Confed capital

It's entirely possible some cities did have phase shielding, Alexandria and Johnston Island on McAuliffe were both completed shielded. However, torpedos can pass through them, although it seems like most planetary missiles are designed simply to overwhelm and cause the shielding to fail instead of penetrating it.

Cities such as DC, London, Paris, Berlin, etc...it would not surprising to see some kind of system.
 
Perhaps certain areas of cities were shielded such as key military bases, political centers, and/or civilian 'safe citadels'. That would certainly cut the power requirements for shielding an entire city.
 
Dragon1 said:
Perhaps certain areas of cities were shielded such as key military bases, political centers, and/or civilian 'safe citadels'. That would certainly cut the power requirements for shielding an entire city.
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Except that, as we've seen in the game, torpedoes make shields useless... and high-yield antimatter or nuclear warheads are similarly effective - what's the point in shielding a base if the area around the base is annihilated, destabilizing the ground which the base is on and probably overwhelming the shields in the process? They may shield bases or cities, but for the most part the missiles and bombs that can be used in such a situation can either bypass or overwhelm them, so the best defense is to avoid being hit in the first place.

But, as we've also seen, you can overwhelm point-defense systems.
 
I believe Haesslich to be correct in the fact that capital ship phase shields can be penetrated or overwhelmed by torpedoes and the such. Although, in both WC3 and WC4, torpedoes didn't appear to penetrate through shields like they did in WC2, they seemed to bombard them (bringing them down and seriously damaging the hull in the process). Could planet based shields be even stronger than capital ship shields? With no space limitations like onboard a warship, you could have many more power plants holding the shield.

For example, the average carrier's phase shields may be the equivalent strength of 3000cm. of durasteel and recharge at 300cm./second.
A planet base may have a different type of shielding (possibly particle or meson) and produce an equivalent defensive strength of 12,000cm. of durasteel with a recharge rate of 1200cm./second.

A system like that I'm sure would have been thought about in a 35-year intergalactic war that included on many occasions planetary bombardment and full-scale invasions.
 
Vader: What is it, General?
General Veers: My Lord, the fleet has moved out of lightspeed. Com Scan has detected an energy field protecting an area of the sixth planet of the Hoth system. The field is strong enough to deflect any bombardment.
Vader: The Rebels are alerted to our presence..... General, prepare your troops for a surface attack. :cool:
 
AS covers a lot of this ground during the book. Without the pressence of torpedos, the kilrathi would have had to attempt a landing onto McAuliffe in an effort to assault the buried fusion reactors in order to destroy them and bring the shields down.

The shields on McAuliffe were made to sound quite stronger than normal capship shields.
 
If a planetary shield was powered by fusion reactors underground, perhaps there would've been the capability to create a multi-level defense against torpedoes.
The outermost shield could have been penetrated by a torpedo, but a secondary shield operating on another frequency would not be penetrated.

Probably very expensive, but we are talking about the most historically significant cities in the Terran Confederation.
 
Yeah, they probably could have wired up some sort of fancy multiphased shield, or rapid frequency shifting, or a phase-masking system, in some way that would be impractical to put on a capship but might work on a planet. McAuliffe was designed without consideration to defense against shield-penetrating torpedos, so it's probably not a perfect example of what could be done by the time of Fleet Action to defend planetary targets against them. I agree it's probably pretty unlikely, though.

Incidentally, would planetary bombardments generally use phase-matching torpedos? They used them at McAuliffe, but they had to send torpedo bombers down to deliver them. In Fleet Action, they were just raining a whole lot of nukes from orbit. Since you need to do the phase-matching step, and that takes time, I'm not sure if city shields make complete sense to begin with (maybe they had them, but took them down after the McAuliffe debacle). Point defenses really make the most sense, from everything we know.

Perhaps the most insight can come from Blair's penetration of the air defenses over Washington towards the close of WC4. Tolwyn's friends were expecting him, and the Confed defenses did seem activated against his approach, but he didn't seem to have to put up with more than a few fighters, and the cloak got him the rest of the way down. That would also seem to argue against a shield, although maybe it would interfere with normal traffic too much, even if Tolwyn made some mutterings about a possible terrorist strike or something by those big bad Border Worlders.
 
GeeBot said:
Yeah, they probably could have wired up some sort of fancy multiphased shield, or rapid frequency shifting, or a phase-masking system, in some way that would be impractical to put on a capship but might work on a planet. McAuliffe was designed without consideration to defense against shield-penetrating torpedos, so it's probably not a perfect example of what could be done by the time of Fleet Action to defend planetary targets against them. I agree it's probably pretty unlikely, though.

Incidentally, would planetary bombardments generally use phase-matching torpedos? They used them at McAuliffe, but they had to send torpedo bombers down to deliver them. In Fleet Action, they were just raining a whole lot of nukes from orbit. Since you need to do the phase-matching step, and that takes time, I'm not sure if city shields make complete sense to begin with (maybe they had them, but took them down after the McAuliffe debacle). Point defenses really make the most sense, from everything we know.

Perhaps the most insight can come from Blair's penetration of the air defenses over Washington towards the close of WC4. Tolwyn's friends were expecting him, and the Confed defenses did seem activated against his approach, but he didn't seem to have to put up with more than a few fighters, and the cloak got him the rest of the way down. That would also seem to argue against a shield, although maybe it would interfere with normal traffic too much, even if Tolwyn made some mutterings about a possible terrorist strike or something by those big bad Border Worlders.
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Several problems with the idea of multiphased shields - one is that we're not sure if that'd really help matters, since shilelds shift phase anyways by themselves; that's why torps take a long time to lock, in order to match frequencies. We're also not sure if stacking phase-shield is possible, much less practical - for all you know, if you try to run multiphase shields, they either take up too much power to be practical or will possibly interfere with one another. Besides, what's the point? We also know that, from Action Stations, a sufficient amount of energy will overwhelm the shields and punch through - that's why battleships were the premiere capship-killing platform of the pre-torpedo era. A big enough bomb or series of bombs will punch through ANY shield - which is why the Morningstar's Mace missile could kill Kilrathi capships.

Also, it should be noted that point defense systems were apparently in place on many worlds - Earth had them, and several other colonies which we see in Fleet Action also had them. However, point defenses can be overwhelmed with either a huge amount of targets simultaneously, or by launching enough targets in series that you strip their ammunition levels to nothing. The Kilrathi used the latter method on Warsaw, while Earth suffered a mass-bombardment which punched through the defensive systems by sheer weight of numbers. Even then, over 75 percent of the missiles launched (at least a hundred of them aimed at over a dozen targets) were successfully intercepted.

Kilrah DID have planetary shielding systems, but Thrakath and the Emperor didn't seem to have much faith in their protective capability, to judge by the way his half of the Home Fleet were positioned in order to intercept the raiders.
 
About Blair's ability to land near the Capitol building--if he were able to broadcast Seether's IFF codes, then Tolwyn's men would have assumed that it was Seether coming in to report to Tolwyn. He WAS flying the same model craft as Seether after all.
 
Does anyone know where the Union of Border Worlds capital may be? Any references in the WC4 novel?
 
I believe a center of organization is mentioned I'm not sure if it actually has a capital, the capitol of the FRL is Landreich if anyone is also curious.
 
Ijuin said:
About Blair's ability to land near the Capitol building--if he were able to broadcast Seether's IFF codes, then Tolwyn's men would have assumed that it was Seether coming in to report to Tolwyn. He WAS flying the same model craft as Seether after all.
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Alternatively, he could've just used his cloaking device. :D
 
Fruitcake said:
Alternatively, he could've just used his cloaking device. :D
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Not if there was a shield in the way--in the WC4 novel it is clearly stated that the only way that a fighter can get through a phase shield without blasting its way through is to have friendly IFF codes (so that it lets you through).
 
Ijuin said:
Not if there was a shield in the way--in the WC4 novel it is clearly stated that the only way that a fighter can get through a phase shield without blasting its way through is to have friendly IFF codes (so that it lets you through).
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That's stated in Fleet Action as well, when the Marines are boarding Thrakhath's flagship.
 
Ijuin said:
Not if there was a shield in the way--in the WC4 novel it is clearly stated that the only way that a fighter can get through a phase shield without blasting its way through is to have friendly IFF codes (so that it lets you through).
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This suggests either there were no shields to raise, or just that no shields were raised when he got there due to friendly intervention. A third possibility is that the shields were up, but that Eisen had given him IFF codes to bypass them, if they weren't already in the Dragon's database.

Or he could've broken the codes there, with Sosa's help, before they got there and done what Dekker did. :D
 
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