Shield Techs: For Better of Worse

Whilst not directly a "Ship" post, it is related in general to the Starship mythology/fiction.

Shield's are almost synonymous to starships as many fictions that have starships, uses shields as a means of defense. Some prefer the term energy barriers, or voids and other terms that may offer 'cooler' sounding terminology than simply "Shields".

Shields affect people and their ships in different manner and availability depending on the source-fiction.

EVE Online:
In EVE shields are the first line of defense or HP (hitpoints) for any ship, starbase structure, drones and such subjects. Shields are usually (but not exclusively) resistant to damage types that are inversed to that of armor. Depleted shields can be replenished automatically at stations at no cost at all, compared to armor, and in flight it passively regenerates on its own, unlike armor.

However a number of people do not prefer shield "tanking", and after further study, i can see why. Consider the armor repair variant of the capitol class modules versus the shield counterpart. A capitol shield booster boosts only 7200HP compared to 9600 of the armor variant. Add a second module, the Shield Boost Amplifier II (tech 2 modules are most commonly used modules in EVE being cheaper and easily replaced but relatively sturdy enough for most combats) and you get a 36% increase, that is 9792 HP. Armor repair modules do not have boost amplifiers, but you can put a second repair module that doubles the 9600 repair amount. And all through that, I found out that the armor repair modules (double rep setup) still uses less capacitor that the single Capitol class Shield Booster.

So why Shield Tank? Perhaps the one strong point of it is that while's it's Cap-intensive, it is not powergrid intensive. Armor repair modules uses up much more powergrid than shield modules, thus leading me to conclude that ranged combat with bigger, more powergrid intensive guns can make use of shields, whilst the deadly knife fights of close combatants can use the extra powergrid to make use of the armor's strong repping ability. Also shields are usable by smaller-less-capacitor intensive ships which make use of the shield's passive regeneration ability (though it by no means can supplant active boosting/tanking in terms of survivability).

Star Trek:
Energy Field bubbles that protect the ship, the one thing that make's it so "geeky" is that the shield's are not always overwhelmed by force alone, but also by "frequencies", as star trek ships uses all manner of frequencies in their mythos that a smaller ship can pierce through the bigger one's defenses simply by knowing the shield frequency of the latter.

That said, since such information is not always available, force is still a usable method to eventually deplete the shields. But pioneering the shield tech, Star Trek ships also divide their shields to quadrants; based on areas, much like a tank that has weaker armor at sides and rear, but with the ability to reinforce any side as necessary by flowing additional power to specified shield quadrants.

Star trek ships almost exclusively use shields for protection, as thus far from what I've seen, mostly, they have crap for armor.

Star Wars:
Star Wars ships employ shields as a second skin of sorts. Whilst also divided into sections and can reinforce as necesary like it's Star Trek variant, the shields of the Star Wars universe are not overly evident on ships, and as such, for Empire most especially, their units still field relative strong armor.

While there are shield bubbles, most ships have shields that are distance away from their immediate hulls, so it largely follows the contours of the ship rather than forming a spherical bubble.

In short, I'd say that the Star Wars universe gives shield as a first line of defense out of several, instead of strongly putting their eggs onto that one basket.

Legacy:
In our fiction, Shields are something exclusive to a higher civilization and the standard ones still rely fully on armor.

I'd protest early on, but I think it's better off we're making things more 'grounded'; and keeping such abundantly reused idea as something more of a unique idea that few can obtain.

It also enables us to further armor tech, the improvisation of solid defenses that has been slightly lacking in a large collection of sci-fi fiction. I take the cue from Babylon 5, where the impressive Victory-class Destroyers use special alloys as armor that deflects most of the incoming fire rather than absorb.

Finally, the end:

There's lots of other shield tech references out there, and many creative niches used in fiction to make shields ever more unique, but I'll leave that out for now, you can try looking on your own, but for the avid enthusiast, check this out:

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Shields/Shield2.html

Interesting argument on shields (if somewhat tech-nerdy) with some scientific considerations to it.