Phase shielding, what now?

[Aginor]

Ok guys, as you already know from my other Threads I am reading Action Stations now, and I tried to figure out something I don't understand: Phase shielding.

So let me go through the various sources:

- In Action Stations fighters cannot harm big ships (the biggest ones I guess, smaller ones are killable with fighters) because they have phase shields. That's why the Admirals love their battleships and the big fights before the 2630s are always decided by battleships. But they figure out how to destroy Battleships with Torpedoes by locking on the shield frequence. Ok. That also explains why Torpedoes have lock times that long: Shield frequencies are rotating and the torpedo (or the bomber's computer) has to figure out the pattern in order to punch through the shield.

In WC1 we kill destroyers and cruisers (which are fairly big I might add, the Fralthi is 500 meters long) and even a starbase with single fighters. I understand that this is actually a gameplay thing. The creators of WC1 wanted the player to kill big things as well. But nevertheless: We kill capships with fighter weapons, with guns even.


In WC2 we can't kill capships at all with fighter weapons. We have to use torpedoes that lock on.

In WC3 we can kill capships without torpedoes, even the biggest ones, but it takes alot of time. Also we can destroy turrets here so this is way cooler for the fighters than before. You can actually do something ehile the bombers attack.
Same in WC4.

In Prophecy we can't kill capships again. Neither with guns (except the Plasma gun thingie on the Devastator) nor with missiles. We can kill the turrets becasue there is weaker shielding there, ok, that's cool. Torpedoes kill capships as always. I don't remember capship missiles in WCP but I guess they are like torpedoes so caps vs. caps works fine, and the Plunkett class has huge turrets which can't be meant to be against fighters so capship guns work vs. capship shields obviously.


Sooo what happened between the games? Fighter weapons vs. capship shields in short form:

source ---- Guns -- Torpedoes -- capship guns -- turrets killable by fighter guns
pre 2634 -- no -- no -- yes -- unknown, but not likely
AS -- no -- yes -- yes -- not likely
WC1 -- yes -- yes -- yes -- no (engine issue I think)
WC2 -- no -- yes -- yes -- no (engine issue I think)
WC3 -- yes -- yes -- yes -- yes
WCP -- no -- yes -- yes -- yes


So any explanations for that? Just an arms race between shield technology and weapon alterations so they could punch through? Or is there more to it?
On a side note: I wondered in which technologies the Kilrathi were superior to the humans. I'm thinking of jump drives because a light fighter like the Darket can jump in 2669 and most confed fighters can't. After the war all of them can jump, even the small Piranha, so maybe the Terrans got that technology from the Kilrathi?

 

[Farbourne]

I think the "official" explanation is that technology keeps evolving... in pre-Action Stations, they have phase shields, in AS they figure out how to make torpedoes penetrate through PS, they extend that technology to guns and fighter missiles in WC1, then in WC2 there's an advance in PS that makes fighter-born weaponry not able to penetrate, but the more sophisticated torpedoes can carry the sensor packages/computers to still punch through, then in WC3+4 fighter-born weaponry advances again and it can punch through. Not sure what the official explanation is for Prophecy.

However, I never liked that "official" line, mainly because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The inconsistencies were, I imagine, largely caused by gameplay and story considerations...different originators of the canonical fiction and the game mechancis grabbing elements they knew from existing games or trying things to make their gameplay or novels more fun, without paying a lot of attention to the actual continuity (much like the writing in the movie caused all kinds of problems by having Bossman die, calling the fighters Rapiers, the ship the "Tiger Claw", and the other ship the "Concordia", because they were compelling Wing Commander icons, even if it didn't fit the continuity and requred exetnsive and painful retconing to make fit in). If fighter-born weaponry had gotten able to penetrate phase shielding by WC1 (maybe because the ships targeting computer could determine shield phase rapidly?), why did this suddenly stop in WC2, but not for torps? And why do torps bypass shields in WC2, but normal weapons have to wear them down in WC1, 3, and 4?

I have always thought a more logical explanation would have been:
* Initially, capships only mounted the same shield technology as fighters, only orders of magnitude more powerful
* Pre AS, fighters didn't pack sufficient power in their guns or missiles to do significant capship damage
* AS invented the anti-matter torpedo which did pack enough power to damage or destroy capships
* Pre-WC1 a better fighter powerplant was invented that brought fighter power up to the point where it could damage capships AND power capship-strengthed shields, hence WC1 fighters could take down capships on relatively equal terms and ignore their flak fire.
* Between WC1 and WC2, phase shields were invented, rendering fighter-born weapons, even with increased power, useless. However, Terrans figured out how to modify the large-warheadded torpedoes to penetrate phase shields. This was then leaked to the Kilrathi.
* Sometime after WC2, phase-recognition got much better and could be incorporated into fighters' targeting computer, allowing fighters to fire right through phase shields. At this point, since capship and fighter weaponry could bypass phase shields, capships went back to ordinary shields which have to be taken down rather than fired through.
* Sometime after WC4, there was another advance--either a new kind of phase shield, or an entirely new kind of shield, that protected the ship from harm, but really only hardened it internally or right on the skin, so turrets had to be external to the shield.

This would fit better with just about all the fiction, and with comments in the manuals (for example, the bit in the WC2 manual about phase-penetrating torpedoes being a "relativley recent terran innovation", which flies in the face of Action Stations, where phase-penetrating torpedoes are a much older technolgy, and a Kilrathi invention at that).

But of course, this is just what I think would work better. It is decidedly not canon, and directly contradicts comments in some of the canonical material about pre-WC1 ships having phase shields.

We're stuck with what sci-fi fans of many franchises are stuck with...trying to make cohesive continuity out of mutually conflicting sources.

 

[Oggy]

....So any explanations for that? Just an arms race between shield technology and weapon alterations so they could punch through? Or is there more to it?
On a side note: I wondered in which technologies the Kilrathi were superior to the humans. I'm thinking of jump drives because a light fighter like the Darket can jump in 2669 and most confed fighters can't. After the war all of them can jump, even the small Piranha, so maybe the Terrans got that technology from the Kilrathi?

In terms of who has got an edge, to me it all seems a bit wooly.
reading the background, the Kilrathi have always have the edge over us on Cloaking, with the production of mainstream stealth fighter, whereas the Terran programs seems focused on smaller numbers of prototype ships (This could be because we can't get the kilrathi crystals that make the devices possible, in WCIV Pliers says that they are mined deep in Kilrathi territory.)
The Kilrathi seems to have had the edge on Jump technology, evidenced with their multiple large Dreadnoughts, whereas we only have the Behemoth, (with stolen technology?) Kilrathi technology was fundmental to the Vesuvius project.
Gun technology is on a par, but in the manual to WCIII it states that Terran engineers reversed engineered the Particle Cannon from a destroyed Kilrathi fighter.
Terran fighters seem to have stronger shields and hulls than their Kilrathi counterparts (there are a few exceptions to this, but it seems kilrathi favour a larger number of medicore vessels).
Terran Capital ships seem to be stronger in a stand-up fight. (there is amission in WCIII where the Victory's escorts duke it out with their Kilrathi counterparts. If you leave them to it, the Terran ships will win)
An interesting one is the different philosophies in respect of onboard computers. Terran capital ships have multiple redundant computers and circuits, in heavily aromoured rooms, whereas the Kilrathi seem to operate a a linked network of computer nodes which is more efficient if they are all running, but can be damaged more easily, as the individual nodes can knocked offline through damage, reducing the processing speed of the network as a whole.

 

[Quarto]

A few things you need to keep in mind...
- Fighter weapons could always penetrate phase shields. Action Stations talks about this - the Varni very nearly destroyed one of the Kilrathi battleships with a concentrated fighter attack. However, the amount of firepower this needed made it a difficult thing to repeat (even that attack ultimately failed). The brute force approach requires a lot of brute force to overwhelm phase shields. But the implication is that any advances in weapons technology could make such an attack easier. Conversely, advances in shield technology would make a fighter attack harder.
- Torpedoes work completely differently, because they do not actually hit phase shields. Once a torpedo has lock, it's as if the shields weren't there at all - they figure out the frequency (sci-fi technobabble here) of the shield and tune in to it.
- Privateer gives us a rather interesting opportunity to see the process of weapons/shield upgrades at work. We are able to buy both shield and gun upgrades, which increase our stats not by a little bit, but by a lot. However, in each case, the power plant is the limit - you have to upgrade the power plant separately, otherwise you just won't have enough energy for your toys. The implication here is that theoretically, any fighter or capship could get a jump in its shields or firepower if it receives specific upgrades. This opens up the possibility of the kind of "arms race" that the games appear to illustrate.

All in all, this is stuff that actually makes sense. It's kinda bizarre that it does, actually, because the designers probably never gave it a moment's thought, they were just trying to figure out what works best for the gameplay - be that as it may, the whole thing still ends up making sense.

 

[Lt.Overload]

(...)On a side note: I wondered in which technologies the Kilrathi were superior to the humans. I'm thinking of jump drives because a light fighter like the Darket can jump in 2669 and most confed fighters can't. After the war all of them can jump, even the small Piranha, so maybe the Terrans got that technology from the Kilrathi?

Kilrathi had cloaking nailed down, while Confed was still trying to figure it out by the end of the Terran-Kilrathi War. In WCP, I think every Confed fighter off the Midway has cloaking, but its useless against the Nephilim, they see right through.

 

[Ijuin]

- Privateer gives us a rather interesting opportunity to see the process of weapons/shield upgrades at work. We are able to buy both shield and gun upgrades, which increase our stats not by a little bit, but by a lot. However, in each case, the power plant is the limit - you have to upgrade the power plant separately, otherwise you just won't have enough energy for your toys. The implication here is that theoretically, any fighter or capship could get a jump in its shields or firepower if it receives specific upgrades. This opens up the possibility of the kind of "arms race" that the games appear to illustrate.

The powerplant issue is why the Lance's new miniaturized antimatter powerplant in WC4 is such a big deal--it offers a major jump in energy density over the ones that fighter-sized craft had been able to mount until then. This is what allowed Excalibur-like speed and agility in a fighter with so much more mass and triple the armor rating, as well as those snazzy charging "fission guns" that, when charged up fully, could do about four times the damage per hit of a Tachyon gun. Later developments in such tech are probably also what allows the Devastator to have that huge plasma gun that is the equivalent of a WC2 capital ship's turret.