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]

Ok, technically water released into space would likely boil, not vaporize of freeze. (EDIT: Of course, since vaporizing IS boiling, I guess I was off a bit here. ) The reason for this is that water freezes by being reduced in temperature, and to do this it has to radiate its heat out. Vacuum is a very poor conductor of radiant heat. Also the vacuum of space is low pressure by definition and the boiling point of water lowers as the pressure drops.

That being said you could supercool the water before releasing it, or add some chemicals to it that would keep the boiling point artificially high I suppose. You could also keep it pressurized in some sort of membrane while you waited for it to freeze. This would actually make a lot of sense as it would allow you to shape the ice shields the way you wanted.

My biggest question about this is why would ice be a shield? It sounds to me like this would be another kind of armor.

But if you want the ice to be considered shields, the ice would be partially effective at blocking projectiles and missles I would think. Maybe you should make the standard weapons blocked by shields.

Also, to your question. An ice plate over the hull would interfere with boarding I would think. They would have to cut through it to get to the docking ports, or to the hull itself.

Geoschmo

[ August 26, 2002, 14:21: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[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 ]