the odd shield question

S

Soma

Spaceman
I just finished playing WCP again and I was wondering about the difference between a fighter's shield shape (more or less an oval) and a cap ship's shield shape (seems to lie flat on the ship itself), why the difference? Just curious...
 
I thought the only differences with phase shields were that they were thicker and extremely charged extremely fast

[Edited by Soma on 07-09-2001 at 02:36]
 
It wouldnt make sense to go to all the trouble to align the shields over a 20 meter fighter that has at the most four shield generators, while on a 2000 meter capital ship they have much more room, and power to properly sheild every inch of the ship with many generators working in tandem.
 
Or are the shields flush with the shape of the cap ship so you can't fly into the "dead" space between the shields and the ship itself to attack it with out having to go through the shields?
 
If capships had oval shields that would require much more energy than having the shields close to the hull. The larger the surface area of the shields, the more energy required. Or they could use the same amount of energy but be much weaker.

What's the point of projecting the shields far from the ship anyway?
 
It's to save CPU time. When you've got thirty fighters zipping around, the last thing you want is complex collision trees - so, fighters get simple spheres (note that they do not have to - you can have a fighter with a more complicated collision tree, like the corvettes). With capships and corvettes, on the other hand, such time-saving would be a bad thing, because these models are just so big that these sort of shortcuts would attract too much attention. I mean, can you imagine having a huge bubble around the Midway? :) Not to mention that this would mean going back to WC1/2-like capships, without components and destroyable turrets.
 
Man that would be brutal... You'd never see the Midway in a defensive mission. You'd see a giant flashing bubble. It's probably also for asthetics, because a bubble around a giant ship like that would look really really bad.
 
But such half-spheres (like in Star Trek) could look cool. But to keep the shields near the hull makes sense and it also enables you to fly over the ship without getting repelled from the shields.
 
WC capships can project their shields...shield projection is mentioned in False Colors (IIRC, don't quote me on that...)
and the Midway does it in the cutscene where you take out the Nephilim fleet.
 
And does that mean that it has to lower it's sheilds every time a fighter lands or takes off? That would be brutal especially in a full scramble when the carrier comes under attack.
 
Maybe they just open a smal gap in the shields right over the launch tube, and timed to coincide right with the fighter's exit. Of course, if the calcaluations were slightly off.......

Best, Raptor
 
bleh... just remembered... in FA they needed to match some type of code to make it through the Kilrathi shields and land... don't remember specifics right now.

TC
 
Probably, sorta like torps.

Alternative idea for the launching tubes: they actually project outside of the area covered by the shields (or at least extremely thick phase shields), as do the bridge, guns, etc. Unknown why they can shield engines but not guns, perhaps because you must move a turret?
 
Another question would be how can they shoot through their own shields? Perhaps this explains why you can't shield turrets?
 
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