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[Professor Fenway]

Responding to Ach's respons to paragraph 2- Like I said, laws of physics we don't understand/know yet. Everyone here knows how, generally, magnets work (I hope) and what plasma is, so explain how tech works in layman's terms that is plausible and fits with physics. If you need an explanation, ask someone (like me). I learn quantum physics for fun; I can make it work.

[ACH0225]

Responding to Ach's respons to paragraph 2- Like I said, laws of physics we don't understand/know yet. Everyone here knows how, generally, magnets work (I hope) and what plasma is, so explain how tech works in layman's terms that is plausible and fits with physics. If you need an explanation, ask someone (like me). I learn quantum physics for fun; I can make it work.

The big problem I have is that cats was saying, it appeared, that shields will do essentially nothing aside from stop debris, and that armour was way more realistic and therefore ship armour is all that matters.

[Error]

@cats ...apologies. Misinterpreted.

@Fen counterpoint to your shields:

Spoiler:

Shields can be one of a few systems. Some use the "light bending" technique to halt incoming fire, as it tends to be a fairly cheap option. More advanced systems include artificial gravity (pulling away from the vessel) and/or gravity barriers holding a layer of particle shielding in place.

Yet more advanced systems project no barrier at all, but generate minitaurized hyperspace windows, shifting incoming fire into the alternate dimension, missing the ship entirely.

Needless to say, the cost and power use of such systems is often proportional to tneir strength and effacy.

Strigiforme shields are unique among all in that they generate a complete and total dimensional barrier around the generator. Some have speculated it is a quantum effect; some say a more powerful version of standard shields. Nobody is sure, and it is entirely possible the Strigiforme themselves don't know.

For flavour:

Spoiler:

Detection systems are standard equipment on just about any vessel. The most common term is DRADIS - Direction, RAnge, and Distance In Space. "Sensors" is another one, covering anything from passive IR ssystems to active tachyon emitters.

The most common form of sensor is RADAR. This emits radio waves on a specific frequency, and based on the time and direction of a return echo, can locate and identify other vessels.

Also common are IR, gamma, and visual-spectrum passive systems. IR detects sources of heat (starships generate quite a lot of heat), gamma sources of radiation (unshielded power plants or incoming nuclear ordnance), and visual-spectrum... is a camera.

The systems grow more advanced, however. Tachyon systems work similar to RADAR, but significantly faster, longer-ranged, and rather more expensive; gravity detectors (mass detectors) allow one to locate ships and planets while in hyperspace or slipspace, though identifying what a vessel is may be iffy.

Sensors can be jammed, of course. RADAR can be scrambled be e itting large amounts of radio waves, thus condusing the detectors; tachyon can be jammed by firing pulses of tachyon energy at the detector to confuse it, and such things as flares, chaff, decoys, and gamma sources can all be used to confuse sensors.

Thermal Issues

Spoiler:

Ships that have any systems running generate heat. Ships with a lot of systems running generate more heat. Given some time, ships can overheat, badly.

Thankfully, the solutions to this are simple: run your coolant tubes through a radiator on the hull. Most ships do this, allowing for fairly easy operation, but making them stand out clearly on any IR scan.

Stealth vessels need to overcome this. Visual detection is exceedingly rare in space, and a coat of black paint will help there. RADAR can be absorbed and refracted with a bit of hull design, shields can be adapted to bypass many other sensors, but IR will always display them clearly.

Stealth vessels, therefore, use a number of things; high-density heat sinks within the hull, to avoid radiating; refrigeration of the outer hull, to prevent detection; and some advanced ships use hyperspatial radiators, shunting excess heat into the alternate dimension at the cost of some power.

To date, there is no "wave hands, ship vanishes" device, merely a combination of the above items. So far, they have proven effective.

[Ivan2006]

@Fen your middle ground seems legit, reasonably fun to use and works for me. +1 on that
@ACH you did realize that catsonmeth just agreed to use a ruleset that allows us to still use stuff like shields like we did before if we explain the mechanics that allow it to work, which just are not supposed to contradict basic physics.

[ACH0225]

@Fen your middle ground seems legit, reasonably fun to use and works for me. +1 on that
@ACH you did realize that catsonmeth just agreed to use a ruleset that allows us to still use stuff like shields like we did before if we explain the mechanics that allow it to work, which just are not supposed to contradict basic physics.

The problem is that a lot of things simply don't have explanations. They could be explained, but who decides what's plausible or not? Cats? Fen? Me? Idk, it'll need a little more discussion for me to accept it.

[Professor Fenway]

Ach, some things can have explanations because our physics understanding is incomplete, I.E we discover principals we don't know about or properties that are unknown. The GM's decide whether something is plausible or not IF we think it might be, together. And we give them a chance to make it more plausible, or we can make an explanation to fit it.

Yttrium? Simple. An undiscovered stable isotope is discovered allowing for HUGE amounts of energy to be stored with Yttrium due to this isotope's extra-dimensional properties.

[cats]

Well, I said that armor would have to be important because super powerful zettajoule shields would be mpossible or at least incredibly difficult to produce, fit on a ship, and run using a ship's powerplant. You want to have a good defense for the things thay get through or or after the shield fails. There are multiple ways to make a shield too, with widely varied functions and mechanisms. Some are more advanced than others. Take those factors into consideration. You can't just say "shield good, make stop thing"

[Ivan2006]

I partly agree with catsonmeth here, zettajoule shields would be completely insane, especially considering your average shipboard MAC would be in the Petajoule area in terms of power while anything that might get in the three-digit Exajoule area would be either a slow-fireing spinal weapon for a flagship designed to one-shot anything it hits or a superweapon similar to the Strigiforme barrage cannon known from the old timeline.
In general, the rate at which a shield is able to absorb energy without going down would be significantly lower than the rate at which energy would have to be fed into the shield system to maintain that level, as you need power for constantly repleneshing your shield (e.g. photon shields lose some photons over time, which causes them to glow but also requires additional photons to be fed back into the shield constantly to keep it up even without being hit, where in this case, routing additional power there would increase the replenishing rate as well as the maximum shield power if I read Fenway's description correctly.) as well as keeping the shield in place (the electromagnetic fields in the case of a photon shield), where the ratio would depend on the type of shield, but they would still require much more power in either case than the shield would be able to absorb.
Strigiforme super-shields would be a different story, as those rely on an interdimensional effect that essentially lets anything that hits them go into another universe/subspace (it is not exactly known) without effecting the power of the shields. The only way to bring them down would be to discharge so much energy into it at once that the rift collapses.
And since shields would be prone to going down at some point, armour would indeed play a major role, as your ship would then have to survive long enough to either retreat or bring its shields back up, not to mention that, depending on the type of shield, it may not be able to deflect certain types of attacks and therefore would have to absorb those using its armour.