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Plasma doesn't always have to be hot, in fact, there are many plasmas that you can touch by hand with no ill effects. Plasma is often referred to as the fourth state of matter, it's essentially just an ionic soup where the electrons have decided they'd rather be elsewhere due to other influences. Technically fire is plasma, tho it's one of the hotter varieties....
Are shields possible...yes. But I personally prefer the concept of no shields. I loved Babylon 5 and Andromeda more cause they didn't really have shields. Every battle had more risk and reality to me. It forces better tactics and strategy not methods for defending the ship.
one thing that i can see possible is if yoru ship is large enough and the power supply is powerful ebough have plasma energy magnetic and partical shiels layerd one over the top of the other but using somthing like a stacked pylon system
Just one thing: most weapons in Star Wars are called lasers, but aren't actually firing light but ionised tibanna gas. (Similarly as laser sword blades are actually plasma blades)
@@aiosquadron why? I just commented this here because this vid is about shielding and shields against light based weapons probably wouldn't work against particle weapons, no matter the yield. And this misconception often happens because Star Wars weapons are often called laser, but are in fact not a laser.
Plasma shields do have another disadvantage, omitted in the presentation. The plasma will eventually run out. If used in close proximity or inside an atmosphere, the charged particles will react with the nearby matter and eventually lose their charge through recombination, turning them into non-ionized gas that will leave the magnetic bottles. On top of that, even left on their own, the charges will eventually recombine when moving along side the spiral trajectories around the magnetic force field. So as long as they are on, plasma shields have to be recharged. An alternative form of plasma shield can be an "electron cloud" shield. That is, using only free electrons as a plasma substitute. This will generate a negative charge bubble around the ship that will interact with the electron clouds of the normal matter and act as a deflector of sorts. Suffers similar penalties as the general plasma shield and doesn't stop heavy particles especially baryons with no charge, so your ship will be vulnerable to neutron radiation. Star trek i think uses local space-time distortions as their deflector shields. Several clues taken from LCARS and tech manuals support this. For one, the shield emitters strength is measured in Cochranes, same unit used for measuring warp fields. Then there is a graviton frequency associated with the shield state displays. Also, local force fields placed on doorways and corridors, seem to act in a repulsive manner to normal matter.
I almost included the space-time distortion idea. The script ended up becoming really complicated, there is a LOT I omitted. So thanks for mentioning this.
@@resurrectedstarships my pleasure! And you are right of course. Besides, being a technology distinctive from plasma shields, perhaps space-time distortions belong in a separate video :D
For atmospheric shields, couldn't the atmosphere itself be used to make plasma, like what happens with lightning, and kept alive using something like shaped microwave beams, sorta like those grape plasma ball experiments?
@@tiagotiagot it could, but the process of recombination would demand much higher sustainment energy requirements. In a vacuum a once ionized plasma stays ionized and you only need to keep it place. In an atmosphere the plasma itself runs out due to contact with the surrounding molecules.
The Earth’s Ozone layer acts like shield for ultraviolet radiation through absorption and deflection. Intense light waves cause interference to lasers. Combine that with a film similar to solar panels on the hull and you could use the diffused energy of the laser that penetrates this shielding to recharge the ship. [edit:] This was an off the cuff comment, but since it’s spurred discussion, I wasn’t thinking specifically ozone, but particles that could act in a similar manner. My idea assumed a field to keep the particles in proximity to the ship or it would just pass through them like a plane through a cloud. Film idea was backward. It would be better to be reflective (as some pointed out heat shedding is problem in space). Anyway, thanks everyone for engaging with the topic, been a lot of quality ideas in these comments.
@@kokofan50 yea... He skipped that one class on thermal dynamics and its application with space. Energy dissipation and all that fun stuff that Star Trek/Wars seemingly skip over in their ship designs.
but there's also a reason solar panels get so hot, be careful with using them as armor, since you basically just changed the attack from light radiation imparting too much heat to light radiation imparting that heat over a larger area. You're still getting baked, just slower, and you're gaining energy from some of it.
@@feartheghus Well I was only suggesting panels as part of a solution. Shedding heat is a major drawback to widespread use of solar energy on Earth as you point out. Historically the Earth has reflected ~29% of heat from the sun but lately it’s been only ~25% which has been suggested as due to increase in solar panel usage - I’m not completely convinced it can all be attributed to this yet. However, there is a temperature variance on the ISS of ~278c between side facing sun and side facing away so shedding heat is definitely a problem for all starship designs. I think starships have to constantly revolve when near stars to prevent concentrated heating on one side just like the Earth and the ISS do. My spitballing here was that you might try holding ozone gas layers around the exterior held by an electromagnetic field perhaps in combination with a wide spectrum light broadcast to deflect/diffuse most of it then collect some of what gets through for recharging. That last bit was more for ironic wit than a serious idea to power the ship.
4:53 Star Wars shields consist of two overlapping layers of deflector shields. Ray shielding would stop "energy" such as plasma, lasers, electricity, radiation, etc. Particle shielding would stop physical objects from passing through it, bouncing/redirecting objects like strike-craft or asteroids off and away from the ship. An object that hit it on a pretty direct course or couldn't be deflected would end up similarly to running your car at max speed into a solid wall or sometimes disintegrated. The particle shield can also be turned on/off separately from the ray shield to allow strike-craft and shuttles to enter/leave the ships hangar.
@@ImperativeGames It also very rarely works that way in actual Star Wars stories, outside of lore books, Legends or Disney, they're all kinda will-nilly with how shields actually work.
Another interesting use of shield systems in sci fi is the reflex gun in space battleship yamato where the beam is reflected from different satellites with shields to attack a enemy ship from multiple directions.
@@aliboy357 except it is a one trick pony. If the weapon was used against starfleet, 9/10 times they would figure out how the shield works and modulate the shield to reflect the beam back to the cannon and make the gamilons embarrass themselves.
7:38 - would be interesting to see in a space battle a ship using 2 different types of weapon projectiles one right behind the other to fool the shields sensors like a plasma torpedo and there is a normal torpedo right behind it or the plasma torpedo is followed by a quick laser
Similar is already done with explosive reactive armor in the real world, rounds contain two explosives one that detonates first to activate and waste the armor and the second that does the real damage.
Star Wars has this on one ship. Its called the Aggressor Class Star Destroyer, used by the Zann Consortium. It fires an Ion shot followed up by a large plasma shot. First drains the shields, second impacts the hull.
About the ships getting knocked about even with shields up; while the real reason for this more likely for the sake of drama and keeping things interesting (hard to build tension of the crew can ignore the effects of weapon hits) there are two good reasons for it scientifically. First is conservation of momentum. If the shields stops an attack that has physical force (like guns and missiles) that momentum doesn't just go away and the shield generators have to absorb it. While you can lesson the felt impact by spreading the force over several generators you can only "cheat" so much. A smart design would have the generators on a sliding rail so it can rock back across it so slow the impulse of the impact (much like the slide action of a semi-automatic pistol) while also making it so that that the rail will fail if the generator takes to much impact so it rips away safely without taking a chunk of the bulkhead with it (I'd also have a reactive armor blow out panel behind it help slow it down one it's ripped away). The second is shields can only really spread out, deflect, deform or turn attacks bleeding energy out of them. If the shields are powerful enough then they can bleed out enough energy that the attack that it's ineffective but it the attack has enough penetrating power it can get through with enough force to maybe not damage the hull but knock the crap out of it.
This is why scifi needs more point defense like in Battlestar Galactica or even the Kelvin timeline Startrek imo. Just target the missiles/torpedoes and fire a proximity phaser. *Boom* Done.
The problem with taking an impact is the differential change in momentum across an object. When your car crashes, the front stops before the back does, and that's what makes your car a wad of tinfoil. If the back of the car stopped at the same time as the front of the car, your car wouldn't change shape and get wrecked. If you apply an impact evenly to every part of a spaceship and its contents on an atom per atom basis, nobody feels any acceleration or damage. You've invented the inertial dampener. Don't just use your shields outwards to stop incoming projectiles, use it as a crash bag to push on the back of your ship at the same time as the front of the ship is pushed, so it won't deform and break.
@@freddyd1783 There is one problem with that, no drag to slow down the fragments. While this can be better then letting the full sized projectile hit, they can still do heavy damage. This is an issue we're having with ADF systems that they're starting to field on tanks. We got ones that are fast enough to intercept tank rounds but even after being intercepted the fragments have so much momentum they can still rip through several inches of RHA equivalent.
In different Sci fi tech manuals it is explained that the ships that have shields will either use a quick rotation system or a layering technique. Your explanation of bleed through explains alot.
In my own sci-fi universe, shields are available and used, but some factions, including the various human groups, still use armor as the primary defense for their starships. Because most of the hostile alien factions favor plasma, laser, or particle-based weapons, human armor is specialized to deal with those kinds of weapons in particular, while still offering acceptable protection against kinetic projectiles. Laser weapons in particular are popular for any group that can make a powerplant and heat sinks strong enough for them to be viable because none of the shields in this universe can block them.
that armor concept kinda reminds me of the nanolaminate armor concept in mobile suit Gundam: iron blooded orphans, the armor in that show makes mobile suits and ships almost completely immune to beam weapons, but physical weapons still can do damage and a number of suits use maces or other blunt weapons because crushing is always better than cutting against thick metal
There's actually a form of vehicle armor developed in the UK called electromagnetic reactive armor. It consists of two conductive metal plates spaced a few inches apart and protects the vehicle from damage by using high-voltage electricity to instantly vaporize projectiles that come into contact with the armor.
I thought about something like that a few years ago, it was basically a ship covered in conductive metal and when needed, a strong electrical current would be shot through the metal, strengthening it against attacks, such as missiles, i called it electromagnetic shielding cause it sounded cool
I always thought a point defence system should be in star trek. Even if only a little incoming fire is Intercepted that by the point defence system it's still fewer hits on your Shields. So you could last longer in a fight. Just my two cents. Love your channel.👍
Agreed. A light, fast fireing Phaser cannon just for intercepting inoming Torpedoes would be a huge help in 99% of all engagements that involve Torpedoes imo.
You can kind of see this working in one of the TNG episodes (forgot the name) where the Ferengi fire a couple of missiles at the wormhole - Worf is able to destroy them using phasers with great precision.
well all the ships beam banks in star trek can also work like point defense actually when needed! but starteks point defenses really suck when compared to what the point defense tech systems in the battletech universe use with there dropships, mechs, tanks, aerospace fighters, warships, jumpships and others. in the time in the battletech timeline in the post clan invasion era and onward combat units in battletech actually can have both have either a regalar automatic ballistic point defense CIWS anti missile system or a pulse laser CIWS point defense anti missile system with basically unlimited shots at the cost of heat generation. these AMS can shot down small missile swarms and large capital ships missiles really efectly. also due to how compact and small the AMS is normally drop ships and warships in battletech can easily fit lots of them while taking up very little of the ships space overall! but will have a incredible effectiveness that one battletech dropship or warship with a few hundred laser anti missile systems would very easily shoot down hundreds or even thousands of micross verta tech fighter micro swarm missiles very easily! also can shoot down a few doesn of those gundam/SRW anti ship cruise missiles very easily too! also they don't even need to worry about running out of ammo when it comes to laser AMS! also the clan versions of the AMS also take up half the space and weight of the inner sphere versions too.
4:15 I love this animation... the idea of shield triggering only on impact makes sense and fits well with Stargate visual effects... The tuning for various damage types also fits well to this and was sometimes part of the story.
Stargate shields work differently though. Stargate shields can be turned into cloaks and anti-replicator fields all on the fly. They can allow physical things through or block everything.
@@the11382 I don't remember cloak, but anti Replicator would still make sense since you know... all they need is something to hit them if you talking Milky Way Replicators and such plasma field would fry quite a bit of electronics and block radio signals with Pegasus Replicators. Tho you are right... while in ship-ship combat seem close enough, when you go in to touch it illusion falls apart. Per usual for sci-fi they often block everything making it air or water tight and we have no real way to make that shields.
Well the shields appear to operate on the energy spectrum in some ways, so going from a light refractive range to a radio frequency disruptor does not seem too far out of hand.
Fun fact: Magnetic manipulation of plasma is how Covenant plasma projectors (And most plasma projectors work.) in Halo. Most directed energy and directed plasma weapons work off this principle. Pulsed is harder.
Very interesting. This mostly talked about real-world possibilities but that is still cool. I had no idea these form of energy shields were already so close to viable. And of course the Earth already has a shield!
Viable maybe, but not practical. For one, the plasma leakage even with the most "dense" and powerful magnetic fields available would be too great to sustain the shield for any macroscopic period of time, even under no enemy fire and in a vacuum. Inside atmospheric conditions, the shield would just fizzle out before it's fully charged. And finally, the high temperatures needed to ionize the plasma, means its density is very low, so the effect would be like blowing hot air to stop a bullet...
@@ilejovcevski79 Well I wouldn't go so far. Boeing has had a design for a projected plasma shield in the works for years now. It's planned function is to prevent the shockwaves which result from explosives from injuring soldiers inside of vehicles.
@@ilejovcevski79 DARPA doesn't have plans for a warp drive. It's NASA's Eagle Works theoretical propulsion laboratory. Not only that, but they already detected a micro warp field while doing casimir cavity experiments. They already have several experiments planned to recreate the conditions and study the phenomenon.
@@A____G you might wanna read the actual papers on that one. As well as the actual commentary by both the researchers and the physics community on what the 'meaning' of that detection is for actual propulsion application
I do also recommend revelation spaces anti collision systems. They are meant to prevent relativistic dust from hitting interstellar space ships. They can basically create a zone of death around a ship
I forget where I read it (it was over 30 years ago), but I remember some short story where the ships used reflective nested and overlapping inflatable gasbags as shielding. The reflectiveness and rolling helped dissipate laser energy and the gasbags worked like a whipple shield, breaking up fast kinetics. Of course, like Brennan-Monster, aka. Vandervecken said, the best defense is distance coupled with unpredictable movement.
@@DoremiFasolatido1979 Distance and movement or the gasbags? I can't say if the gasbags were realistic, but the distances that Brennan-Monster meant were in the order of light minutes, hours, days and weeks. Enough distance for a target to dodge lasers even if the shooter has a super-advanced brain developed for fighting.
There's also the fact that lasers aren't perfectly coherent. Even if the divergence is measured in fractions of a degree, enough distance and it may as well be a flashlight for all the damage it'll do.
@@janneaalto3956 Distance and evasion are a great defense vs lasers. If the firing and target ships are, say 250,000km apart then the firing ship's sensors "see" where the target was almost a second ago while the laser beam itself needs almost another second to reach the target. And no amount of compensation can predict unpredictable movement. Some sci-fi settings solve this with self-targeting missiles, drones, etc. Other sci-fi settings cheat this with superluminal (faster-than-light) energy beams.
In Star trek, at some point, the distinction stopped being made between deflector screens and shields. The original series mentions them along with The Motion Picture. When the A was being pelted with torpedoes from the cloaked bird of prey, it seemed as if they only had energy shields with no screens. You would think that deflector screens would have been more useful against torpedoes than standard shields as the shields were penetrated with every hit
TNG also mentioned multiple shield types a few times in the early seasons. "Raise shields and deflectors", "Force fields, deflectors, and screens online", etc. At first I thought the big Galaxy-D must have sophisticated new layered defenses. But it became evident after a few episodes that the writers were just making up stuff without a clue.
Deflector screens would make little difference as the torpedo's would be set to detonate rather then allow themselves to be deflected. Shields spread out the energy and impact over a wider area, allowing the ship to take more damage and still operate correctly. Energy fired at a ship doesn't go away, its instead absorbed through the ships systems in a semi controlled way through the shields. The ship is designed to take this beating, but can only do it so much before it just can't and then you start to see damage done despite shields still being up. Exploding consoles, power conduits blowing out etc, all caused by the energy being directed through the ship overloading something as there is no safe route to dissipate the energy after the designed overflow is spent. But not allowing another ship to concentrate all that damage to one particular area of your ship means you can keep fighting on longer as damaging a particular system of your ship is harder. At least is my understanding of it.
@@gerble36 Yes, deflector screens in Star Trek are for navigation only. They have to be up, so the ship can go to warp the instant it is ready to depart for combat manoeuvring.
@@shauntempley9757there was a scene in Star Trek where an unidentified ship locked lock lasers Picard responded laser won't even penetrate navigation shields. The navigation shields being the deflectors.
I would like to give a shoutout to Battlestar Galactica's *FLAK SHIELD,* which functions by delivering a continual barrage of steamin' hot lead in the general direction of your enemy. The don't even require sophisticated targeting computers. Just turn your ship's broadside towards the nearest enemy and watch their missiles and fighters explode mid-air.
I’m doing a little challenge where I try to reimagine Star Trek without adding or removing any of the material (I can’t just add a fifth season to Enterprise or Drop Star Trek V without either taking episodes from other places to assemble it or putting a new movie in its place), and shield work is one of my top considerations. Your research and thoughts on this will be most helpful! Thank you!
In Warhammer 40k they use a different mechanic. Much like how their FTL engines are just "lets rip a hole into hell and hope we make it through alive and sane," their Void Shields are just shunting projectiles, energy, particles, and bad feelings off into hell until we run out of the power needed to do that. Then the void shield falls and you're screwed.
That would work for me. But you could nest them. A weakpoint in energy shields is that if you overcome the powerplant's output, you could overcome the shields and if you match it you could render weaponry ineffective. So your energy weapons and shields would need to work from bateries that are constantly being resupplied by the powerplant and are drained on use. And you want to to to layer. The stuff that's tuned for c-speed threats need to be on all the time, but not all the way on. If hull sensors find that the armor is being heated beyond reasonable tolarence then they be snapped to whatever is reasonable. Anything coming in at less than c can stay off until the threat is calculated. Anything that makes your ship hard to hit would likely also make it hard to see and anything that makes your ship hard to see will also make it hard to see out. The ST: TNG Tech Manual states that their shields is a use of subspace to change the nature of space around the ship. It seems to me that if that were true, you could make the shields change in a chaotic fashion to make the ship harder to focus on.
Having researched this for over a decade (on and off) you're on the right track. Yes, tuning fields of electromagnetism can modify plasma clouds to do a lot. Additionally, a strong enough magnetic field can actually levitate non-magnetic objects. Look up levitating frog for an example. Strong magnetism can potentially slow or stop incoming bullets or even sheer them apart. Plasma shields are unlikely to stop physical objects, but they can soften them. The heat can detonate warheads and soften or even vaporize projectiles. That said, a plasma shield may still let through the resultant cloud of particles and this can still do significant damage, but armor can be used to stop the rest. Indeed, shields don't have to stop incoming fire. They only need to weaken it so the armor can do the rest. There is another type of shield I rarely see: spatial shielding. Any civilization sufficiently advanced to create warp drives can manipulate space time enough to make "bubbles" of spacetime. That's the basis of real warp field mechanics. If you can do that, you can shape space time in other ways like, say, bending a region of space back on itself so tightly it tears physical objects apart on the molecular level, and scatters incoming energy beams or packets. One major limitation of shielding is Isaac Newton's laws of motion. Specifically, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you shoot a shield with a bullet, and that shield stops the bullet completely, the kinetic energy is imparted on the shield directly. It has to go somewhere. Either the shield has to flex towards the ship, or the shield generator is pushed by the field or both. Hilariously, this could result in a ship's shield stopping a railgun blast, but the ship crumples in half like a tin can because the energy is imparted as a push on the generator. Or the generator is pushed so hard it rips out of the ship. A way around this is to have the energy change forms from kinetic (impact force) to thermal (heat). I'm actually writing a sci fi where that's how shields function. They're designed to slow or dissipate damage and let the armor take it. The energy is transfered to the shield generator as heat, and the limiting factor on shielding is how hot the generator can get before failing or melting the actual deck around it.
As you mentioned EVE Online, which i played a lot some years ago... One downside of Shields is a great strain on power source. I pvp-ed a lot in EVE with passive armor buffer, sometimes with shield buffer but mostly armor. So depending on situation, if you have some kind of home base close by to the battle, armor is better because it greatly frees up your ship's resources. In Star Trek, for example, where a ship is long time away from some kind of base or repair dock that is not good... but even in Start Trek in some combat scenarios, such as Wolf 395 or some battles in dominion war, maybe Starfleet would benefit from passive armor, or shield, tanked ships that have much more power resources to dish out damage. Especially at Wolf 395, imagine if Starfleet had a few passive tanked ships that could fire phasers with power twice or thrice greater than their ship should, think Miranda class with additional armor plates and with Galaxy class phasor emitters slapped on, just unleashing on that Borg cube and warping back to starbase for quick repair and out again.
The Defiant class, built specifically for fighting the Borg has ablative armor. Admiral Janeway brings from the future technology of tactical holographic armor. Starfleet in TNG times is a strange military fleet that forgot they are a military fleet. A thing I was thinking of on my own were Galaxy Class shield platforms. Take a Galaxy saucer, remove all the civilian quarters and other superfluous systems, add armor, weapons, energy storage, and shield generators. Then when a Galaxy class ship gets into battle, they separate off the saucer and use it as a big physical shield for the more manuevrable engines section.
6:37. I agree with this a lot. I love stellaris's space combat because it takes this into account. Certain weapons can simply bypass shields, some weapons are terrible for combatting a sheild and take a lot of time to wear it down. Energy isn't infinite, and the shields would eventually runs out.
4:40 Worf: They are now locking lasers on us Riker. Lasers ? Worf: Yes, sir. Picard: Lasers not even penetrate our navigation shields, don´t they know that.
All neat and straight forward enough. I was wondering if you'd touch on the Galaxy Class' shields as this delves into new physics concepts that can be applied to defense. The Forerunners from Halo used slipspace technology (hyperdrives in SW) to compress light into a hard matter-like state. They also used it to manipulate panels and could reconfigure their ships on the fly. I feel science has a lot of unexploited potential and that no one is bothering to investigate that anymore.
Hardlight makes no sense scientifically, and that's before taking future-tech into account. Light simply doesn't act that way. At least things like shields can be explained with the right applications of physics.
As someone who prefers some kind of scientific backing behind sci-fi concepts, that's a fair argument. Are there any ideas or guesses as to what happens to light when it enters a black hole?
There's also the 'sponge' type of armor or shields, that gobble up laser energy and dump it back into the ship's systems, usually into the point defence capacitors. There's Chaff and Microprism dust to consider, especially if you're already using magnetics to keep it dusting the ship. The armor is probably going to be some laminate to better deal with a bit of everything.
This was also explored in an episode of StarGate Universe, where the crew of the Destiny discovered the shields of the ship where looping between every frequency needed to deflect and protect from every possible incoming object or weapon. When they tuned the shield for laser based firing only, the ship took almost no damage, but then the enemy started using bullets and missiles to inflict damage since the manually tuned shields would not stop that.
At about 7:40, you mentioned how EVE Online handles differing damage types, and it immediately reminded me of the system Star Conflict uses. In Star Conflict, there are three damage types: Kinetic, Electromagnetic, and Thermal with each damage type having different resistances. Kinetic damage is dealt by railguns, and shields have really good resistance against it, while hulls are weaker to kinetic. Electromagnetic damage is dealt by plasma, and it very quickly drops shields, but is less effective against hulls. Thermal weapons most commonly take the form of lasers, and they tend to be in a halfway point between Kinetic and EM damage. They deal less damage to hull and shields than the dedicated damage types, but at the same time, they deal more damage than one of the other two hitting it's opposite medium. To put it to numbers, on a scale where 100 is unmodified, kinetic damage would do 150 damage against hull, but only 50 damage against shields. EM would be the opposite, where it does 150 damage to shields, but only 50 damage to hulls. Thermal, being a halfway point, would do 100 damage to hull AND shields. Obviously the numbers are grossly exaggerated, but it gets the basic idea across. And ships can have modules installed that change how much damage they take, or how well they recover from damage. In my builds, I don't bother trying to modify resistances, because increasing one resistance tends to weaken you to another. Instead, I build for maximum shield and hull volume, combined with maximizing regeneration. Smaller, more agile ships are a bit different for me, though. Since they're normally much weaker than the bigger ships, I'll actually sacrifice hull and shield capability in favor of agility and speed, and rely on just not being hit.
One correction: "laser" weapons in Star Wars actually don't shoot laser beams at enemies. They use lasers to create plasma bolts that are being shot at enemies.
Decades ago I heard of magnetically forcing ions along a laser beam to attract lightning strikes, as a new form of lightning rod. This too can be used for the delivery method of a Tesla style lightning gun/death ray, ST Phaser, or SW Blaster.
IN regards to the Enterprise series of ships in startrek, its important to note that the Deflector dish or otherwise specified as the "deflector array" is that colorful lit up section located on the front of the engineering section of starships. Gene Roddenberry described the deflector as beam that is shot off into space which eliminates all matter in its path as the ship travels at warp speed, so that the ship is not contacting small pieces of matter while moving near the speed of light.
Lasers? Mirrored hull plating. Kinetic weapons? Smart point defence batteries. Most effective tactic? Shoot first, shoot accurately, and from very far away. First rule of combat. I recommend Isaac Arthur's discussions on space warfare.
You also have some specialty weapons, like particle beams, that essentially make anything physical they touch radioactive. So the more armor a ship would have, the faster it would cook the crew/circuitry. They have to be deflected with energy at extreme distance, or counteracted by another particle beam tuned just right. Or something like a refined Casaba-howitzer that uses a nuclear explosion but focuses it to laser-like precision, dumping all the heat of the explosion into one spot.
when i used to draw my own spaceships, i gave them... i can't remember what I called it, but basically anti-laser shield which worked by first releasing a powder of ferromagnetic metal, which was then manipulated and held by magnetic fields... same as you describe plasma could be, except these were solid metal particles, thus opaque and would disperse and absorb lasers.
I have thought something similar in the past, that maybe ships could just deploy a smokescreen of sorts to both absorb lasers and also block sensors as well.
In Star Trek, I’ve always taken damage or movement despite the shields being up as just natural reaction to a force acted upon the craft and as the shield generators not being able to compensate for the extra force. That’s why you see EPS ruptures.
Ok, I have to say it, there is another type of shield, one that redirects the energy of the inbound object into a different dimension. I am talking about the Void Shield from Warhammer 40K. Ships of the Imperium utilise a shield array that redirects weapons fire into the alternate dimension (used for FTL and is the domain of some very nasty entities) called the Warp. Void shields when activated form an energy layered shell around the ship, the Shield forms as a series of layers, the Void Shields can only take so much incoming energy fire before the layer collapses. Now ships of the Imperium are colossal in size, and will have a number of void shield generators, if the ship doesn't take fire for some time, the void shield will recharge at a very fast rate. These shields are also employed by the titanic walker units of the Collegia Titanica, the Titans. They have downsides, Psychic phenomena and warp storms can cause these shields to lose effectiveness, or fail entirely, they are very power hungry, and as with most imperium tech, their technical understanding on how these shield work is very limited. But then as with everything in WH40K, its very much grim dark, over the top, and utterly batshit crazy. Don't get me started on the Orks.
I like the Shields in the game "I-War" ship shields were a function of the FTL drive. Consider: if you have the ability to warp space to move your ship, you can also use that ability to warp the trajectory of incoming projectiles away from your ship.
One of my favourite examples of unusual "shields" is in one of the Warhammer 40k novels, Wraithflight. Tyranid bioships are described as puffing out clouds of crystalline powder to refract laser attacks, while also having dense spore mine clouds around them and point defense to intercept projectiles, missiles and strike craft.
in Star Wars a species that invaded the galaxy in Legends used micro blackholes to displace or destroy incoming fire. Strangely enough they used it as a gravity slingshot in order to travel FTL.
usually not described as just powder but bioforms specifically bred as shields that way you dont leave a wasteful trail of shield mater behind but your shieldbeasts can return to the ship for reabsorbtion and reproduction once their energy reserves are spent also gives the benefit of them attacking enemy ships once in range
Fun thing with Star Wars shields and the Death Star attacks. The exhaust port (one of at least a dozen) had ray shielding, much like many of the exposed systems on the Death Star, and that made them immune to most blaster fire. However, the designers knew about the threat of a bomb being dropped into a critical system, and many of these systems were given particle shields as well. These can sit flush with most surfaces or enclose gaps, and are even used as airlocks due to how they interact with fluids. However, Star Wars particle shields by their very nature don't play nice with solids. They _need_ to have a gap between the edge of the shield and any nearby solid surfaces, such as those they are protecting, or they can overload or damage the surfaces. So, that plan and the crazy approach was actually 100% needed by the in-universe logic: a dive bomb approach would have protection from both bombs (upper particle shields) and blasters (inner ray shields), you _had_ to slip a physical projectile under the edge of the particle shield so it could then go through the ray shield beneath that. The solution for the Death Star II was also pretty simple in concept if complicated in logistics: Just have a massive offside base project a planetary-sized ray shield around the station, that way ships would crash into it if they approached. Throw up a sensor jammer and they won't even see what they're about to crash into.
I'd like to hear his thoughts on the Holtzman Shields in Dune: space-time reactive Shields that stop fast moving objects, and react violently to lasers/energy weapons...
It's never actually explained as far as I know. It's a fantastical "just accept that this happens" kind of thing. Without some real material basis, there's no much to really speculate about. It existed mainly as a plot device to serve Herbert's dramatic need for a preponderance of close range fighting.
@@anthonyhudson3459 Perhaps, but there is real world precedent. Non newtonian fluids behave rather strangely. If you try to move your hand through it, it goes through. If you try to karate chop it... Too fast! Ouch! Just like a photon through the shields... Wait, why doesn't sunlight make them explode?
Keep in mind that in a gas, some types of lasers self-focus and filament into extremely intense beams of white light. This means if you're deploying a gas envelope around your ship and trying to refract incoming laser light, it may misbehave in certain cases by locally changing the temperature and chemistry of that envelope.
With regards to defending against laser type Weaponry one of the Sci-Fi series I've read over fo years has way to do shielding against projectiles and energy weapons by using the same magnetic Shield approach you describe, and also suspending particles in the shield that are a derivative of the "brilliant Pebbles" concept from the SDI in the 80s, and is nearly the same as "Smart matter";the ships use magnetics to screw with physical projectiles, and use the pebbles/smart matter that "rides" the magnetic shield bubble to wherever they are needed, and ablate away to defend against particle beams and lasers/masers/grasers.
It sounds to me like the most practical strategy for shield use would be to have a tunable plasma shield that's normally set to deflect the most common forms of high-speed weaponry, with some sort of detection system that can retune on the fly to respond to slower moving threats.
Good take on actual believable shields. A magnetic shielding would effectively make any kind of plasma weapon completely useless, which means no phasers or disruptors, not even Borg particle projectors, could harm a ship with such shields. Matter, on the other way, would be simply unstoppable, unless you created a sheet of really superheated plasma around the ship, as you suggested. But that would also create a barrier hampering both your sensors and light-based communications, especially your own targeting systems, much like it happens to any ship reentering atmosphere, when it is enveloped in plasma due to attrition. Also, magnetic fields and charged plasma offer little protection against neutrons, which can kill the crew in no time leaving the ship intact. Some media suggest using gravity to create a warped space bubble around the ship to simply deflect everything thrown at you, but that would mean to deflect also the light that allows you to see your enemy in the first place. A really dumb idea. Some kind of armor seems to be the best investment for any kind of space warship, then, because no matter what the shields are made of, they would still let something through. Also, shields require energy to exist, which can't last forever.
Despite there are dozens of shields had developed, repulsive shields, magnetic shields, ionic deflectional shields, beam shields, and photonic hypercrystal generated shields are main consideration for starfleets. However, more types of shields advancement are encouraged to further space projects.
Thanks for this :) I'm writing a world where magnetic shields are a thing, they are great against kinetic hazards, and they stop plasma dead, however, the plasma dissipation challenges mean that the ship has to deal with a heat surplus as the plasma is funneled towards the emitters, effectively making short range plasma weapons and plasma warheads a go-to effective shield breaker. Laser type weapons can be neutralized with ablative or reflective armor. However, reflection becomes difficult with X-ray lasers.
About the point of shielding from lasers, plasma shields can do that. Plasma is opaque to lasers and stops them. That's why most lasers in the real world are pulsed. Their energy creates plasma along the path, which makes it opaque and wastes lots of energy, so they turn on, laser goes through, plasma builds up, laser is turned of, plasma dissipates and laser can fire again. It's done within nanoseconds so it looks like a continuous beam to us, even though it's not. A plasma barrier can therefore stop the laser.
I had an idea once for a series where the manipulation of gravity has been achieved. This enabled FTL travel (by targetting points of space and pulling them closer with gravity beams). But another novel idea someone else pointed out to me is that a ship that could control gravity and lock things to it could use ozone, or non-newtonian fluidic shields. The idea being that the vessel vents an amount of ozone which is then held densely around the ship, which will burn up incoming projectiles and also dissipate directed energy weapons. The idea of using non-newtonian fluids would be such that the harder something hits, the greater the reactive force of the fluid, which hardens and breaks the projectile, while also dissipating energy in the same way as an ozone layer would.
The aurora borealis is not plasma. The plasma ionizes air molecules which are what we actuall see. So the aurora borealis is caused by plasma but it is not plasma.
fun item about Earth orbit, In the mass effect codex on Earth it mentions keeping your kinetic barriers up if coming into low orbit due to all the stuff left over from our early spaceflight programs.
Static shields project a field of static electricity that discourages or even fully disables people passing through by doing exactly that; projecting a static charge (the kind you feel when a thunderstorm is coming irl, or when you drag your feet on a synthetic surface and touch a radiator or other conductor). In Titan A.E., Star Trek and Star Wars we sometimes see people pushing through such a shield with great pain to the person attempting this.
There is another interesting design in the game Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos. There the shield generators create a bend in space causing any attack to deflect back into itself. Though the shield generators only work in one direction, so they swivel around inside the ship to face any potential thread. This means that attacks from multiple directions can overwhelm them. Also they don't work over the ships main thrusters as they would interfere with those. And they only work in a single burst, needing to recharge every time they are used.
"Shields free up the architecture of your ship!" Meanwhile the inside of the ship overflowing with colossal power generators, gas tanks, and electromagnets that all had to be sent up in pieces for a fortune a pound
There's an episode in Stargate Universe, where Destiny (the ship of our cast) is under attack by drones. Destiny's shields take a beating, but the crew was able to retrieve a damaged drone and learn the specific energy output used by the drones' weapons. Since Destiny's shield was constantly shifting between energy signals (I don't remember the specifics), they weren't 100% effective against the drones so they attuned Destiny's shields to the specific energy used by the drones which greatly reduced the stress on the shields. This did mean that Destiny would be vulnerable against other types of damage, which the drones figure out and start to kamikaze into Destiny in order to do damage. Quite a fun episode.
Star Trek Beta Canon (Best Destiny) explains there is a difference between the shields of Constitution Class and Excelsior Class. Constitution was designed with multiple types of shields that overlayed and were focused to defend against a specific type of attack, Excelsior has a "General Shield" that protects against all of them but can't automatically adjust.
In Star Trek, shields and deflector technology are based on the use of graviton generators. In essence, they harness artificial gravity to create a graviton field. For the main deflector, which is primarily used in warp flight (though impulse flight to a lesser degree) to create a line of artificial gravity in the ship's flight path. This has the effect of "deflecting" or altering the trajectory of objects that would otherwise hit the ship in flight. This is generated by the "dish" at the bottom front of most starships. Shields, however, are generated by grid like structures on the hull itself. This is the typical "bubble" like shield effect you're used to seeing in the show and is most commonly what you see enemy weapons "hitting" in the series and movies. These are intended for combat but also general radiation protection. This is also most commonly what they refer to when they say "shields are at 47%". Deflector shields are required for warp flight. Standard shields are required for combat protection and will not protect the ship at warp velocities from objects on the ship's flight path. There's a little gray area in the recent movies in the TNG era where the shield bubble was no longer there and it was sort of acting like Star Wars shields. I don't know if this was intended or not, but the inconsistency is annoying.
It’s not mentioned in the video but my favourite type of shielding in sci-fi is the Void Shield from Warhammer, which teleports the oncoming attack into the, always fun to use, Warp.
In Star Trek the most interesting shields are Borg in nature. It is a magnetic EMP like shield. It is designed to scramble any thing that comes into it. Thw ships uses it outer hall to absorb damage that gets thru. Warhammer 40K void sheilds that literaly transfer items to the Warp.
Armor is great for ablative and conductive protection, a laser or particle beam hits and the heat /charge can be bled off over a large surface area, not to mention if the armor is designed to mirror finish itself when heat damaged. Which means you only have to shield so much damage or change how that damage is being applied, which means you can use shields to downshift from higher spectra to lower more reflectable ones.
However Reflec Armor, as BattleTech terms it, has a flaw. It cannot take a heavy hit, which will reduce its efficiency. Assume you have a projectile of a mass similar to a Toyota Corolla to use the popular meme, and it is going at 65% c. That's a lot of force you are stopping, and some of that may bleed over and impact the Reflec Armor, denting and changing its geometry. The armor may also have a slight brittle factor, compounding the problem. Even then, weaponized lasers might not even be a problem depending on the target ship's alloy, the power plant of the firing ship, the safeguards on the weapon being fired, and the evasive track of both ships. Lasers are only really good if the enemy isn't going evasive. Then let's have some real fun with weaponry. Sufficiently advanced enough, and a weapon can evade shields even. Say someone comes up with a Neutron Cannon, a particle weapon that fires a lot of nasty neutrons, which have no charge and therefore cannot be diverted by magnetic field. This type of weapon could cause neutron activation in the armor, rendering a whole section dangerous to replace without proper PPE. This could render whole sections of a ship dangerous even. And not many things can take a pointblank thermonuclear or A-M bomb right on the hull. Going back to BattleTech a moment, it does have Ferro-Fibrous Armor. This stuff is like an iron Kevlar vest, so to speak. How do you stop a kinetic round? You slow it the heck down. In a setting with Gauss Rifles and Autocannon, that can be useful. However the best defense against being attacked or being spotted on the attack is not being seen. Combat in space needs to be done like beneath waves on Earth. The Expanse has an answer in the form of a Protogen stealth ship. Your target will never know what hit it until it is too late.
The disadvantage of plasma shields that no-one ever mentions is that they need fuel. You don't just conjure up plasma out of thin vacuum. You can make one out of thin air tho. Plasma shields require a material to be put into the state of plasma so you will need probably large canisters of pressurised gas on your ship, and your use of the gas will be limited for long engagements. However if we're talking ground forces, you could theoretically hold a shield as a permanent barrier if you've got the power for it since you have an entire planet worth of atmosphere to use as your shield fuel.
Actually, a plasma barrier can indeed be adjusted to deflect frequencies of light like a mirror, and can change frequency as well. Take a look at what they call a "plasma mirror". EDIT: I typed this before finishing the video. He addressed this at 5:30
Shields in 'Independence Day' and 'War of the Worlds' are classified as Force-fields. The units take no damage until the field is beaten by overwhelming force. Babylon 5 had aliens with powerful force fields dubbed '3rd Space Aliens'. They use gravimetric fields.
if we could store "infinite energy" in very small spaces then using all the technologies we have today would allow us to get closer to a real life star wars. When I met SpaceX a few years ago, I imagined that although suicide burn is fantastic, it would be even cooler not to have the need to do that show if technology were more capable. In those days when I was starting my engineering studies I saw all the technologies of "today" that could be used to solve the problems of space travel but the problem "we try to fuel futurism with chemical fuel"
I always thought of the shields that act as a sort of wall as being more of a spacial or subspace distortion powered by the ship, and the more damage that the shields take, the more energy it takes to keep them active which will eventually either overload the capacitors or just drain too much power from the ship.
At least for Star Trek. The TNG Tech manual describes shields on a Galaxy-class starship as being an intense bubble of graviton particles or field that creates that spatial distortion that is effective against both matter and energy, if I remember correctly.
I always wondered about that and in my own writing projects made a whole document exploring shield types, characteristics, pros-cons and all that to make shields feel like an actual countermeasure tool. That stuff gets complicated fast lol
Shields are just a lazy way to add stakes without needing to blow up their miniatures. I always appreciate franchises like the 2009 BSG and The Expanse for using armor and plating instead of some hand-wavey mystical energy shield that protects the model from being damaged
the ship from another life has another type of shield, a relativistic shield, generated from the warp drive and negative mass. basically, it bends space around the ship to redirect all forms of mass and energy around the ship.
I like the way that Neal Asher deals with shields and armour in the Polity series. When the shield projectors overload they eject into space rather than becoming explodium inside the ship. Like their engineering design is to have ejection ports and be designed to fail safe. Another couple of interesting ideas from harder sci fi: Sand shield (I think from Jack Campbell) they literally mine asteroids to crush into sand and gravel sized particles. As the human fleet fights it blasts sand ahead of itself then "taps the brakes" so space ahead is a wall of sand. This then interferes with beam weapons, is a physical obstacle for kinetic weapons (a railgun projectile hitting a near c sand grain will make a pretty explosion) and when the sand reaches enemy energy shields it dumps a massive load of energy into them and overloads them. Point defence so good that it is shield like; or in other words you cover your ship in very fast short range lasers to individually or in an array target incoming kinetic threats
Funfact about Lasers - In "Star Trek the next Generation", when some weaker Ships attacked the Enterprise-D, it was mentioned that the Laser-Weapons can't penetrate the Navigational Deflection. And there'S a simple reason for that to be a part of the Starships Navigational Deflection: When travelling in space with more than LightYear, the Front of the Ship is hit with Particles and the Light of the Stars in a much-bigger amount than usual if approaching a solar-system with Warp-Speed, this could mean, that the Front is hit with the equal amount of light, comparable to a Laser hitting the Ship. Wioth that amoun t of energy< hitting a ship, the Navigational shielding should be able to absorb or deflect so much energy. Why I compare the Light of a distant star to a Laser: Imagine that when you travel to a star System that got quite a bright star, then Travel at it with a speed that let's your Ship catch up with the amoiunt of light, that would usually come at you in the usual timeframe of 10 Years, but within a few Minutes, that Amount could become Dangerous. And in some Cases, they showed in Star Trek, how the Outer Plating of some Shjip-Section would start to receivbe Damage.
Energy in whatever form whether it be kinetic, em, heat or radioactive can be measured in waves. Frequency is the unit of how we can measure these waves. Just like how you can repel two magnetic fields of the same pole, similarly can be done by adjusting the frequency of the field protecting the ship. By using software to automatically adjust the frequency of the shield to match the frequency of the incoming energy, you can repel multiple forms of energy (eg. kinetic and radiation) by finding a median frequency and increasing power to the shield to successfully repel the incoming energy.
Thank you for the great breakdown of Shield technology and Star Trek universe. Always enjoy your videos especially Star Wars imperial forces versus Star Trek. Two great videos. Although it is all sci-fi and mental masturbation, still extremely interesting!
It's nice when, after barely if any research, I'm like, "I think Y can be done because of X without breaking suspension of disbelief," and someone comes along with actual science that supports my fantasy/sci-fi idea. Is it odd that it's happened way more than twice, though?
8:50 5. you need shields (some sort of energy field/ warp bubble/ whatever) to protect your ship while it's going ridiculously fast. If a pebble hits with same force as a nuke, you need protection and armor won't cut it I think. And since you already have it, it's logical to use for protection in battle.
I would think that some sort of polished armor would be a defense to laser type weapons, Something like the Naboo ship in Star Wars. As for heat type weapons I would look towards what is used on the Parker Solar Probe, not pretty but it works. As for explosives weapons, I do not know fully how a shock wave will work in a vacuum, but from my limited knowledge shock waves are not a thing in space, or should I say do not work the same way as Depth Charges in water and slandered explosives in air. I think the thing that is scar in space are kinetic weapons or just impact weapons. sabot round, rail guns, mas drivers, Felix, and A-10 GAU-8 Avenger 30mm gatling gun firing depleted uranium... But then with those types of weapons you need to store the ammunition on the ship, when it is gone, it is gone. You also need to take into account of recoil of those types of weapons in space. Firing a weapon like that can do large amounts damage to the enemy, but needs to be compensated and reaimed every every shot as it acts like a maneuvering thruster when fired.
@@resurrectedstarships And heat too, don't forget that. That's why the Saturn 5, Space Shuttles, and other certain spaceships are painted white to diffuse heat from the sun.
@@resurrectedstarships Reflective or "high albedo" surfaces however cannot meaningfully protect against lasers powerful enough to be useful as weapons. Most prospective laser weapons operate in the megawatt range or above which would cause most materials to explosively fracture under thermal shocking, in addition most combat lasers will not be visible light, they'd likely range from the NUV (Near-Ultraviolet) to XUV (Extreme-Ultraviolet) range, and further into the future will likely be Xrays. These beams will not be reflected in the least by most any metal on the periodic table until you reach Hafnium, which is dense, rare, and difficult to work with meaning it will likely not be in sufficient supply to make up the armor of space warships. Furthermore, energy weapons may skip over lasers to laser-coupled particle beams, which while slower moving could impart massive damage to a target because their beam consists of a stream of substantially massive particles traveling at .1-.25C, these kinds of weapons will render practically any conceivable physical armor useless.
One note about how star trek ships get damaged while shields are on is that the engineer may have just been dumb and not seen the projectile incoming. In the game star trek bridge crew which is an official VR game you can adjust where the shields are primarily at at the cost of weakening other areas.
Another type of shield you did not mention would be "hard shields." Only place I've ever really heard about those are in the game Master of Orion and they don't really explain what they are. I figure they could be magnetic shields and have a large amount of magnetic particles suspended in the field to create a wall of sorts. You could manipulate the field in certain ways to allow your ship to fire weapons through it and once the weapon is clear close the gap again. Also rather than just suspending particles in the field you could rotate the field at a high velocity which would move the particles along with it and essentially barrage any physical objects that enter the field with those particles making it more of a point defense. If you had various different color particles it could also be used to essentially create a cloak by matching the colors to the environment behind you.
I think that with modern physics shields described in video will require insane sources of energy onboard to run. Taking this into account and harsh physical conditions in space, manned starships made of metal will be very vulnerable and just impractical. Realistic interstellar space travel instruments will be VERY far from simple extrapolation of conventional sea vessels to space.
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Plasma doesn't always have to be hot, in fact, there are many plasmas that you can touch by hand with no ill effects. Plasma is often referred to as the fourth state of matter, it's essentially just an ionic soup where the electrons have decided they'd rather be elsewhere due to other influences. Technically fire is plasma, tho it's one of the hotter varieties....
Are shields possible...yes. But I personally prefer the concept of no shields. I loved Babylon 5 and Andromeda more cause they didn't really have shields. Every battle had more risk and reality to me. It forces better tactics and strategy not methods for defending the ship.
one thing that i can see possible is if yoru ship is large enough and the power supply is powerful ebough have plasma energy magnetic and partical shiels layerd one over the top of the other but using somthing like a stacked pylon system
@@caseyhaywardfoxington5324 is the multiphasic shield an advancement beyond?
Just one thing: most weapons in Star Wars are called lasers, but aren't actually firing light but ionised tibanna gas. (Similarly as laser sword blades are actually plasma blades)
So just a romulan plasma disruptor.
@@aiosquadron basically, yeah
@@Stahlkeks ok... So we have yield to compare then to.
@@aiosquadron why? I just commented this here because this vid is about shielding and shields against light based weapons probably wouldn't work against particle weapons, no matter the yield. And this misconception often happens because Star Wars weapons are often called laser, but are in fact not a laser.
@@Stahlkeks Hmm yea. But Trek shields tend to be all in one.
Plasma shields do have another disadvantage, omitted in the presentation. The plasma will eventually run out. If used in close proximity or inside an atmosphere, the charged particles will react with the nearby matter and eventually lose their charge through recombination, turning them into non-ionized gas that will leave the magnetic bottles. On top of that, even left on their own, the charges will eventually recombine when moving along side the spiral trajectories around the magnetic force field. So as long as they are on, plasma shields have to be recharged.
An alternative form of plasma shield can be an "electron cloud" shield. That is, using only free electrons as a plasma substitute. This will generate a negative charge bubble around the ship that will interact with the electron clouds of the normal matter and act as a deflector of sorts. Suffers similar penalties as the general plasma shield and doesn't stop heavy particles especially baryons with no charge, so your ship will be vulnerable to neutron radiation.
Star trek i think uses local space-time distortions as their deflector shields. Several clues taken from LCARS and tech manuals support this. For one, the shield emitters strength is measured in Cochranes, same unit used for measuring warp fields. Then there is a graviton frequency associated with the shield state displays. Also, local force fields placed on doorways and corridors, seem to act in a repulsive manner to normal matter.
I almost included the space-time distortion idea. The script ended up becoming really complicated, there is a LOT I omitted. So thanks for mentioning this.
@@resurrectedstarships my pleasure! And you are right of course. Besides, being a technology distinctive from plasma shields, perhaps space-time distortions belong in a separate video :D
For atmospheric shields, couldn't the atmosphere itself be used to make plasma, like what happens with lightning, and kept alive using something like shaped microwave beams, sorta like those grape plasma ball experiments?
@@tiagotiagot it could, but the process of recombination would demand much higher sustainment energy requirements. In a vacuum a once ionized plasma stays ionized and you only need to keep it place. In an atmosphere the plasma itself runs out due to contact with the surrounding molecules.
If you have a fusion reactor of some kindin your ship wouldn't you be able to use excess plasma from that?
The Earth’s Ozone layer acts like shield for ultraviolet radiation through absorption and deflection. Intense light waves cause interference to lasers. Combine that with a film similar to solar panels on the hull and you could use the diffused energy of the laser that penetrates this shielding to recharge the ship.
[edit:] This was an off the cuff comment, but since it’s spurred discussion, I wasn’t thinking specifically ozone, but particles that could act in a similar manner. My idea assumed a field to keep the particles in proximity to the ship or it would just pass through them like a plane through a cloud.
Film idea was backward. It would be better to be reflective (as some pointed out heat shedding is problem in space).
Anyway, thanks everyone for engaging with the topic, been a lot of quality ideas in these comments.
These ships are going to be much more concerned with cooling than having enough energy.
Bruh
@@kokofan50 yea... He skipped that one class on thermal dynamics and its application with space. Energy dissipation and all that fun stuff that Star Trek/Wars seemingly skip over in their ship designs.
but there's also a reason solar panels get so hot, be careful with using them as armor, since you basically just changed the attack from light radiation imparting too much heat to light radiation imparting that heat over a larger area. You're still getting baked, just slower, and you're gaining energy from some of it.
@@feartheghus Well I was only suggesting panels as part of a solution. Shedding heat is a major drawback to widespread use of solar energy on Earth as you point out. Historically the Earth has reflected ~29% of heat from the sun but lately it’s been only ~25% which has been suggested as due to increase in solar panel usage - I’m not completely convinced it can all be attributed to this yet.
However, there is a temperature variance on the ISS of ~278c between side facing sun and side facing away so shedding heat is definitely a problem for all starship designs. I think starships have to constantly revolve when near stars to prevent concentrated heating on one side just like the Earth and the ISS do.
My spitballing here was that you might try holding ozone gas layers around the exterior held by an electromagnetic field perhaps in combination with a wide spectrum light broadcast to deflect/diffuse most of it then collect some of what gets through for recharging. That last bit was more for ironic wit than a serious idea to power the ship.
4:53 Star Wars shields consist of two overlapping layers of deflector shields. Ray shielding would stop "energy" such as plasma, lasers, electricity, radiation, etc. Particle shielding would stop physical objects from passing through it, bouncing/redirecting objects like strike-craft or asteroids off and away from the ship. An object that hit it on a pretty direct course or couldn't be deflected would end up similarly to running your car at max speed into a solid wall or sometimes disintegrated. The particle shield can also be turned on/off separately from the ray shield to allow strike-craft and shuttles to enter/leave the ships hangar.
I'd love a Star Wars game to represent this (maybe even an Empire at War successor). I did like the idea
That's how it described in lore but, to put it mildly, it's not very scientific ^^
@@ImperativeGames It also very rarely works that way in actual Star Wars stories, outside of lore books, Legends or Disney, they're all kinda will-nilly with how shields actually work.
@Ben Quinnobi The X-Wing series is fantastic for the military spacetech stuff used to its fullest.
Another interesting use of shield systems in sci fi is the reflex gun in space battleship yamato where the beam is reflected from different satellites with shields to attack a enemy ship from multiple directions.
Oh you mean the Gamilas reflection cannons.
@@barrybend7189 yes
The reflecting satellite cannon is a fairly unique one
@@aliboy357 except it is a one trick pony. If the weapon was used against starfleet, 9/10 times they would figure out how the shield works and modulate the shield to reflect the beam back to the cannon and make the gamilons embarrass themselves.
One can come up with Dynamic ways of Arranging New kind of Reflectors which Can also act as Beam Manipulators.
7:38 - would be interesting to see in a space battle a ship using 2 different types of weapon projectiles one right behind the other to fool the shields sensors like a plasma torpedo and there is a normal torpedo right behind it or the plasma torpedo is followed by a quick laser
I could also see someone mixing them. Like coating a kinetic round in plasma energy.
Similar is already done with explosive reactive armor in the real world, rounds contain two explosives one that detonates first to activate and waste the armor and the second that does the real damage.
Star Wars has this on one ship. Its called the Aggressor Class Star Destroyer, used by the Zann Consortium. It fires an Ion shot followed up by a large plasma shot. First drains the shields, second impacts the hull.
@@WorkWaffle Tandem explosives
@@Nostripe361 The expanse torpedoes are the perfect exemple.
About the ships getting knocked about even with shields up; while the real reason for this more likely for the sake of drama and keeping things interesting (hard to build tension of the crew can ignore the effects of weapon hits) there are two good reasons for it scientifically.
First is conservation of momentum. If the shields stops an attack that has physical force (like guns and missiles) that momentum doesn't just go away and the shield generators have to absorb it. While you can lesson the felt impact by spreading the force over several generators you can only "cheat" so much. A smart design would have the generators on a sliding rail so it can rock back across it so slow the impulse of the impact (much like the slide action of a semi-automatic pistol) while also making it so that that the rail will fail if the generator takes to much impact so it rips away safely without taking a chunk of the bulkhead with it (I'd also have a reactive armor blow out panel behind it help slow it down one it's ripped away).
The second is shields can only really spread out, deflect, deform or turn attacks bleeding energy out of them. If the shields are powerful enough then they can bleed out enough energy that the attack that it's ineffective but it the attack has enough penetrating power it can get through with enough force to maybe not damage the hull but knock the crap out of it.
That would be "Plot Armor" ;)
This is why scifi needs more point defense like in Battlestar Galactica or even the Kelvin timeline Startrek imo. Just target the missiles/torpedoes and fire a proximity phaser. *Boom* Done.
@@freddyd1783 Babylon 5 Also had the Defense Webs with plasma cannons for defense against other plasma shots, missiles/torpedoes, and enemy ships.
The problem with taking an impact is the differential change in momentum across an object. When your car crashes, the front stops before the back does, and that's what makes your car a wad of tinfoil. If the back of the car stopped at the same time as the front of the car, your car wouldn't change shape and get wrecked. If you apply an impact evenly to every part of a spaceship and its contents on an atom per atom basis, nobody feels any acceleration or damage. You've invented the inertial dampener. Don't just use your shields outwards to stop incoming projectiles, use it as a crash bag to push on the back of your ship at the same time as the front of the ship is pushed, so it won't deform and break.
@@freddyd1783 There is one problem with that, no drag to slow down the fragments. While this can be better then letting the full sized projectile hit, they can still do heavy damage. This is an issue we're having with ADF systems that they're starting to field on tanks. We got ones that are fast enough to intercept tank rounds but even after being intercepted the fragments have so much momentum they can still rip through several inches of RHA equivalent.
In different Sci fi tech manuals it is explained that the ships that have shields will either use a quick rotation system or a layering technique. Your explanation of bleed through explains alot.
I always love your work..very well done..
He’s amazing huh? I’m so happy he’s back to doing these videos!
In my own sci-fi universe, shields are available and used, but some factions, including the various human groups, still use armor as the primary defense for their starships. Because most of the hostile alien factions favor plasma, laser, or particle-based weapons, human armor is specialized to deal with those kinds of weapons in particular, while still offering acceptable protection against kinetic projectiles. Laser weapons in particular are popular for any group that can make a powerplant and heat sinks strong enough for them to be viable because none of the shields in this universe can block them.
that armor concept kinda reminds me of the nanolaminate armor concept in mobile suit Gundam: iron blooded orphans, the armor in that show makes mobile suits and ships almost completely immune to beam weapons, but physical weapons still can do damage and a number of suits use maces or other blunt weapons because crushing is always better than cutting against thick metal
Basicalllly warhammer
There's actually a form of vehicle armor developed in the UK called electromagnetic reactive armor. It consists of two conductive metal plates spaced a few inches apart and protects the vehicle from damage by using high-voltage electricity to instantly vaporize projectiles that come into contact with the armor.
I think that's more of a hull polarizer than a shield but nice to know we have that tech already!
@@alexslgato1735 we don't have it... Yet.
It's in development. No vehicle In active service is equiped with it today.
Link, please.
@@-Postoronnij- th-cam.com/video/o7rxBifd0cY/w-d-xo.html
I thought about something like that a few years ago, it was basically a ship covered in conductive metal and when needed, a strong electrical current would be shot through the metal, strengthening it against attacks, such as missiles, i called it electromagnetic shielding cause it sounded cool
I always thought a point defence system should be in star trek. Even if only a little incoming fire is Intercepted that by the point defence system it's still fewer hits on your Shields. So you could last longer in a fight.
Just my two cents. Love your channel.👍
Agreed. A light, fast fireing Phaser cannon just for intercepting inoming Torpedoes would be a huge help in 99% of all engagements that involve Torpedoes imo.
That's a feature in STO, depending on which abilities and items you have slotted into your character and ship.
You can kind of see this working in one of the TNG episodes (forgot the name) where the Ferengi fire a couple of missiles at the wormhole - Worf is able to destroy them using phasers with great precision.
well all the ships beam banks in star trek can also work like point defense actually when needed! but starteks point defenses really suck when compared to what the point defense tech systems in the battletech universe use with there dropships, mechs, tanks, aerospace fighters, warships, jumpships and others. in the time in the battletech timeline in the post clan invasion era and onward combat units in battletech actually can have both have either a regalar automatic ballistic point defense CIWS anti missile system or a pulse laser CIWS point defense anti missile system with basically unlimited shots at the cost of heat generation. these AMS can shot down small missile swarms and large capital ships missiles really efectly. also due to how compact and small the AMS is normally drop ships and warships in battletech can easily fit lots of them while taking up very little of the ships space overall! but will have a incredible effectiveness that one battletech dropship or warship with a few hundred laser anti missile systems would very easily shoot down hundreds or even thousands of micross verta tech fighter micro swarm missiles very easily! also can shoot down a few doesn of those gundam/SRW anti ship cruise missiles very easily too! also they don't even need to worry about running out of ammo when it comes to laser AMS! also the clan versions of the AMS also take up half the space and weight of the inner sphere versions too.
Surprised the federation doesn't have Electronic Warfare Suites aswell
4:15 I love this animation... the idea of shield triggering only on impact makes sense and fits well with Stargate visual effects... The tuning for various damage types also fits well to this and was sometimes part of the story.
Stargate shields work differently though. Stargate shields can be turned into cloaks and anti-replicator fields all on the fly. They can allow physical things through or block everything.
@@the11382 I don't remember cloak, but anti Replicator would still make sense since you know... all they need is something to hit them if you talking Milky Way Replicators and such plasma field would fry quite a bit of electronics and block radio signals with Pegasus Replicators.
Tho you are right... while in ship-ship combat seem close enough, when you go in to touch it illusion falls apart.
Per usual for sci-fi they often block everything making it air or water tight and we have no real way to make that shields.
Well the shields appear to operate on the energy spectrum in some ways, so going from a light refractive range to a radio frequency disruptor does not seem too far out of hand.
In the Honorverse by David Weber, gravity fields are used both as defensive shields and propulsion
Also by the Yuzang Vong in Star Wars
@@solarblacksun603 I was thinking that too
Nice
Ok i need to ask this: is „in fury born“ part of the honorverse or not? I liked the book but i don’t want to starr another universe right now…
@@anticlaassicno. Separate universe
Fun fact: Magnetic manipulation of plasma is how Covenant plasma projectors (And most plasma projectors work.) in Halo.
Most directed energy and directed plasma weapons work off this principle. Pulsed is harder.
Also Covenant ships have to drop a small section of their shields in order to fire their plasma weapons
that's just how plasma weapons work in general
Very interesting. This mostly talked about real-world possibilities but that is still cool. I had no idea these form of energy shields were already so close to viable. And of course the Earth already has a shield!
Viable maybe, but not practical. For one, the plasma leakage even with the most "dense" and powerful magnetic fields available would be too great to sustain the shield for any macroscopic period of time, even under no enemy fire and in a vacuum. Inside atmospheric conditions, the shield would just fizzle out before it's fully charged. And finally, the high temperatures needed to ionize the plasma, means its density is very low, so the effect would be like blowing hot air to stop a bullet...
@@ilejovcevski79 Well I wouldn't go so far. Boeing has had a design for a projected plasma shield in the works for years now. It's planned function is to prevent the shockwaves which result from explosives from injuring soldiers inside of vehicles.
@@A____G and DARPA has design plans for warp fields, i wouldn't hold my breath on it though...
@@ilejovcevski79 DARPA doesn't have plans for a warp drive. It's NASA's Eagle Works theoretical propulsion laboratory. Not only that, but they already detected a micro warp field while doing casimir cavity experiments. They already have several experiments planned to recreate the conditions and study the phenomenon.
@@A____G you might wanna read the actual papers on that one. As well as the actual commentary by both the researchers and the physics community on what the 'meaning' of that detection is for actual propulsion application
The Expanse: haha, PDC's go BRRRTT
I do also recommend revelation spaces anti collision systems. They are meant to prevent relativistic dust from hitting interstellar space ships. They can basically create a zone of death around a ship
I forget where I read it (it was over 30 years ago), but I remember some short story where the ships used reflective nested and overlapping inflatable gasbags as shielding. The reflectiveness and rolling helped dissipate laser energy and the gasbags worked like a whipple shield, breaking up fast kinetics.
Of course, like Brennan-Monster, aka. Vandervecken said, the best defense is distance coupled with unpredictable movement.
Which is only useful against everything but lasers.
@@DoremiFasolatido1979 Distance and movement or the gasbags?
I can't say if the gasbags were realistic, but the distances that Brennan-Monster meant were in the order of light minutes, hours, days and weeks. Enough distance for a target to dodge lasers even if the shooter has a super-advanced brain developed for fighting.
There's also the fact that lasers aren't perfectly coherent. Even if the divergence is measured in fractions of a degree, enough distance and it may as well be a flashlight for all the damage it'll do.
@@janneaalto3956 Distance and evasion are a great defense vs lasers. If the firing and target ships are, say 250,000km apart then the firing ship's sensors "see" where the target was almost a second ago while the laser beam itself needs almost another second to reach the target. And no amount of compensation can predict unpredictable movement.
Some sci-fi settings solve this with self-targeting missiles, drones, etc.
Other sci-fi settings cheat this with superluminal (faster-than-light) energy beams.
In Star trek, at some point, the distinction stopped being made between deflector screens and shields. The original series mentions them along with The Motion Picture. When the A was being pelted with torpedoes from the cloaked bird of prey, it seemed as if they only had energy shields with no screens. You would think that deflector screens would have been more useful against torpedoes than standard shields as the shields were penetrated with every hit
TNG also mentioned multiple shield types a few times in the early seasons. "Raise shields and deflectors", "Force fields, deflectors, and screens online", etc.
At first I thought the big Galaxy-D must have sophisticated new layered defenses. But it became evident after a few episodes that the writers were just making up stuff without a clue.
Deflector screens would make little difference as the torpedo's would be set to detonate rather then allow themselves to be deflected. Shields spread out the energy and impact over a wider area, allowing the ship to take more damage and still operate correctly. Energy fired at a ship doesn't go away, its instead absorbed through the ships systems in a semi controlled way through the shields. The ship is designed to take this beating, but can only do it so much before it just can't and then you start to see damage done despite shields still being up. Exploding consoles, power conduits blowing out etc, all caused by the energy being directed through the ship overloading something as there is no safe route to dissipate the energy after the designed overflow is spent. But not allowing another ship to concentrate all that damage to one particular area of your ship means you can keep fighting on longer as damaging a particular system of your ship is harder. At least is my understanding of it.
@@gerble36 Yes, deflector screens in Star Trek are for navigation only.
They have to be up, so the ship can go to warp the instant it is ready to depart for combat manoeuvring.
@@shauntempley9757there was a scene in Star Trek where an unidentified ship locked lock lasers Picard responded laser won't even penetrate navigation shields. The navigation shields being the deflectors.
I would like to give a shoutout to Battlestar Galactica's *FLAK SHIELD,* which functions by delivering a continual barrage of steamin' hot lead in the general direction of your enemy.
The don't even require sophisticated targeting computers. Just turn your ship's broadside towards the nearest enemy and watch their missiles and fighters explode mid-air.
I’m doing a little challenge where I try to reimagine Star Trek without adding or removing any of the material (I can’t just add a fifth season to Enterprise or Drop Star Trek V without either taking episodes from other places to assemble it or putting a new movie in its place), and shield work is one of my top considerations. Your research and thoughts on this will be most helpful! Thank you!
In Warhammer 40k they use a different mechanic. Much like how their FTL engines are just "lets rip a hole into hell and hope we make it through alive and sane," their Void Shields are just shunting projectiles, energy, particles, and bad feelings off into hell until we run out of the power needed to do that. Then the void shield falls and you're screwed.
That would work for me. But you could nest them.
A weakpoint in energy shields is that if you overcome the powerplant's output, you could overcome the shields and if you match it you could render weaponry ineffective.
So your energy weapons and shields would need to work from bateries that are constantly being resupplied by the powerplant and are drained on use.
And you want to to to layer. The stuff that's tuned for c-speed threats need to be on all the time, but not all the way on. If hull sensors find that the armor is being heated beyond reasonable tolarence then they be snapped to whatever is reasonable. Anything coming in at less than c can stay off until the threat is calculated.
Anything that makes your ship hard to hit would likely also make it hard to see and anything that makes your ship hard to see will also make it hard to see out.
The ST: TNG Tech Manual states that their shields is a use of subspace to change the nature of space around the ship. It seems to me that if that were true, you could make the shields change in a chaotic fashion to make the ship harder to focus on.
Having researched this for over a decade (on and off) you're on the right track. Yes, tuning fields of electromagnetism can modify plasma clouds to do a lot. Additionally, a strong enough magnetic field can actually levitate non-magnetic objects. Look up levitating frog for an example. Strong magnetism can potentially slow or stop incoming bullets or even sheer them apart. Plasma shields are unlikely to stop physical objects, but they can soften them. The heat can detonate warheads and soften or even vaporize projectiles. That said, a plasma shield may still let through the resultant cloud of particles and this can still do significant damage, but armor can be used to stop the rest. Indeed, shields don't have to stop incoming fire. They only need to weaken it so the armor can do the rest.
There is another type of shield I rarely see: spatial shielding. Any civilization sufficiently advanced to create warp drives can manipulate space time enough to make "bubbles" of spacetime. That's the basis of real warp field mechanics. If you can do that, you can shape space time in other ways like, say, bending a region of space back on itself so tightly it tears physical objects apart on the molecular level, and scatters incoming energy beams or packets.
One major limitation of shielding is Isaac Newton's laws of motion. Specifically, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you shoot a shield with a bullet, and that shield stops the bullet completely, the kinetic energy is imparted on the shield directly. It has to go somewhere. Either the shield has to flex towards the ship, or the shield generator is pushed by the field or both. Hilariously, this could result in a ship's shield stopping a railgun blast, but the ship crumples in half like a tin can because the energy is imparted as a push on the generator. Or the generator is pushed so hard it rips out of the ship.
A way around this is to have the energy change forms from kinetic (impact force) to thermal (heat). I'm actually writing a sci fi where that's how shields function. They're designed to slow or dissipate damage and let the armor take it. The energy is transfered to the shield generator as heat, and the limiting factor on shielding is how hot the generator can get before failing or melting the actual deck around it.
As you mentioned EVE Online, which i played a lot some years ago... One downside of Shields is a great strain on power source.
I pvp-ed a lot in EVE with passive armor buffer, sometimes with shield buffer but mostly armor. So depending on situation, if you have some kind of home base close by to the battle, armor is better because it greatly frees up your ship's resources.
In Star Trek, for example, where a ship is long time away from some kind of base or repair dock that is not good... but even in Start Trek in some combat scenarios, such as Wolf 395 or some battles in dominion war, maybe Starfleet would benefit from passive armor, or shield, tanked ships that have much more power resources to dish out damage.
Especially at Wolf 395, imagine if Starfleet had a few passive tanked ships that could fire phasers with power twice or thrice greater than their ship should, think Miranda class with additional armor plates and with Galaxy class phasor emitters slapped on, just unleashing on that Borg cube and warping back to starbase for quick repair and out again.
The Borg cube had tractor beams to hold enemies in place and finish them off.
The Defiant class, built specifically for fighting the Borg has ablative armor.
Admiral Janeway brings from the future technology of tactical holographic armor.
Starfleet in TNG times is a strange military fleet that forgot they are a military fleet.
A thing I was thinking of on my own were Galaxy Class shield platforms. Take a Galaxy saucer, remove all the civilian quarters and other superfluous systems, add armor, weapons, energy storage, and shield generators. Then when a Galaxy class ship gets into battle, they separate off the saucer and use it as a big physical shield for the more manuevrable engines section.
GRRR GOONS!
6:37. I agree with this a lot. I love stellaris's space combat because it takes this into account. Certain weapons can simply bypass shields, some weapons are terrible for combatting a sheild and take a lot of time to wear it down. Energy isn't infinite, and the shields would eventually runs out.
4:40
Worf: They are now locking lasers on us
Riker. Lasers ?
Worf: Yes, sir.
Picard: Lasers not even penetrate our navigation shields, don´t they know that.
All neat and straight forward enough. I was wondering if you'd touch on the Galaxy Class' shields as this delves into new physics concepts that can be applied to defense. The Forerunners from Halo used slipspace technology (hyperdrives in SW) to compress light into a hard matter-like state. They also used it to manipulate panels and could reconfigure their ships on the fly. I feel science has a lot of unexploited potential and that no one is bothering to investigate that anymore.
Hardlight makes no sense scientifically, and that's before taking future-tech into account. Light simply doesn't act that way. At least things like shields can be explained with the right applications of physics.
As someone who prefers some kind of scientific backing behind sci-fi concepts, that's a fair argument. Are there any ideas or guesses as to what happens to light when it enters a black hole?
I absolutely LOVE that ship design near the end of your video, it looks like a Romulan type of ship. It looks pretty badass!
There's also the 'sponge' type of armor or shields, that gobble up laser energy and dump it back into the ship's systems, usually into the point defence capacitors. There's Chaff and Microprism dust to consider, especially if you're already using magnetics to keep it dusting the ship. The armor is probably going to be some laminate to better deal with a bit of everything.
This was also explored in an episode of StarGate Universe, where the crew of the Destiny discovered the shields of the ship where looping between every frequency needed to deflect and protect from every possible incoming object or weapon. When they tuned the shield for laser based firing only, the ship took almost no damage, but then the enemy started using bullets and missiles to inflict damage since the manually tuned shields would not stop that.
Sounds a lot like how star citizen approaches shields.
At about 7:40, you mentioned how EVE Online handles differing damage types, and it immediately reminded me of the system Star Conflict uses. In Star Conflict, there are three damage types: Kinetic, Electromagnetic, and Thermal with each damage type having different resistances.
Kinetic damage is dealt by railguns, and shields have really good resistance against it, while hulls are weaker to kinetic.
Electromagnetic damage is dealt by plasma, and it very quickly drops shields, but is less effective against hulls.
Thermal weapons most commonly take the form of lasers, and they tend to be in a halfway point between Kinetic and EM damage. They deal less damage to hull and shields than the dedicated damage types, but at the same time, they deal more damage than one of the other two hitting it's opposite medium.
To put it to numbers, on a scale where 100 is unmodified, kinetic damage would do 150 damage against hull, but only 50 damage against shields. EM would be the opposite, where it does 150 damage to shields, but only 50 damage to hulls. Thermal, being a halfway point, would do 100 damage to hull AND shields. Obviously the numbers are grossly exaggerated, but it gets the basic idea across.
And ships can have modules installed that change how much damage they take, or how well they recover from damage. In my builds, I don't bother trying to modify resistances, because increasing one resistance tends to weaken you to another. Instead, I build for maximum shield and hull volume, combined with maximizing regeneration.
Smaller, more agile ships are a bit different for me, though. Since they're normally much weaker than the bigger ships, I'll actually sacrifice hull and shield capability in favor of agility and speed, and rely on just not being hit.
One correction: "laser" weapons in Star Wars actually don't shoot laser beams at enemies. They use lasers to create plasma bolts that are being shot at enemies.
Decades ago I heard of magnetically forcing ions along a laser beam to attract lightning strikes, as a new form of lightning rod. This too can be used for the delivery method of a Tesla style lightning gun/death ray, ST Phaser, or SW Blaster.
turbo lasers are plasma, normal laser cannons are lasers
IN regards to the Enterprise series of ships in startrek, its important to note that the Deflector dish or otherwise specified as the "deflector array" is that colorful lit up section located on the front of the engineering section of starships. Gene Roddenberry described the deflector as beam that is shot off into space which eliminates all matter in its path as the ship travels at warp speed, so that the ship is not contacting small pieces of matter while moving near the speed of light.
Lasers? Mirrored hull plating. Kinetic weapons? Smart point defence batteries. Most effective tactic? Shoot first, shoot accurately, and from very far away. First rule of combat. I recommend Isaac Arthur's discussions on space warfare.
You also have some specialty weapons, like particle beams, that essentially make anything physical they touch radioactive. So the more armor a ship would have, the faster it would cook the crew/circuitry. They have to be deflected with energy at extreme distance, or counteracted by another particle beam tuned just right. Or something like a refined Casaba-howitzer that uses a nuclear explosion but focuses it to laser-like precision, dumping all the heat of the explosion into one spot.
Smoke screening might be enough for lasers
It was an best and only explantation of Shields I ever heard! You are a Genius!
when i used to draw my own spaceships, i gave them... i can't remember what I called it, but basically anti-laser shield which worked by first releasing a powder of ferromagnetic metal, which was then manipulated and held by magnetic fields... same as you describe plasma could be, except these were solid metal particles, thus opaque and would disperse and absorb lasers.
I have thought something similar in the past, that maybe ships could just deploy a smokescreen of sorts to both absorb lasers and also block sensors as well.
@5:00 Another thing that it can't stop? When Captain Purple Hair hyperspaces her ship right through yours
In Star Trek, I’ve always taken damage or movement despite the shields being up as just natural reaction to a force acted upon the craft and as the shield generators not being able to compensate for the extra force. That’s why you see EPS ruptures.
i would love to see an analysis of the different shield types used in Stargate. some of them can even hold back gas and liquids.
Ok, I have to say it, there is another type of shield, one that redirects the energy of the inbound object into a different dimension. I am talking about the Void Shield from Warhammer 40K. Ships of the Imperium utilise a shield array that redirects weapons fire into the alternate dimension (used for FTL and is the domain of some very nasty entities) called the Warp. Void shields when activated form an energy layered shell around the ship, the Shield forms as a series of layers, the Void Shields can only take so much incoming energy fire before the layer collapses. Now ships of the Imperium are colossal in size, and will have a number of void shield generators, if the ship doesn't take fire for some time, the void shield will recharge at a very fast rate. These shields are also employed by the titanic walker units of the Collegia Titanica, the Titans. They have downsides, Psychic phenomena and warp storms can cause these shields to lose effectiveness, or fail entirely, they are very power hungry, and as with most imperium tech, their technical understanding on how these shield work is very limited. But then as with everything in WH40K, its very much grim dark, over the top, and utterly batshit crazy. Don't get me started on the Orks.
I like the Shields in the game "I-War"
ship shields were a function of the FTL drive.
Consider: if you have the ability to warp space to move your ship, you can also use that ability to warp the trajectory of incoming projectiles away from your ship.
Sulu: "shields, SHIELDS!"
Me: "shields won't be installed until Tuesday"
I’m working on some sci-fi stuff, and the starships have reflective hulls and plasma shields, so this is pretty lit!
One of my favourite examples of unusual "shields" is in one of the Warhammer 40k novels, Wraithflight. Tyranid bioships are described as puffing out clouds of crystalline powder to refract laser attacks, while also having dense spore mine clouds around them and point defense to intercept projectiles, missiles and strike craft.
in Star Wars a species that invaded the galaxy in Legends used micro blackholes to displace or destroy incoming fire. Strangely enough they used it as a gravity slingshot in order to travel FTL.
An organic flak cloud. Nice concept.
usually not described as just powder
but bioforms specifically bred as shields
that way you dont leave a wasteful trail of shield mater behind but your shieldbeasts can return to the ship for reabsorbtion and reproduction once their energy reserves are spent
also gives the benefit of them attacking enemy ships once in range
That is similar to Star Trek's ablative armour which creates a very dense particle cloud that deflects further incoming fire.
Fun thing with Star Wars shields and the Death Star attacks.
The exhaust port (one of at least a dozen) had ray shielding, much like many of the exposed systems on the Death Star, and that made them immune to most blaster fire. However, the designers knew about the threat of a bomb being dropped into a critical system, and many of these systems were given particle shields as well. These can sit flush with most surfaces or enclose gaps, and are even used as airlocks due to how they interact with fluids.
However, Star Wars particle shields by their very nature don't play nice with solids. They _need_ to have a gap between the edge of the shield and any nearby solid surfaces, such as those they are protecting, or they can overload or damage the surfaces.
So, that plan and the crazy approach was actually 100% needed by the in-universe logic: a dive bomb approach would have protection from both bombs (upper particle shields) and blasters (inner ray shields), you _had_ to slip a physical projectile under the edge of the particle shield so it could then go through the ray shield beneath that.
The solution for the Death Star II was also pretty simple in concept if complicated in logistics: Just have a massive offside base project a planetary-sized ray shield around the station, that way ships would crash into it if they approached. Throw up a sensor jammer and they won't even see what they're about to crash into.
I'd like to hear his thoughts on the Holtzman Shields in Dune: space-time reactive Shields that stop fast moving objects, and react violently to lasers/energy weapons...
It's never actually explained as far as I know. It's a fantastical "just accept that this happens" kind of thing. Without some real material basis, there's no much to really speculate about. It existed mainly as a plot device to serve Herbert's dramatic need for a preponderance of close range fighting.
@@anthonyhudson3459 Perhaps, but there is real world precedent. Non newtonian fluids behave rather strangely. If you try to move your hand through it, it goes through. If you try to karate chop it... Too fast! Ouch! Just like a photon through the shields... Wait, why doesn't sunlight make them explode?
Keep in mind that in a gas, some types of lasers self-focus and filament into extremely intense beams of white light. This means if you're deploying a gas envelope around your ship and trying to refract incoming laser light, it may misbehave in certain cases by locally changing the temperature and chemistry of that envelope.
With regards to defending against laser type Weaponry one of the Sci-Fi series I've read over fo years has way to do shielding against projectiles and energy weapons by using the same magnetic Shield approach you describe, and also suspending particles in the shield that are a derivative of the "brilliant Pebbles" concept from the SDI in the 80s, and is nearly the same as "Smart matter";the ships use magnetics to screw with physical projectiles, and use the pebbles/smart matter that "rides" the magnetic shield bubble to wherever they are needed, and ablate away to defend against particle beams and lasers/masers/grasers.
That....was AWESOME! very thorough explanation!
I always liked the physics around the warships of the Honorverse, makes for great long range battle visuals
It sounds to me like the most practical strategy for shield use would be to have a tunable plasma shield that's normally set to deflect the most common forms of high-speed weaponry, with some sort of detection system that can retune on the fly to respond to slower moving threats.
Good take on actual believable shields. A magnetic shielding would effectively make any kind of plasma weapon completely useless, which means no phasers or disruptors, not even Borg particle projectors, could harm a ship with such shields. Matter, on the other way, would be simply unstoppable, unless you created a sheet of really superheated plasma around the ship, as you suggested. But that would also create a barrier hampering both your sensors and light-based communications, especially your own targeting systems, much like it happens to any ship reentering atmosphere, when it is enveloped in plasma due to attrition.
Also, magnetic fields and charged plasma offer little protection against neutrons, which can kill the crew in no time leaving the ship intact.
Some media suggest using gravity to create a warped space bubble around the ship to simply deflect everything thrown at you, but that would mean to deflect also the light that allows you to see your enemy in the first place. A really dumb idea.
Some kind of armor seems to be the best investment for any kind of space warship, then, because no matter what the shields are made of, they would still let something through. Also, shields require energy to exist, which can't last forever.
Despite there are dozens of shields had developed, repulsive shields, magnetic shields, ionic deflectional shields, beam shields, and photonic hypercrystal generated shields are main consideration for starfleets.
However, more types of shields advancement are encouraged to further space projects.
Thanks for this :) I'm writing a world where magnetic shields are a thing, they are great against kinetic hazards, and they stop plasma dead, however, the plasma dissipation challenges mean that the ship has to deal with a heat surplus as the plasma is funneled towards the emitters, effectively making short range plasma weapons and plasma warheads a go-to effective shield breaker.
Laser type weapons can be neutralized with ablative or reflective armor. However, reflection becomes difficult with X-ray lasers.
How did you make objects reflecting after the impact, did you use some physics or animated manually? Are you still in Blender?
Two shields - one unrendered acting as a collision object, the other behind it has a dynamic paint - it was complex :D
@@resurrectedstarships ah, I see, unrendered was the tricky part, thanks!
A video on Structural Integrity Fields and Polarised Hull Plating would be great next.
About the point of shielding from lasers, plasma shields can do that. Plasma is opaque to lasers and stops them. That's why most lasers in the real world are pulsed. Their energy creates plasma along the path, which makes it opaque and wastes lots of energy, so they turn on, laser goes through, plasma builds up, laser is turned of, plasma dissipates and laser can fire again. It's done within nanoseconds so it looks like a continuous beam to us, even though it's not.
A plasma barrier can therefore stop the laser.
I was really surprised when he mentioned this, Plasma shields would likely be better at stopping lasers than solid objects.
I had an idea once for a series where the manipulation of gravity has been achieved. This enabled FTL travel (by targetting points of space and pulling them closer with gravity beams). But another novel idea someone else pointed out to me is that a ship that could control gravity and lock things to it could use ozone, or non-newtonian fluidic shields. The idea being that the vessel vents an amount of ozone which is then held densely around the ship, which will burn up incoming projectiles and also dissipate directed energy weapons. The idea of using non-newtonian fluids would be such that the harder something hits, the greater the reactive force of the fluid, which hardens and breaks the projectile, while also dissipating energy in the same way as an ozone layer would.
The aurora borealis is not plasma. The plasma ionizes air molecules which are what we actuall see. So the aurora borealis is caused by plasma but it is not plasma.
fun item about Earth orbit, In the mass effect codex on Earth it mentions keeping your kinetic barriers up if coming into low orbit due to all the stuff left over from our early spaceflight programs.
Am I finally early?
I heard of Gravitational Shields. It would be interesting seeing a breakdown of this.
Thank you so much! For years, I couldn't figure out why the shields were up but the Enterprise was still getting shot at.
🤔 . . . Bring me a Space Spartan! I’m going to use his Energy Shield to go Sledding on Hoth . . .
Static shields project a field of static electricity that discourages or even fully disables people passing through by doing exactly that; projecting a static charge (the kind you feel when a thunderstorm is coming irl, or when you drag your feet on a synthetic surface and touch a radiator or other conductor). In Titan A.E., Star Trek and Star Wars we sometimes see people pushing through such a shield with great pain to the person attempting this.
This has been extremely informative. I’ll be using this for future reference.
There is another interesting design in the game Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos. There the shield generators create a bend in space causing any attack to deflect back into itself. Though the shield generators only work in one direction, so they swivel around inside the ship to face any potential thread. This means that attacks from multiple directions can overwhelm them. Also they don't work over the ships main thrusters as they would interfere with those. And they only work in a single burst, needing to recharge every time they are used.
first person I've ever seen mention that game.
"Shields free up the architecture of your ship!"
Meanwhile the inside of the ship overflowing with colossal power generators, gas tanks, and electromagnets that all had to be sent up in pieces for a fortune a pound
There's an episode in Stargate Universe, where Destiny (the ship of our cast) is under attack by drones. Destiny's shields take a beating, but the crew was able to retrieve a damaged drone and learn the specific energy output used by the drones' weapons. Since Destiny's shield was constantly shifting between energy signals (I don't remember the specifics), they weren't 100% effective against the drones so they attuned Destiny's shields to the specific energy used by the drones which greatly reduced the stress on the shields. This did mean that Destiny would be vulnerable against other types of damage, which the drones figure out and start to kamikaze into Destiny in order to do damage. Quite a fun episode.
Star Trek Beta Canon (Best Destiny) explains there is a difference between the shields of Constitution Class and Excelsior Class. Constitution was designed with multiple types of shields that overlayed and were focused to defend against a specific type of attack, Excelsior has a "General Shield" that protects against all of them but can't automatically adjust.
In Star Trek, shields and deflector technology are based on the use of graviton generators. In essence, they harness artificial gravity to create a graviton field. For the main deflector, which is primarily used in warp flight (though impulse flight to a lesser degree) to create a line of artificial gravity in the ship's flight path. This has the effect of "deflecting" or altering the trajectory of objects that would otherwise hit the ship in flight. This is generated by the "dish" at the bottom front of most starships.
Shields, however, are generated by grid like structures on the hull itself. This is the typical "bubble" like shield effect you're used to seeing in the show and is most commonly what you see enemy weapons "hitting" in the series and movies. These are intended for combat but also general radiation protection. This is also most commonly what they refer to when they say "shields are at 47%".
Deflector shields are required for warp flight. Standard shields are required for combat protection and will not protect the ship at warp velocities from objects on the ship's flight path.
There's a little gray area in the recent movies in the TNG era where the shield bubble was no longer there and it was sort of acting like Star Wars shields. I don't know if this was intended or not, but the inconsistency is annoying.
It’s not mentioned in the video but my favourite type of shielding in sci-fi is the Void Shield from Warhammer, which teleports the oncoming attack into the, always fun to use, Warp.
In Star Trek the most interesting shields are Borg in nature. It is a magnetic EMP like shield. It is designed to scramble any thing that comes into it. Thw ships uses it outer hall to absorb damage that gets thru. Warhammer 40K void sheilds that literaly transfer items to the Warp.
Armor is great for ablative and conductive protection, a laser or particle beam hits and the heat /charge can be bled off over a large surface area, not to mention if the armor is designed to mirror finish itself when heat damaged. Which means you only have to shield so much damage or change how that damage is being applied, which means you can use shields to downshift from higher spectra to lower more reflectable ones.
However Reflec Armor, as BattleTech terms it, has a flaw. It cannot take a heavy hit, which will reduce its efficiency. Assume you have a projectile of a mass similar to a Toyota Corolla to use the popular meme, and it is going at 65% c. That's a lot of force you are stopping, and some of that may bleed over and impact the Reflec Armor, denting and changing its geometry. The armor may also have a slight brittle factor, compounding the problem.
Even then, weaponized lasers might not even be a problem depending on the target ship's alloy, the power plant of the firing ship, the safeguards on the weapon being fired, and the evasive track of both ships. Lasers are only really good if the enemy isn't going evasive.
Then let's have some real fun with weaponry. Sufficiently advanced enough, and a weapon can evade shields even. Say someone comes up with a Neutron Cannon, a particle weapon that fires a lot of nasty neutrons, which have no charge and therefore cannot be diverted by magnetic field. This type of weapon could cause neutron activation in the armor, rendering a whole section dangerous to replace without proper PPE. This could render whole sections of a ship dangerous even. And not many things can take a pointblank thermonuclear or A-M bomb right on the hull.
Going back to BattleTech a moment, it does have Ferro-Fibrous Armor. This stuff is like an iron Kevlar vest, so to speak. How do you stop a kinetic round? You slow it the heck down. In a setting with Gauss Rifles and Autocannon, that can be useful.
However the best defense against being attacked or being spotted on the attack is not being seen. Combat in space needs to be done like beneath waves on Earth. The Expanse has an answer in the form of a Protogen stealth ship. Your target will never know what hit it until it is too late.
What about a shield system that uses magnetic fields to focus and shape a dense shell/field of electrons around the projecting ship?
That sounds similar to Covenant energy shields, I think.
The disadvantage of plasma shields that no-one ever mentions is that they need fuel. You don't just conjure up plasma out of thin vacuum. You can make one out of thin air tho. Plasma shields require a material to be put into the state of plasma so you will need probably large canisters of pressurised gas on your ship, and your use of the gas will be limited for long engagements. However if we're talking ground forces, you could theoretically hold a shield as a permanent barrier if you've got the power for it since you have an entire planet worth of atmosphere to use as your shield fuel.
Actually, a plasma barrier can indeed be adjusted to deflect frequencies of light like a mirror, and can change frequency as well. Take a look at what they call a "plasma mirror".
EDIT: I typed this before finishing the video. He addressed this at 5:30
Shields in 'Independence Day' and 'War of the Worlds' are classified as Force-fields. The units take no damage until the field is beaten by overwhelming force. Babylon 5 had aliens with powerful force fields dubbed '3rd Space Aliens'. They use gravimetric fields.
if we could store "infinite energy" in very small spaces then using all the technologies we have today would allow us to get closer to a real life star wars. When I met SpaceX a few years ago, I imagined that although suicide burn is fantastic, it would be even cooler not to have the need to do that show if technology were more capable. In those days when I was starting my engineering studies I saw all the technologies of "today" that could be used to solve the problems of space travel but the problem "we try to fuel futurism with chemical fuel"
I always thought of the shields that act as a sort of wall as being more of a spacial or subspace distortion powered by the ship, and the more damage that the shields take, the more energy it takes to keep them active which will eventually either overload the capacitors or just drain too much power from the ship.
At least for Star Trek. The TNG Tech manual describes shields on a Galaxy-class starship as being an intense bubble of graviton particles or field that creates that spatial distortion that is effective against both matter and energy, if I remember correctly.
I always wondered about that and in my own writing projects made a whole document exploring shield types, characteristics, pros-cons and all that to make shields feel like an actual countermeasure tool. That stuff gets complicated fast lol
Shields are just a lazy way to add stakes without needing to blow up their miniatures. I always appreciate franchises like the 2009 BSG and The Expanse for using armor and plating instead of some hand-wavey mystical energy shield that protects the model from being damaged
the ship from another life has another type of shield, a relativistic shield, generated from the warp drive and negative mass. basically, it bends space around the ship to redirect all forms of mass and energy around the ship.
I like the way that Neal Asher deals with shields and armour in the Polity series. When the shield projectors overload they eject into space rather than becoming explodium inside the ship. Like their engineering design is to have ejection ports and be designed to fail safe.
Another couple of interesting ideas from harder sci fi:
Sand shield (I think from Jack Campbell) they literally mine asteroids to crush into sand and gravel sized particles. As the human fleet fights it blasts sand ahead of itself then "taps the brakes" so space ahead is a wall of sand. This then interferes with beam weapons, is a physical obstacle for kinetic weapons (a railgun projectile hitting a near c sand grain will make a pretty explosion) and when the sand reaches enemy energy shields it dumps a massive load of energy into them and overloads them.
Point defence so good that it is shield like; or in other words you cover your ship in very fast short range lasers to individually or in an array target incoming kinetic threats
A deflector shield is a Photonic shielding were particles (depending on mass of objects and the speed your going) pass around the shield bubble.
Funfact about Lasers - In "Star Trek the next Generation", when some weaker Ships attacked the Enterprise-D, it was mentioned that the Laser-Weapons can't penetrate the Navigational Deflection.
And there'S a simple reason for that to be a part of the Starships Navigational Deflection:
When travelling in space with more than LightYear, the Front of the Ship is hit with Particles and the Light of the Stars in a much-bigger amount than usual if approaching a solar-system with Warp-Speed, this could mean, that the Front is hit with the equal amount of light, comparable to a Laser hitting the Ship.
Wioth that amoun t of energy< hitting a ship, the Navigational shielding should be able to absorb or deflect so much energy.
Why I compare the Light of a distant star to a Laser: Imagine that when you travel to a star System that got quite a bright star, then Travel at it with a speed that let's your Ship catch up with the amoiunt of light, that would usually come at you in the usual timeframe of 10 Years, but within a few Minutes, that Amount could become Dangerous.
And in some Cases, they showed in Star Trek, how the Outer Plating of some Shjip-Section would start to receivbe Damage.
Energy in whatever form whether it be kinetic, em, heat or radioactive can be measured in waves. Frequency is the unit of how we can measure these waves.
Just like how you can repel two magnetic fields of the same pole, similarly can be done by adjusting the frequency of the field protecting the ship.
By using software to automatically adjust the frequency of the shield to match the frequency of the incoming energy, you can repel multiple forms of energy (eg. kinetic and radiation) by finding a median frequency and increasing power to the shield to successfully repel the incoming energy.
I served on a V-22 Winged Defender. Great memories.
This is what I'm actually making my PhD dissertation on. Lol
Thank you for the great breakdown of Shield technology and Star Trek universe. Always enjoy your videos especially Star Wars imperial forces versus Star Trek. Two great videos. Although it is all sci-fi and mental masturbation, still extremely interesting!
It's nice when, after barely if any research, I'm like, "I think Y can be done because of X without breaking suspension of disbelief," and someone comes along with actual science that supports my fantasy/sci-fi idea. Is it odd that it's happened way more than twice, though?
Want to buy me a coffee so I can keep working on this stuff? Hit the super-thanks button above and send me a special comment which I WILL reply to!
8:50 5. you need shields (some sort of energy field/ warp bubble/ whatever) to protect your ship while it's going ridiculously fast. If a pebble hits with same force as a nuke, you need protection and armor won't cut it I think. And since you already have it, it's logical to use for protection in battle.
I would think that some sort of polished armor would be a defense to laser type weapons, Something like the Naboo ship in Star Wars. As for heat type weapons I would look towards what is used on the Parker Solar Probe, not pretty but it works. As for explosives weapons, I do not know fully how a shock wave will work in a vacuum, but from my limited knowledge shock waves are not a thing in space, or should I say do not work the same way as Depth Charges in water and slandered explosives in air. I think the thing that is scar in space are kinetic weapons or just impact weapons. sabot round, rail guns, mas drivers, Felix, and A-10 GAU-8 Avenger 30mm gatling gun firing depleted uranium... But then with those types of weapons you need to store the ammunition on the ship, when it is gone, it is gone. You also need to take into account of recoil of those types of weapons in space. Firing a weapon like that can do large amounts damage to the enemy, but needs to be compensated and reaimed every every shot as it acts like a maneuvering thruster when fired.
Apparently pure white armor is better as it diffuses the laser light best.
@@resurrectedstarships And heat too, don't forget that. That's why the Saturn 5, Space Shuttles, and other certain spaceships are painted white to diffuse heat from the sun.
@@resurrectedstarships Reflective or "high albedo" surfaces however cannot meaningfully protect against lasers powerful enough to be useful as weapons. Most prospective laser weapons operate in the megawatt range or above which would cause most materials to explosively fracture under thermal shocking, in addition most combat lasers will not be visible light, they'd likely range from the NUV (Near-Ultraviolet) to XUV (Extreme-Ultraviolet) range, and further into the future will likely be Xrays. These beams will not be reflected in the least by most any metal on the periodic table until you reach Hafnium, which is dense, rare, and difficult to work with meaning it will likely not be in sufficient supply to make up the armor of space warships.
Furthermore, energy weapons may skip over lasers to laser-coupled particle beams, which while slower moving could impart massive damage to a target because their beam consists of a stream of substantially massive particles traveling at .1-.25C, these kinds of weapons will render practically any conceivable physical armor useless.
One note about how star trek ships get damaged while shields are on is that the engineer may have just been dumb and not seen the projectile incoming. In the game star trek bridge crew which is an official VR game you can adjust where the shields are primarily at at the cost of weakening other areas.
200km+ Culture Systems-class GSV with maniple fields as structure/shields: Heyo, have you heard the Word of Banks?
Another type of shield you did not mention would be "hard shields." Only place I've ever really heard about those are in the game Master of Orion and they don't really explain what they are. I figure they could be magnetic shields and have a large amount of magnetic particles suspended in the field to create a wall of sorts. You could manipulate the field in certain ways to allow your ship to fire weapons through it and once the weapon is clear close the gap again. Also rather than just suspending particles in the field you could rotate the field at a high velocity which would move the particles along with it and essentially barrage any physical objects that enter the field with those particles making it more of a point defense. If you had various different color particles it could also be used to essentially create a cloak by matching the colors to the environment behind you.
I think that with modern physics shields described in video will require insane sources of energy onboard to run. Taking this into account and harsh physical conditions in space, manned starships made of metal will be very vulnerable and just impractical. Realistic interstellar space travel instruments will be VERY far from simple extrapolation of conventional sea vessels to space.