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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would love to see an expansion on this video based around point defense as well! A comparison of armour, shields, and point defense weapons and a discussion of how they could be balanced out for the most effective defense would make such a cool video. Absolutely loved this video, you earned a happy subscriber :)
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 think some of the best examples of high sci-fi puts shielding, particularly plasma shields, are the Halo novels. Even in the earliest books, the authors take care to note that because the Covenant uses both plasma-based weaponry and high-powered magnetic shielding, the shields themselves are typically segmented and they must be powered down in order for covenant projectiles to pass through. However, because the magnetic tuning on their lighter plasma-based weaponry and shields are different, they can use these lighter armaments without compromising shield integrity.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
There was a tabletop game series back in the 1990's by FASA called Renegade Legion. Their shields acted by having a vibratory frequency, and affected both physical and directed energy weapons. However, they could not be maintained all the time, and had to be shut off and on dozens or hundreds of times per second. They pretty much automatically deflect incoming attacks that hit them, but the overall effect is a penalty to hit. They also could not stop heavier projectiles, such as full gauss cannon rounds. Therefore tanks would have "painting lasers" to measure the flicker rate of the shields, and enable them to time their incoming attacks for the moment the shield flickers off.
Programmable matter in Star Trek is gong to be interesting for shielding. You could, theoretically, create ablative armor, or change the properties of matter at the projected point of impact to something best capable of dealing with the threat. For example, if someone fires EM weapons, you could make that spot on your hull momentarily retro reflective, sending the energy back at the attacker. Transporter tech should see more use in defense, as you can get around the conservation of momentum problems. From what I have seen, transported objects conserve their momentum from the point where they were dematerialized and retain the speed and direction when rematerialized without exerting force on the “beam” apparatus. So, for projectiles, you could simply lock them and transport them back pointing a slightly different direction, even back towards the attacker. I also like the idea of programmable matter weapons that would have to conserve mass, but could figure out the best payload to deliver a given target milliseconds before impact based on sensor data.
yeah i think your bang on with bleed-through damage in star trek, i've been thinking much the same thing especially for the TOS era where ships are just generally less spongy. makes me think what did space combat in trek look like before the advent of effective shield systems...
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.
Since we're talking about how shields and armor are implemented across various canons, I think it's worth mentioning that in many settings there actually are ways to adapt and repair armor in the field. For example, in EVE, you can fit your ship with armor repair modules, though they're slower and less effective than getting repairs at a station, and armor hardeners can be used to dynamically increase your armor's resistance to various damage types. In Freelancer, you can deploy nanobots to repair your ship in the field.
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.
At least in TNG, the navigational deflector used tractor beams for larger than microscopic particles. And the navigational deflector sensor array was used as part of tracking and adjusting of the deflector shields.
This is some pro video making and i love that there was a bit of all the sci-fi (seriously was that a terran wraith?!?). How are you not more popular?!
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.
There is a high powered magnet in America that is so powerful it can deflect any object that contains water or metals... i seriously think magnetic shields for navigation deflection of space objects is extremely feasible this early in our space evolution.
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.
One of the things I like about Eve Online is that two of the kinetic weapon types, missiles and projectiles, can vary the damage they output. Missiles can be of a high explosive warhead, an EMP warhead, a plasma warhead, or essentially a shaped-charge with a sabot to propel the projectile through the shields or armor. {blasters/rail guns use a shell of titanium with a core of various metals/antimatter suspended in plasma)
You can see in startrek, that they also can modulate the shield frequency to deal with different frequencies of energy weapons which can be used to surpass the shields
One of the earliest games I can remember with super realistic shielding is a game called Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, I remember how amazing the game was and the tactics you had to use to get a shield down and then destroy or immobilise a ship. You needed to have a balance of energy and projectile weapons, it was tough as old boots
Something I don’t know if anyone has talked about (or has even realized) is that kinetic energy is still transferred across two interlinked objects even if that connection isn’t material/physical. I’ll use two examples, one of which I’ve actually seen in a UA-cam video. I’ll start with the one I haven’t seen in a youtube video, although surprisingly enough I figured out this whole thing and came up with this example specifically by thinking about Megumin’s staff, Megumin from Konosuba. Let’s say that you have a hard light energy generator that makes a plate of energy exactly and precisely one meter in front of it. Let’s also say that it gets hit by something fast or heavy enough to push it, a cannonball should suffice for demonstration. Because the plate of energy will always be one meter in front of the generator, if the plate gets pushed back, so too will the generator. In order for the generator to not get moved, the energy plate would need some other way to deal with the kinetic force of impacts. Because let’s do another thought experiment. You have a shield generator the size of a shed, and it projects a bubble shield 1km in diameter. Your ship is on a collision course with a large asteroid, and it hits your shield. You briefly think to yourself that maybe since the largeness of it means that the force gets spread out over a large surface area, and that might mean you’ll be OK, but no. All of that force has now been concentrated into the shield generator, making it like the tip of a pile bunker. Having lots of shield emitters scattered across the ship’s hull might diffuse the energy, especially if the emitters position on the hull don’t correlate to the position of the shield they emit, but I digress. Next is the youtube one, let’s say that you have a pair of superconducting magnets, and have gotten them to magnetic/quantum lock (this principle is what would be used in maglev trains). You then place the magnets on a scale, one of them hovering in the air due to the locking. You then place an object on top of the floating magnet, and if you didn’t predict this then to your surprise you watch as the scale shows an increase in weight. Even though it wasn’t through a direct material connection, the force of the added weight was carried through the superconducting magnetic fields and increased the force applied onto the scale. In conclusion I’ve never seen this directly addressed, although it does explain why you hear shield impacts in Star Trek and the like.
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.
Thank you for this Video it informs about a lot of things some people don't even think about that much and is very helpful esspecially for people interested in World Building for their own stories.
I worked on a shielding device that was tested on the X37, basically a plasma layer cake of ion/electron/ion/electron alternating directions, intended to deflect alpha and beta radiation around an object. Works extremely well and low energy with the field modulated by a superconductor - which converts the kinetic energy of the radiation into thermal energy, picked up by the superconducting mass. Hit a big cloud of particles and watch a bit of liquid helium boil off
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.
Insightful as always. Physics is pretty close to spot-on. The state of the art in plasma manipulation is still very primitive.... we have only been doing magnetic containment of plasmas for about 70 years. And fully magnetohydrodynamic code is processing intensive to simulate. You also have the problem that you need an electric field to also manipulate plasma and counter the problem that the poles of your magnetic field geometry will be weak (if using a quadropole field geometry).
Thanks. I needed this. I like the idea of shields in sci-fi and fantasy but always thought they were a plot device to just work as the plot needs them to work. With this knowledge in the back of my mind I'm finally able to "realistically" integrate them into my stories.
Real life shields tend to be physical barriers though: radiation shielding, heat shields, Whipple shields. This in turn blends the distinction between 'shields' and 'armor' when it comes to real life scenarios. Afterall, a shield was originally a piece of armor anyway. 🤷♂️ Similarly, when it comes to spacecraft the distinction between hull and armor IRL isn't as meaningful as it may seem. However, there seems to be a clear distinction between passive protection systems like these, and active protection systems (APS), which also include things like smoke launchers, decoys, and CiWS aka what we might call 'ballistic shielding', etc. I think it's better to talk about APS instead of just shields, which seems to be useful when proposing the more realistic idea that a ship's "shields" is actually an array of integrated systems of different kinds performing different tasks. In my own clumsy & clueless amateur writings that I am too shy & ashamed to share 😅, I tend to describe the systems you've mentioned respectively as artificial magnetospheres (or just magnetospheres), plasma screens or plasma belts (depending on the shape given to the ship's magnetosphere), and finally I tend to talk about the ship's 'ionised atmospheric layers' or IAL, for the gaseous component. And yes, that basically boils down to spacecraft which seek to imitate the kinds of protections that planets possess, the 'shell' or 'crust' being its composite armor layers. I have their magnetospheres and plasma screening being generated by their fusion reactors by the way, and their IALs sort of contained or shepherded by their magnetospheres around their crusts, thus all these APS are tied to the ships' power generation and propulsion (the generated plasma being usually channelled through, magnetically compressed, and accelerated even more by VASIMR type thrusters).
Not sure about the Star Wars universe but Star Trek staffers have gotten pretty good at explaining how their tech works. Try reading through the TNG Tech Manual. "Deflectors Shields" are a TOS techno-babble because the writers and Roddenberry only had half an idea about anything Trek. By TNG these systems were better defined and while they work in similar manners, "Deflectors" and "Shields" are two separate systems. Both are modulated graviton fields but "Deflectors" are generally of low intensity for keeping small debris from shedding the ships hull but there is a secondary deflector that works similar to the tracker beam and is used to help move larger objects, like asteroids and comets out if the way. Both of these are emitted from the "dish" usually found somewhere on the front of the Ship. On the other hand, Shields are high intensity and high density gravitron fields that are emitted from grids mounted directly to the outer surface of the hull.
A multi level magnetic shield that creates a plasma layer between the various magnetic layers is the best defense. In real life it would stop the Tsar bomb if you had enough layers.
Exactly, and I do not know why Star Trek doesn't use the transporters for defensive capabilities. Someone shoots a nuclear bomb at you, just transport it inside the hull of the attacker.
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.
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 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.
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.
I never thought about it until this video, but for lasers, the navigation deflector (as Picard noted in one of the early episodes as easily able to stop a laser) could be a gravitational wave moving objects out of the flight path through gravitation lensing. A laser could be deflected and diffracted to weaker energy levels simultaneously from this continuous effect. nav deflector will never be turned off
Looking at klingon technologies, the cloaking device is based on gravitational warping, forming a shell around the ship. The warp core bubble is also a type of shield, since while the bubble moves through space, the ship is no longer a part of the universe. It follows that a warp field and a gravitation field can also be used as shields.
I can think of a few situations in Star Trek where they had to up their shields game, - Vs the Borg. which could scan shield, & match harmonics. Similarly if you stole a Federation star ship, the captain of another Federtion ship could look up your shield freaquency, & blast you. - Shield Frequency matching also allowed a ship to use transporter beams, or pass through shields with shuttles and such. - Vs the Borg, the Federation had to up their shields game by remodulating their shield frequency. Same for their weapons, the borg adapted their shields specifically to the weapons being used against them, In order to keep their weapons affective ,the Federation had to modulate the phasers energy freqauency harmonics, or whatever. --- Another situation was with DS9, First the Dominion using phased polaron beams to cut through shields, The Federation had to adapt their shield tech. Seeing a galaxy class ship cut up with Phased Polaron beams like it didn't even have shields was a shocker to the Federation, Conversely when DS9 used a shield the was able to counter the Phased Polaron it was the Dominion that had the wtf moment. - Then the Breen came in with Energy dampening weapons. The Klingons accidently had a fix because of a modified tritium intermix chamber. Whatever that is. But again the Federation had to adapt their shield tech by reverse engineering the Breen weapon.
i should mention that deflector shields in star wars are mounted on smaller ships like freighters & star fighters, ray shields are mounted on warships, in cooperation with particle shields. particle shields work by acting as a strong magnetic field that induces gravity to push hard objects away from the warship, allowing it to absorb /vaporize, redirect & prematurely detonate torpedoes & other physical weapons. with this one with ray shields & projected in a space around the ship, the heat is dissipated by the cold vacuum of space.
in one episode of STTNG once they met a Ship which still had Laser as Weapons, Riker mentioned with such antiquated Weaponry their opponent wouldnt even be able to get through the navigation deflector but Phaser on the other handy is powerful enough to get through
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.
If you watch tank videos on youtube you will see that there are many types of armor that can be used to combat attacks as well. There is definitely a possibility that combining this with an eventual nanotechnology for self repair, it's possible to have much more usable armor in actual combat in space. Also I'm kinda surprised we didn't talk about the issues that should/shouldn't arise for the sci-fi series that don't have shields, namely battlestar galactica and babylon 5. Finally, while I appreciate that these technologies exist for shields and might be integral to developing technology in the future, I want to emphasize the 1) difficulty of maintaining a strong enough magnetic field to do anything remotely like deflecting debris of significant momentum, and 2) the concerns of the damage you'd do to people inside the ship to maintain those magnetic fields. After all, people get nauseated and lose their balance at .5 to 1.5 T, the biggest magnetic field we've been able to make across a Tokamak is about 14T which struggled to contain a small mass of plasma (this is likely outdated, my research was in 2010), and there wouldn't be much way of making that magnetic field outwardly directed.
Would you ever be willing to discuss the designs and possible doctrines and uses of the ships of Battlestar Galactica? Or do you only talk about series and franchises that you’re familiar with?
Bravo for using ship designs from Star Trek the Roleplaying game. Seeing those romulan ships in 3D was great. The Winged Defender was my favorite ship although that Gallant Wing looked good too. I've got a good selection fo those ships in miniature, like the ships in this video, including the Romulan Nova class Battleship
Gene Rodenbury was specific that the “satellite dish” on the front of the Enterprise was the “main deflector” and used for clearing debris from in front of the ship so that nothing hit it at impulse speeds. This was separate from the defense shields. In TNG, the shields are shown to be actual bubbles around the vessels.
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.
Warp drives based off of Miguel Alcubeire’s model will also function as a shield since space itself is warped around you so anything that touches said bubble of spacetime will be instantly flung behind it.
Thoughts on projected bubble type sheilds vs contouring? Personally bubble sheilds seem safer to me. Also, my personal favorite type of sheild is rubbish your finish with. Good video 👏🏻
If a ship like the Enterprise or ships in Star Wars can make Warp or Hyperspace fields, then those could also be used as shields too. Just bend space around you like you do with your warp drive and the weapon fire will bend with it, and hopefully not hit your ship. I was hoping you might discuss this type of shield.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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- ua-cam.com/video/o7rxBifd0cY/v-deo.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
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
Basicalllly warhammer
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
I always love your work..very well done..
He’s amazing huh? I’m so happy he’s back to doing these videos!
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
I always liked the physics around the warships of the Honorverse, makes for great long range battle visuals
Would love to see an expansion on this video based around point defense as well! A comparison of armour, shields, and point defense weapons and a discussion of how they could be balanced out for the most effective defense would make such a cool video.
Absolutely loved this video, you earned a happy subscriber :)
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 think some of the best examples of high sci-fi puts shielding, particularly plasma shields, are the Halo novels. Even in the earliest books, the authors take care to note that because the Covenant uses both plasma-based weaponry and high-powered magnetic shielding, the shields themselves are typically segmented and they must be powered down in order for covenant projectiles to pass through. However, because the magnetic tuning on their lighter plasma-based weaponry and shields are different, they can use these lighter armaments without compromising shield integrity.
Sulu: "shields, SHIELDS!"
Me: "shields won't be installed until Tuesday"
Congrats on your new Sponsor! Great Channel. Love the growth!
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
Sooooooo glad you’re doing these videos again! Also taking on a sponsor was a fantastic idea! You may even call it brilliant!
Thank you for putting your sources in the description, makes the video a lot more trust worthy!
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
There was a tabletop game series back in the 1990's by FASA called Renegade Legion. Their shields acted by having a vibratory frequency, and affected both physical and directed energy weapons. However, they could not be maintained all the time, and had to be shut off and on dozens or hundreds of times per second. They pretty much automatically deflect incoming attacks that hit them, but the overall effect is a penalty to hit. They also could not stop heavier projectiles, such as full gauss cannon rounds. Therefore tanks would have "painting lasers" to measure the flicker rate of the shields, and enable them to time their incoming attacks for the moment the shield flickers off.
Sounds a lot like how star citizen approaches shields.
Programmable matter in Star Trek is gong to be interesting for shielding. You could, theoretically, create ablative armor, or change the properties of matter at the projected point of impact to something best capable of dealing with the threat. For example, if someone fires EM weapons, you could make that spot on your hull momentarily retro reflective, sending the energy back at the attacker. Transporter tech should see more use in defense, as you can get around the conservation of momentum problems. From what I have seen, transported objects conserve their momentum from the point where they were dematerialized and retain the speed and direction when rematerialized without exerting force on the “beam” apparatus. So, for projectiles, you could simply lock them and transport them back pointing a slightly different direction, even back towards the attacker.
I also like the idea of programmable matter weapons that would have to conserve mass, but could figure out the best payload to deliver a given target milliseconds before impact based on sensor data.
Yeah or just beam the matter based weapon and rematerialize it with a 180° velocity back at the attacker.
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!
yeah i think your bang on with bleed-through damage in star trek, i've been thinking much the same thing especially for the TOS era where ships are just generally less spongy.
makes me think what did space combat in trek look like before the advent of effective shield systems...
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.
I absolutely LOVE that ship design near the end of your video, it looks like a Romulan type of ship. It looks pretty badass!
Am I finally early?
Since we're talking about how shields and armor are implemented across various canons, I think it's worth mentioning that in many settings there actually are ways to adapt and repair armor in the field. For example, in EVE, you can fit your ship with armor repair modules, though they're slower and less effective than getting repairs at a station, and armor hardeners can be used to dynamically increase your armor's resistance to various damage types. In Freelancer, you can deploy nanobots to repair your ship in the field.
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.
At least in TNG, the navigational deflector used tractor beams for larger than microscopic particles. And the navigational deflector sensor array was used as part of tracking and adjusting of the deflector shields.
This is some pro video making and i love that there was a bit of all the sci-fi (seriously was that a terran wraith?!?). How are you not more popular?!
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.
There is a high powered magnet in America that is so powerful it can deflect any object that contains water or metals... i seriously think magnetic shields for navigation deflection of space objects is extremely feasible this early in our space evolution.
I like how Stellaris does things kinetic weapons ignore shields but stopped by armor. Energy weapons eat through armor but are stopped by shields.
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.
One of the things I like about Eve Online is that two of the kinetic weapon types, missiles and projectiles, can vary the damage they output. Missiles can be of a high explosive warhead, an EMP warhead, a plasma warhead, or essentially a shaped-charge with a sabot to propel the projectile through the shields or armor. {blasters/rail guns use a shell of titanium with a core of various metals/antimatter suspended in plasma)
4:53 SW blasters are canonically a form of plasma bolt, ironically.
You can see in startrek, that they also can modulate the shield frequency to deal with different frequencies of energy weapons which can be used to surpass the shields
One of the earliest games I can remember with super realistic shielding is a game called Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, I remember how amazing the game was and the tactics you had to use to get a shield down and then destroy or immobilise a ship. You needed to have a balance of energy and projectile weapons, it was tough as old boots
It was an best and only explantation of Shields I ever heard! You are a Genius!
Something I don’t know if anyone has talked about (or has even realized) is that kinetic energy is still transferred across two interlinked objects even if that connection isn’t material/physical. I’ll use two examples, one of which I’ve actually seen in a UA-cam video.
I’ll start with the one I haven’t seen in a youtube video, although surprisingly enough I figured out this whole thing and came up with this example specifically by thinking about Megumin’s staff, Megumin from Konosuba. Let’s say that you have a hard light energy generator that makes a plate of energy exactly and precisely one meter in front of it. Let’s also say that it gets hit by something fast or heavy enough to push it, a cannonball should suffice for demonstration. Because the plate of energy will always be one meter in front of the generator, if the plate gets pushed back, so too will the generator. In order for the generator to not get moved, the energy plate would need some other way to deal with the kinetic force of impacts. Because let’s do another thought experiment. You have a shield generator the size of a shed, and it projects a bubble shield 1km in diameter. Your ship is on a collision course with a large asteroid, and it hits your shield. You briefly think to yourself that maybe since the largeness of it means that the force gets spread out over a large surface area, and that might mean you’ll be OK, but no. All of that force has now been concentrated into the shield generator, making it like the tip of a pile bunker. Having lots of shield emitters scattered across the ship’s hull might diffuse the energy, especially if the emitters position on the hull don’t correlate to the position of the shield they emit, but I digress.
Next is the youtube one, let’s say that you have a pair of superconducting magnets, and have gotten them to magnetic/quantum lock (this principle is what would be used in maglev trains). You then place the magnets on a scale, one of them hovering in the air due to the locking. You then place an object on top of the floating magnet, and if you didn’t predict this then to your surprise you watch as the scale shows an increase in weight. Even though it wasn’t through a direct material connection, the force of the added weight was carried through the superconducting magnetic fields and increased the force applied onto the scale. In conclusion I’ve never seen this directly addressed, although it does explain why you hear shield impacts in Star Trek and the like.
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.
Thank you for this Video it informs about a lot of things some people don't even think about that much and is very helpful esspecially for people interested in World Building for their own stories.
I worked on a shielding device that was tested on the X37, basically a plasma layer cake of ion/electron/ion/electron alternating directions, intended to deflect alpha and beta radiation around an object. Works extremely well and low energy with the field modulated by a superconductor - which converts the kinetic energy of the radiation into thermal energy, picked up by the superconducting mass.
Hit a big cloud of particles and watch a bit of liquid helium boil off
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.
Insightful as always. Physics is pretty close to spot-on. The state of the art in plasma manipulation is still very primitive.... we have only been doing magnetic containment of plasmas for about 70 years. And fully magnetohydrodynamic code is processing intensive to simulate. You also have the problem that you need an electric field to also manipulate plasma and counter the problem that the poles of your magnetic field geometry will be weak (if using a quadropole field geometry).
Thanks. I needed this.
I like the idea of shields in sci-fi and fantasy but always thought they were a plot device to just work as the plot needs them to work.
With this knowledge in the back of my mind I'm finally able to "realistically" integrate them into my stories.
Real life shields tend to be physical barriers though: radiation shielding, heat shields, Whipple shields. This in turn blends the distinction between 'shields' and 'armor' when it comes to real life scenarios. Afterall, a shield was originally a piece of armor anyway. 🤷♂️
Similarly, when it comes to spacecraft the distinction between hull and armor IRL isn't as meaningful as it may seem. However, there seems to be a clear distinction between passive protection systems like these, and active protection systems (APS), which also include things like smoke launchers, decoys, and CiWS aka what we might call 'ballistic shielding', etc.
I think it's better to talk about APS instead of just shields, which seems to be useful when proposing the more realistic idea that a ship's "shields" is actually an array of integrated systems of different kinds performing different tasks.
In my own clumsy & clueless amateur writings that I am too shy & ashamed to share 😅, I tend to describe the systems you've mentioned respectively as artificial magnetospheres (or just magnetospheres), plasma screens or plasma belts (depending on the shape given to the ship's magnetosphere), and finally I tend to talk about the ship's 'ionised atmospheric layers' or IAL, for the gaseous component.
And yes, that basically boils down to spacecraft which seek to imitate the kinds of protections that planets possess, the 'shell' or 'crust' being its composite armor layers. I have their magnetospheres and plasma screening being generated by their fusion reactors by the way, and their IALs sort of contained or shepherded by their magnetospheres around their crusts, thus all these APS are tied to the ships' power generation and propulsion (the generated plasma being usually channelled through, magnetically compressed, and accelerated even more by VASIMR type thrusters).
Not sure about the Star Wars universe but Star Trek staffers have gotten pretty good at explaining how their tech works. Try reading through the TNG Tech Manual. "Deflectors Shields" are a TOS techno-babble because the writers and Roddenberry only had half an idea about anything Trek.
By TNG these systems were better defined and while they work in similar manners, "Deflectors" and "Shields" are two separate systems.
Both are modulated graviton fields but "Deflectors" are generally of low intensity for keeping small debris from shedding the ships hull but there is a secondary deflector that works similar to the tracker beam and is used to help move larger objects, like asteroids and comets out if the way. Both of these are emitted from the "dish" usually found somewhere on the front of the Ship.
On the other hand, Shields are high intensity and high density gravitron fields that are emitted from grids mounted directly to the outer surface of the hull.
A multi level magnetic shield that creates a plasma layer between the various magnetic layers is the best defense. In real life it would stop the Tsar bomb if you had enough layers.
Exactly, and I do not know why Star Trek doesn't use the transporters for defensive capabilities. Someone shoots a nuclear bomb at you, just transport it inside the hull of the attacker.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I never thought about it until this video, but for lasers, the navigation deflector (as Picard noted in one of the early episodes as easily able to stop a laser) could be a gravitational wave moving objects out of the flight path through gravitation lensing. A laser could be deflected and diffracted to weaker energy levels simultaneously from this continuous effect. nav deflector will never be turned off
Looking at klingon technologies, the cloaking device is based on gravitational warping, forming a shell around the ship. The warp core bubble is also a type of shield, since while the bubble moves through space, the ship is no longer a part of the universe. It follows that a warp field and a gravitation field can also be used as shields.
I can think of a few situations in Star Trek where they had to up their shields game,
- Vs the Borg. which could scan shield, & match harmonics. Similarly if you stole a Federation star ship, the captain of another Federtion ship could look up your shield freaquency, & blast you.
- Shield Frequency matching also allowed a ship to use transporter beams, or pass through shields with shuttles and such.
- Vs the Borg, the Federation had to up their shields game by remodulating their shield frequency. Same for their weapons, the borg adapted their shields specifically to the weapons being used against them, In order to keep their weapons affective ,the Federation had to modulate the phasers energy freqauency harmonics, or whatever.
--- Another situation was with DS9, First the Dominion using phased polaron beams to cut through shields, The Federation had to adapt their shield tech. Seeing a galaxy class ship cut up with Phased Polaron beams like it didn't even have shields was a shocker to the Federation, Conversely when DS9 used a shield the was able to counter the Phased Polaron it was the Dominion that had the wtf moment.
- Then the Breen came in with Energy dampening weapons. The Klingons accidently had a fix because of a modified tritium intermix chamber. Whatever that is. But again the Federation had to adapt their shield tech by reverse engineering the Breen weapon.
This has been extremely informative. I’ll be using this for future reference.
i should mention that deflector shields in star wars are mounted on smaller ships like freighters & star fighters, ray shields are mounted on warships, in cooperation with particle shields.
particle shields work by acting as a strong magnetic field that induces gravity to push hard objects away from the warship, allowing it to absorb /vaporize, redirect & prematurely detonate torpedoes & other physical weapons.
with this one with ray shields & projected in a space around the ship, the heat is dissipated by the cold vacuum of space.
in one episode of STTNG once they met a Ship which still had Laser as Weapons, Riker mentioned with such antiquated Weaponry their opponent wouldnt even be able to get through the navigation deflector but Phaser on the other handy is powerful enough to get through
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.
A video on Structural Integrity Fields and Polarised Hull Plating would be great next.
If you watch tank videos on youtube you will see that there are many types of armor that can be used to combat attacks as well. There is definitely a possibility that combining this with an eventual nanotechnology for self repair, it's possible to have much more usable armor in actual combat in space. Also I'm kinda surprised we didn't talk about the issues that should/shouldn't arise for the sci-fi series that don't have shields, namely battlestar galactica and babylon 5. Finally, while I appreciate that these technologies exist for shields and might be integral to developing technology in the future, I want to emphasize the 1) difficulty of maintaining a strong enough magnetic field to do anything remotely like deflecting debris of significant momentum, and 2) the concerns of the damage you'd do to people inside the ship to maintain those magnetic fields. After all, people get nauseated and lose their balance at .5 to 1.5 T, the biggest magnetic field we've been able to make across a Tokamak is about 14T which struggled to contain a small mass of plasma (this is likely outdated, my research was in 2010), and there wouldn't be much way of making that magnetic field outwardly directed.
Would you ever be willing to discuss the designs and possible doctrines and uses of the ships of Battlestar Galactica? Or do you only talk about series and franchises that you’re familiar with?
Oh yes - when I ever get around to it!
Bravo for using ship designs from Star Trek the Roleplaying game. Seeing those romulan ships in 3D was great. The Winged Defender was my favorite ship although that Gallant Wing looked good too. I've got a good selection fo those ships in miniature, like the ships in this video, including the Romulan Nova class Battleship
Gene Rodenbury was specific that the “satellite dish” on the front of the Enterprise was the “main deflector” and used for clearing debris from in front of the ship so that nothing hit it at impulse speeds. This was separate from the defense shields. In TNG, the shields are shown to be actual bubbles around the vessels.
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.
For now, we can rest assured that shields are like plot armor. Its strength is based on how the writers want it to be.
Warp drives based off of Miguel Alcubeire’s model will also function as a shield since space itself is warped around you so anything that touches said bubble of spacetime will be instantly flung behind it.
Thoughts on projected bubble type sheilds vs contouring? Personally bubble sheilds seem safer to me.
Also, my personal favorite type of sheild is rubbish your finish with.
Good video 👏🏻
If a ship like the Enterprise or ships in Star Wars can make Warp or Hyperspace fields, then those could also be used as shields too. Just bend space around you like you do with your warp drive and the weapon fire will bend with it, and hopefully not hit your ship. I was hoping you might discuss this type of shield.