Shield Technologies

[Mecron]

while you could make a point about torps...I am not sure why you would expect an impactor round to recharge you.

[ZedF]

I think he's thinking the other way around, energy weapons don't recharge your impactors or torpedoes when you are hit with energy weapons.

IIRC, partly it's to avoid framerate/balance/etc issues in the case of torps and partly because folks thought that weapons systems that use physical ammo shouldn't really be accelerated that much by absorbing more energy. There's a limit to how fast your mechanical ammo loaders can cycle.

[Redeyes]

Hmm, the speed of light? No... we can always put a FTL drive into the loading unit!

[Gryfalcon]

Which reminds me: Why don't Liir just teleport large quantities of explosive into the middle of enemy formations? I can understand needing to stutter-warp a ship precisely - you want the contents to arrive at the other end in one piece. But the bottle of anti-matter in the bomb works just as well when it gets a bit smeared around by the teleport.

[Mecron]

in space...explosives are best as contact weapons. And flicker drives are not exactly cheap

Zed...ah ok I see what he meant now...and yes you are right about the laoding issue

[AlanF5]

Which reminds me: Why don't Liir just teleport large quantities of explosive into the middle of enemy formations? I can understand needing to stutter-warp a ship precisely - you want the contents to arrive at the other end in one piece. But the bottle of anti-matter in the bomb works just as well when it gets a bit smeared around by the teleport.

Note that you might eventually get micro-flicker drives for your missiles. The Liir uderstading of the flickerwarp drive seemes to preclude teleporting far enough to be weaponized; I get the impression that each teleport is significantly shorter than a single ship length.

The weapon that seems to act most like teleporting antimater into your target would be the Meson Projector, in my opinion.

If you want to spread AM across an entire formation of enemy ships, you should consider detonating torps, cracker COL, and projectors.

<blinks at thread title> Projectors should do a number on shielded cruisers: The shields are big and easy to hit and a portion of the salvo will still get through after a shield fails.

[Mecron]

One flickerwarp TP is on the order of an electron diameter.

[Azrael Ultima]

Hmm, the speed of light? No... we can always put a FTL drive into the loading unit!

If you want to rip it to shreds or melt it, maybe. There is only so much stress and heat even the most advanced materials can take, and cooling things in space is much harder than keeping something warm. Space isn't cold, space is a vacuum, and vacuums isolate.
So, unless you somehow manage to create a frictionless loader, you will have to let it cool down eventually. And if you have a loader that can move ammunition at FTL speeds, why not just use that as a gun by itself?


On Flickerwarp, what would happen if a Liir ship tried to intrude into a shielded area? And how would it differ(if at all) from other races doing the same?

[usermist2]

You just need to wrap your head around a simple concept when it comes to Liir ships: the universe moves around THEM. However, the actual ships are almost stationary (they still have newtonian thrusters for secondary purposes, but if the ship needs to rotate, it generally just teleports into a different heading).

The teleports are huge eistances considering how massive Liir ships are (they are filled with oxygenated liquid, after all). Any further and the teleportation process would take up too much energy to be feasible. Also, this is the way the era-techs work: Fusion and Antimatter increase the distance you can teleport, while the stutter/flicker drive upgrades increase the frequency of the teleports, which greatly reduces the effect of gravity on Liir ships.

[nickersonm]

On Flickerwarp, what would happen if a Liir ship tried to intrude into a shielded area? And how would it differ(if at all) from other races doing the same?

Given that Mecron said flickerwarps are on the order of an electron diameter, likely nothing special. It might ionize the outer layer of paint, but would probably just repulse the ship, as it apparently does for reaction drives.

[Azrael Ultima]

What makes me curious is not how far in they are getting, but rather, how they are getting that far.

In other words, is porting into(or extremely close to) them different from just bumping into them, aside from Liir ships having no kinetic energy to speak of due to their relative speed being basically zero.

[talos]

What type of shields do the peace enforcers use?
The peace enforcers sheilds seem to snap on and off on demand which is very cool
Can humans and Tarka get those too?

[nickersonm]

Yes, the PK simply has shield projectors. A standard technology added in AMOC.

[kdonovan]

Deflectors - the wiki says they have "a chance of deflecting ballistic weapons and detonating tracking weapons" and "adds a low chance (+50%) that a ballistic weapon will ricochet off the shield". This implies that some will get through - especially ballistics with good penetration like AP rounds.

However I thought they blocked all ballistics (and most warheads and many types of torpedoes too).

Which is it?

[Mecron]

they block all ballistics...the reference is to whether the shot is destroyed or potentially ricochets to cause possible trouble.