Re: Kinetic Shields

--- Oerjan Ohlson <oerjan.ohlson@telia.com> wrote:
...
> >I'd like to see an actual official shield in
> >FBIII (even if it's in a genre section but
> >preferably not) which works against everything.
> 
> You could get that, provided that the "shield" is
> considerably less 
> effective, or more expensive for the same effect,
> against the currently 
> screen-skipping weapons ...> The various
screen-skippers were all balanced around
> the fact that they 
> aren't degraded by screens, so if your "shield"
> degrades them by the same 
> percentage at the same cost as it does beams you
> effectively make all 
> screen-skipping weapons useless :-(
> 

That's a bit of an exaggeration. After all beams
aren't "useless" just because there are screens. If
a "kinetic screen" or a Star Trek shield bounces
pulse torpedoes or K-gun damage, then it should
be expensive enough to play balance out. My guess
is such a screen would reduce the amount of damage
delivered by these weapons. Or, it would absorb
a specific amount of damage every turn and then
get overwhelmed. Either would be a powerful effect,
but it doesn't make the pulse torpedo or the k gun
useless.

Tell you what, you take such a screen and I'll
sit outside with 30 pulse torpedoes and we'll
see how it goes ;-).

I figure if it was possible to balance screens
against beams it's possible to balance a kinetic
shield (or a universal one) against the rest of
the game. After all, every game with shields
does it (Renegade legion interceptor, renegade
legion centurion, renegade legion leviathan,
FASA starship combat simulator, Star Fleet Battles,
and so on).

In SFB, shields bought you an ablative resource
that protected you for a while. In FASA it bought
you a selective way to reduce the damage coming
into the ship each turn (never enough to stop
much, but enough if you have the shield up to
make it a lot easier to take). Renegade legion
shields are impossible to shoot through period,
EXCEPT that you can't have them on all the time.
So, they flicker in and out. That means that
some percentage of the shots get through. In
effect it makes you harder to hit based on your
flicker rate. You can simulate SFB with armor,
IF it works against armor puncturing weapons.
You can simulate FASA with the mass energy
screen in the weapon defense archive (I think).
RL shields would make you harder to hit, so 
maybe each level of RL shield would be a -1 to 
hit for any weapon (and it would be incompatible
with screens).

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 
a year!  http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/