).
Having base shield strength be a property of the ship that is modified by the size and rating of the shield generator you fit achieves both of these goals.
Shield strength as a property of the ship nearly eliminates the purpose of customization. The shield you put on your cobra costs just as much as the same shield put on your viper, but produces half the effect?
Where and in what universe is this logic?
I don't see how. You still have a lot of choices about what class and rating of generator to fit (or even whether to fit one at all), and those choices have meaningful consequences in terms of what shield rating you end up with, what mass and power draw the shield generator adds to your ship, and what you have to give up by using the slot for a shield generator instead of the other modules you could fit in that space.
Having a base stat value from your class/ship/mech/whatever and then a variety of equipment that can modify that base value is a very common approach used in many, many games.
Erm, ours? You can fit a 911 engine in a VW beetle, but it won't give you the same performance as in a 911. You can fit a top of the line 3D card in a five year old PC, but it won't give you the same gaming performance as in a brand new, top of the line machine.
So an engine is is minor player in the top speed of a car? "Performance" is a loaded word, weight, suspension, engine transmission all play a part, even still the engine is a major player, and the other component are upgradable as well. Here we are talking about a very specific aspect of ship performance and that is shield strength, this would be like talking about horsepower in a car, which is what the engine generates, not "performance".
The only component which draws power from the ship power plant for the shields is the shield generator, therefore logically based on it's name and power draw one can safely assume that device "generates" the shield.If a Python with and A6 has twice the shield strength of an ASP with an A6, this not only violates conservation of energy, it just doesn't make any sense. The hull must generate the shield and the generator just boosts it, fine where does the hull get power from? WHy does the ship have no shield without a generator?
This system just makes no sense, you would have to really stretch some techno babble to even begin to explain it. It is a heavy handed and boring approach to balance while there are obvious other approaches. The generator should generate a certain strength shield modified by hull mass (hull surface area would make more sense), having a minor hull efficiency factor might make sense, but you should never see a larger ship have a stronger shield than a smaller ship with the same generator. If the larger ship should have stronger shields it should fit a bigger, more power hungry, more expensive generator, maybe even allow fitting multiple generators on larger ships.
That's not what I was trying to say. My apologies for any confusion.
I was responding to the question, 'where and in what universe is it logical that putting the same shield generator on a Cobra produces half the effect of the same shield generator installed on a Viper'.
I was pointing out that there are many cases in our real universe where this basic principle applies - the same 'component' fitted into different things can produce different effects.
Sorry if my car analogy wasn't a great one.
Well, I guess it depends on your tolerance for techno babble.
Perhaps shields are actually projected by multiple 'shield emitters' that are built into the structure of the hull of the ship, to which the shield generator provides power or energy in some form. Perhaps some ships have particularly well-placed or efficient or otherwise advanced shield emitters, which allow the ship to project a stronger shield from a given level of input from the shield generator, while other ships have badly positioned or inefficient or just plain cheap shield emitters that can't project the same strength of shield from a given level of input from the shield generator.
I personally see nothing nonsensical about such a setup (or at least no more nonsensical than the concept of 'shields' in the first place). Your mileage may of course vary.
With respect, you're just making an arbitrary judgement about what makes sense to you personally, and using it to justify a criticism of the game design.
Whether an aspect of the fictional technology makes sense to you personally isn't really the point. The point is whether the game design achieves the goals that FD want it to - namely that it allows different ships to have inherently stronger or weaker shields than others (allowing for more variation between the combat effectiveness of different ships, especially ones of similar size), it allows for meaningful outfitting choices for the player that have a direct impact on how their ship performs in different roles, and it achieves both of these with a single set of shield generator modules that's shared by all ships (significantly reducing complexity for both the devs and players).
Of course, if you think those are the wrong goals, or that there's a better way to achieve them without significantly increasing complexity, I would humbly suggest that the devs might find that kind of feedback much more useful than whether one variety of handwavium makes more sense to you than another.
This is just a variation on efficiency. What your essentially saying is an ASP wastes twice as much of it's generator output compared to a Python. It is an explanation, it doesn't account for the conservation of energy, which makes it illogical, its just not intuitive. Basically an ASP has an extremely inefficient design at an extreme level to the point of being laughable.
Of course, if you think those are the wrong goals, or that there's a better way to achieve them without significantly increasing complexity, I would humbly suggest that the devs might find that kind of feedback much more useful than whether one variety of handwavium makes more sense to you than another.
Respectfully, I did suggest alternative approaches as feedback that would maintain logical consistency, did you read all of what you quoted?
My problem is that the way shields are designed it makes it hard to reason about them. They follow no consistent pattern, same generator on larger ship, less or more protection? Impossible to answer, go look up magic hull shield number instead. This stems from a core logical inconsistency. Even fiction must have logical consistency or we will reject it.
They said they don't want specific shield generators per ship type, why? They already have this, the module may be named the same and have the same cost and power consumption but it is not the same shield generator by a long shot, might as well append the ship type to the module name if your going to do that and call it a day.
Edit: BigBad had the idea first!
/exitstageright
I think that a change in naming would perhaps make things clearer. Currently we have shield strength that is a property of the hull, and shield generators that you purchase and fit, that have a class & rating.
A more sensible (to me at least) abstraction would be to call the "shield strength value" something akin to the ship's shield projector array which has an output value measured in megaWatts / m^2 or whatever (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_power_density). Vipers, being military craft have a military-grade projector array. The shield generator generates some value of shield output (in MJ), but that output needs to be translated into a field. The efficiency of the "projector array" -- which is fixed per hull type -- will determine how well this translates into the actual thing that protects your ship.
A ship that inherently has a weaker projector array (say a Cobra) won't be able to translate it's A rated generator's output into real shields as effectively as a ship that mounts a more efficient projector array. The Shield Generator just generates raw juice, but it needs the projector (which cannot be changed) to effectively push the juice into a shield shape.
While the idea probably needs some massaging in terms of how ship mass factors into generator power from a "here's a fluff explanation" perspective, I hope the idea helps people put a label on what is currently just an abstract number in a ship screen.
Heck, if FD wants to take the idea and run with it, I think it would lead to less confusion Name one of the manufacturers of the projectors after me or sumthin
/exitstageright
MajorLag said:
I think that a change in naming would perhaps make things clearer. Currently we have shield strength that is a property of the hull, and shield generators that you purchase and fit, that have a class & rating.
A more sensible (to me at least) abstraction would be to call the "shield strength value" something akin to the ship's shield projector array which has an output value measured in megaWatts / m^2 or whatever (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_power_density). Vipers, being military craft have a military-grade projector array. The shield generator generates some value of shield output (in MJ), but that output needs to be translated into a field. The efficiency of the "projector array" -- which is fixed per hull type -- will determine how well this translates into the actual thing that protects your ship.
A ship that inherently has a weaker projector array (say a Cobra) won't be able to translate it's A rated generator's output into real shields as effectively as a ship that mounts a more efficient projector array. The Shield Generator just generates raw juice, but it needs the projector (which cannot be changed) to effectively push the juice into a shield shape.
While the idea probably needs some massaging in terms of how ship mass factors into generator power from a "here's a fluff explanation" perspective, I hope the idea helps people put a label on what is currently just an abstract number in a ship screen.
Heck, if FD wants to take the idea and run with it, I think it would lead to less confusion
Name one of the manufacturers of the projectors after me or sumthin
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I thought the power plant created the raw juice? So yeah another call for this being related to efficiency, again the Asp is now somehow half as efficient as the Python but doesn't generate excess heat? I guess it's emitting all that wasted energy out into space, but isn't creating a bigger signature?
Still don't understand why they don't want to do bespoke generators while basically having bespoke generators.
It is indeed about efficiency. One ship has a civillian grade handwavium projector / emitter / insert-term-of-choice, and the other one has a military grade one.
The way I visualize it (you might do so differently)
Power Plant (raw juice) --> Shield Generator (convert to shield particle stuffs with x efficiency) --> "Shield projector / term of art" (convert shield particle stuffs into shield shape with surface power density of Y and Z efficiency)
In a completely unrelated example, take the Engine mounted to a Cirrus Vision SF50 "Very Light Jet". It is a jet powered General Aviation Craft with minimal passenger / payload capacity. According to the manufacturer's website, it has a jet engine that produces 1800 lbs of thrust.
Compare this to military engines that produce ~15000 lbs of thrust / 24000 lbs with afterburner (source wikipedia -- numbers rounded to nearest 1000). I certainly will admit this is comparing apples / oranges / fruit of your choice - but the point is that there can be an extreme difference between something that is built for a combat platform, and something else that is built for a multirole / civilian platform.
You certainly have a point that FD could improve how the information is conveyed to us. The "magic hull shield number" could certainly be conveyed better. In fact they've already said that we'll get shield and hull values on the outfitting screen in the future. That being said, all that needs to be done is to have a fictional construct that explains the "magic hull shield number" in an internally consistent way that furthers the fictional setting that FD has created. A shield emitter is one way of doing this. Just make sure that we don't have to do backflips to understand the system at least in a general way -- they don't need to give us the math beind everything for example, and that we can access the needed information when we're making decisions based on the information (put everything we need to know in the outfitting screen) and I think everyone's complaints go away.
As for excess heat -- who says that it has to be emitted, or wasted? If I have two 1,000 gallon tanks (the stuff our shield generator has made for us), and poke a hole in the bottom of the tank and fit a "spigot" to it (our emitter) the first one being a 4" pipe (military grade), and the second one being a soda straw (civillian grade) -- does the excess water in the tank do anything except sit in the tank? I think of the "magic hull shield number" as the limiting factor in our shields scenario, and regardless how big a tank you put on there (yes you'll get more water pressure out of the soda straw with a bigger tank, but you're still rate limited) you won't get past a certain result.
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You are talking about different engines right? This is exactly not whats going on, imagine that the civilian engine produces 1800 lbs of thrust and the SAME engine on the military plane creates 15000 lbs of thrust while consuming the same amount of fuel. Would that make sense? This is what ED shield generators are doing.
Same power is coming from the power plant to the same shield generator on both the Python and Asp, yet Python shield can absorb twice damage than Asp. We can assume shield generators take power and turn them into shield right? Since the Asp only has half the shield capacity of the Python where did the same power consumed go? Conservation of energy get it? It can't be created or destroyed, it goes somewhere, not into shield, something had to fill the tank, one has 1000 gallons the other 500, where did the extra 500 go? If something is more efficient than something else it means it wastes less. Energy being wasted goes somewhere, usually heat, could be radiation, either way it can't be destroyed. The power draw tell you the rate, and they are the same for both, if one has a straw and the other a 4" pipe, the one with the straw will overflow since the same amount is being pumped in from the power plant, the overflow is waste.
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