![]() The downside is that creators often have to resort to Explosive Instrumentation to provide combat casualties on a shielded ship. having your Ensign call out "Shields down to twenty percent!" can be a lot cheaper than showing a gash blasted in your ship's armor. In older or lower-budget movies and TV, they also eliminate the need to show battle damage on the ship e.g. Shields are popular in fiction because it allows the Cool Ship to participate in battles without the inconvenience of having to spend the rest of the episode making repairs to physical armour and systems. The latter encourages certain maneuvers, such as making sure your shielded side is always facing the enemy. Shields may be handled as a single egg-shell or as several independent barriers covering different areas of the ship. Other issues involve a shield's interaction with the same effects passing from inside and lower-grade effects. Unless, of course, the shield is Handwaved to stop kinetic energy as well. Usually in these cases Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better. acts as a rechargeable sort of Whipple Shield) or it's not a main defense against missiles and that pesky iron-nickel gravel, or both. So bonus points if the shield either mostly disintegrates incoming projectiles so that armor deals only with dust (i.e. So if the shield is not very thick and/or does not distribute load over a very large area, its not a missile-stopper: any massive object moving at a modest (on an orbital scale) speed will pass through the shield if their interaction is limited to the safe level or crush the shield emitters and then pass through if it isn't. Note that if a shield deflects not just rays but massive objects, Newton's third law kicks in, as it requires the force stopping the projectile to be equally applied to the shield-and if it has negligible mass, this means directly to the shield generator, bypassing armor and everything. For the bigger ones, a layering of dust particles a hundred kilometers or so in front can be used to eliminate large objects. ![]() That should be enough for the small constant impacts. It takes well over 2/3 its mass in TNT just to go from near absolute zero to the melting point. ![]() Beryllium has a high melting point and a VERY high specific heat capacity. Note: one possibility is to put a beryllium shield in front. 01g, and then when you arrive you just need a way to decelerate quickly while your armour lasts. There are feasible alternatives though-self-repairing armour seems to be a common feature of bioships, or, since the ship only needs to be well-protected at the front, a fountain can be used while the ship is accelerating-most of the voyage may be spent accelerating at. Unfortunately, the alternative is not much better though many writers choose to omit energy fields these days, they neglect that, without some kind of continuously regenerating barrier, a ship traveling at relativistic speeds (say, more than half the speed of light) isn't going to get very far before micrometeors and particulate matter punch holes through its armor, however thick it is. NASA and ESA are actually researching how to reproduce the effect on future interplanetary spaceships, to protect Mars travellers from cosmic radiation. A better example is the Earth's magnetic field which safeguards us from charged particles in the solar wind. In practice, this is somewhat less scientifically feasible than Energy Weapons, but not by much, at least in the way it is usually depicted-a strong electromagnetic field really can be used to deflect particle beam weapons or railgun/coilgun slugs. ![]() It's often represented in the form of a Beehive Barrier or another Hard Light construct. They may also be subject to Phlebotinum Overload if they get hit by too many Energy Weapons.Īn energy barrier can zap or repel anyone who touches it, or can simply behave like an impenetrable wall. This also makes for yet another reason you are boned if the energy runs out. How much protection they offer is usually proportional to their power. Most common around space ships, but also seen around bases and-very occasionally - individual people. Also called " Force Fields", these are invisible (or, if the budget allows it, barely-visible) energy barriers placed around objects to protect them from harm.
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