ice for shields, and other grit-tech stuff

[Puke]

some well-read sci-fi fan posted on another thread, the concept of blowing water into space so that it will vaporize and freeze (yes, it does both at the same time). thus it can be used as shields to defract laser beams. of course, this isnt so effective if energy shields and phaser-blazer-megaguns exist, but its great stuff for a grit-tech mod.

since im too lazy to look up the original thread, and i wanted to ask a specific question, i have opened this new thread.

here is my delema. i am working on a grit mod, and will be using low tech stuff. i wanted to use this idea, but im having some trouble. i made all conventional weapons ship shields, so projectiles and missiles will go right through shields, if these ice fields are the only kind of shields in the game. then laser weapons would not skip shields, and would be hampered by these ice fields.

now everything should be fine, but what about boarding parties? they wont board until shields are down. do you mean to tell me that some pithy amount of ice floating through space is going to stop a few hundred kilotons of starship from latching a docking collar onto its target? i doubt it!

so how do we make this great idea work, without breaking how ship-capture works?

If its just too imposible to do, then I have also had this other idea for shields that could be modled, and would reasonably stop a boarding attempt. it is based on this technology:

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_652954.html

[geoschmo]

So I am stupid. I think I see what you mean now. Ejecting streams of water which vaporize and then freeze into a mist of tiny ice crystals which will interfere with lasers and other energy weapons. Duh. And no, I don't guess that would interefere much with boarding operations. So I have no suggestions for how to justify the two. I will go sit down and shut up now.

Geoschmo

[Jmenschenfresser]

What about giving it the armor ability, but also giving it a regenerative ability.

And call it a shield.

[Deathstalker]

"so how do we make this great idea work, without breaking how ship-capture works?"

hmmm, possibly worthless suggestions:

1)Make the 'Ice Shields' using the newly working 'Emissive Armor' ability but don't use the 'armor' tag so it is not destroyed first? (and you could give different 'levels' of ice shields this way by upping the emissive ability)

2)Use the Crystalline Armor ability (they are ice crystals ) on a component but again forget the armor tag so they are not destroyed first. Give the component a small shield capacity but 0 points to start off with (to simulate the ice field 'hanging around' so hits reduce the field to nothing but also generate a new ice shield {ie, more water being shot out}). IIRC crystalline armor reduces the hit by 'X' amount and shunts it to the shields so this can simulate the 'shield protection' itself.

or maybe I am babbling again...

[ August 26, 2002, 14:44: Message edited by: Deathstalker ]

[Suicide Junkie]

Unfortunately, Crystalline will block boarding parties.

Emissive armor would not, but it would protect against all other weapons too.

However, if you were to make lasers 1-turn reload, and the other weapons much longer reload, you could have a situation like this:

30 Emissive points (ice shields)
Laser: 35 damage, reload 1
Explosive Shell Projectile: 350 damage, reload 7

14% (5/35) of the laser gets through the shield, but 91% (320/350) of the cannon gets through.

Increase the length of the space combats to you get a reasonable number of shots per combat with the projectile weapons.

[ August 26, 2002, 16:47: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[Spoo]

What about giving it the armor ability, but also giving it a regenerative ability.

And call it a shield.

Similar idea: Give the ice shield the armor ability (no regen unless you have ice shield regenerators). Make non-energy weapons armor-skipping. Make armor an internal component w/ high damage resistance (like in Proportions).

[Jmenschenfresser]

My suggestion for regen capabilities came from the idea that it could regenerate from combat round to combat round (if not destroyed), just like a shield.

Minus the supply usage of course. Least I think armor regen doesn't use supplies.

[Puke]

so if you make it an armor component, conventional weapons would have to skip armor, and regular armor would have the shield ability?

and then you would have to go back and destroy the armor once the hull was hollowed out? hmmm.

if using the emissive idea, conventional weapons would need to do enough extra damage to account for the emmissive armor, but what if it ran up on a ship without the shields? they would do an extra 35 points of damage per shot, or so.

These ideas are definitly better than what i had come up with though, thanks guys. if anyone has more to add, i would be eager to hear it.

[Spoo]

You could use an allegiance subverter (change the range to 1) to represent the boarding parties. Then you could still use shields as shields.

[Puke]

hey, thats a good idea. how would you do boarding defenses then? is it harder to subvert (i used to think so, but have not tested in a while) a ship with more crew-quarters?