Phoenix Space Combat System for Dummies - Part Seven Shields

  

A Star Trek type Shield in place


Shields are the second layer of defence and are one of the least 'seen' in primary line of battle combat ships. I am a fan personally but their main issue is that to get a large enough protective shield layer takes up more space than a Heavy hulled ship can spare. Plus when the most serious opposition uses Photon Batteries or anti-matter missiles then shield efficiency decreases rapidly. They are both useful and possible to carry in a normal hulled warship so it is still worth looking at. A shield functions much as every space tv/game shield you have ever seen does. Everything shot aimed at the ship must be dealt with by the shield and the more that is absorbed the weaker that shield gets.  

There are three numbers to pay attention too with regard to shield and these are its Factors/Depth and recharge. The recharge is just how much the shields will refresh for the following day battle and as naval ships rarely waste space carrying enough generators to make this worthwhile so can be ignored.  

The other two are both important. The Factors indicate how resilient the shield is. As a shield is hit it burns off shield factors so if a shield 'absorbs' 30 damage then 30 shield factors will get removed. The amount a shield can absorb is indicated by its depth and this is normally a number like 50.6. In this example the max protection the shield can provide is to absorb 50 damage (thus also burning 50 shield factors) and the minimum around 0 with the average per shot probably being something like 20-30. As the shield factors get burnt off (and potentially internal item 'Shields' get destroyed) then the Shield depth is continuously re-calculated on a shot by shot basis. 

Example Hit 

Let us return to our test combat. The enemy ship has  fired two Photon Gun Mark IVs for one round and the defensive ship's scintillators blocked 8 and 10 damage respectively. We shall now assume that the ship actually has enough shields for a decent shield depth of 50 with shield factors of 2000. 

Round 1 Shot 1 . The scintillators absorbed 8 of the first shots initial 90 damage so the shield has to deal with 82 damage. The shield blocks the hit through a random number on the 3d6 bell probability curve in the same manner as the scintillators. In this example it works well and blocks 30 damage. This blocked damage is removed from the shield factors dropping them to 1970. The shield depth is now recalculated as the shield has been hit and it drops very slightly to 49.9. The damage that was not blocked (52) carries on to the next layer of defence (usually armour but possible straight to hulls). 

Round 1 Shot 2 The next shot is now dealt with. Here the scintillators blocked 10 damage so 80 is the total the shields have to look at. The shield does worse this time only blocking 20 damage. This is removed from the shield factors dropping them to 1950 and the recalculated shield depth is 49.89. The unblocked 60 damage from the photon gun moves through to the next layer. 

Let us adjust our battle report to show what is would now report 

Round 1: 2 Photon Gun Ivs - 2 Hits - 112 (50) 180 - 100% 

So indicating out of 180 possible damage from hits  50 damage was blocked as a total this round by the shields and 112 damage got through to hit hulls and internals. So the additional information in the line is surrounded by brackets and shows the total damage the shields blocked.

Shields have a couple of interesting nuances. The first - which players might try and take advantage of but cannot really is that if damage does not reach the internals then the shield factors are not dissipated. So if the attack is 'weak' and the shields have zero difficulty blocking then they do no lose strength. It's actually hard to set this up but if you had a ship with a high shield depth of 80 and an opponent with 300 light photon guns Mark I (damage 25) then every shot 'should' be blocked by the average damage blocked of 40 - the odd shot might get through as we are on a random probability bell curve but in this case the shield would make the defender invulnerable. Now many budding ship designers might start getting gleeful thoughts of light hulled warships carrying so many shields to make them invulnerable but in practice there are two reasons why this wont work. The first is that the effectiveness of defensive measures is weakened the weaker the hull type. If you think of a 75 heavy hulled warship as a brick then you can image 50 shields would be enough for a shield depth of 30. Put 50 shields on a normal hull and the total shield depth would only be say 15. Put those 50 shields on a light hulled ship and the shield depth drops to say 5. This is a simple matter of the shields covering a bigger area so being weaker and needing more to compensate for the extra size.  

This though is a sensible design decision by the game. The real killer is that the available shield depth weakens the greater it gets. Add 10 shields and you might get 10 depth. When you have a hundred shields and you add 10 more then the additional shield depth might be 1. As far as I can tell from the rules the maximum possible shield depth is around 90. Those extra shields help keep the shield factors high so make it harder to burn out but keep that number beyond an important 100. I say 'important' because the most smallest 'common'  line of battle weapon is a Photon Cannon Mark I which does 90 damage (as does a Photon Gun IV). Big warships tend to carry bigger weapons like Photon Batteries (400 damage) and missiles (200 damage normal though Kinetic doing 60 are more common). This means that no shield is capable of consistently blocking all incoming damage from any serious military player and neatly prevents 'invulnerable ships floating around' 

It still might be worth playing with the concept but it would be most useful with (say) high mark ablative armour and even then a ship with 90 shield depth, Mark IV ablative armour, heavy hulls, mark IV scintillators would block (on average)175 damage per shot which admittedly defends against most Photon Cannon weaponry but would still lose a lot of armour destroyed but against a battery armed ship would still take on average 225 per hit. This might seem attractive but the amount of internal space taken up by those shields would mean minimal weaponry in return. It all lies in what trade offs you are happy with and the resources you have available. 

The next 'interesting' point concerning shields is that they are more effective versus some weapons. Using the IGN example we have standard Missile Mark I's these do a huge 200 damage and 200 further explosive damage (another example could be the even more damaging torpedo which does 600 normal and explosive damage). 

Both these have an 'Armour Factor' listed. Missiles of '8' and Torpedos of '5' This does not mean the weapon is armoured but that when it hits protective layers there is a good chance those layers will absorb most of the damage. Anything above 1 really increases a shields potential value. Assume a ship with an excellent shield depth of 50 is hit by a single Mark I missile. The damage to be dealt with is 200. But a 3d6 probability is not generated using the current Shield Depth (probably protecting against 25 mean damage allowing 175 to move to more damageable ship gear). Instead the shield depth is multiplied by the armour factor so increases to 400! Now the shield generates the 3D6 probability possibly protecting against all that damage (if lucky). Assume it provides the mean amount of protection and 200 damage is absorbed. That 200 is not then removed from the shield factors as instead we now divide that value by the Armour Factor (of 8) which returns '25' and 25 only is removed from the Shield Factors.1 

This might sound great but you have to have a high shield depth (and 50 and over is high, most ships get to around 30 if they have shields at all) and not all missiles/torps adjust the same way. Torpedo Mark 1's only have an AF of 6 so the shield is still good but not as good as Mark I missiles. Kinetic Missiles do much less damage (60 normal ) but don’t have an AF so the shields treat them like a photon gun blast.  

1 I don’t want to blow anyone's minds but also remember the earlier point the shield that does not cause damage does not dissipate the shield.. So if ALL damage is absorbed then the shield would not drop at all… In practice it's hard to set up a ship that is so weak it cannot impact a decent shield depth. I ran some tests on this and even with Light Photon Guns (a real 'meh' weapon) could get through a 67 shield depth....I will show these combat tests in posts once I have covered the initial descriptions so you can see for yourselves.

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