Navigational Shield

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Navigational Shield

   Navigational Shields and Defensive Shields are two versions of the Force Field technology given to the humans once they were accepted into the Confederacy.

Navigation Shields

   A Nav Shield protects space ships in normal space from collisions with small objects like orbital debris, dust and small asteroidal bodies, and they can also act as a defensive shield.  It is a deflector that is mostly effective against projectiles and missiles as they have mass.  They can be tuned to reflect the electromagnetic radiation spectrum, making them effective against laser-based weapons, but doing so prevents shipboard sensor systems from using EM radiation for navigation and fire control.  They do NOT affect disruptor fire.
   Nav Shields are not all-powerful.  They can be taken down by high-energy interactions.  Recovery time varies, from instantaneous to a full second for energy levels near the maximum capacity.  If the energy level is high enough, either by a high speed collision with a small object or a low speed collision with a large object, the generator can be damaged or destroyed.  This can cause damage to the volume surrounding the generator even if the hull of the ship is not affected but the interaction.

First Generation Defensive Shields

   This is one of several technologies that the Sa'arm recovered from Confederacy diplomatic missions.  Because of this, early-timeline Confederacy ships and Sa'arm ships have identical defensive shields.  These must be "lowered" momentarily in order to fire anything other than energy weapons, in order to allow the projectile to pass through the shield.  If a projectile weapon is fired from inside a shield, the shield will attempt to reflect the projectile, causing stress on the shield and possible damage to the firing ship when the ricochet strikes it.  Confederacy warships can automate the shield/weapon coordination, limiting the time the shield is down.  The Sa'arm may not be able to do this as quickly.  An unwillingness to lower shields to fire weapons may be why most Sa'arm ships seem to be mostly armed with energy weapons.
   Between the initial Tulakat campaign (see Alien Bear Baiting) and the later system blockade, Confederacy ships were modified so that, instead of dropping the shield to fire a weapon, a "portal" was opened in the shield that would allow the projectile to exit while still retaining defensive coverage elsewhere.  The ship's AI could again handle the shield management, making this a Confederacy-only upgrade.

Second-Generation Defensive Shields

   About the same time as the 'firing port' was developed, it became possible to generate a hemispherical defensive shield that was twice as strong as the original spherical shield, at the cost of taking four times the power.  Since a ship using such a generator to protect its bow and sides would also want the option of using a second generator to protect its stern, this actually increased the possible power hit by a factor of eight.  Most of our early designs, the ones handed down from the original Confederacy, did not have the power budget to support this.  Therefore, these double-strength shields are only found in our newer designs which have more powerful engineering plants.

Sa'arm Shield Variants

   In approximately year 29, an experimental Confederacy ship ambushed three Sa'arm ships in a remote system. One Sa'arm appeared to have shifted power from the shield protecting its rear to its front to deal with debris in its path. The Sa'arm was hit by two missles from its rear, destroying most of the vessel. Other new technology was found in the system, and it was not determined if the shield was new development or technology copied from Confederacy warships, nor if it was a one-off development or soon to be encountered in meetings with all Sa'arm ships. (see Caleb and Cheval Jaune)

Unattributed Comments

These systems can handle about 1 Megajoule (10 km per second for a mass of 20 grams) per impact. (Who wrote this? Which of the four different technologies described above does this apply to? -ZM)

Excerpts from Texts

Below are excerpts about how shields are used and their effectiveness:

From Independent Command:
For some reason, disruptors ignored shields, so an Africa could use a third of its disruptors to blow out your hull plates or armor or whatever, and the rest of them to vaporize whatever was hiding behind your armor, all within a second or two. The effect would be very much like using a Bazooka on a telephone booth. However, if you stayed 20 klicks or more away, they were even less dangerous than the Castles.

The plasma torpedoes were more likely to hit, but again could not be considered capable of delivering a knockout blow to a ship with a functional shield. However, a single plasma torpedo could take out a shield, and if an enemy was kept busy enough, we could saturate his defenses with missiles.

It may have been a range thing, but we could report positively that our current shields would stop one hit from a Vervactor's beam weapons. We had to follow that datum up with the corollary that our current shields would probably not stop two at the same time, or within something like half a second. We had been lucky to not take any damage from them. Apparently they considered 500 kilometers their outside range, and due to the way the battle ended we did not know if they would do more damage if they got closer than 400 Km.

From The First Command:
Another piece of critical equipment was a sort of ion shield that surrounded the shuttle. Charged particles would be deflected gently. So would anything that acted enough like a charged particle, like cosmic rays. It couldn't do much about high-mass items, like meteorites. Those, if moving fast enough, would simply punch right through the shield, then leave a pair of coming and going holes in the shuttle itself. The shield also tended to act like a Faraday cage, dropping any electromagnetic flux by several orders of magnitude.

Miguel said that where we were going, in very close orbit behind Jupiter, the shield was absolutely required to keep us alive. Apparently Jupiter radiated the same sorts of stuff that the Sun did. Not at the same rates, but we were going to be close enough that we would fry from Jupiter's radiation faster than we would from the Sun's. The ion shield was A Good Thing.

The Confederacy had a force field they called a "Nav Shield" that helped with running into that stuff in normal space, but it couldn't deal with the effects of a hyperspace transition into a gas cloud. Even in a good clean vacuum the conversion of the occasional cold, low-energy gas molecules to high-energy plasma made a flare that could be seen for millions of miles.

Drawbacks

The navigation Shield requires substantial power that may tax the power generation capabilities of a ship.

Using a shield increased the observability of a platform and is not conducive to stealth.

Story Usage

A textual analysis of the story repository, current as of 9/2019 and performed on 2019-09-21 and using SS Lib ver 1.15.07 (9/21/2019) identified the following top ten usage counts for Shield:

• Independent Command by Zen Master 84 instances.
• The First Command by Zen Master 61 instances.
• Ending This Mess by en Master 57 instances.
• Chosen Frozen II by Lordshipmayhem 15 instances.
• We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers by LughIldanach 15 instances.
• Family Letters by Allan Joyal 14 instances.
• Victoria Per Scientiam by SGTStoner 14 instances.
• The Chinese Obligation by Thinking Horndog 13 instances.
• Behind Enemy Lines by DeGaffer 10 instances.
• Destination Azahar by DeGaffer 9 instances.

See Also

• Force Fields

(Someday this will be a navigation template.  It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links.  Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))