[Topgun]

Is there anyway to do this?

[Goober5000]

There ought to be.  But I took a look at the shield effect code years ago and couldn't make heads or tails of it.  It appears to require a shield mesh for any effect to be drawn, and I can't see an easy way to remove that restriction.

That doesn't mean there isn't one, but perhaps someone else should take a look at it.

[swashmebuckle]

As an alternative to the way normal shield impact effects are handled (with a grayscale animation propagating around the spherical mesh), it might work well for surface shields to simply trigger an alternate impact hit animation, maybe chosen randomly from a set defined in the ships.tbl or something.  Big ships that use surface shields tend to be slowish, so even something as long as the normal FS shield hit animation might still look good from most angles, and it would be great for Star Wars, where shield flashes are very quick and very distinct from hull hits.  All the info for the impact explosion radius is already present in the weapons.tbl...Anyway, it'd be a lot better than what's in there now, where normal hull hit animations are played even when no actual damage is being done to the ship beneath.