I'd think of it like an external armor layer that is held in place with electromagnetic fields. Spray out mass that your electromagnet control system orients and holds relative to the ship. Lasers get scattered, high velocity projectiles disintegrate into plasma (and the electromagnets fill the hole relatively quickly).
Low velocity, high mass projectiles might penetrate the shield with only a small momentum change.
It would work kind of like the shields in Dune, minus the part where lasers make Dune shields explode.
Blake Watson
Shields are the HP-bar literary device of Sci-Fi.
Only 10% shield left, we're almost dead! (despite having no internal damage worth mentioning).
Logan Mitchell
>Even in shows with no shields at all though, you usually get another brand of count-down timer, such as "hull integrity" or "armor plating".
this to me is more believable and in line with current technology. flood compartments, armor belts, and double hulls are common in ships, though space ships would probably have more in common with submarines than surface ships. depth charges work by compromising hull integrity and using the water pressure to break up the sub, in space though it would be the internal pressure pushing out.
Nicholas Turner
Yeah and a real life space battle would just be drones and missile swarms, putting humans into a ship would cost too much and make the ship perform worse. A human vessel would get wrecked by drones every time.
Juan Morales
You do eventually get to magi-tech levels where the energy you're tossing about would destroy any matter in an instant, sometimes even in a nice chain reactive fashion. At that point, if your shields go down, you are dead.
Granted, maybe Star Trek isn't quite there yet, as every time their shields go down, they manage to take several more punches without even all being terminally irradiated. I suppose they do have a secondary set of shields for holding the ship together and navigation though.
Gotta transport humans around at some point though. (Well, you don't gotta, but ya probably wanna.)
But yeah, drone on drone battles are boring. Though, at least in Star Trek's case, they are often faced with them, and the Enterprise itself has an excuse for having a crew, even if some of its opponents don't.
Jeremiah Torres
Hull integrity is worthless when given as a % number, instead it should be system damage.
Jeremiah Bennett
perhaps one that bent space so that incoming energy is routed around the vessel? i'm thinking something like mass effect's element zero. the energy depletion wouldn't come from the incoming energy exactly, more from the strain of having to keep the shields activated.
Josiah Hill
but drones wouldn't care about seeing attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion
I always understood that hull integrity is maintained by force fields and electromagnetic currents running through the ship. A failure of hull integrity means the mechanisms in place can just no longer counter the forces at work in the hull, either because they're overwhelmed by damage, or the conduits that allow energy to pass to core sections are destroyed.
In star trek federation ships lack armor plating following from the vulcan doctrine of shields. Klingon ships are mostly armored by contrast and outside of plot holed scenarios like Gorkon's assassination on Kronos One are intended to take several direct hits to the hull and remain in fighting shape. Which Kronos One arguably did after the systems came back online. Compare it to the Reliant in Wrath of Khan where a single photon torpedo ripped through the reliant's saucer section, and the reliant's phasers ripped through the enterprise's engineering section.
