Ambrosia Software Web Board: Realism in sci-fi - Ambrosia Software Web Board

I think that some weapons will use fuel, some others will use beam. In fact, I think that normal beam weapons won't, since have their own energy sources, but that hypermodded (super versions of lasers or whatnot) would, as well as being illegal.

Damage amounts - in our universe it can go 3 ways: EV frozen heart, where ships are destroyed almost before you realise you're under attack, to EVN, to some other kind of universe where damage is very slow.

It would affect the storyline I predict. If it behaves like Spanish War Galleons, so it takes almost forever to destroy a ship, the universe will behave alot differently.

this post is of rather inferior quality

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There are only 3 kinds of people; those who can count, and those who can't.

I still say there's virtually no good reason to use a missile. If you can't see where they are, then there's no reason to fire a missile because it probably won't see them either. If you can see them, shoot them with a laser until they die.

As for damage, EVN got it fine. Anything longer would take forever.

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"In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others." Andre Maurois
Onii7/Frinkruds and his funky forums
macgamer.net

I've decided that it's quite good. However you could say that Ares was perfectly balanced, and I find that my plugin, which has by alternatives faster or slower deaths to be more interesting.

I guess I'll have to vary the races so that a player can taste some quick and short battles.

My thinking is this; some races will focus on very quick contentment, using missiles with only enough space to pack a few, and then dash. These races won't concentrate on armour either, they'll be all firepower. They will probably also make use of weapons that are spinal mounted, because they don't believe you need turrets if you're swarming.

Another race will be able to stand viable in combat for a longer time. Possibly energy weapons. After a while they obviously just don't have enough energy and at that time they pull out. These races will concentrate more on turrets and create more battleships (race 1 wouldn't necessarily see any advantage in a battleship.)

Race 3 will be some kind of engineering expert race. They'll create titanic ships (Think SSD) with amazing numbers of turrets, shielding and obviously they'll focus on very effecient energy weapons. These ships should be mobile space platforms able to go for years without sight of habitation, and will have thousand + man crews easily.

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There are only 3 kinds of people; those who can count, and those who can't.

Future Weapons?

LASER, however cool sounding, will probably never reach the efficiency required to destroy anything.
The primary weapons will probably be long range cruise missiles, probably not very maneuverable though. In space, these missiles would nearly always be loaded with nuclear warheads or something more powerful.
Plasma/Energy weapons could be possible, however, their range would be short and limited. The plus side is being able to take out specific targets, say the bridge of a hijacked craft.

The problem with most games nowadays is that they fail to take in the one-shot-kill policy. With todays missile technology, anything can be wiped out with a single hit from a missile. The size of the missile may vary, but usually, when your hit, your dead. I would imagine it to be the same way in space, one hit and your dead. However, that presents a problem as it makes gameply un-fun.

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"...yet gradually we recovered, venturing cautiously back into the void of space afraid of what we might find there."

Am I going to need to repeat myself until the end of time?
Missiles. Are. Bull****.

They're inefficient and just too slow. Lasers could fire across intersteller ranges (although they'd have trouble hitting non-planet targets at that distance). Missiles are MONUMENTALLY INEFFICIENT because they expend too much energy on propellant. You can shoot a missile down. While you CAN reflect a laser, it's vastly impractical to do so, given that the smallest cracks in your mirror could render it useless.

The only good reasons to use lasers over missiles would be for homing purposes - but considering the acceleration of any theoretical non-faster-than-light engine vs the speed of light, at any reasonable distance, dodging a laser would be impossible.

Oh, and the one-shot-one-kill thing might not be true. Depending on the relative power of the laser and size of the target (as well as how well compartementalized the target is) it might take a little bit of exposure for a fighter's laser to melt enough of it.

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"In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others." Andre Maurois
Onii7/Frinkruds and his funky forums
macgamer.net

[This message has been edited by Fleet Admiral Darkk (edited 03-29-2003).]

Lasers don't have to be reflected. Light can be bent by gravity waves, so a ship could simply be sheathed in a gravity field that will bend any incoming laser away from the ship. In any case, I agree with Skyfox that lasers are probably VERY inefficient at long ranges because of the loss of power due to 1/r^2. This fall-off of strength is very small (today, we can hit targets far far away with a laser and still get a reflection back.) but on a weapons laser, it would lose its hitting power the further a target got until it was no more than a bright light hitting them. (NOTE: I know **** about lasers, so I'm probably wrong. Oh well.)

Also, how are the lasers doing damage? Heating up the skin of the target? Or blasting it with hard radiation? There is a negligible amount of kinetic energy in light, and the amount of energy that would have to be pumped into a laser in order to do some kinetic damage would be astronomical (many many times the output of the sun). Radiation shielding that can block solar flares would attenueate lasers that blasted their target with hard radiation. And a ship skin that could efficiently transfer heat away from an impact point would further reduce the effectiveness of a laser weapon.

Plasma weapons might be a different story for directed energy weapons. They actually send a lump of superheated charged particles through space. Though not a light speed, they move awfully fast and would probably hit a target before the have time to react even if they did detect it coming at them. Also, you would have a significant amount of physical punch behind the plasma that impacts something because it has an appreciable amount of mass moving at a very high speed.

And let us not forget of course the vernerable rail gun. Pitching dust at someone at near light-speed will probably waste their ship rather quickly.
Your disparagement of missles is very unwarranted though. The smaller mass of a missle means that it can accelerate much faster than a warship can, and reach a much higher terminal velocity. While this doesn't matter much to your lasers, the TRACKING systems on the other hand need to target and track guns onto a very small, and very fast moving target. If the missle still has manueverability left in its engines, itself can make evasive manuevers to make it even harder to hit. Also, placing a nuclear payload on a missle will undoubtedly be much more powerful of a bang than a laser at range would pack. OR, if you don't like making hard contact, the missle's explosion could power a blast of lasers that would be fired at effectivly point-blank range into the ship.
And the final note is that you seem to be assuming that the missle is using a reaction drive to power itself. There is no reason for the missile to be using a reaction drive if ships are using reaction drives. I'm quite certain that reaction drives are NOT going to be the future. Gravity manipulation is a much more efficient and faster way to get around both in sublight and superlight speeds.

P.S. Nobody's silly enough to suggest that you can dodge a laser any more than a person dodges a bullet. In reality, a "dodging" person is trying to second-guess the targeter.

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"That was quick."
"Well you know, when you don't do it right it doesn't take as long."

[This message has been edited by El Spamo (edited 03-29-2003).]

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Even if we did have major advances in the energy department, the ratio of damage to energy required for a LASER makes them impratical. Lasers, also, would be limited to light speed, whereas it could be possible to mount a tachyon/warp drive on the missile. Lasers could come in use to melt incomeing missiles that are traveling STL. That would be one of their uses, also Lasers could be used for welding stuff over a long distance, but that doesn't seem to be an advantage unless the enemy ship has their fusion reactor lines open to space.

Hmm, thats anouther idea, if humanity ever discovers teleportation, is warping an explosive charge right into the enemy ships interior. 100% kill rate as there is no way to protect the inside of a ship. That would totaly change the way wars would be fought.

Considering how modern warfare has evolved down through the ages, would you settle for anything that fell short of killing your enemy in the first shot?

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"...yet gradually we recovered, venturing cautiously back into the void of space afraid of what we might find there."

Would you settle for something that couldn't even make it to the target?
At range, a ship could outrun a missile. And they're getting more efficient all the time - laser pointers would have been laughable only a couple decades ago. What's inefficient is the charging system - it's bulky and time-consuming. But the air force is experimenting with ones that can shoot down ballistic missiles. Why? Because they're better than missiles at any decent range.

Assuming any large difference in velocity between the target and the platform, a missile could easily be unable to acelerate to the velocity required.

And let's leave warp out of it. I could just say they'd make tacyon(sp?) lasers.

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"In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others." Andre Maurois
Onii7/Frinkruds and his funky forums
macgamer.net

Why would a warship outrun a missle? At relativistic (revalistic?) speeds, there wouldn't be much in the way of engagement anyways since the amount of time that opponents spend inside each other's engagement envelopes would be very small, missiles or no missiles. To actually engage an enemy craft, the relative velocities would need to be moderate to small. Missiles would certainly be able to make it to their targets due to the fact that they have a much higher capability of accelerating due to their smaller mass. A fleeing ship of course does have the capability of outranging the missiles, just as it can run away and outrange the attacking ship. La de da. At such high speeds, acceleration is everything and the ability to cram in a little more acceleration means the ability to manuever. Missles would probably accelerate like mad (several hundred thousand gravities) before burning out, giving a high terminal velocity (to catch running ships), or accelerate less in exchange for a greater time being able to manuever and track a target (manuevering ships).
But there is no good reason that a missile would be too slow to reach its target. And futuristic computers would most certainly be able to compute firing solutions to hit ships moving a high relative velocities at odd trajectories. Missiles will always have their place in naval combat, no matter what the setting.


ADDENDUM: I do recognize the extreme usefullness of having a weapon system that does not rely on magazines. Energy weapons do have the advantage of not running out of ammo as quickly, if they lack somewhat in the raw power department.

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"That was quick."
"Well you know, when you don't do it right it doesn't take as long."

[This message has been edited by El Spamo (edited 03-30-2003).]

Spamo. Imagine two warships on perpendicular courses. Not only would the missile have to null its velocity forward, it would then have to raise its velocity to equal that of the other ship. Intercept is the word I should be using, since space combat will likely feature ships with little ability to halt or turn around. Imagine a fleet of solar sail ships going at it!

Also, I submit that lasers could be used to shoot down missiles (the Air force is testing this right now with Anti-ICBM missiles mounted on 747s - I've got pics somewhere...). Therefor, as a laser cannot be shot down, it would be superior.

Further, ships could easily be made very large to minimize the impact of single missiles. Imagine a 17km radius sphere of bubble foam with a small core for habitation and booms going out of it to hold the solar sail.

Nuclear missiles lose a good deal of power in space due to their reliance on expanding atmospheric gasses to deliver damage.

IMHO lasers just can't cut the double-acceleration problem, the defenses problem, or the range problem.

BTW, a missile with small size would maneuver just as well as a ship with large size, assuming the engines and thrusters were porportional - so the missile would have a hard time there too. Air to air missiles are fast because they're desinged for speed at the expense of all else (like range).

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"In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others." Andre Maurois
Onii7/Frinkruds and his funky forums
macgamer.net

I don't think missiles would be crap. One reason is that they would be immensely useful in precision targeting in orbital bombardment. Lasers and plasma would be diluted by the atmosphere.

Another reason is that they would be easier to manufacture en masse than equip a ship with a power generator capable of firing a laser powerful enough to hit targets across the solar system. If you could have an accurate enough hyperjump, you could jump very close to an enemy ship and use thousands of thousands of miniaturised missiles to swarm their laser defenses and shoot them down.

Missiles actually do have a large advantage in speed. They can accelerate at more than 1 G's without worrying about killing the passengers (whereas 1 G in space locomation is very slow, that is what we're talking about for human ships, because of gravity.)

I believe that cloaking technology will be in use very widely at this time. It would be like being on a battlefield with alot of wreckage. In many ways, one hit one kill, and so you want to hide behind a piece of scenery or a broken wall. The cloaking field would be like that for ships.

Computers unfortunately cannot operate in a cloaked state, and most ships would be phasing in/out very quickly to get off shots, so the computers are ineffective at targeting because ships are constantly trying to evade shots by disappearing.

(*note this optional. I plan on doing a test of it and seeing how fun it is. But it does support putting humans on spaceships.)

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There are only 3 kinds of people; those who can count, and those who can't.

Well, if you're making it up, you're making it up.
And missiles still don't have enough of a speed advantage if the ship's initial speed is high enough - and it very likely will be, unless you want to use drive systems "not yet on the drawing board". Of course, this is the EVN engine, so acceleration/velocity ratios will be much higher than IRL.

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"In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others." Andre Maurois
Onii7/Frinkruds and his funky forums
macgamer.net

Are you familiar with anti-matter? Apparently a few grams is enough to propel a rocket across from one end of our solar system to the other. Imagine how fast a rocket would go with 50 kilograms of the stuff.

I think the greatest problem might actually be getting the rocket to go that fast without disintegrating. So to put it bluntly I completely dismiss your idea that rockets can't go fast enough. Clearly this is the quick acceleration alternative that makes them possible.

The most effective weapons seems so far to be these:

antimatter
railgun

Nothing else really comes close. Antimatter doesn't really need that much in the war of lasers. Lasers are hot, granted, but antimatter is infinitely more powerful. As long as you can 're-scan' the atoms to be anti-matter... you'd have effectively limitless power, weapon range etc...

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There are only 3 kinds of people; those who can count, and those who can't.

The primary issue with using antimatter, however is the fact that it is HIDEOUSLY volatile. Storage and production of antimatter is and will probably always be a very expensive, time consuming and difficult process. Therefore, while antimatter weapons will be very effective, they would somewhat of a white elephant compared to other weapons that can deliver a very adequate amount of damage in a much more efficient manner. Killing a cockroach with a cannon so to speak.

Besides, would you really want to be on a ship whose antimatter missile magazine or storage unit just got pegged? The loss of containment would vaporize your ship, and maybe nearby objects if they are close enough.

Oh, and to Darkk, I had believed we were making things up as we went along so I was pulling stuff from various assorted sci-fi universes. The one I find most realistic and well thought out was the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. That is one military sci-fi that makes very extensive use of missles in ship to ship combat. As a result of course the electronic warfare and countermissile technologies are highly developed, as are the missiles' penetration aids to help get them through all sorts of jamming, countermissile fire, and gravity shields.


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"That was quick."
"Well you know, when you don't do it right it doesn't take as long."

You missed something, Jov. Antimatter makes photons. Laser beams are made of photons. Use the antimatter to produce a laser beam instead. And even antimatter wouldn't be enough to overcome some of the acceleration problems. In the Physics of Star Trek, Klauss calculates a ship (or missile) using antimatter as a fuel would need to carry 3 or 4 times its mass in reactants to accelerate to .25 lightspeed. Ooops.

That speed could easily be achieved by laser-powered solar sails, our current best guess for how to build a starship, due to the fact that they don't carry their own powerplants.

Also, the laser would be able to use energy that would have been wasted moving the missile, and thus need considerably less antimatter.


Railguns WOULD be somewhat fine, because at the high end they become sorts of "matter lasers". They would, however, have tremendous recoil (assuming they were firing >=.80c bullets) and be rather cumbersome compared to lasers.


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"In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others." Andre Maurois
Onii7/Frinkruds and his funky forums
macgamer.net

[This message has been edited by Fleet Admiral Darkk (edited 04-01-2003).]

[This message has been edited by Fleet Admiral Darkk (edited 04-01-2003).]

I don't see why it would be so hard to store anti-matter, assuming your 'magnetic' (correct me if I'm wrong, this is how they store anti-matter today) doesn't fail. I suppose you're danger is getting hit by EMP weapons and losing power. Losing power, with antimatter... is a bad thing...

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There are only 3 kinds of people; those who can count, and those who can't.

[This message has been edited by Joveia (edited 04-01-2003).]

Ok.. ignore the above post...

This is some stuff I drew up since I'm serious about getting this accurate. Here are some constants:

Upper limit, lower limit

Upper limit will be more effecient. Every weapon will have an upper and lower limit. This is to ensure that weapons do realistic amounts of damage (i.e. it is impossible to do more than 60 kj's worth of energy damage and expend LESS than 60 kj). The closer you are to upper limit, the more 'cost' effective your weapon is, the more effecient. Although this could also be applied to outdated weapons that have been improved over time. For example, a new weapon might be much less cost-effecient because it is new. So it depends on relative scientific advancement and how long the weapon has been in society.

Lower limit weapons will be of course, worse and worse for their output.

Kinetic energy

A bonus for kinetic weapons. In some research (hint, I looked it up) I found amazingly that you actually get MORE energy from an object travelling at 99% the speed of light (in terms of energy it would expend if it HIT something) than converting the thing into energy (E=MC^2). Which means that the faster kinetic weapons go, they get to do more damage. For example, somewhere near the speed of light, a 1 kg projectile weighs something like a hundred times it's normal weight not at that speed, relativistically. So it would do 100x the damage normally allowed via converting it via fusion. I think this means that kinetic weapons should play a big part.

Construction

Larger objects can't have the same strength or relative hitpoints of a smaller object. To create a large object you have to magnify it's strength so it will, in effect, be that much stronger. For example, if I build a Nikko starfighter, and then another one exactly the same 100 times larger, it has to be 100 times stronger - over each metre^3 compared to the original. This is if you wanted it to maneouvre and hold it together with the same tenacity as the tiny version.

Generally speaking, larger ships cannot just be weapons platforms. Larger = more hitpoints. This means that ships will tend to favour towards 'battleship' design than 'destroyers.' (I.e., no hitpoints but tons of weapons.) Ships will be well-rounded in terms of armaments:hitpoints.

More later...

I've been actually writing some of this down as you can see... I am serious about this.

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There are only 3 kinds of people; those who can count, and those who can't.

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There's a reasoning gap. Accelerating the mass to .9c takes a lot of energy. Where's it coming from? Other matter-energy conversion (all energy sources that I can think of do this, some are more obvious about it).

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"In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others." Andre Maurois
Onii7/Frinkruds and his funky forums
macgamer.net

[This message has been edited by Fleet Admiral Darkk (edited 04-03-2003).]

Yeah, I think actually the article I read only meant to factor in the equivalent cost of accelerating it versus it's kinetic damage. I think that was pseudo-sci fi I made up there. oh well.

Shields

Assuming shields exist and can be constructed. There are some ways of going about this. The easiest shield to imagine is this one:
[url="http://"http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Shields/Impact.gif"]http://www.stardestr...elds/Impact.gif[/url]

I think this is pretty realistic as far as ultra-zaney shields go. The shield just projects 'itself' it's own force substitute across matter. It's substitute accepts kinetic energy and the projector is thrown back. Few problems:

You could not possibly protect a delicate piece of electrical machinery - assuming the pressure occurs inside the piece of machinery which actually does the blocking, assuming the generator has more than one component. And 2) the shield would most likely be torn to pieces as a 70 m asteroid has the kinetic energy (at 1 km/s) of 7.5 NUCLEAR BOMBS. Lets say our railgun fleets will do atleast that much damage regularly.

Ouch. So I have come up with a new method. Supposing the generator blocks it - but our society has invented a way to store the energy brushed from the generator into batteries/absorbers. So it would be like the diagram above. The asteroid hits, the generator feels 6.25E 14 J of pressure, and the energy is transferred immediately into actual 'stored' energy ready for use and no different from storage for it's weapons.

So shield strength would be in effect (unless they got lucky and it had a crappy energy transformer, or something) the charging ability of the ship. If the kinetic energy was simply too great for their batteries to handle, then they'd have a massive overspill of energy. What would this do? Well, first off it would completely overload their recharge systems. That much energy at once will do no good. I assume that the generator could have a failsafe installed, so that if it detects it's at maximum capacity it automatically shuts it's shields down and lets the ship take the hits. If it did NOT do that, then it would probably overload every electrical system in the area, including the absorber, and destroy the shield generator with collateral damge to nearby ship systems. Something like a Dresden electrical firestorm inside the ship.

I think that fits nicely. 'Shields recharging' in Nova would mean the opposite in terms of energy. The ship would desperately try and find ways to burn of millions of joules of energy as fast as possible. This is not easy. It is in fact, almost impossible to simply get rid of energy without some kind of cheating device, like a blackhole. This might have an interesting side effect of making ships captains extremely anxious to fire their guns as often as possible. (although for nova's sake, lets pretend that due to the volatility of the energy system related to the buffer, it has to be disconnected from the main power sources.)

I guess you could use 'singularity projectors' to funnel the energy in. So a ship would have 'projector' for shield size, 'batteries' for strength, and 'singularity projectors' as well as their size, for the recharge rate.

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There are only 3 kinds of people; those who can count, and those who can't.

Oh, and every time the shield drops theres a chance that it fails because the generator failed to shut off the shield quickly enough.

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There are only 3 kinds of people; those who can count, and those who can't.

That's one way of implementing a shield, and it seems to work fairly well against kinetic weapons, but I don't see (or understand) how effective it would be against energy weapons.

I think that another viable shield implementation would be to project a gravity "wall" around the ship. Against kinetic weapons it would alter their trajectory to go around the ship rather than through it (ouch!). Given sufficient armor on the ship, having the projectile hitting the ship at an angle and skipping off would be a lot less harmful than a solid blow. And deflecting energy weapons would be much more effective than with the absorbtion shields. We already know about gravitational lensing around large gravity wells. If a ship is able to project a pseudo-gravity well around itself, this would bend the beam of an energy weapon away from the ship.

Also, you wouldn't have to worry about having the shields overload. Since the shields function by warping spacetime around the ship, the generators don't have to worry about absorbing any shocks. If something gets across the gravity gradient then it's up to the ship's armor to stop it. Otherwise, the weapon would just bounce off/deflect in a new direction with little or no effect on the generator.

Probably a combination of the two would be most effective. Project a gravity gradient around the ship, and then inside that project the absorbtion field to deflect and stop whatever gets across the gravity shields.

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"That was quick."
"Well you know, when you don't do it right it doesn't take as long."

Gravity is created in cones and non-hollow objects. I don't see how you could do that. Even if presumably you had a gravitron emitter that could emit however much gravity you wanted it to...

Oh, if you idea is so that the gravity field *also* affects the spaceship, then it could work. But then it would crush the delicate electronics if they were activated.

I suppose you could bring the existence of a gravitic 'nullifier' too. The gravitic field is projected outside the ship, and inside the ship's living quarters there is a gravitic nullifier.

But anyway, such an idea, however cool, isn't easy to implement in Nova, as the field has no strength, just makes weapons slide off it.

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There are only 3 kinds of people; those who can count, and those who can't.

Well, since I'm no physicist nor much of an engineer either I really can't say how the whole deal would work. Some sort of manipulation of gravitons. There are a couple of books where this level of control over gravity fields is done.

But as to saying that the shield has no strength, and that weapons just slide off of it, isn't that the whole point of having shields in the first place? To prevent the damage of the ship?
Besides, with a weapon of sufficient strength, it would be able to penetrate through the shield and impact the hull of the ship although somewhat attenuated by being pushed around by the gravity field. The field would have to be immensly strong in order to knock massive attacks out of the way.

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"That was quick."
"Well you know, when you don't do it right it doesn't take as long."

So it's a different approach I see. Instead of using shields as another layer of armour you want to use it as a kind of 'blocking' attack.

Well, I suppose it could work. It's net effect would make a hierarchy of shields and weapons where the more advanced weapons can only affect the more advanced shields.

However it might be hard to implement. Considering that your traders shield is going to be weaker than a generals. Every weapon has got to have an element of ignore shields, but how do you define which are the stronger shields? You can't, unless you only have one weapon. Because of this, shield damage has to be done so theoritically it will still be a shield which takes damage in Nova. But that runs contrary to the design principle.

You'd have a weapon do an amount of SP damage, and then normal damage. This would affect any kind of shield - the SP. The normal damage has to destroy the shield to get through, so you have the simulated effect of the stronger shield. But it would be totally useless versus stronger shields unless it's a kick ass weapon, because of high values.

Hmm.

My idea is of course very regular. I think it would block ray attacks by catching the heat the same way it catches kinetic energy. Remember that lasers are very ineffective compared to kinetic weapons at .99C, which should be a relatively easy task for an advanced railgun. So it may turn out lasers aren't affected by these shields. You have to exterminate laser ships yourself.

In regards to lasers, I doubt they'll play a major part. This is because they inherently don't do enough damage fast enough. Our beam weapons will have to be hybrids of lasers mixed with some other more advanced method. Neither Star Wars nor Star Trek actually use lasers except on special occasions. Star Wars have 'turbolasers' which except such different characteristics as to be considered totally un-laserlike, and Star Trek first of all, dismisses lasers as completely useless and uses 'phasers' which are multidimensional weapons that cause long-range particle reactions, converting matter with lower atom signatures into massive numbers of neutrinos (err... technobabble.)

So even if common lasers can't be deflected, the upgrades to them to make them effective beam weapons will somehow interact. Of course, all this is besides the point if I decide my advanced generator system also sucks heat off the hull...

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There are only 3 kinds of people; those who can count, and those who can't.

Phasers use gamma rays. And lasers are not useless.

In any case, shields in Origin Conflict are implemented as a double-layer of negative gravity (generated by field effectors, which I'll go into on request), with a layer of negative energy sandwitched between. The negative energy "melts" lasers fired through it, and the gravitons generated by the negative energy are used to hold up the double layers of gravity, which slows projectiles down enough to make them easier for the nega-energy to cancel, as matter is energy. To massed projectiles, the shield acts as a combination vaporizer/speedbump. The energy evenly distributes itself throughout its assigned area in the form of solitons (which are basically energy that acts like non-energy). Another note, shields will damage people who touch them. To fire through a shield, matter weapons simply have a shield of their own projected around them. An energy weapon simply is phase-linked to the frequency, which hops in a truely random pattern that's linked by spins (so you don't need to update).

Quite a lot of dense technobabble, eh?

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"In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others." Andre Maurois
Onii7/Frinkruds and his funky forums
macgamer.net