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How come there are no Personal shields?

Luca

Luca

The Ultimate Badass
🎖️ Game Master
Shields, the things that usually find home on Power Armour to protect against initial damage salvos before it starts affecting the armour and wearer proper.

How come there aren't any stand alone shield generators for personnel? Are they just not widespread with how prevalent power armour technology is, or is it because they require a lot of power to be practical, or do they shred an unarmoured person to bits without secondary containment?

Just curious. It's something that's kind of a hole.
 
I think Yamatai doesn't have them because they use CFS technology, which does not mix well with bare skin or clothing fibers. As well, Yamatai's ground troops only now are being fleshed out. They might get personal shields later on (who knows?), but likely don't have them now in part to maintain the much more gritty feel of ground combat.

As for energy or particle shields? Dunno. Do we want to go down the road of Kyle Katarn running around taking blaster bolts and ignoring them because lol shields?

I admit, I kinda like that idea ...

More to the point, though — I think it's just a matter of wanting the unarmored experience to be different than the armored one. It doesn't stop anyone from developing personal shield tech.
 
Doshii Jun said:
More to the point, though — I think it's just a matter of wanting the unarmored experience to be different than the armored one. It doesn't stop anyone from developing personal shield tech.
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An interesting point. I guess the prevalence of power armour means that personal shields look very redundant when it's possible to don a suit that does just that and gives you so much more.

However, I'm wondering if there are other answers and opinions about this. I'm genuinely puzzled by this.
 
I think it's just too magicky, and if there were personal shields, wouldn't armor become obsolete?
 
Not necessarily. It could be a rather minor boost, like say threshold pdr 1 so that pretty much anything above 1 would do damage, but lighter things wouldn't.
 
Some questions that would have to be considered:

Energy or particle? Energy stops energy rounds, particle stops solid rounds.

General questions include: how does it affect the wearer? Do they look different? Do they lose some of their senses, such as touch or scent? How long do they last, in time and in damage? How are they powered? How are they detected? How are they bypassed? How are they projected, and over how much of the body? How do they respond to movement?

If particle, how does it interact with the ground? How much kinetic force can they stop? How do they respond to explosive ordinance? Armor-piercing? How does the person receive oxygen?

I think the technology for them exists now, but it'd be cumbersome — wearing a bulky vest/pack, special clothes, maybe even a rebreather.
 
It's my understanding that shields require a myriad of things to be usable; generators, emitters, a stable power source. These things are heavy and (at least in Nepleslia's case) not carried around by unarmored personnel simply because they are too burdensome. The Hostile and Aggressor both have 3 UCF generators, not just for redundancy but for simple power draw. The equipment would be extremely heavy, and making it more lightweight would usually mean less of a protective ability.

At least, this is my understanding of it. Seems like a lot of trouble and money protecting Average Joe instead of the million-dollar powered armorsuit he could use instead with greater effect.
 
Oh well look at this way. Armour has those fancy generators because it needs enough power to produce shield that stops weaponry able of killing tanks. You Average Joe would not go against tanks probably. So the Personal Shield would be exactly that: Personal. Aka it would only need to be strong enough to stop Personal Grade weaponry that we have in our DR system.

So it needs to be able to stop or at least slow pistols, shotguns and rifles. One guy really does not have a need for shield that can stop tank-cannon. That would be just silly.

As fro the magicky feel, unlike bulletproof vest that stops well bullets until it is shot to hell, which takes usually quite a few bullets, the shield once it is down takes some time to recharge and I would not assume it would take that many bullets to take the shield down. Like we made clear here, it would only had limited power source. Hell it might not even recharge on its own until you recharge the power source itself once it has been brought down. Point is that bullet-proof vest stops bullets until you wear, shield does not protect a jack until it is brought down so it actually, even though it might be magicky for some a slightly weaker thing then for example Styrling Muur armour. Just my opinion.

And one more thing. Personel shield would be cool and badass stuff. We could use. As for whether it would be energy or particle. Well that is tough question. For Nepleslia I would just go and say particle. That is an easy one. For Yamatai? Well that is a hard once since Yamatai uses both energy and solid round weapons frequently.
 
The big thing with Personal shields is as has been stated, they're made up of a myriad of different parts. As it stands, no one nation has the aptitude for such things. All nations are too focused on Powered Armor utilizing shields which provides a stable platform to do so. So if you take the idea of a Personal Shield and try it out you won't get the desired result due to working along the same Powered Armor design methodologies the nations have worked with for decades.

Translation: It'd take long development cycles that I hope wouldn't be auto'd and handwavium'd into being finished. Something like this is so incredibly intricate, exorbitantly expensive, compact and down right a marvel of engineering it makes Powered Armor look like Kite Shield with arms and legs. Not everyone could own one, even militaries would likely avoid them due to expense and their Powered Armor/Frame-centric mindsets.

Nations or rather militaries are slow to change and adopt new things. So I think it would be safe to say that Personal Shields would be absurdly rare to non-existent things much like they are in the Imperium of Man of Warhammer 40,000 lore.
 
To answer the OP, there are no Personal Shields because - as far as I know - no one's made an attempt to pursue that line of tech. MOST, but not ALL, faction are concentrated on power armors.

My faction, at the very least, has little to no desire to go into the realm of power armor (at least, not combat armor) - not unless my players truly desire it and the last time I talked with them about this it seemed that wasn't the case.

Personal Shields is something that I'm presently working on, granted at the moment it'll be a 'one shot and depleted' type barrier until the technology is perfected but still something I'm working on since it hasn't been done yet.

no one nation has the aptitude for such things
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Incorrect, Yamatai and Nepland have the ability and the scientific intellect to design PS's, they just favor power armor and thus don't focus on those areas.
 
Actually when I was creating gear for the SSS and designed the Tanken Armor with its personal shield, the concept was less than warmly received.
 
It's mostly a matter of the experience offered by SARP as a setting.

Wes has things this way to emphasize vulnerability for a soldier. In SARP we can recover easily from injury, but when harm is applied to our characters, it is often quite lethal. Out of many roleplay settings I've touched on, SARP is one which has very high mortality rates. And that is actually something that's power of the experience.

The power armor was the tool chosen by Wes to offer plot shield-like 'crunchability'. This offered the advantage of providing PCs with more staying power against adversity and augment their capabilities in a way which allowed him to deliver stronger attacks that 'felt' threatening without actually needing to kill the PC to maintain a dangerous atmosphere.

Power Armors sometime around YE 28 gained 'bubble-like' shielding similar to the Nadesico series, distorsion tech mostly - but those where practically environmental dangers to unarmored bystanders. By YE 29, the technology was refined further in the more conformal styled 'barrier' used by the Mindy II's forearm generators and the Daisy's full-body protection - that was gravimetric technology that proved more similar to the kinetic barriers in Mass Effect.

Shielding on the power armors we have today cropped up when use of zesuaium and aether weaponry was being 'toned down' to validate the use of other weaponry against power armor. Zesuaium itself was put down a few notches because it could kinetically 'ablate'. It also provided 'layers' of renewable plotshielding to a player that wasn't as finite as the physical condition of the power armors (many power armors can self-regenerate to a degree, but it's usually more a long-term maintenance aid than an advantage in combat).

This is why. In SARP, personal shielding power up would drastically shift things in favor of people fighting without said armor, because the aerospace-like maneuvering of a power armor these days isn't really needed. I could easily find it falling into disuse rather than its present 'necessity' in a military space roleplay in fighting tentacled-horrors-from-outer-space.

Does it exist? Yes. It can. But right now in SARP, it's abnormal. Exceptional. Alien, even. From a GM standpoint following style-guidelines for the roleplay, I'd also flag it as undesirable for use by PCs if the goal is to help Wes animate his setting for similar reasons to why we use shuttles to transit rather than Star Trek-style teleportation.
 
In SARP, personal shielding power up would drastically shift things in favor of people fighting without said armor
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Personally I don't see a problem with this, power armor shouldn't be the end all be all on SARP. This is because battle field conditions can and WILL change, eventually technology will catch up and that isn't something we should discourage.

Not to mention the roleplay factor to, there are bound to be characters out there that don't WANT to use power armor for one reason or another, creating personal shields is another avenue for those characters to get involved in.

Plus, power shields won't completely shift the dynamics of the battle, it'll just mean that players without PA will have a power life-span against PA but that doesn't mean that PA should remain all powerful. With that said, having power armor encounter personal shield wearing infantrymen, would present a new challenge to the wearers and more roleplaying oppertunities..

So, let's not try and discourage this please.
 
I don't think you got my point, Kyle.

I speak of ideology. The question is "How come there are no Personal shields?" I answered. I rationalized it.

When I GM, I try to cling on the ideal that what I am doing is fleshing out and animating Wes' setting for his memberbase. This point of view makes me think much more about how to further the experience he'd prefer them to have. Generally, when I make pushes for change, it's far more to help the setting make more sense and flesh it out comprehensively to deliver the target experience.

You can prefer differently. I certainly don't mind if you do - I myself went and provided Melisson with an alien artifact providing her with a type of personal shield.

But I don't see this as the thread to debate whether it should be in or not. Such a thing is presently a rarity, and if it would become more common, there would be an impact - both positive and negative.
 
I'm against personal shields unless the body is built to emit them (such as the NH-32). Fred explained it best. It changes the setting from armored soldiers to people in miniskirts being able to stop bullets. That feels lame and overpowered to me. Plus it would probably require some sort of DR revision to make them useful. What's the point of personnel-scale shields when armor-scale weapons are going to instantly cut through them? Power armor is the way to go. The only people I could think of that might even use personnel-scale shields are police and civilian VIPs.
 
I have some ideas for chelti personal shield tech, which is a primary stepping stone technologically as chelti do not start with PA. However, these shield ideas do not mimic SARPs traditional bubble-like shields. Most chelti shields are directional and are only active for a few seconds, working around energy and technological limitations to deliver maximum defense force against incoming damage.

One current idea is for a sort of shield "buckler" of sorts that uses gravitational blasts to deflect bullets and such, it also makes shoulder barging much more powerful. Imagine running into someone and sending them flying across the room.

I mention these things mostly to demonstrate that personal shields do not have to be exact replicas of PA shields and that they can be used for more purposes than strictly overall defense, and partly because I couldn't resist a chance to advertise chelti technology. Perhaps other factions have completely grown out of personal shields, but some of us have to start climbing the ladder somewhere.
 
I feel obliged to point out that in many cases, personal shielding doesn't work all that well, not because of power or anything like that, but because of user risk. In order to prevent something from hitting the user, it has to be capable of affecting that given subject. It's why CFS systems aren't a good idea around unarmored-anythings. It's not that they're not effective, or useful, but that the shield itself would cause harm to anything unshielded that came into contact with it.

Now, keeping in mind the idea of purpose, I think they'd be exceptionally popular among criminals and VIPs. Depending on how they're described, they could be very effective concealed protection for people, and if they're small enough, much easier to sneak around with, compared to realistically solid body armor. As such, they'd have a very useful niche of their own, even if they can't protect from anything above PDR.
 
I would really really really really point out one think. As far as I meant and I hope what Luca meant personal shields is something for human to wear so they do not have to wear bulky armour. It is stylish and pretty cool and makes good tech for roleplay. BUT! And like you see it is big but I never said that this shields should work agains ADR weaponry! Quite the contrary, personal shield should be just that. Personal. Against normal handguns and all that. Why?

Well that was mentioned before. It is not an easy tech to handle. You need power source, emittor and all that. I feel that if you want the shield to be handle ADR guns, then normal guy could not really wear it properly. It would be big cumbersome and what not. You can as well take the PA. Should we talk about personal grade weaponry, that would be something absolutely different. You would need less power, the emittors would not have to be that strong and all that. Of course it could not be CFS-based.

Also I see no point why personal shield could even discourage use of PA. Yes it is shield, yes it protects, but that is about it. PA gives you extra strength, much better mobility then even Neko has, it gives you mean of communication, targeting computer, means of survival in space and more. Personal shield would not push PAs away in the slightest
 
What's the point of personnel-scale shields when armor-scale weapons are going to instantly cut through them?
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For the military probably not, but as we have a number of civilian plots where such a device which would have a limited use would have appeal.
 
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