Shielding Technology

[paladinrpg]

I had a quick question for the tech-inclined out there, and possibly a new idea for submission if it hasn't been done before (which it is usually has been). Is there currently or in the past ever been a shielding technology that instead of blunting the impacts of weaponry or ablating away from damage like a protective sheath of whatever type of energy or field, that instead was more of an energy void or mini black hole concept that sucked in a certain amount of energy or mass thrown at it into a pocket dimension/out of phase reality/storage area etc., at least until being overloaded and then failing, or even releasing the built up force violently?

 

[Kyle]

Kind of almost sounds like my idea of an absorbtion shield, basically designed to absorb the power from energy based weaponry and feed it into a ships weapons capacitors.

 

[paladinrpg]

Kind of almost sounds like my idea of an absorbtion shield, basically designed to absorb the power from energy based weaponry and feed it into a ships weapons capacitors.

That's exactly what I was thinking. So Neshaten has that kind of tech?

It was actually inspired by this wiki article, which goes along with an anime I was watching recently.

 

[Kyle]

They have a concept for the tech, and it'll be put on their gunboats (a starship that has a lot of weapons, but minimal defenses)

That anime wouldn't perchance be Arpeggio of Blue Steel would it?

 

[paladinrpg]

Yep, a friend recommended me to watch it and I was enjoying it. I thought the idea of the 'Klein Field' was nifty, and the fact it actually has some real physics behind how it works. Made me wonder if SARP couldn't have something similar in feel, as it would be a shield-that-isn't to break the mold.

Sounds like you have already got the concept down, though. My idea was more to take a normal Hyperspace Fold Drive system -- which works to form a bubble of space immediately around a ship and move it somewhere else through hyperspace -- and instead try to use it to take incoming energy or solid projectiles that come into a highly localized bubble of space around the ship and move THAT somewhere else where it won't harm. Continuum Distortion Drives also do something similar to this by moving pockets of spacetime around, so what if the pocket was actually something that could be used defensively? Hmm.

 

[Fred]

Hyperspace has a bigger relationship with bending space, rather than absorbing energy.

SARP tends to gravitate between two kinds of shield technology. Distorsion shielding, which is mostly inspired by the beam-bending shields you might be in anime like Nadesico. The other are graviton-based barriers, which have more to do with Star Trek-style deflector shields and Mass Effect-style personnal, well, barriers.

The Klein field actually has more in common with the Asamoya's energized armor, though in this case I believe it was polarizing the armor in order to give the hull greater resilience and keep at bay the system-disabling effects of particle-based weaponry. I think the idea was to sheath the hull with a conformal magnetic field so that any direct-fire beam weaponry would end up spreading more on impact, thus applying much less concentrated heat saturation.

 

[paladinrpg]

Thank you kindly, for the clarifications... but the pocket dimension shield tech could still be viable as long as it used some other technology, perhaps?

Polarizing hull armor... wasn't that what they used to do in the first season of the Star Trek: Enterprise series? Before Starfleet deployed deflector shield technology?

 

[Fred]

That's one possible reference, though, honestly, the idea was just about layering forcefields right over the material in a conformal fashion.

In Star Trek 2, when the Reliant is acting creepy, Kirk sounds yellow alert, and hull-tight forcefields look like they are being erected over important regions of the ship. That's one interpretation.

In Star Trek 6, the Enterprise is being pummeled by torpedoes. Even though the shield visuals make it look like it ought to be some kind of bubble around the ship (like the Enteprrise-D in Star Trek TNG), the Enterprise-A looks like, despite her shields being up, she's taking every torpedo hit on her hull. She gets black marks scoring her hull on every torpedo. One even bounces off the surface of the saucer. However, when the shields collapse, one torpedo actually goes straight through the saucer. By then the damage difference is pretty obvious.

 

[FrostJaeger]

I've been thinking about this as well and, seeing the concepts mentioned here, I'm curious: would Paladin's EVE (Energy Void Emitter) be possible by inverting/reversing the process used in aether generators? (seeing as how they essentially perform the opposite function by drawing energy from a different dimension)

 

[paladinrpg]

EVE? Hey that's a very catchy acronym! you make an excellent point though - there's even the fact that there are entities that dwell in the realm of the aether and can go in and out of it (such as Osaka's Sourcians, and perhaps your Umbral Mishhuvurthayar as well, Fred) so why couldn't that be a viable technology to go both ways? Perhaps it could even be a nice plot device, because I know that these creatures are angry about us stealing energy from the aether already... Imagine we start putting unwanted/harmful energy back in there too.

 

[Fred]

And in-plot special artifact that cropped up was when the PCs were fighting Melisson. Melisson happened to have on her an orb which was an artifact of another ancient alien race. Said artifact allowed her to sheathe herself in armor made of floaty energy panes and create translucent flat whirlpool-like discs that would absorb all kinds of matter they came in touch with.

She could move them around, use them to shield her, or to throw about as a deadly frisbee/boomerang. The only thing that could stand up to it was the special dimensional properties of zesuaium. The nearest analogy I have to this concept was the D&D Sphere of Annihilation artifact.

This said, the 'Varin artifact orb' wasn't something I qualified as technology that was reverse engineerable. It was a special in-plot element that was meant to illustrate something so far beyond what we had that it felt more 'magical' (hence Melisson's unofficial title: Mahou Shoujo Melisson).

With that point of view, I'll admit I'm not very keen on the direction this brainstorm is going towards. Not to mention delving into the nature of Aether has never made Wes comfortable and I've hindsight that we probably ought to leave it alone.

 

[paladinrpg]

Wow, that's wild. It is quite a shame I was not around to see that fight sequence with Melisson.

If Wes is a bit touchy about delving into the aether energy plane aspects, then let's go backtracking to the original brainstorm... the "Energy Void Emitter" (grats to you FrostJ) technology would simply just act more like some kind of a near-hull sheathed "interdiction field" that basically would dissipate a portion of the energy of an attack via sucking it into either:

A) a pocket of briefly warped space, which it transits and either loses energy or explodes somewhere else a second later not directly next to the ship to cause damage (a bit like how I used the High Ground anti-FTL system on the Uno X in Aquilla Flight to stop Vogel-assisted bullets)
B) absorb it into the ship's energy systems itself (although this already exists in some form with Kyle's gunboat).

I also should note that I thought up this technology specifically for the fact that it could be a nice "eery" factor for an antagonist or enemy. Like, suddenly this ship come along cloaked in some negative energy field and it definitely would have some intimidation value. We could even say it's creating a "black hole" sphere or torus shape around the vessel, I suppose, and not even touch the realm of aether at all... then it would be classed as some kind of extreme gravitic shield.

 

[Guard Dog]

 

[FrostJaeger]

I know understand why Wes is touchy about the subject - I've been reading up on the mechanics behind Aether and the associated articles on RL particle physics - barely understanding the latter - and have quite the headache.

Still, though, I'll continue to work at this, as my curiosity is piqued (and it'd be a shame to put a good acronym to waste).

 

[FrostJaeger]

After a brief nap and additional research, I've come up with a theoretical EVE system:

Mentioned here is this interesting tidbit of information:

The aether dampening field system accomplishes its task by utilizing a system consisting of...[other stuff]..... and a space-subspace tunneling system.

The subspace and space-subspace tunneling system are utilized to produce an instability in the aetheric sea by creating a means of interacting with the dimensional layer which contains the aetheric sea.....

Couldn't such a tunneling system (or perhaps systems) also be used to create more numerous micro-portals in front of incoming aether beams (similar to the Pinpoint Barrier from Macross)?

Of course, to maintain some semblance of balance, there'd be limitations on an EVE system (feel free to suggest more):

• Only [insert value] number of portals active at any given time
• Exponential increase in power req. (and poss. of overloading?) as portal size and/or number increase
• Large in size (experimental as well, so not widely used)
• Portals incapable of affecting 'solid' matter (ships, PAs, missiles, etc.) - possibly overloads if contact does occur?
  
• Takes time to reposition barriers

 

[Aendri]

So far as I'm aware, nothing with phasing or tunneling can be created anymore. Those two styles of technology just caused headaches. We'll see what is said by the man in charge, but you might want to look into something more along the lines of black hole shielding.

 

[FrostJaeger]

Ah, okay. In that case, a gravity-based shield could theoretically work provided that gluons act in the same fashion as photons when exposed to distortions in space-time. Creating said shield, however, would be far more difficult - perhaps through the usage of multiple Gravity Distortion Generators and/or Scalable Graviton Beam Projectors being focused on a single point (say, an incoming aether beam)?

Acronym-wise, the best I have so far is the GDA (Gravitic Defense Array).

 

[Aendri]

Keep in mind that a responsive system like that would be very nearly impossible to keep effective. That's the big reason most shielding tech is focused in general, not on pinpoint precision. When you're dealing with lightspeed weapons at ranges that max around a lightsecond (if I recall correctly on that max effective range we decided on), your chance to see an attack incoming, and not just calculate where it will hit, but intercept it are slim to none. Shields need to cover at least a feasibly large portion of the ship at any given time, because part of the point is also to limit your opponents reasonable targets. If your shield isn't active and covering part of the ship, you're relying entirely on sheer reaction time to save you, and that means you're even more susceptible to sneak attacks, or stealth attacks.

 

[Fred]

Sorry, Aendri, but that's one bit I don't agree with.

I was actually going to implement something pretty similar. Shielding that's on hot-standby to go full strength in order to protect against an attack. Because, science-wise, it's hard to justify how an energy field is going to 'take damage', but it's feasible to justify energy expenditure to blunt some incoming attack.

Considering how SAoY ships have quantum computers, that's pretty much within the realm of possibility.

Also, as an addendum, Mass Effect shielding also works the exact same way. It's not constant shielding (unless really required to be so) so much as something that's expended as needed.

Yes, there are constant-types of field systems, like those you need to deflect/protect from space hazards. But, in the case of anti-ship weaponry... that's considerably stronger, and I felt it made a good enough distinction to justify my approach.

 

[Aendri]

There's a huge difference between that, which I actually agree with, and a point to point system like FrostJaeger is describing, Fred. A full shield system, or hell, anything that covers a spread, instead of a small, specific point, would probably work on what you term "hot-standby". A point to point system, like Frost is discussing, would only work, even as a hot standby, against slower weapons, especially missiles and the slower plasmic weapons. Because of that, I can see something like that being a secondary system, pinpoint protection against some of the heavier hits that it can catch before they hit the main shields, but never as a primary system, because it would be useless unless you know attacks are coming, from where, and when they'll hit.