Hi there. I had this idea while thinking about Woo's Lucifer for Inferno, and wanted to hear what you thought of it.
Okay, the Lucifer has a sheath-shielding system, so when it first ran into the GTA\PVN, it owned anything it went near. Nothing could hit it, until it went into hyperspace and the shield shut down.
Now, if we had the technology to build a sheath-sheild (As shown by the GTI and the Hades), it would be perfectly plausible for the GTVA to develop weapon systems designed specifically to pierce such sheilding and cause damage. But how to put this in game?
How about this. In the weapons table, insert a new data value for each weapon, the "Sheath-Piercing" value. This boolean can be either 0 (no) or 1 (yes).
Then add to the Lucifer a sheild with a program that checks the value of a weapon that hits it. If the value is 0, the weapon registers the ship as invulnerable, and thus causes no damage. But if the value is 1, the weapon causes damage to the vessel. This represents either specially made weapons, or weapons so powerfull that they overload the shield anyway (the Icanus's main gun for instance).
With this, the Lucifer could still have a sheath shield, but be destroyable. It would add a new challange to pilots, as only specially modified weapons (such as beams) could damage the ship, and so pilots would have to protect their capital ships more.
For realisim, it could be argued the Shivans only put sheath shielding onto Planet killers and Star Destroyers (The Lucifer and the Vinasshak) becuase of the insane power requirements for such a device, which would explain why the Lucifer had so many reactors while a non-sheathed ship (such as the Sathanas) did not, and yet the Sathanas had sufficent power to use a subspace weapon.
So anyway, what do you think?
